- It strikes me that rather than being an educational moment to teach the public about obstructionism, continued "outreach" to Republicans on policy issues they are constitutionally opposed to is playing a game only Republicans can win. Democrats and the president will say they extended an olive branch, only to have it swatted away, and Republicans will claim that their ideas were never taken seriously by the opposition. The public sees partisan bickering and legislative gridlock, and Republicans double down on anti-incumbency sentiment and bad economic conditions to sweep them back into office. I agree that Republicans are overconfident if they think their chances of taking back Congress are strong, but what have they got to lose?
- "House Democrats," The Hill reports, "say leadership has their work cut out in convincing the public to support a tax increase on those making more than $250,000." The reason for this, we're told, is that concerns about the deficit makes raising taxes risky. Short of the fact that raising taxes on people earning over $250,000 is one -- but by no means the only -- way of reducing the deficit, what are these Democrats afraid of? A fraction of the population going Galt? Other no-brainer policy proposals meeting serious resistance include reforming federal student loans and the president encouraging healthy eating.
- Steve Clemons has become the latest leftish political commentator to diagnose the path to failure for the Barack Obama presidency, relying on the reporting of Edward Luce noted here by Mark Schmitt on Friday. What stands out for Clemons is that the theory of management embraced by this president -- relying on a tight inner circle of trusted advisers -- has corrupted the promise of the administration. This has the luxury of being both impossible to prove or disprove, which is to say it's more useful at this point to look at what has and has not been accomplished, and focus on the more tangible institutional barriers that affect the shape of the president's agenda.
- Pollster Scott Rasmussen has a theory about the American public: "Americans don't want to be governed from the left, the right or the center. They want to govern themselves." I don't know what this means in practice (direct democracy?) but I assume Mr. Rasmussen has data to bolster this claim, data that probably reaches a different conclusion than this Rasmussen poll, subtitled "Republicans Still Trusted More on Most Key Issues." Emphasis mine, as in "the Republican position is still the default for our center-right nation."
- Howard Kurtz would like to inform you that the White House press corps is feeling neglected by the president, who has been spending all his time in the unaccountability zone of YouTube, instead of taking questions from professional reporters. Meanwhile, we learn that the editors at Kurtz's newspaper went out of their way to solicit a piece on why liberals are condescending. Perhaps someone in the White House press corps could ask Mr. Obama this very question next time there's a press conference and get some answers for the American people.
- Weekend Remainders: Harold Ford Jr. wants to shake up the liberal establishment and we should not stand in his way; a debate between Ford and Michael Steele predictably results in astute observations about being in touch with the bulk of the American people; Annie Lowrey take you on an adventure in alternative Senate seat disbursement; Zbigniew Brzezinski appreciates that even though the president has primacy in foreign policy, he is still very much constrained by domestic politics; Republicans discuss the superiority of last year's GOP budget proposal, ignore their current proposal; and opposition to climate change legislation becomes easier to understand when viewed in its most unhinged form.
--Mori Dinauer
The alliance of Nancy Pelosi and John Murtha, perhaps the last archetypal old-style pol in the House, who died this afternoon of complications from gall-bladder surgery, always struck some observers as more than a bit bewildering. Pelosi, after all, hailed from the most post-industrial metropolis in the nation, while Murtha represented an old steel-and-mining district near Pittsburgh. Pelosi was ever proper; Murtha was a gruff old bull who would have fit right into a hard-drinking, spittoon-spraying meeting of the Tammany chiefs. Pelosi came from anti-war, culturally vanguardish San Francico; Murtha was a hawkish Viet vet who reveled in doling out defense dollars from his post on the House Appropriations Committee.
But when the Democrats retook the House in 2006, Pelosi backed Murtha in his challenge to Steny Hoyer for the post of majority leader, just as Murtha had provided key support to Pelosi all throughout her rise to the party’s top leadership position in the House. He was one of several no-nonsense senior members -- Appropriations Chair David Obey was another -- who’d been impressed by the speaker-to-be’s performance while a member of the Appropriations Committee -- more specifically, by her ability to deal with the boys and to understand who needed what to get a bill passed. Beyond that, she clearly had an affinity for the old pols in the House, which likely stemmed from her childhood as the daughter of Baltimore Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro, who, like The Last Hurrah’s Frank Skeffington, met with constituents at his home, as Nancy and her brothers scurried around.
Not all of Pelosi’s fellow liberals took a shine to Murtha, and a number of her closest allies -- Henry Waxman, for one – stuck with Hoyer during Murtha’s challenge. But it’s a mark of Pelosi’s skills that she could almost always count on having both Waxman and Murtha in her column. No intra-party relationship better symbolized the link between old and new politics than that between Murtha and Pelosi, in which the party of Harry Truman met the party of Gavin Newsom. And just now, as Pelosi surely realizes, the party could use an in to the Truman Democrats who still inhabit districts such as that represented by John Murtha.
--Harold Meyerson
(AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
It's not surprising that the response to the Tim Tebow Super Bowl ad was a collective, "All that fuss for that?" The spot mostly features his mom, Pam Tebow gushing about her miracle baby, only to be tackled by the son who grew up to be a Heisman Trophy winner. Both had big smiles for the camera.
Of course, the spot directed you to the Web site for Focus on the Family, the conservative, anti-abortion group that funded the spot. There you can watch an interview with Pam Tebow and her husband, Bob, who elaborate a little on the back story. The Tebows were in the Philippines as missionaries when she became pregnant with Tim, their fifth child, and the pregnancy was complicated from the start. We know from other sources how likely it was that Pam Tebow's condition could have killed her, and why her doctors would have recommended an abortion to save her life.
At the end, Bob Tebow makes a tearful plea to the camera: "Don't kill your baby." Drats! Feminists' nefarious baby-killing plans foiled again! This, right after Pam Tebow encourages women to seek help and recognize they have options. Again, it seems like the Tebows think women only have one real choice, and it's hard to respect their message when that one choice could kill a lot of women.
The ad could have seemed so innocuous just so anti-abortion groups could decry unwarranted feminist hysteria, which they were already doing. But as Amanda Marcotte points out on Double X, it's really not so innocuous when you know the back story. Tim plowing into his mother carries double symbolic weight when you think he nearly killed her in utero and that the image of a man plowing over a woman is exactly the kind of misogynistic symbol you would expect from an anti-abortion group.
-- Monica Potts
Greg Anrig says that in some states, progressive leadership and grass-roots activism have turned crisis into opportunity for long-deferred tax reform:
In October 2007, two months before the onset of the worst U.S. recession since the Great Depression, Maryland's Democratic governor, Martin O'Malley, convened a special session of his state's Democrat-controlled General Assembly in a high-stakes effort to close an unexpectedly large $1.7 billion budgetary shortfall. A central component of O'Malley's proposal was converting the state's flat income tax of 4.75 percent to a progressive system with higher brackets of 6 percent and 6.5 percent for upper-income households. At the same time, he advocated a combination of tax hikes on corporate income, sales, tobacco, and vehicle titles, along with reductions in taxes on property and the incomes of lower earners.
The progressivity of O'Malley's plan was somewhat weakened as the negotiating process unfolded, largely through the interventions of legislators representing Montgomery County and its influential minority of multimillionaires. Nonetheless, the final budget reduced income taxes for lower- and middle-income taxpayers while adding three new rates ranging from 5 percent to 5.5 percent on incomes from $150,000 to $1 million for single individuals and $200,000 to $1 million for married couples.
Rep. John Murtha, Pennsylvania's longest-serving member of Congress, has died at age 77. As chair of the Defense Appropriations subcommittee, he was critical of the Bush administration's approach to fighting terrorism and argued for withdrawal from Iraq. Recently, he had signed on to the "Share the Sacrifice" Act, which would impose a surtax to help pay for the war in Afghanistan.
--The Editors
Contrary to Tim, I'm not totally skeptical of the news that Obama has invited Republicans to have a half-day conference -- at which they'd tell him why his health-care bill is awful, and he'd tell them why they're wrong. This is, of course, a media event in the strictest sense -- it has no legislative purpose but is something created so that it can be viewed. It's something to get us from the limbo we're in now to some actual voting.
Here, Obama has put Republicans in a bit of a bind: If they refuse his invitation, they confirm that they're just "the party of no." If they accept, on the other hand, they'll probably end up being taken to school by the president the way they were when he came to the House Republicans' meeting a couple of weeks ago. As many of us have been explaining at absurd lengths over the past year, nearly all of their objections to health-care reform are bogus. And this meeting promises a kind of exchange we don't actually get that often at a high level: one in which ridiculous claims can be refuted directly and immediately.
Despite all the cable chatter, this back-and-forth doesn't actually happen that much in places most people notice. When people watch the news, they tend to get a claim by one side followed by a claim from the other side wherein no claim is ever definitively shot down. Contrast that with, say, the exchange at the Baltimore meeting, in which Rep. Jeb Hensarling made the assertion that the yearly deficits under President Bush have become the monthly deficits under President Obama. Obama shot him down by noting that what he was saying was simply false, and Hensarling looked a little ridiculous.
If this next meeting takes place, we're likely to see some repeats of that moment. Republicans are unlikely to score too many points against health-care reform because the most politically effective arguments they have made on the topic have been the most dishonest and simplistic ones. It may have had an impact for Sarah Palin to tweet about "death panels," but that was partly because there was no one right there to call her out for the lie. In a situation where there are people from the other side sitting right there, these kinds of distortions become much more risky, with each potentially producing a humiliating moment that ends up leading the 6:30 news. And of course, the White House will be prepared for every argument Republicans will make (because there aren't that many of them), and will no doubt make sure Obama has compelling, sound-bite-ready answers.
At the end of it, Democrats can say, "All right -- you've had your say, we've listened to your ideas, such as they are, and now it's time to move forward with the bill." Perhaps more important than anything, the meeting could give tremulous congressional Democrats the shove they need to finally pass the damn thing.
-- Paul Waldman
Washington Monthly has a fantastic feature detailing the efforts of ultra-conservatives to rewrite textbooks for Texas schools. Since Texas is such a big market, it will affect what's in textbooks around the country. The effort had been reported on before, but Mariah Blake adds some history, noting that the involvement of conservatives grew after efforts in the 1960s to teach a more inclusive history:
This shift spurred a fierce backlash from social conservatives, and some began hunting for ways to fight back. In the 1960s, Norma and Mel Gabler, a homemaker and an oil-company clerk, discovered that Texas had a little-known citizen-review process that allowed the public to weigh in on textbook content. From their kitchen table in the tiny town of Hawkins, the couple launched a crusade to purge textbooks of what they saw as a liberal, secular, pro-evolution bias.
Among the changes? History books, for example, would emphasize the Christianity of America's founders and the role of conservatives in recent decades, leaving out liberals -- a sad coda to the death of Howard Zinn, the people's historian who showed the course of events from the perspective of the oppressed. Zinn, of course, undeniably had a point of view when he did so. The idea that history is colored by the lens of those who view it is, surely, nothing new. What's so depressing here is the anti-intellectualism and exclusionary tactics of those in charge in Texas. They seem to have mistaken the idea that there might be multiple readings of any historical event to mean almost anything you want to believe is true.
-- Monica Potts
On a news-slow, snowed-in Monday (TAP's Washington-based staff is corresponding from various neighborhood bureaus today) the most interesting topic -- barring The New York Times deciding to bring the thunder -- is the White House's decision to host a big, televised, bipartisan family meeting on health-care reform next week. On the subject, here's Ezra Klein, here's Jon Cohn.
Just about everybody figures that Obama is trying to capitalize on the success of his last televised interaction with the GOP to disarm the argument that Republicans have been left by the wayside on health-care reform, giving cover for Democrats to push ahead with the bill. It's not the worst idea in the world if he can't privately convince Senate leaders to use reconciliation to modify their bill and induce the House to pass it. Indeed, this may be what is needed to get reluctant Dems over the line. But I'm a little concerned because, as Kevin Drum observes, this effort is "largely going to succeed or fail based on how well Democrats and Republicans are able to make their case in the media." We've had these summits before (for health care, above, and for energy, and for the jobs bill as recently as December), and they haven't moved the debate.
Thus far, Republicans have been very effective in making this bill out to be a grand social experiment in Marxist horror, even though it actually incorporates many of their ideas. The legislation's component parts also remain individually popular. Republicans are going to come out of this meeting just as they are going into it -- complaining and demanding that Obama follow their advice. However brilliant the president's performance may be, it won't change the Republican-promoted narrative that the GOP was left out of making this bill, that it is is too complex to understand, and that it represents the end of the world. I mean, the media isn't even willing to challenge Republican claims that the bill "spends money we don't have" when the nonpartisan CBO has scored it as deficit-neutral in the short run and a deficit-reducer over the long term.
What might change that narrative would be if Democrats demonstrated their belief in the quality of their proposals by passing them. Show, don't tell, Dems.
-- Tim Fernholz
Dayo Olopade profiles Attorney General Eric Holder:
Hours before dawn on one of the last days of October 2009, the deadliest month for American troops in Afghanistan since 2001, Eric Holder, attorney general of the United States, strode out of a C-17 cargo plane parked at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. President Barack Obama, having reversed the ban on media coverage of the arrival of war dead at Dover, trailed just behind. During the official military ceremony, the two friends stood in dark suits, silently saluting 18 servicemen, including three Drug Enforcement Agency officials claimed by the Afghan War days prior. The aggrieved expressions on their faces were identical.
Holder's presence was surprising. The attorney general has played only a minor role in the public debate over issues of war and peace. But as the president contemplates the legal and logistical puzzles bequeathed to him by George W. Bush -- chiefly the management of what the administration no longer calls a "war on terror" -- Holder has provided crucial, if understated, counsel and support.
It was encouraging to see the Domestic Policy Council's Heather Higginbottom say in a White House chat last week that the Obama administration is supportive of a federal law restoring ex-felons' voting rights. The messy patchwork of laws we currently have for the once-incarcerated is one of the least appealing aspects of the modern American practice of democracy. It doesn't have to be this way.
Elections are, of course, largely state affairs in the U.S., by history and by the fact that people would freak if we threatened that. But the way that the ex-felons are treated on Election Day isn't right -- all the more so because it varies so wildly from state to state. Take Maine. There, you can vote from your prison cell. But if you sold the same amount of marijuana in Florida, you'll most likely never vote again. Even after you've formally repaid what society has said is the debt incurred by your crime. According to the Sentencing Project, 35 states prohibit the once-incarcerated from voting while they are on parole. All but five of them also prevent felons from voting while on probation.
We end up with broken places like Providence, Rhode Island, where 1 in 5 black men there can't vote, according to a 2004 report. We incarcerate so many people that in the U.S. as a whole, 13 percent of black men can't vote. That's a problem for everything from representative democracy to the damage it does to how these men and women (and others like them) think about themselves, their communities, and their country.
Now, the political optics of restoring the right to vote to former felons through a federal law are obviously, well, pretty challenging. But I do think that a supremely talented politician could convincingly lay out the case and come away with a historic civil-rights win. Anyone know of one?
-- Nancy Scola
(Photo credit: iandavid)
Many state school systems are facing a "funding cliff" next year when their federal stimulus money runs out, which was the kind of dramatic budget shortfall the stimulus money was meant to prevent in the first place. Most states spent the bulk of the funds last year and this year, and are left with little. But a few states spent everything, leaving nothing for the coming academic year, according to the New York Times.
The leaders of some of these struggling states, like South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, were among the most vocal opponents of the stimulus and feigned reluctance when the federal money was dispersed. And since many states used those federal funds to bolster the program that helps poor and disabled children, it's hard to imagine where those children would be if it weren't for the stimulus money. Now, those kids could be poised to suffer most since the budget pain was merely postponed, not averted. And don't look for Republicans and centrist Democrats in Congress to vote for the second stimulus package their states could use.
Of course, this disconnect is part of a larger problem. Many of the reddest states, whose citizens espouse the loudest anti-tax rhetoric, benefit the most from federal money, and have for a long time. That was part of the reason the video of Obama schooling the G.O.P. over their hypocrisy on the stimulus was so satisfying. We could use more of that from the Democratic leadership.
-- Monica Potts
Mark Schmitt argues that the real concern after Citizens United should be that small donors will stop giving:
Discussions of money in politics are usually steeped in watery metaphors: The Supreme Court's recent Citizens United decision will "open the floodgates" of corporate money, we're told, which will "drown" or "swamp" the voice of ordinary citizens. Skeptics of campaign finance regulation warn that, like damming a river, it will only divert the flow to other channels.
Permit me to extend the soggy simile for just a few lines more: In the case of water, floods and dambreaks make headlines, but far more human suffering and strife is caused by too little water than by an excess of it. And the same is true of political money. While political reformers still sometimes lapse into slogans like, "Get money out of politics," or bemoan the total amount spent, in fact, a scarcity of money for campaigns is a source of far more trouble than an excess is.
Via David Schorr, former Bill Clinton- and George W. Bush-era counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke accuses the GOP of positioning themselves in order to take advantage of a terrorist attack. Noting that the Obama administration's approach to handling the failed underwear bomber was consistent with that of prior administrations, Clarke writes:
It has been hard to escape the conclusion that the goal of these critics is to discredit the President's handling of terrorism for political advantage, whether or not the administration is actually doing a good job. Indeed, they seem to be posturing themselves simply so that if there is a successful terrorist attack on America, they can say "I told you Obama doesn't know how to fight Al Qaeda."
[...]
There may well be another successful terrorist attack in the U.S. someday soon. No system can stop all of the attempts all of the time; ask Israel. When and if that attack does come, let us hope the American people will reject any attempt to make it a partisan issue. It is not conduct worthy of real patriots.
Naked political interest would certainly explain the irrational discrepancy between the rather sudden Republican opposition to Bush-era policies now that the Obama administration is implementing them.
At any rate, remember when criticizing the president on national security was giving "aid and comfort to the enemy," the definition of treason as described in the U.S. Constitution? Now apparently it's giving aid and comfort to the enemy for the president to respond. Perhaps if the GOP retakes Congress, they can rewrite the statutory definition of treason to mean "disagreeing with Republicans."
-- A. Serwer
All for the best, in my view. The move also doesn't eliminate the possibility of a bipartisan bill; if anything, it makes the chances of a bipartisan bill even stronger. Republicans would be happy to pull a Gang of Six and spend months weakening a regulatory reform bill, publicly dragging it through the mud and then, ultimately, not voting for it. By moving forward on an aggressive bill, Dodd and the Democrats can harness anti-bank sentiment by staking out a clear position and daring Republicans to oppose it. Despite the Frank Luntz memo's newspeak, I just don't think this is a winning issue for Republican opposition if Democrats demonstrate that they are pushing for serious restrictions on the banks.
The worry, though, is whether the rest of the Democrats on the committee can hold together. While Jack Reed and Chuck Schumer (despite his Wall Street fundraising prowess) are both solid on these issues, others -- like Mark Warner, Evan Bayh, and especially Tim Johnson -- are not known as reformers. The question now is whether they calculate that the political incentives of restricting banks outweigh the financial incentives of cosmetic reform. In that effort, some clear lines in the sand from the president would be helpful.
-- Tim Fernholz
Last night's NFL Championship game provided many instructional moments for politics. For one, President Barack Obama could learn strategy from Saints' Coach Sean Payton, who turned the game around with his bold play-calling, particularly an on-sides kick to start the second half.
Unfortunately, the political ads were not so enlightening. The controversial anti-choice ad from Tim Tebow and his mother didn't seem as pernicious as we all expected due to vague language and the weird decision to have Tebow fake-tackle his mom. But another ad, run by one of Rick Berman's astroturf shops, the Employment Policies Institute, was a classic debt-scare, featuring children reciting an altered pledge of allegiance: "I pledge allegiance to America's debt, and to the Chinese government that lends us money. And to the interest, for which we pay, compoundable, with higher taxes and lower pay until the day we die."
Oh noes! Except that this is way over-hyped, especially the pledging allegiance to the Chinese government. Shall we go to the chart?
The chart is from this excellent Brad Setser post which explains why we relied more heavily on China in 2006 and 2007 than we did last summer -- basically, because of the recession's effect on trade and the fact that many U.S. bondholders are private. Even though that data is a bit older, right now, the Chinese only own 22 percent of America's public debt. True, China owns the most of any single country, but that also makes sense given they're the third largest national economy in the world (Japan, for instance, holds comparably high U.S. reserves). And as I've written before, China can't do much to hurt us with that debt unless they are willing to hurt themselves.
The deficits needed to get us out of the this recession are pretty easy to finance thanks to low interest rates and the fact that the vast majority of the current deficit was inherited by the current administration. But you didn't hear Rick Berman and the rest of the debt-scare crew complaining about China taking over the country when we were even more in hock three or four years ago.
-- Tim Fernholz
An emotional fan of the New Orleans Saints reacts to their performance in Superbowl XLIV at the Turning Point Lounge in New Orleans. The Saints beat the favored Indianapolis Colts 31-17.
(Flickr/dsb_nola)
White House Counterterrorism Adviser John Brennan said Sunday that Republicans had been briefed that underwear bomber Umar Abdulmutallab had been placed in FBI custody shortly after the failed attack. At the time, they had raised no objections, and only criticized the administration's approach later.
This isn't exactly surprising. Even though the policy continuity between the Obama and Bush administrations has been so flush that it's disturbing, Republicans have nevertheless vehemently objected to policies that they found acceptable when their party controlled the White House.
Brennan said that on Christmas night he had briefed four senior House and Senate Republicans about Abdulmutallab, who was "in FBI custody" and at that point "talking" and "cooperating." He said that at no point did any of the four -- Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the Senate Republican minority leader; Sen. Christopher S. Bond (Mo.), ranking GOP member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), the House minority leader; and Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), ranking minority member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence -- raise concerns about Abdulmutallab being placed in military custody or being Mirandized.
Bond and spokespeople for McConnell and Hoekstra have subsequently said that they didn't know Abdulmutallab was being "mirandized," but that's precisely what being in FBI custody would entail -- they are a federal law enforcement agency. That response doesn't excuse the subsequent Republican overreaction. In fact, it makes it worse. It suggests those among the GOP who are now complaining about how Abdulmutallab is being handled are incompetent rather than uninformed.
The GOP seems mostly disappointed that Abdulmutallab is providing useful intelligence without being tortured or otherwise mistreated. Had Obama heeded the GOP's calls for Abdulmutallab to be put in military custody (and it's not clear that's legal; the past two administrations have deliberately dodged SCOTUS cases on the assumption that it likely isn't), it's unlikely the key cooperation of Abdulmutallab's family could have been secured -- or for that matter, that of other Muslims in future terrorism cases. Meanwhile, Republicans seem to have settled on two lines of attack, with the first being to disparage the FBI like McConnell did last week. The second is to argue that while Republicans are allowed to attack the administration for being weak on national security, correcting the faulty assumptions at the heart of those criticisms is unfair.
Brennan, a career CIA man whose controversial record in support of some Bush-era policies got him in trouble with the left early last year, seemed particularly fed up with the GOP criticism of those intelligence and law enforcement professionals whose job it is to protect the country:
I think those counterterrorism professionals deserve the support of our Congress. ... And rather than second-guessing what they are doing on the ground with a 500-mile screwdriver from Washington to Detroit, I think they have to have confidence in the knowledge and the experience of these counterterrorism professionals.
I think this approach, trashing counterterrorism professionals, has substantial political risk for the GOP. Or it would, if the Democratic Party were interested in something other than playing defense. While the Center for American Progress' John Podesta called on McConnell to apologize for trashing the FBI Sunday, you're not likely to see very much aggressive pushback from members of Congress while the administration appears to want Republican cooperation on the health-care bill.
What's that definition of insanity again? Doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different response ...
-- A. Serwer
- Barack Obama continues to display a trait guaranteed to annoy his supporters: clearly articulating the nature of a problem, and then refusing to throw his weight behind a solution. The president's remarks last night won't put liberals at ease. To look at the big picture, House Democrats want the Senate to act first on a reconciliation bill before they vote for the final Senate bill and its amendments, Senate Democrats want the House to make the first move and are waiting for leadership from the president, and Obama wants the Senate to move before he gets behind the effort. No wonder people are frustrated.
- Lawrence Lessig on what ails the country: a corrupt "Fundraising Congress" that is trapped in a cycle of dependency on lobbyist and corporate money. It's a familiar argument for anyone who has followed Lessig's political advocacy career, and his diagnosis, I think, is spot-on. Less convincing is his belief that Barack Obama, perhaps uniquely, squandered an opportunity to do something about it. It's impossible to assess whether coming out strongly in favor of changing Congress would have been enough to fix the problem, although some of the specific reform ideas he throws out -- particularly changing campaign finance law -- are sound. Read the whole thing.
- From the better-late-than-never file, Dana Milbank has finally gotten off the tire swing and declared that he misses the old John McCain from a decade ago. The Maverick was always a myth, of course, but compared to the vindictive warmonger that is the John McCain running for re-election in a hostile conservative environment, I'd take the figment-of-the-imagination John McCain any day.
- Freshly inaugurated Sen. Scott Brown, in claiming that the stimulus did not create a single job, has more or less proven the Larison Theory of Tea Party Support -- allegiance aligns with acceptance or rejection of the stimulus. Bonus circumstantial evidence: dead man walking Gov. Mark Sanford flying to Washington, hat in hand, after spending the better part of last year decrying the stimulus and promising to reject it.
- The Internet is hardly novel, so I am surprised to read discussions about who has the "edge" on the Internet, politically. In 2003 or thereabouts when all this stuff was new, the question of how technology would affect media and politics was legitimate. But it's clear now that technology is a tool, and who has leveraged Twitter the best is not a particularly interesting question. Look at it this way: if Michael Steele had rolled out an awesome GOP.com Web site instead of the joke du jour of the blogosphere, would we be saying right now that the awesomeness of the new GOP.com Web site is a major factor in the Republican comeback?
- Remainders: In light of this whole Shelby brouhaha, I'd like to endorse Steve Benen's "bring on the recess appointments" approach to filling government posts; Gallup discovers that most Americans have opinions on political systems that they define with their own imaginations; Newsweek notices that people earning over a quarter million dollars aren't exactly struggling; Tom Tancredo has the courage of his convictions to let everyone know that he is a bigot; and while this post examining the 2010 Obama legislative strategy is worth reading for the analysis, the LBJ quote alone is worth the price of admission.
--Mori Dinauer
The latest breakdown in the operations of the world's most farcical legislative body that Paul mentions below should serve as a reminder that the Senate's crazy anti-democratic rules go well beyond the filibuster. As Mark Tushnet recently noted, getting rid of the filibuster in itself probably wouldn't accomplish very much:
Changing the rule over the objections of a cohesive minority that's big enough -- as the Republican minority is -- would immobilize the Senate because an enormous amount of the Senate's work gets done by unanimous consent to the waiver of otherwise applicable rules. (Remember the contretemps over reading Senator Sanders's substitute amendment for the health care reform bill? The rules require reading such amendments, which almost never happens because the proposer seeks and obtains unanimous consent to waive that rule.) By denying unanimous consent to such waivers, a minority can stall legislation almost as effectively as it can through the modern form of the filibuster.
The problems posed by non-filibuster obstructions can also be seen in Republican threats to derail a Senate reconciliation vote on health care. But this brings us the other issue Paul discusses, the asymmetry in how the two parties approach minority obstruction. (As an example of how shameless the GOP has become, take Jim DeMint's assertion that using the majority voting rules that prevail in pretty much every other legislative body in the world would be "tyrannical"; tyranny of minorities of one, apparently, doesn't count.)
I think Paul identifies the critical fact here: Until Senate Democrats realize that the Republican minority is simply no longer willing to adhere to norms that allowed the institution to function despite its stupid rules, basic governance will be enormously difficult. Dems need to realize that the party in power will be held responsible by the electorate for these failures either way, so they need to do what they can to move the Senate toward majority rule.
--Scott Lemieux
Rosa Parks sits for a booking photo following her arrest for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, on Dec. 1, 1955. She would have turned 97 this week.
Previous Little Pictures in honor of Black History Month:
The P-51 Mustang Group of the 15th Army Air Force
The Little Rock Nine
Jack Johnson
Jitterbugging in Clarksdale, Mississippi
Robert Kuttner argues for more deficit spending on public investment and jobs:
The economy is still very fragile, yet Washington seems more fixated on deficits than on recovery. Fiscal conservatives in Congress hope to hold recovery spending hostage for long-term caps on social outlay, and they have some company in the White House. Groups like the billion-dollar Peter G. Peterson Foundation are leading the charge.
For a quarter-century, Peterson has been exaggerating long-term costs of Social Security and Medicare. In truth, Social Security is close to balance -- its 75-year projected deficit is just one-half of 1 percent of gross domestic product. Medicare is seriously in deficit, but reform of Medicare consistent with high-quality health care depends on tackling the deeper drivers of medical inflation.
Adam Serwer reviews Born to Use Mics, a new anthology edited by Michael Eric Dyson:
Illmatic, the first album by hip-hop elder statesman Nas, is a masterpiece. Released in 1994, its tales of scowling corner boys, prowling drug addicts, undercover cops, treacherous lovers, and remorseful gangsters are so vivid that you can almost feel your nostrils being singed as Nas brushes the marijuana ash from his clothes. From out the gate, Nas identifies himself as a writer's writer ("see with the pen I'm extreme") and proceeds to prove himself right, offering lines that are poetic ("with more kicks/than a baby in a mother's stomach"), bleak ("straight-up shit is real/and any day could be your last in the jungle"), and cautiously hopeful ("that buck that bought a bottle/could have struck the lotto").
As the legend goes, the frenetic pace of Nas' flow, his complex internal rhyme schemes, and his dense lyricism had people wearing out their cassette tapes, rewinding them over and over again in disbelief. It's the one album in all of hip-hop whose artistic value, regardless of the critic's personal taste, is unassailable. Even Nas' longtime nemesis, Jay-Z, frankly confesses that the first time he heard the album, "the shit was so ahead/thought we was all dead."
Ten American missionaries accused of kidnapping 33 Haitian children were formally charged with abduction and conspiracy by a Haitian court yesterday. Haiti's ambassador to the United States, Raymond Joseph, says he hopes the move sends the message that Haiti's government is alive and well after the earthquake. From the Christian Science Monitor:
'By this action, I think the Haitian government is sending a clear message to the world that there is a government in place, and that nobody can just take it upon himself or herself to come and do in Haitii whatever they think is good,' Mr. Joseph said by telephone Thursday from Washington, D.C.
Joseph noted that the motives of the group, who were from Idaho and Kansas, will likely be taken into account at a later point in the prosecution. I have no doubt the missionaries believed they were helping. And we now know many of the children have living parents who gave them to the Americans because they were told they would be taken to a school in the Dominican Republic.
But what's bothered me about the case is what can only be the Americans' arrogance, even if it was well-meaning. It's beyond me why they felt they knew how best to help the children -- because they're Americans? because they're Christians? -- without checking with the Haitian government that their actions were legal or better than anything else already in place. And it's just another symbol of the problematic relationship we have with Haiti, that the U.S. feels that whatever it does to Haiti, it must be helping and never hurting.
--Monica Potts
My crack yesterday, denigrating Ramesh Ponnuru's integrity and intelligence was admittedly mean-spirited, and he has justifiably responded to me in kind. But in the course of responding to my substantive claims, he has essentially acknowledged that economic forces drive anti-incumbency sentiment, but without addressing why any discussion of these forces is absent in his original essay.
To review, Ponnuru begins with a comparison between 1994 and 2010, stating baldly that the former was "first and foremost a referendum on the first two years of Bill Clinton’s presidency" and that the original Contract with America, while not entirely on the public's radar, nevertheless provided "the party with an image of being forward-looking problem-solvers rather than merely anti-Clintonites." Fair enough, and as Rep. Jeff Flake recently remarked, "In 1994, nobody had any memory of Republicans in power. Now they do, and it wasn’t pretty. And so we have something to overcome that we really didn’t in 1994." Ponnuru acknowledges the differences between 1994 and 2010, but it's after his review of this history that he goes astray.
Ponnuru chastises me for omitting his contention that 2010 will "primarily" (why not "first and foremost?") be a referendum on Obama and the Democrats. Fine. But what is the nature of this referendum? I think it's undeniable that 10 percent (now 9.7) unemployment would drag down any president, a point Ponnuru himself makes in his response. But this fact is not mentioned anywhere in his original essay. In fact, I searched the text for the terms "job," "employ," and "econ" to ensure I didn't miss some discussion of the economic conditions facing the country. Of "job" I found an unrelated reference ("That will be the job of Rep. Kevin McCarthy"), "employ" a hit against government workers ("Pay for government employees has been booming at a time of private-sector layoffs") and "econ" an attack against the supposedly dire consequences of cap-and-trade ("...economic damage that cap-and-trade legislation would entail").
The balance of the essay is devoted to describing how Republicans ought to harness public anger and incorporate it into a new Contract. He offers the usual boilerplate Republican solutions ("new energy technologies," "tax policies that are pro-growth and pro-family," "no new bailouts," repealing "Obamacare," fighting corruption, etc.) but does not offer even a vague proposal for dealing with unemployment. I presume that the tax policies he has in mind are across-the-board tax cuts that will somehow produce growth and hence create jobs. But therein lies the problem. As always with conservatives, a tax cut is the appropriate response to any economic situation. And viewed that way, such a tax policy is less a demonstration of competent conservative governance, and more a demonstration of rigid and thoughtless ideology. Ponnuru is taking it as axiomatic that a tax cut will lead to hiring and hence doesn't need to explicitly talk about unemployment. But from outside the bubble, the conservative response would seem to be let it burn.
This is why Ponnuru equates middle-class tax cuts with electoral success. He would like to believe that the public responded in 2006 and 2008 not to endless war and economic ruin but "in part" because Republicans didn't promise to cut taxes. He is recasting an ideological position (tax cuts are a permanent prescription) as a bread-and-butter issue, and assuming that the public will punish Democrats come November not just for being poor stewards of the state but being ideologically incompatible as well. As I keep saying, this is an article of faith in the conservative movement: the public, unchanging, ideologically conservative, is a permanent silent majority that occasionally takes leave of its senses and foolishly elects Democrats because Republicans lost their way and were not conservative enough. Ponnuru's essay doesn't say this explicitly, but his focus on a Republican strategy that exploits public anger without even acknowledging the source of the anger is quite telling.
--Mori Dinauer
“This macho bravado—that’s the kind of thing that leads you into wars that should not be fought, that history is not kind to. The quest for justice, despite what your contemporaries might think, that’s toughness. ... This is something that can get a rise out of me, the notion that somehow Eric Holder and Barack Obama, this Administration, is not tough. We have the welfare of the American people in our minds all the time. We’ll fight our enemies, and we’ll do that which is necessary, and we won’t turn our backs on the values and traditions that have made this country great. That is what is tough.” -- Attorney General Eric Holder speaking to The New Yorker's Jane Mayer about trying suspected terrorists in civilian courts.
As I've said before, killing is just a means to an end with terrorism. In this case, the end is the self-destruction of American society in a vortex of hysteria. What's remarkable now is that Republicans are agitating for that self-destruction in the aftermath of a terrorist attack that utterly failed. They don't even need to kill us any more. Al-Qaeda screams "boo" and half the country is ready to throw the Constitution in the toilet. That's not "toughness." That's what an al-Qaeda victory looks like.
-- A. Serwer
Sen. Chris Dodd, the Senate Banking Committee chair, scolded Wall Street representatives at a hearing Thursday for sending “an army of lobbyists whose only mission is to kill the commonsense financial reforms” needed by the public.
“The fact is,” Dodd said, “I am frustrated, and so are the American people.” He charged that Wall Street’s intransigence was the reason for Congress’ failure to pass any bill to regulate the Street. “The refusal of large financial firms to work constructively with Congress on this effort borders on insulting to the American people who have lost so much in this crisis.”
In other words, it isn’t Congress’s fault. It isn’t the Senate Banking Committee’s fault. It certainly isn’t Dodd’s fault. The reason more than a year has passed since the biggest bailout in the history of the world and nothing has been done to prevent a repeat performance -- even as the biggest banks are doling out more than $30 billion of bonuses, even as Goldman Sachs is awarding its big traders $16 billion in bonuses (more than the $13 billion Goldman collected from taxpayers via the bailout of AIG), even as AIG itself is handing out bonuses -- the reason is … what, exactly, Senator? Because the Street has sent an army of lobbyists to Capitol Hill?
Call me old fashioned, but I thought Congress was in charge of passing legislation, not Wall Street.
Dodd left out the most telling detail, of course. Wall Street is where the campaign money is. Dodd of all people knows that. He’s been on the receiving end of lots of it over the years.
More after the jump.
--Robert Reich
MORE...One interesting aspect of today's unemployment numbers is the up-tick in women's emplyoment. Economist Dean Baker writes in:
The unemployment rate fell to 9.7 percent in January driven by a 0.4 percentage point drop in the unemployment rate for women to 8.4 percent. The unemployment rate for men fell 0.2 pp (percentage points) to 10.8 percent... The improved employment picture was primarily a story for adult white women. Their unemployment rate fell by 0.6 pp to 6.8 percent, while their employment rate (EPOP) rose by 0.6 pp to 56.1 percent. The unemployment rate for black women rose slightly to 13.3 percental though their EPOP also rose 0.2 pp to 54.7 percent. It is striking that the EPOP for white women is now 1.4 pp higher than for black women. Until last summer it had always been lower, although the gap had been narrowing over the last three decades.
This reflects the long-time trend in recessions where typically "male" jobs bear the brunt of cut backs, and the more recent expansion of the health-care sector, which disproportionately hires female workers. Dana Goldstein discussed this trend on TAPPED earlier in the fall, highlighting the need to look for a balanced recovery, when a decline of women in the work force is expected. We also published a special report on women in the work force in June.
-- Tim Fernholz
The news of the day is that Sen. Richard Shelby has placed a "hold" on every single pending Obama nominee, until the Democrats give in to his blackmail and fork over a few billion dollars in defense pork for Alabama. This could be, as Josh Marshall suggests, a shark-jumping moment for the GOP. But I doubt it.
Republicans' audacity about these kinds of things has changed the standards of what we consider audacious. You might remember how, back when George W. Bush was president and Democrats were filibustering a few truly abominable judicial nominees, Republicans considered eliminating the filibuster on judicial nominations but keeping it on everything else. This idea was considered so radical it was termed the "nuclear option," in that it would incinerate the Senate and vaporize any hope of cross-partisan comity for all time. But now this kind of stuff barely raises an eyebrow, particularly among a press corps that has gotten used to the idea that Republicans play hardball, Democrats don't do anything about it because they're wimps, and therefore the latest outrage is barely worth taking note of. Jonathan Chait explains why this is possible:
Many of the changes in American politics over the past three decades have involved the two parties slowly doing away with social norms that preventing them from using every tool at their disposal. The Senate minority could filibuster every single bill the majority proposed, but you just didn't do that, until you did. You could use a House-Senate conference to introduce completely new provisions into a bill, but you just didn't do that, until you did. (The topic became common in the Bush administration.) The possibility was always there to use endless amendments to filibuster a reconciliation bill. But nobody thought to do that until Republicans floated the tactic this week.The "hold" is a now similar tool to what the filibuster was forty years ago. It's a sparingly-used weapon meant to signal an unusually intense preference. A Congressional scholar reports that putting a blanket hold on all the president’s nominees has never been done before. But there's no rule that says you can't. It's just not done, until it is.
The main thing that keeps those kinds of norms in place isn't the good will of all involved -- it's the understanding that if you violate them, there will be some kind of cost. The problem today is that there is no foreseeable cost for this kind of move.
Take the filibuster, for instance. Under the rules that obtained when Strom Thurmond was bellowing from the Senate floor about the dangers of race-mixing, undertaking a filibuster had a cost. Namely, it was a huge pain in the ass -- you had to keep talking, and you weren't allowed to leave, even to go to the bathroom. Partly because of that, the filibuster was used only rarely. It just wasn't something you would want to do every day. Since then the Senate's rules have been changed, and now all you have to do to undertake a filibuster is express your intention to do so. When a party decides they'd like to just filibuster everything -- as today's Republicans have -- there's no reason they can see not to go ahead and do it.
If there's no practical cost, the only thing left to stop them from filibustering everything, or putting a blanket hold on every nominee to extort some pork for Alabama, is the possibility of a political cost. At this point, that's up to the Democrats to impose. It would require a little bit of toughness: they'd have to have everyone go out and say, over and over so it would take over the news, that Richard Shelby and his Republican friends are despicable extortionists who will sabotage the operation of the United States government for the sake of some pork-barrel earmarks. They could also fit it into a larger narrative about nihilistic Republicans who care so little about the country's fate that they will do virtually anything to subvert the administration, no matter what the cost, if they think it will gain them some advantage or some pork. If Democrats made enough noise about it, Shelby would back down, and it might even convince Republicans to think twice the next time one of them considers undertaking this kind of extortion.
Is that something Democrats are willing to do? Or are they afraid it would seem impolite?
-- Paul Waldman
(Flickr/Stephen Grose)
Matthew Yglesias on conservatives and due process:
The underlying issue here, as I’ve been saying, is that conservatives think that any constraint on the state security apparatus is too much. They believe, contrary to all of the evidence, that the rule-bound criminal justice system can’t or doesn’t function and that things would be better if we scrapped all the rules. And, indeed, in the civilian context they’ve worked steadily and systematically over a period of decades to weaken the constitutional protections as much as possible, and bring us as close as possible to their dream scenario of limitless state-sponsored violence. The desire to push certain categories of people (non-citizens) or certain categories of suspects (terrorists) out of the constitutionally protected realm is just part-and-parcel of that broad-based assault on the idea of a rule-bound justice system.
I don't really think this part about "certain categories" is peripheral to this argument. Conservatives didn't merely support "state violence," William F. Buckley's 1957 declaration that the South was "entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where [they do] not predominate numerically." This was an endorsement of vigilante violence against black people, so that white people might still clutch the reins of power. As long as the violence of the state is being used against a defined other who lacks the defined cultural "birthright," whether it be an illegal immigrant, a suspected terrorist, or a black kid walking home from school, such state-sponsored violence is inherently legitimate. The mere possibility that the state might use its resources against groups conservatives identify with provokes massive hysteria, and even when such concerns are legitimate, they don't extend to anyone outside a narrowly defined group. The point is that conservatives don't so much endorse "limitless" state violence -- it's limited in the sense that it should only be applied to "those people." This also may help to explain some of the paranoia about Obama's "re-education camps" and such -- for the first time, the head of state is one of "those people."
Just speaking for myself, when you grow up a minority in the United States, you learn early lessons about the violence of the state not being inherently legitimate, from friends and relatives if not first hand. The casual acceptance of state violence has always seemed to me dependent on one's individual ability to imagine that kind of force used against you, or someone like you, or perhaps even someone you care about. The torture wing of the GOP lacks that impulse entirely, being motivated solely by the intellectual principle at the heart of Buckley's pro-South manifesto.
-- A. Serwer
Sarah Posner on the religion trap that Obama has fallen into:
In advance of yesterday's National Prayer Breakfast, President Barack Obama was under pressure to use the opportunity to condemn the anti-homosexuality bill pending in the Ugandan Parliament. The legislation, which would criminalize homosexuality and require the death penalty or life imprisonment for certain "offenses," has been described by human-rights activists as tantamount to instigating a genocide against sexual minorities, who are already persecuted in the African nation.
Obama, speaking just before the first anniversary of the launch of his Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, once again fell into the religion-in-public-life trap: Faith is intended for good, and we must present it as such -- regardless of its exploitation for ends that are less than pure, and regardless of one's stated commitment to secular government.
The arguments against environmental regulation always include the pro-business folks who fear a huge economic hit. That underestimates business. It assumes every company, when faced with new regulations, would roll over, say, "Well, I guess we can't make profits any more," and die. It completely leaves out the other response regulation can inspire: innovation and competition.
In an effort to get ahead of the curve, Calpine Corporation, a company that builds power plants, has voluntary asked for a permit limiting the amount of carbon it can emit, according to the New York Times' Green, Inc., blog.
The permit, issued by a California state agency under rules set by the federal Environmental Protection Agency, sets those limits by using the output of the 'best available control technology,' said Donald R. Neal Jr., the company’s vice president for environmental health and safety.But in anticipation of federal rules on carbon dioxide emissions, Calpine asked that the permit include a figure for carbon dioxide, derived the same way.
“The understanding by everyone is that by the end of March, the E.P.A. will issue the first rule to regulate greenhouse gases,’’ Mr. Neal said. That will be in light-duty vehicles, but at the same time, it will issue a rule specifying which stationary emitters will be covered by greenhouse gas rules in the future, he said.
Never mind that, for many of the regulations environmentalists call for on vehicle and power plant emissions, technology already exists to make it better. But a little anticipated government pressure is all it takes to get companies to use them.
-- Monica Potts
The jobs report out today shows a tiny decrease in unemployment, from 10.0 percent to 9.7 percent. This still follows 20,000 jobs lost in January and new revisions that measure the entire toll of this recession: 8.4 million jobs lost since the recession officially began in December 2007. Nonetheless, January's numbers show the smallest monthly job loss in over a year, suggesting that the unemployment market is beginning to stabilize, although economists forecast unemployment remaining at current levels for the rest of the year.
One interesting fact to note, however, is that the U-6 measurement, which includes people who have lost work hours and those who have given up on finding a job alongside the unemployed, dropped relatively dramatically, from 17.3 of the labor force -- where it had held steady for the last several months -- to 16.5 percent. This could augur well for the jobs situation: The decrease comes from part-time workers transitioning back to the full-time -- nearly 850,000 involuntary part-time employees made the switch -- a sign that broader hiring could be in the offing as demand for labor increases.
With discussion now turning to the jobs bill in the Senate, the question is whether Democrats can convince Republicans not to filibuster their effort to cut taxes on small businesses to encourage hiring. Let's not even talk about extending automatic stabilizers and investing in future jobs, or any of the other jobs-building priorities from the president's budget that will attract even more heat from congressional conservatives.
-- Tim Fernholz
Andy McCarthy tries to do a snow job on Jose Padilla and Ali Saleh al-Marri:
Jose Padilla (who, unlike Abdulmutallab, is an American citizen) was designated an enemy combatant and held without trial after being arrested inside the United States; so was Ali al-Marri. Ultimately, both were prosecuted in the civilian system — but only years later, after the intelligence community had ample opportunity to exhaust their capacity to provide useful information.
In fact, they were put back in the criminal justice system because the courts were about to wipe the floor with the Bush administration over Padilla, and as I've reported before, the Obama administration over al-Marri. They weren't put back in because their capacity to provide useful information had been "exhausted." What I love about this line of argument is that it directly contradicts the ones Republicans make in favor of detaining Umar Abdulmutallab in this manner. Republicans argue that military detention allows the government to get otherwise "perishable" intelligence quickly, but Padilla was held for three and a half years in military custody, al-Marri for nearly eight. That's some pretty non-perishable intelligence.
Moreover, putting people in the criminal justice system doesn't preclude further intelligence gathering. Law enforcement and intelligence can go back to those wells whenever they want. McCarthy simply believes that suspected terrorists require "more" punishment than the criminal justice system can mete out -- his opinion has nothing to do with intelligence or national security.
And on the specific point that Padilla and al-Marri were exhausted for intelligence while in military custody, Jane Mayer says otherwise:
Confusion on this point may derive from the Bush Administration’s controversial handling of two suspected terrorists, José Padilla and Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri. Both men were arrested in the U.S. by law-enforcement officials, and indicted on criminal charges. But Bush declared Padilla and Marri to be “enemy combatants,” which, he argued, meant that they could be transferred to military custody, for interrogation and detention without trial. (Neither suspect provided useful intelligence.) The cases provoked legal challenges, and in both instances appeals courts ruled that Bush had overstepped his power. The Administration, not willing to risk a Supreme Court defeat, returned the suspects to the civilian system.
It's not entirely true that al-Marri was useless as an intelligence source, however. Once al-Marri was taken out of complete isolation in a military brig, according to his attorney, he spent "hours" helping investigators correct errors in intelligence they had previously gathered.
So basically, we put two terrorists in military detention for several years and got scratch zero out of it before they were transferred to the civilian justice system -- at which point one of the detainees started talking. McCarthy would like us to repeat this process just for funsies.
-- A. Serwer
My friend Ed Luce at the Financial Times has written what seems to me the best and most succinct rundown of what's gone wrong in the White House, with particular attention to the role of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.
A concluding theme of the piece is that the White House, flush with the enthusiasm of an "amazing victory" in 2008, essentially carried the mood and tactics of the campaign into the White House. The November trip to China, in which administration officials with expertise on China were apparently kept at bay by Obama's inner circle, is described as, "the Obama campaign goes to China."
But in one important respect, the article suggests that the White House forgot the campaign's most significant political innovation, the one without which either Hillary Clinton or John McCain would be president. Here's a key quote from the piece:
“The whole Rahm Emanuel approach is that victory begets victory – the success of healthcare would create the momentum for cap-and-trade and then financial sector reform,” says one close ally of Mr Obama. “But what happens if the first in the sequence is defeat?”
In other words, the White House embraced a momentum strategy -- move fast, move big, and once things are rolling, they'll keep rolling. That's a very traditional way to see a new presidency. It's the legend of FDR's Hundred Days; it's Reagan in 1981; it's advice Obama probably got from almost everyone.
But momentum -- big victories beget victories -- was not the only strategy. And a momentum strategy has a significant downside: Since everything follows from the first victories, the only thing the other side has to do is stop the first, and the whole train runs off the rails. And while there is a powerful case that health reform should have priority on an economic and moral basis, putting it at the head of a momentum strategy, based on history, is not the soundest bet.
The thing is, momentum, or "victory begets victory," is the traditional advice given to insurgent presidential candidates as well. In place of health reform, put "New Hampshire," and the formula is the same. Presidential campaigns pour all their resources into Iowa and New Hampshire on the theory that if they win, more victories and more money will follow, and if not, they're doomed anyway. But the actual brilliance of the Obama campaign was to recognize -- after losing the Nevada caucuses and the New Hampshire primary -- that every victory is its own accomplishment and none actually matters more than the delegates it produces. Rejecting a momentum theory, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe deployed resources to dozens of states that wouldn't vote for weeks, picking off a dozen or more caucuses and primaries through that patient, grind-it-out strategy that resulted in winning the nomination on points, not a momentum-driven knockout.
Could there have been a governing equivalent to the Obama political strategy -- a comparable patient, grind-it-out, accumulation of small wins, building up to bigger consequences? It's hard to say. Just like the political strategy, it's never really been tried -- certainly not by Democrats. And Emanuel is hardly alone in believing that a momentum strategy with health care in the lead was the administration's best and only option. Indeed, many of Emanuel's sharpest critics from the left would have been even more outraged if the administration had pursued a different strategy. But all that's finished now, and a more strategic, piecemeal strategy is the only option that remains. Fortunately, it's the one that Obama has already mastered.
-- Mark Schmitt
- The socialist Obama administration, in its authoritarian quest to control every aspect of our lives, has proposed spending $400 million to develop healthy food outlets in urban communities to increase livability. Doesn't he realize that the free market works best when it's free? For example, Dollar General (the Dollar Store) saw that there were more poor people in the market and has added thousands to its payroll to accommodate this demand. The invisible hand has thus been made visible.
- I think Ramesh Ponnuru's reputation for being a smart and honest conservative really ought to be called into question after reading his essay at National Review that games out a Republican Contract with America for 2010. He repeatedly claims that the elections will be a referendum on Obama and the Democrats, who will have controlled Congress for four years, without once mentioning the state of the economy, unemployment, or jobs. And his assertion that "[i]t may not be a coincidence" Republicans lost in 2006 and 2008 because they didn't promise a middle-class tax cut? Perhaps this alternative reality could be used in an upcoming episode of Fringe.
- But surely other writers at National Review are taking the prospect of conservative governance seriously, right? Veronique de Rugy, for instance, finds it "interesting" that a reader suggests eliminating the entire federal government save Defense, Treasury, and Justice. This reader also thinks Defense should be renamed "Offense" and ought to take over the State Department. Reader then concludes with, "If something breaks somewhere, figure out what state/county/town it’s in, and let them get to work on it. If they don’t care to fix it, they can live with it as is." Truly commonsense conservatism.
- I know what you're thinking. It's not fair for me to cherry-pick nonsense from some joke conservative publication. Surely congressional Republicans have ideas for the country? You betcha. Rep. Paul Ryan, the House GOP's top budget writer, has suggested privatizing Medicare and Social Security. Sen. Tom Coburn gets innovative and suggests we need looser gun laws, including allowing "mentally defective" veterans to buy firearms and honoring concealed-carry permits across state lines. And in the final analysis, Republicans are cool with the budget deficit, so long as taxes are not raised.
- Remainders: Republicans can't wait to get back in bed with eager Wall Street donors; polls that ask for ideological self-identification are meaningless; submissive Senate Democrats put on the leash and hand Obama the whip; Nick Baumann thinks revelations that the Bush administration considered military action in Georgia in 2008 is a non-story; Harold Ford hires someone to write as Harold Ford for a blog that's about Harold Ford; actually, I could do with a little less nationalistic chest-thumping, but politically it's certainly a winner; and Chris Wallace is a very serious journalist.
--Mori Dinauer
Greg Sargent already pointed out the absurdity of this Washington Post article, but there's something else of which we should take note. The article asserts that Obama is "a rare president who comes from the middle class, yet people still perceive him as disconnected from it. As he arrived in Nashua, nearly two-thirds of Americans believed that his economic policies had hurt the country or made no difference at all; almost half thought he did not understand their problems." As Sargent notes, according to the Post's own polling, 57 percent of Americans say Obama "understands the problems of people like you," while 42 percent -- that's the "almost half" -- say he doesn't. Seems pretty good, right?
And in fact, if you look back at their polls on George W. Bush -- remember him, the reg'lar fella who liked nothing more than chewing on some pretzels while watching football after a vigorous session of brush-clearing? -- Obama looks even better. Turns out that the high Bush achieved on that question was 61 percent in January 2002, just four months after September 11. By July of that year he was at 57 percent -- where Obama is now -- and he kept falling and falling, until the last time they asked it, in early 2006, only 37 percent of Americans thought Bush understood their problems (the data can be read at pollingreport.com).
So the Post could have written a story headlined, "Despite Rough Political Waters, Obama Retains Bond With Ordinary Americans." But they wrote the opposite story. Why? I would argue it's probably the same reason reporters always write this story about Democratic politicians, and almost never about Republicans. It's one of the greatest successes of the conservative campaign of browbeating the press. Reporters have internalized the conservative argument about class: It's to be understood not as a factor of money but of tastes and style. Bush, who went to Andover, Yale, and Harvard, and who had a senator grandfather and a president father, can be a regular guy, because despite his expensive education, he has contempt for book learnin' and talks like a simpleton. No reporter would ever have considered asking whether Bush was an "elitist," despite his impassioned advocacy for the interests of the moneyed class. Obama, on the other hand, despite being raised by a single mother, must be some kind of chardonnay-swilling elitist who can't possibly relate to ordinary people.
The fact that most reporters themselves fit their own definition of "elitist" is precisely the point. The views of regular, real, heartlandish people can just be assumed, regardless of what the polls might say. Go to a diner or a barbershop, interview a couple of angry Republicans, and you've got your story.
-- Paul Waldman
Whenever I hear people complain about the Democrats' soft-on-banks policies -- and they are, in general, too soft for my liking -- I always think of the alternative:
In discussions with Wall Street executives, Republicans are striving to make the case that they are banks' best hope of preventing President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats from cracking down on Wall Street.GOP strategists hope to benefit from the reaction to the White House's populist rhetoric and proposals, which range from sharp critiques of bonuses to a tax on big Wall Street banks, caps on executive pay and curbs on business practices deemed too risky.
... Last week, House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio made a pitch to Democratic contributor James Dimon, the chairman and chief executive of J.P. Morgan, over drinks at a Capitol Hill restaurant, according to people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Boehner told Mr. Dimon congressional Republicans had stood up to Mr. Obama's efforts to curb pay and impose new regulations.
This shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with Republican efforts to obstruct financial reform. What's really absurd about this whole scenario is that the Democrats can't seem to get any political points off of this, or the fact that Rep. Paul Ryan's alternate GOP budget demolishes Medicare and Social Security in an effort to balance the budget.
-- Tim Fernholz
With the revelation that Umar Abdulmutallab has been talking to investigators despite not being tortured and despite having been mirandized, the bottom has fallen out of the GOP's criticism of the way the Obama administration handled the attempted Christmas Day bombing.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell seems to have grown particularly desperate trying to respond, making an absolutely indefensible statement about the men and women on the front lines of the fight against al-Qaeda (via Adam Blickstein):
MCCONNELL: They’ve seen on full display, the chaos of treating the Christmas bomber as if he has robbed a convenient store. This was a person who was trying to blow a plane out of the air from Nigeria. It’s clearly a case for the military and for our intelligence people, not for the U.S. court system. What happened? He was given a 50 minute interrogation, probably Larry King has interrogated people longer and better than that. After which he was assigned a lawyer who told him to shut up. That is not the way to deal with someone in the war on terror.
And again on Sunday:
“I mean, Larry King would have a more thorough interrogation of one of his [guests] than the Christmas bomber had by the Justice Department,” McConnell said, referring to the AP report that Abdulmutallab was interrogated for just 50 minutes before being read his Miranda rights.
This is an unconscionable statement. The men and women of the FBI put themselves on the line every day to protect the people of the United States from terrorist attacks, while politicians like McConnell puff out their chests and act like tough guys. They don't deserve to be disparaged by some high-ranking politician groping for a talking point on cable news.
McConnell owes the men and women of the FBI an apology.
UPDATE: Thinkprogress has video.
-- A. Serwer
E. J. Dionne had a talk with Joe Biden on the subject of American superiority (Biden is strongly in favor), which brings up yet another way in which the right and the left are often talking past each other when they appear to be talking about the same thing.
Progressives tend to find conservative jingoism distasteful, which conservatives sometimes interpret to mean that progressives hate America and want it to fail (indeed, one out of four Republicans believes "Barack Obama wants the terrorists to win"). The problem is that the two groups think about the subject of America and its awesomeness in different ways. Conservatives are far more likely to think that loving your country means you should, as often as possible, proclaim how awesome it is. These proclamations can be general ("U.S.A.! U.S.A.!") or specific ("We have the best health-care system in the world!"). The latter can get you into trouble if it's factually wrong, not just because you look foolish but because it actively prevents you from solving problems. Why would we need to reform health care, if we have the best system in the world?
When President Obama said in his State of the Union address that "I do not accept second place for the United States of America," he wasn't talking about the present, he was talking about the future -- whether we will retain our economic position. Progressives are much more likely to see this future as uncertain. Twenty years from now we might still have the most vibrant economy on earth, or we might not. The decisions we make between now and then will determine what happens. But conservatives tend to react negatively to even the suggestion that America could wind up in second place. That's because their focus is on the present tense, which it is assumed will be true for all eternity -- America is great, so of course it always will be great. We don't have to worry too much about what we need to do to keep it that way (apart from not enacting socialist policies), so long as we keep telling ourselves that it's true.
Is the person who devises a plan to improve America's health-care system more or less patriotic than the person who just declares that America's health-care system is great? That depends on how much importance you put on feelings, words, and symbolic gestures. Whatever else you can say about the two parties, Republicans are the ones who are much more concerned about these things (think about how often they complain that Obama didn't use a particular word or phrase enough, or used a word or phrase too often).
Nevertheless, they always seem a little flummoxed when confronted with patriotic-sounding proclamations from Democrats, like the one Obama made in the State of the Union. They know they're supposed to think he hates America, so it doesn't quite make sense. It could just be insincere, of course. But it might be better for them to just appreciate that he's talking about the future, while their patriotism is about the present.
Even though today he would probably be a Democrat, Gerald Ford's 1976 campaign had a song that pretty much summed this up. As the lyrics say, "I'm feeling good about America, I'm feeling good about me!"
-- Paul Waldman
What upset my stomach this morning wasn't so much the news that Google had partnered with the National Security Administration as it was that Google seems to have felt threatened enough by cyberattacks to do it. Google cherishes its reputation as one of the "good guys." The company counts how the public feels about it and its mission as one of the best things going for it.
And the NSA's public reputation ... You can make the case that among the damaging things caused by recent wiretapping excesses is the fact that a company like Google really has to think seven or eight times before allowing its information caches to be opened up to the federal government. The misuse of the U.S.' digital security capabilities weakened one of the defenses that is much needed on the cybersecurity front.
Of course, Google has to be very, very, very careful about protecting its users' data here. Its relationship with NSA has to be structured to limit things to the minimum of what is needed to track the intrusions into their systems that they cited as the reason why they're considering abandoning China, maybe even appointing some sort of special commission to oversee and ultimately audit the relationship.
But if Google was being accurate in that withdrawal statement and 20 other large companies in the "Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors" were victims of massive cyber-intrusions, then Google earns a little bit of respect for being the lone company (at least publicly) to do the difficult but responsible thing and ask for some government help tracing the attacks back to their sources. A recent report suggested thousands of American companies have been compromised online. Are those other corporations making the judgment that it's better for them and their bottom lines to sweep their cybersecurity weaknesses under the rug? Other companies have made that judgment before. But America's cybersecurity vulnerabilities are in some ways the sum total of those vulnerabilities. Their country needs them to step up and take this stuff seriously.
One big question now, of course, is what happens if and when the NSA traces back these attacks and the road does lead to a foreign government.
-- Nancy Scola
(Photo credit: RabunWarna)
Charter schools are often touted as labs for novel approaches to education, but one of these innovations isn't so new at all. The Civil Rights Project at UCLA today released a report showing that charter schools have become bastions for racial re-segregation.
The racial segregation cuts both ways. In certain states with high minority populations -- in the West and South in particular -- the composition of charter schools is overwhelmingly white. In other places, it is primarily black or Latino. And because these schools operate independently of state school districts, they are more free to skirt guidelines for racial and economic diversity.
The Civil Rights Project suggests turning to magnet schools for the specialized approaches to education currently offered by charter schools. But it's an incomplete recommendation: Magnet schools function just like charter schools, but operate within the purview of school districts -- and draw on their students. There is no guarantee that they will draw a representative sample of the district's students. So unless school districts make it an active goal to ensure a diverse student body, they just become segregated charter schools with an institutional blessing.
Personally, I have never understood why specialized educational initiatives can't be implemented as programs at public schools. My high school, on the U.S.-Mexico border, was plagued by many of the problems that school districts serving high-immigrant, low-income students face (35 percent ELL learners, low college grad rate). And yet the school offered the International Baccalaureate program, allowing nerds like me to get the specialized education we needed without having to be shipped off to another school.
-- Gabriel Arana
Over at Foreign Policy, Israeli scholar Danny Kaplan has an article about Israel's experience since it lifted its ban on gays serving in the military back in 1993. The piece's title -- "They're Here, They're Queer, It's No Big Deal" -- pretty much says it all:
The United States and Turkey are now the only NATO military powers that do not allow gays to serve openly, but Israel and other countries have shown that the participation of gay soldiers in combat units presents no risk for military effectiveness. What's more, acknowledging their presence might even improve unite cohesion.It is important to understand that even without restrictions, most gay soldiers do not "come out" in combat settings. Only a few of the soldiers I have interviewed confided their sexuality in friends from the unit, and they often did so shortly before leaving their position. Most of them developed strategies to separate between their various personal and social identities. One soldier, a gay activist prior to his enlistment, explained to me: "I don't really see that the army and my identity have anything to do with each other. Just like there is a separation of religion and state, I draw a line between the army and my ‘religion.'" This ability to balance conflicting identities is hardly unusual in the army. Soldiers of various ethnic and religious backgrounds similarly adjust to the melting pot of military culture.
This is why the policy of "don't ask, don't tell" has little relevance to the reality of military life. Despite what military officials want to ask or insist on not asking, and despite what gay activists want soldiers to tell about their sexuality, most straight soldiers are not interested in hearing it, and many gay soldiers are not interested in telling it. They simply are what they are and find ways to function together. Policies restricting the participation of gay soldiers paradoxically make sexuality a more salient issue.
This couldn't help but bring to mind the now-infamous NPR interview with former Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter. When Melissa Block pointed out to him that there are lots of gay people now serving in the military, he replied, "But they aren't open about it, like you just said. It's like if you want to work for NPR, you don't go to work and on the first day say, hey, I want everybody to know that I'm gay." (Hunter also contended that the "special bond" between members of the military will be broken "if you open up the military to transgenders, to hermaphrodites, to gays and lesbians.")
What are supporters of the ban missing that the Israelis understand? It has only been in recent years that the broader public has become aware of the mundane reality of most gay people's lives. Many older people like Hunter (and the Republican membership of the Senate Armed Services Committee, apparently), haven't quite gotten that message. They seem to believe that there are only two states of gayness: closeted, and RuPaul, with nothing in between. They seem to think that existence as a gay person, in the military or elsewhere, is one long gay pride parade, where everyone is required to dance in assless chaps (see the classic article from The Onion, "Gay-Pride Parade Sets Mainstream Acceptance of Gays Back 50 Years"). An exit from the closet, whether by a soldier or anyone else, must be performed in hot pants, to the pulsing strains of "It's Raining Men."
If that's what you think, it's only understandable that the prospect of openly gay people serving sounds like a recipe for chaos. But chances are that when it actually happens, things are going to go a lot more smoothly than the ban's proponents fear.
-- Paul Waldman
Paul Waldman talks with Christopher Carrick about urban planning and regional inequality:
I suppose what was so attractive about Richard Florida was the idea that he had uncovered a foolproof path to economic and cultural vitality. What is the current thinking about what cities can, and should, do?
After many years of debate among economic-development theorists between those who argued that "people follow jobs" and those (Florida among them) who claimed "jobs follow people," the current consensus is that cities have to build local production systems and train their local labor force at the same time as they try to attract the "creative class." Unfortunately, Florida's ideas have been used to justify using scarce public resources to provide urban amenities that cater to the presumed needs of a very limited part of the work force.
Cities should focus on "the basics" -- the essential needs of middle-class workers such as civil servants, nurses, teachers, and other service workers and the displaced manufacturing workers who want to remain in the area where they grew up rather than migrate to the South or West in search of work. Rather than catering to the desires of downtown developers by subsidizing luxury lofts, cities should address their crumbling infrastructure (especially in transportation), dysfunctional schools, city/suburban inequality, crime, and the needs of small businesses.
denied citizenship to a man whose French-born Muslim wife wears a burqa.
France’s immigration minister said he is refusing citizenship to a Muslim man who called his wife 'an inferior being,' and forced her to wear a full veil in public, an announcement that plays well with French public support for a burqa ban. . . .. . . (Prime Minister Francois) Fillon said the Moroccan man, who had married a French woman, failed to respect the 'values of the [French] republic.'
The assault against those who wear the burqa has continually couched xenophobia in language that expresses a faux concern for women. It's true that there is a strong history of secularism and women's rights in France. However the minister seems to fail to understand is the paternalism of his own actions. It is disturbing, and against France's stated values, to think of one's wife as an inferior being. But it's also unlikely that denying her husband citizenship is going to help.
What proponents of France's anti-burqa laws -- a ban in some public spaces still hasn't been enacted but there is popular support for it -- fail to recognize is that some women actively choose to practice Islam in such a way that requires them to wear a burqa. One could argue that their choices are informed by hegemony and culture in such a way that they're aren't really choices at all, but further marginalizing those women by outlawing a central tenant of their religion isn't going to magically make them un-oppressed.
The least paternalistic thing for the government to do would be to create a public sphere in which women have access to a full range of choices about what they want to wear and what religion they want to observe, even at the risk that those choices are made with the influence of a husband who thinks them inferior. Restricting choice based on an external idea of what is going in the home is just replacing the husband with the government.
-- Monica Potts
Fliers of a P-51 Mustang Group of the 15th Army Air Force in Italy "shoot the breeze" during August of 1944, during World War II. Despite the fact that at the time, the American military remained segregated by race, black airmen served with distinction and ultimately their valor contributed to the military being desegregated in 1951.
(Flickr/U.S. Army)
Former New York State Insurance Commissioner Eric Dinallo has taken to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to dispel criticisms that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner misrepresented himself during his testimony on the AIG rescue that both men participated in during the 2008 crisis.
Mr. Geithner does not contradict [my testimony]. What he does say is that a bankruptcy of the parent company would have caused problems for the insurance companies, policyholders, and the insurance market as a whole.I agree. If AIG had gone bankrupt, state regulators would have seized the individual insurance companies. The reserves of those insurance companies would have been set aside to pay policyholders and thereby protected from AIG's creditors. However, as Mr. Geithner correctly points out, AIG's insurance companies were intertwined with each other and the parent company. Policyholders would have been paid, but only after a potentially protracted delay.
The whole thing is, as they say, worth reading.
Dinallo had more power than your average state insurance commissioner simply because of his jurisdiction -- many major insurance companies are headquartered in New York and played a large role settling the AIG debacle. He also brokered a major settlement with the multiple international firms that insured the World Trade Center in the wake of 9/11, and was one of Elliott Spitzer's top attorneys going after Wall Street. Now Dinallo is seeking Spitzer's old job and has thrown his hat into the New York State attorney general's race. I have no idea whether he's got a chance of being elected -- New York readers? -- but he certainly has a very strong body of experience for the job.
-- Tim Fernholz
Stephen Hayes thinks he has Eric Holder dead to rights, quoting a 2002 CNN interview in which Holder says that interrogating a detainee with a lawyer present is “harder,” referring to “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh.
CNN’s Paula Zahn asked: “How much pressure should they put on this man to get information out of him as they interrogate him?”
Holder said: “Well, I mean, it’s hard to interrogate him at this point now that he has a lawyer and now that he is here in the United States. But to the extent that we can get information from him, I think we should.”
I’ll see Hayes’ Holder and raise him a former Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey. In the same year, Mukasey ruled as a federal judge that detainees had a right to counsel and that “the interference with interrogation would be minimal or nonexistent.” So at best, we have Holder being to the right of Mukasey in 2002, and Mukasey being to the left of Holder. They’ve both changed their minds.
What hasn’t changed though, is that conservatives were dead silent as the Bush administration proceeded to try terrorists in civilian courts all through their two terms in office. Holder’s statement yesterday, that “the practice of the U.S. government, followed by prior and current Administrations without a single exception, has been to arrest and detain under federal criminal law all terrorist suspects who are apprehended inside the United States,” remains accurate. Hayes himself forgot to raise a note of protest at the 145 trials of terrorists conducted over eight years of Bush. He was apparently too busy fabricating a nonexistent link between Iraq and al-Qaeda and fluffing Dick Cheney.
Lindh's case differs from that of Abdulmutallab in that Lindh was an actual enemy combatant captured fighting for the Taliban in a zone of active military combat. Why wasn’t Hayes calling for Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation when he recommended Lindh be given a civilian trial?
Again, the Obama administration hasn’t handled the Abdulmutallab case any differently than the previous administration would have. The only difference is the presence of knee-jerk conservative hysteria.
— A. Serwer
In the health-care portfolio, Matt Yglesias and Peter Suderman have been sparring about whether the passage of a health-care bill will benefit the Democrats; Suderman reaches the following conclusion:
So the choice for Democrats may actually be whether they want they want to be portrayed as so single-minded in their determination to push their unpopular agenda on the public that they are willing to use party-line voting and any sort of obscure procedural trickery they can come up with to get it passed, or whether they want to be able to make the argument that they responded to the public's clear concerns and backed off an incredibly unpopular piece of legislation when they had the chance.
That's one way to look at it. Then again, I think the choice for Republicans may actually be whether they want they want to be portrayed as so single-minded in their determination to obstruct a popular president that they are willing to use party-line voting and any sort of obscure procedural trickery they can come up with to prevent his party from governing, or whether they want to be able to make the argument that they responded to the public's clear concerns and backed off an incredibly unpopular legislative strategy when they had the chance.
Governing by poll is generally silly, but if you are going to break down health-care polls, people generally support individual provisions in the bill. They just respond negatively to the politicized package of "health-care reform." And many people who oppose health-care reform actually wish it went further. This should suggest to people who quite reasonably believe both that there is a serious problem with this country's health-care system and that the bills in Congress can fix some of those problems, that the responsible thing to do is pass them. Also, Suderman seems to forget that whether or not the Democrats pivot, Republicans will be criticizing their health-care plan for many months to come, so the Dems might as well pass their bill if they have to pay for it no matter what.
-- Tim Fernholz
Matthew Yglesias argues that the Quadrennial Defense Review has China wrong:
Pretty much everyone agrees that China is the only nation with any chance of challenging American military superiority in the foreseeable future. So it's awfully strange that the Department of Defense's new Quadrennial Defense Review has little to say about the country. Explicit discussion is mostly limited to a single paragraph atop page 60, which begins with the banal observation that "China's growing presence and influence in regional and global economic and security affairs is one of the most consequential aspects of the evolving strategic landscape in the Asia-Pacific region and globally." The Defense Department then reaches the banal conclusion that our two countries "should sustain open channels of communication to discuss disagreements in order to manage and ultimately reduce the risks of conflict that are inherent in any relationship as broad and complex as that shared by these two nations."
Dull, dull stuff. But beyond being boring, these kinds of considerations are surprisingly distant from the most important issues in the U.S.-China relationship.
Yesterday, the al-Qaeda-affiliated Aafia Siddiqui was convicted for attempted murder and armed assault after she opened fire on American troops in Afghanistan without killing anyone -- a crime for which she now faces up to 60 years in prison.* Michelle Malkin strains to show how this vindicates her claim that civilian courts can't handle terrorism cases, because Siddiqui said some pretty mean things while she was being tried, and she wasn't convicted of "terrorism":
Today, she was convicted of attempting to murder a U.S. serviceman in Pakistan. Proof that civilian trials for terrorists work? Hardly. Note that while KSM named her as a principal in U.S.-based plots to bomb gas stations and counterterrorism investigators traced her bank account to Saudi terror funders, she was not convicted of terrorism.
Right. Infamous gangster Al Capone was convicted of tax evasion -- not bootlegging, racketeering, or murder. It's been decades since his conviction; is it finally time to institute mandatory military commissions for everyone accused of a criminal offense as a part of our new "war on crime"?
There's just a general hostility from some people on the right to the basic notion of due process that I fight hard to fathom. It basically comes down to a lynch-mob mentality, where trials are a mere bureaucracy that gets in the way of a good hangin'.
-- A. Serwer
*Charged by military commission, Siddiqui's sentence would likely have been lighter than it will be now.
- Obviously, "centrist" Democratic senators like Blanche Lincoln and Evan Bayh provided crucial filibuster-breaking votes last year on progressive legislation, but their support came at the cost of hefty compromises to appease conservative constituencies. With this in mind I'm pretty indifferent to the fate of Bayh, Lincoln, or any of the usual Democratic bed-wetters in November. Their contribution to the halcyon days of the supermajority was ultimately to make good legislation worse and exacerbate the collapse of our already broken political institutions.
- It certainly seems like a Lucy-and-the-football ploy, but Lindsey Graham's consistent apostasy on climate change -- even in the face of threats from his own party -- has convinced me that he's serious about implementing carbon pricing, and his dismissal of an "energy only" bill today only reinforces that. But I suspect the compromise -- if such a thing is even possible -- will inevitably lead to a push for more nuclear energy. I'm open to nuclear as a short-term solution for reducing output of and dependency on carbon sources, but it can't just be a no-strings-attached deal -- you have to negotiate with the nuclear industry.
- A group of Internet luminaries has put up a petition that would seek to regularly replicate Obama's recent Q&A with members of Congress. I'm as optimistic as the next progressive about the public's capacity to engage more with the political process via honest and lively debates freely available online. But one name on the list stood out: Andrew Keen, author of such thought-provoking diatribes as "The Cult of the Amateur: How blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today's user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values." What on Earth is he doing on a list with a bunch of pioneering bloggers and the founder of Wikipedia?
- Something to keep in mind, from John Sides: "So while it’s true that opposition to health care reform is positively related to the length of the process, that doesn’t imply any causal relationship. The rapid increase in opposition and the partisan polarization in opinion suggests that the lengthy process matters not by opening people’s eyes to the cruel realities of legislating, but by giving opponents of reform additional time to attack it."
- If I have this right, the basic libertarian take on employment is that a) government jobs aren't actually jobs, and b) unemployment would disappear overnight if we removed every bit of leverage (the minimum wage, unions, OSHA, etc.) workers have over employers. It's ironic, but the anarchy this free-market paradise would unleash would probably lead to an even more authoritarian state, forged in a Hobbesian fear of unemployed and desperate masses tearing society apart.
- Remainders: The spectacle of rich Republican executives vainly believing that they alone can solve California's problems is always amusing; I thought this was from The Onion but it turns out it's just another piece of serious journalism from a right-wing publication; John Bolton is concerned that the United States' ability to contribute to a global nuclear holocaust is being dangerously imperiled; I'm George Will, syndicated columnist, and I'm here to tell you I know jack about health care policy; a Republican Senate candidate enlists the help of time-traveling Ronald Reagan to help him knock off Harry Reid; the Republican strategy to attract women to the party relies on treating them as flighty, helpless; and look, I get -- and disagree with -- the argument that corporations have free-speech rights, but its nuts to ignore the consequences for campaign financing.
--Mori Dinauer
During yesterday's testimony on the Volcker rule, we heard this exchange:
Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, the senior Republican on the banking committee, asked how regulators would discern “excessive growth” in a bank’s share of market liabilities.“Well, I think — the only answer I can give there is like pornography: You know when you see it,” Mr. Volcker said, paraphrasing the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart. Many in the room laughed.
Mr. Shelby noted that the regulatory overhaul approved by the House in December already contained provisions permitting regulators to restrict speculative trading by banks.
But [former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker] said those provisions should not allow discretion. “The regulator ends up in an impossible position during fair weather,” he said. “Because all the banks will say: What are you talking about? Nothing is happening. My trading is perfect. We haven’t had any big losses. You can’t restrict us. I’m going to go down to the banking committee and tell them you’re going to be unfair and unreasonable.”
He added: “If you just take away the word voluntary in the House bill, I think you’ve got a better bill.”
This is a problem I've discussed before. It's definitely better to make rules by statute, especially on scope issues, because regulatory discretion often means no regulation. But you can't build legislative language to limit size around "you know when you see it," and there has yet to be a good measurement of how to really enforce a size cap. I think the administration's idea about limiting liabilities by market share a la deposit caps has promise, but they have yet to really enunciate it; I think other ideas about capping asset size by percent of GDP paints with too broad a brush. We really need better leadership on this issue.
Ironically, in the hands of good regulators, the Kanjorski amendment would be much, much more powerful than the Volcker rule simply because the discretion is so broad -- regulators could dismantle almost any financial firm they liked if they thought it was getting too risky. Meanwhile, the Volcker rule has pragmatic appeal because it eliminates discretion, but that makes it much narrower -- while commercial banks would be less risky by dint of the scope limits, investment banks and insurance companies (i.e. Bear Stearns and AIG) would be virtually unaffected. It's the paradox of regulatory reform, and why some kind of hybrid between the two -- basic statutory rules with regulatory discretion going further -- is probably the best solution.
-- Tim Fernholz
Yesterday's hearing on the Volcker rule did not go very well. In the preceding 24 hours, there was some confusion over whether Dodd supported the rule. Eventually, his spokesperson Kirstin Brose told me he did. Then, at the hearing, the two witnesses, former Fed Chair Paul Volcker and Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin were clearly not prepared to defend the rule; ironically, Wolin did a much better job making the case than Volcker himself.
The problem remains that the administration has yet to specifically define how the two parts of the rule -- one that would separate proprietary trading, hedge and private equity funds from federally insured banks, and one that would limit the size of a bank's liabilities -- would work in practice. This led Dodd to complain, at the end of the hearing, that the administration's late change in its regulatory proposals is "adding to the problems of trying to get a bill done.” Yipes.
Republican criticisms were, typically, all over the board, with Sen. Mike Johanns pretending that the Volcker rule represented the entirety of the administration's proposal, and Bob Corker ignoring the role that Bear Stearns hedge funds played in the crisis and the fact that losses at trading desks played a role in the need to re-capitalize any number of major commercial banks, from CitiGroup to Bank of America.
Basically, a common fallacy these senators (and others) often fall into is that there is one solution to the regulatory mess: Either we don't need to regulate bank size and do need resolution authorities, as Kevin Warsh argues, or the only solution to Too Big To Fail is to make banks smaller through regulation, as Felix Salmon has said.
I think the whole thing is analogous to fire fighting: You definitely want a fire department that does a good job putting out fires (our dissolution authorities, in this example). But you also don't want to skimp on fire alarms, rules about where you can store oil rags, or codes that require your electrical system to be safe (the Volcker rule and other regulatory reforms). Mitigation is important and saves money in the long run, but you still need a rapid response in the event of an unforeseen accident. It's a point I made in this oft-vilified article.
-- Tim Fernholz
A key part of the conservative argument for keeping the ban on gay Americans serving in the military is that military leaders supposedly tell us that removing the ban will cause untold chaos. The problem comes when those military leaders begin to change their minds, as John McCain is finding out. His previous position was that "the day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, 'Senator, we ought to change the policy,' then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it." Oh, well. Now that the military leadership has done just that, McCain decided that he has to support the ban because Colin Powell does. Seems that may not be quite the ace in the hole he was hoping for:
During the hearing, McCain told the committee that "the reason why I supported the policy to start with is because Gen. Colin Powell, who was then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is the one that strongly recommended we adopt this policy in the Clinton administration. I have not heard General Powell or any of the other military leaders reverse their position." But today, Powell released a statement doing exactly that. "In the almost 17 years since the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ legislation was passed, attitudes and circumstances have changed. I fully support the new approach presented to the Senate Armed Services Committee this week by Secretary of Defense Gates and Admiral Mullen," his statement read.
Just going out on a limb here, but I'm guessing McCain will come up with yet another justification for his continued support of the ban. Perhaps he could join his good friend Sen. Saxby Chambliss, who warned that repealing the ban could force the military to tolerate "alcohol use, adultery, fraternization and body art." Come to think of it, if the Navy Seals started painting henna on their faces, it would be totally badass.
-- Paul Waldman
It's been fun to see the Democrats push back at the GOP over national security issues, even going on the offensive against Evan Bayh's potential opponent, Dan Coats, by pointing out that he once questioned whether Bill Clinton was using Osama bin Laden to distract everyone from the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Yesterday, White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan said that all the former Guantanamo Bay inmates suspected of engaging in terrorist activity were released by the prior administration. Top law enforcement and intelligence officials also told the Senate yesterday that Umar Abdulmutallab was providing valuable intelligence, despite having been read his rights after he initially stopped talking. This afternoon, Attorney General Eric Holder blasted Republican hypocrisy over the administration's handling of Abdulmutallab, pointing out that the procedure that had been followed was "[T]he practice of the U.S. government, followed by prior and current Administrations without a single exception."
At the press briefing today, Michael Scherer reports that Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was equally punchy:
[T]he Federal Bureau of Investigation is part of the intelligence community. Since 9/11, the FBI has made preventing terrorism its principal mission. The men and women of the FBI have disrupted plots, saved American lives, and acquired intelligence that has allowed us to take the fight to terrorists overseas. That includes the counter-terrorism professionals who were on the scene in Detroit, and those who continue to gather critical intelligence from Abdulmutallab while politicians in Washington second-guess their work.
More of this, please. The GOP doesn't have a leg to stand on here.
-- A. Serwer
Soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division escort a group of black students to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, shortly after the Supreme Court had outlawed segregation in public schools with the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus had vowed to enforce segregation, which prompted President Dwight Eisenhower to send federal troops to protect the nine black students, who became known as the Little Rock Nine.
(Flickr/U.S. Army)
Tim Fernholz examines the curious, conservative way Obama has sold his budget:
President Barack Obama's first budget was notable for its honesty -- it eliminated stale tricks designed to conceal the impact of expensive programs and forecast a progressive agenda in the midst of an economic downturn. His second budget, released Monday, marks a return to smoke and mirrors: Its relatively liberal goals are wrapped in conservative rhetoric.
"It's time to hold Washington to the same standards families and businesses hold themselves," Obama said when he announced the budget on Monday. Yet a key tenet of his economic policy thus far has been that the government should do the exact opposite of a family during a recession: take a larger role in the economy to make up for the dearth of consumer spending and private investment. His top budget official, Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag, said as much on Monday.
Attorney General Eric Holder has just sent a letter responding to the concerns of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has been critical of the administration's handling of the alleged underwear bomber, Umar Abulmutallab. In the letter, Holder repeats the claims made by other administration officials about Abdulmutallab's providing intelligence.
Holder writes that Abdulmutallab was "questioned by experienced counterterrorism agents from the FBI in the hours immediately after the failed bombing attempt and provided intelligence, and more recently, he has provided additional intelligence to the FBI that we are actively using to help protect our country."
Holder also remarks on the decision to try Abdulmutallab in civilian court:
[T]he practice of the U.S. government, followed by prior and current Administrations without a single exception, has been to arrest and detain under federal criminal law all terrorist suspects who are apprehended inside the United States.Holder adds, "In keeping with this policy, the Bush Administration used the criminal justice system to convict more than 300 individuals on terrorism-related charges," citing several convicted terrorists, referring to shoe bomber Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui by name.
Holder also responds to criticism that Abdulmutallab wasn't put in military detention. Republicans have been trying to use Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair's testimony before the Senate a few weeks ago to argue the decision about how to deal with Abdulmutallab wasn't made in consultation with intelligence and military officials, but here Holder says the opposite is true. "No agency supported the use of law of war detention for Abdulmutallab," writes Holder, "and no agency has since advised the Department of Justice that an alternative course of action should have been, or should now be, pursued."
As to whether or not Abdulmutallab should have been allowed access to counsel, Holder offers a doozy:
Some have argued that had Abdulmutallab been declared an enemy combatant, the government could have held him indefinitely without providing him access to an attorney. But the government's legal authority to do so is far from clear. In fact, when the Bush administration attempted to deny Jose Padilla access to an attorney, a federal judge in New York rejected that position, ruling that Padilla must be allowed to meet with his lawyer. Notably, the judge in that case was Michael Mukasey, my predecessor as Attorney General. In fact, there is no court-approved system currently in place in which suspected terrorists captured inside the United States can be detained and held without access to an attorney; nor is there any known mechanism to persuade an uncooperative individual to talk to the government that has been proven more effective than the criminal justice system.
Earlier today, McConnell vowed to block funding for civilian trials of terrorism suspects. I doubt Holder's letter will change his mind, although I hope it will convince reporters covering this story to include the relevant context and precedent. The Republican outrage over how the underwear bomber has been handled is a matter of selective, fraudulent outrage on behalf of a party uninterested in anything other than political gamesmanship.
Although it has to be read with the caveat that this administration's policies are not completely in line with the law, Holder writes that, "President Obama has made clear repeatedly, we are at war against a dangerous, intelligent, and adaptable enemy. Our goal in this war, as in all others, is to win."
"Victory," Holder explains, "means defeating the enemy without damaging the fundamental principles on which our nation was founded."
Yes.
-- A. Serwer
Until now, I've somewhat ignored a new study that found an abstinence-only program had delayed the start of sexual activity among middle school African American girls in the Northeast, but not because I don't think it's great news: It is. I don't think anyone wants middle-school girls having loads of sex. But I didn't want to give the study more attention than it deserved.
Both the Washington Post and the Christian Science Monitor want to draw big conclusions about what this could mean for U.S. sex-education policy, especially since President Obama has cut funding for abstinence-only programs.
But the study did two things that don't really back up the claim that abstinence-only education totally works. First, it encouraged the teens to delay sex until they were ready, not until they were married. The latter is the way conservatives want the programs to look. Second, we already knew abstinence-only programs could cause teens to delay their sexual activity -- just not all the way until marriage. According to a 2001 study, virginity pledges can work in some instances, but those who break the pledge are less likely to use protection. So the delay doesn't translate into lower rates of STIs or, probably, unintended pregnancy.
So while this group of teenagers started having sex later, the number who had sex was only 9 percentage points lower than the group who were given comprehensive sex education that included information on contraceptives and on the importance of delaying sexual activity. I'd rather all those girls were using condoms than just waiting a few years to start.
-- Monica Potts
In a more perfect world, Barack Obama's command of the nuances of tech policy would rival his grasp of health-care policy. But this world ain't perfect, and we're stuck with a president who strongly backs net neutrality principles but is occasionally clumsy on the details. We can wish he didn't do that, for the very reason that it gives cover to commentary like this from Digital Society -- a nonprofit affiliated with companies like Verizon, Microsoft, and AT&T -- that "pars[es]" Obama's voice of confidence in favor of neutrality regulation during his YouTube Q&A on Monday. Obama admittedly gave them something to sink their teeth into when he tried to put some political meat on the dry bones of neutrality policy:
We’re getting pushback, obviously, from some of the bigger carriers who would like to be able to charge more fees and extract more money from wealthier customers.
Where Obama slightly mis-struck here is that "bigger carriers," when you think about it, already "extract more money from wealthier customers." I have, for example, the option of paying $59 rather than $39 so that I can get faster broadband at home. Companies choose to have T1 lines for their employees. That's fine. That's well within our rights, and theirs.
But it's going too far to get from Obama's ham-handed statement to Digital Society's scary question, "Could the FCC and the administration be planning an assault on ISP pricing models?" All that, from a few ill-chosen words from Obama? The network neutrality principles currently on the table at FCC are concerned with whether Internet providers are allowed to discriminate against certain digital content that flows along their networks. Or if they can carve out one part of the broadband pipe running to my house to be dedicated to Comcast TV -- putting YouTube or Hulu, for example, at a disadvantage. That's the crux of the neutrality debate. It's not whether American telecom companies can continue to practice capitalism by making more money from people who want to pay more for available services.
This is confusing stuff, as Obama's inability to keep it straight demonstrates. Net neutrality is a policy debate that goes from sexy to mind-numbing in about 12 seconds. That's practically an invitation to obfuscating arguments on the details. How do you combat that? I'm not sure I know, or that anyone working on the pro-neutrality side has cracked it either. But the best bet in the short term is probably to play whack-a-mole on weak arguments.
-- Nancy Scola
Robert Farley argues that the current Quadrennial Defense Review underscores the stark contrast between Obama's and Bush's visions for U.S. military engagement:
On Monday, the Obama administration released a pair of critical documents indicating the path it intends to take on military and defense issues. One of these documents was the budget for fiscal year 2011, which calls for an increase in defense spending as well as the restructuring of a couple of major weapons programs. The other document was the Quadrennial Defense Review, or QDR. Every four years, the Department of Defense reports to Congress on its long-term strategic and procurement plans. The QDR gives the White House the opportunity to both lay the tracks of future equipment procurement and to make a statement about its strategic orientation.
Developed under the supervision of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, the 2010 QDR eschews grand strategic theory in favor of a concrete approach to fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead of developing a vision for the application of U.S. military power and weaving a narrative around it, the 2010 QDR concentrates on the lessons learned in recent conflicts and on the maintenance of the standing force. Gates' QDR would prefer to finish our current wars before thinking about the next.
Newly elected Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown was on the teevees over the weekend and got ridiculous, then smacked down by large federal employees union:
Barbara Walters: President Obama has asked for a spending freeze on almost everything except matters like the military, Social Security, and Medicare. He says he's going line by line through the budget. Now, you have said that's not enough for you; that you want to cut spending and not just freeze it. So what are the first 3 items that you would cut?Brown: The problem with what the president said is he's not doing it until 2011. We need to do it immediately. We need to put a freeze on federal hires and federal raises because, as you know, federal employees are making twice as much as their private counterparts.
Let's look at two things: One, is he right? Nope. If you actually look at average salaries between occupations on both sides, you see that they're pretty comparable. Even the graph above, which shows average civilian government employee versus private sector pay, isn't perfect because it forgets that many government workers have high levels of education -- 51 percent have a college degree, and 20 percent have another professional degree or doctorate -- which naturally leads to higher wages in comparison to the entire private sector. And if you look at economic analysis, you'll find that government workers are underpaid, making it "increasingly more difficult to attract and retain high-skill workers." Which is one reason why bankers are running circles around our regulatory agencies.
Two, is he serious about deficit reduction? Nope. Keep in mind that Walters asked him what are the first three items he would cut to reduce the deficit. His answer is to cut federal employee pay, which he clearly knows nothing about -- not to deal with rising health-care costs, not to identify wasteful programs and subsidies, not to invest in economic recovery. This kind of ideological pandering isn't going to solve the budget problem.
-- Tim Fernholz
Yesterday, FBI Director Robert Mueller and Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told the Senate that the alleged underwear bomber, Umar Abdulmutallab was talking to intelligence and law enforcement authorities.
“It is a continuum in which over a period of time, we have been successful in obtaining intelligence, not just on day one, but on day two, day three, day four, and day five, down the road," Mueller said. Charlie Savage and Scott Shane at the New York Times subsequently reported that Abdulmutallab's cooperation had been secured in part by the influence of his family, who had been flown in:
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian man accused of trying to blow up a jetliner bound for Detroit on Dec. 25, started talking to investigators after two of his family members arrived in the United States and helped earn his cooperation, a senior administration official said Tuesday evening.
The recent news about the interrogation of Abdulmutallab destroys several pro-torture, anti-due process myths that I'll list here:
Mirandizing a suspect prevents intelligence from being collected. Clearly not the case, as Abdulmutallab has continued talking to investigators after being mirandized. Interrogating someone without mirandizing them means that you can't use that information in court, though it's still usable as intelligence.
The FBI stopped interrogating Abdulmutallab so they could mirandize him. No. As the LA Times reported, the FBI decided to read Abdulmutallab his rights after he stopped talking.
Putting an "enemy combatant" like Abdulmutallab in the criminal justice system is unprecedented. False, as the Bush administration did it with nearly 150 terrorists convicted in civilian courts over eight years. Most recently, Bush-era CIA Chief Michael Hayden wrote an op-ed criticizing the decision to put Abdulmutallab in the criminal justice system, even though it was standard practice under Bush. A recent example is Bryant Vinas, an al-Qaeda recruit captured in Pakistan in 2008, who as part of a plea deal has reportedly provided a "goldmine" of intelligence. Hayden was CIA chief at the the time and said nothing, because the practice was uncontroversial.
We would have gotten all this information more quickly if we had just tortured him. Unlikely, and there would have been substantial downsides. Part of interrogating a suspect is verifying that information is true, and that takes time whether someone is being tortured or not. But if we had tortured Abdulmutallab, it's unlikely that his family would have played such a key role in his interrogation. Also, the information he gave wouldn't have been as reliable. Treating him humanely shows the world that it can trust the United States and encourages Muslims who may have important information to come forward.
The only way to get terrorists to talk is by torturing them, because of their religion. This myth is a staple of torture stalwarts on the right. Cliff May and former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen have argued that suspected terrorists are compelled by their religious beliefs not to talk unless they "reached the limit of their ability to endure the hardships the infidel is inflicting on them," in May's words. Thiessen responded gleefully to a poll suggesting most Americans wanted Abdulmutallab to be waterboarded. Something tells me that despite the fact that Abdulmutallab is talking, Thiessen is probably disappointed he wasn't tortured first.
The FBI isn't good at interrogating suspected terrorists. The events of the past few days have again proved this to be false. As former counterterrorism official Richard Clarke told ABC, "The FBI is good at getting people to talk. ... They have been much more successful than the previous attempts of torturing people and trying to convince them to give information that way. The FBI does it right.”
Facts are ultimately irrelevant to the pro-torture right. They're concerned with approaches that levy extrajudicial punishment on Muslims suspected of terrorism, not with sound national security policies. The point is to make "those people" pay for what they've done; because Muslims are collectively responsible, actual guilt and innocence are beside the point.
When it comes to the Obama administration, I'm going to pretend for a second I don't disagree with many of their national security policies to give them some advice as to how they should respond to Republican criticisms: "We're doing exactly what the previous administration used to do. Only we're doing it better."
-- A. Serwer
Rush Limbaugh is happy that Obama is having political troubles, which is as it should be. But this remark is kind of odd:
"This is the first time in his life there is not a professor who can turn his C into an A, or to write the law review article for him he can't write. He is totally exposed. There is nobody to make it better," Limbaugh said.
Does Limbaugh really think that Obama just isn't that smart, and he got where he is because people gave him a pass? You'll recall that conservatives also like to mock Obama for the fact that when he has a prepared statement to read, he uses a teleprompter. He does this in some situations, like at the start of a press conference, when previous presidents would read the statement off pieces of paper placed at the lectern. Yet those conservatives who like to joke about this take his preference for looking up at his audience rather than down at his lectern as evidence that Obama isn't smart enough to talk extemporaneously.
It would be no use to offer evidence that Obama is, in fact, a pretty smart guy. I doubt Limbaugh believes that he isn't -- it's just a handy opportunity to call Obama an affirmative action hire and poke at his white listeners' racial scab, the one that tells them they're the real victims of racism, that their troubles come from the fact that unqualified black people who can't get good grades or write well are being pushed ahead by the liberal elite. But why is it that more of those listeners, or other sympathetic conservatives, don't say, "C'mon, Rush -- I agree with you that Obama is a dangerous socialist, but you can't say he's a dummy."
Some do, of course. But when you look at things like the Daily Kos poll of Republicans and see that only 24 percent will answer "No" to the question, "Do you believe ACORN stole the 2008 election?" and only 36 percent will answer "No" to the question, "Do you believe Barack Obama is a racist who hates white people?", it can make you question whether anytime soon it will be possible to have a reasonable public debate about anything.
-- Paul Waldman
Dana Goldstein, late of TAP and now at the Daily Beast, reveals today that CBS actually worked closely with the conservative group Focus on the Family in the making of Tim Tebow's Super Bowl ad. The ad, implicitly but possibly not explicitly, is expected to be anti-choice and tell the story of how Tebow's mother, Pam Tebow, ignored the advice of doctors after she got sick and decided not to abort Tim:
CBS declined to comment on the details of its work with Focus on the Family on the Tebow ad, but said such cooperation is not unusual. Abortion rights advocates see it differently. If CBS did vet scripts for the ad, the cooperation is 'appalling,' said Terry O'Neill, president of the National Organization for Women. 'If true, CBS is not just selling ad time for profit, but has been affirmatively working hand-in-glove—in secret—to promote Focus on the Family's agenda. When you recall that Focus on the Family wants to overturn Roe v. Wade…this revelation is extremely, extremely disturbing.'
But if you watch any television shows that make even the slightest forays into unwanted pregnancy, it's not surprising that a major network would make a tacit endorsement of the conservative, anti-choice view. The number of pop culture outlets that discuss abortion in any sort of adult, productive way is small, and its absence probably contributes to the debate whether intended to or not. Recent episodes of Friday Night Lights are excepted.
Again, though, the disturbing thing about Pam Tebow's story is not that she chose to go through with her pregnancy. It's that, in the retelling, she seems to be urging other women to make the same, incredibly dangerous decision while her beliefs would deny women any other choice. Goldstein quotes doctors who note the most appalling aspect of the ad: it's not just anti-choice; it's anti-science:
The ad's content has also raised hackles among some ob-gyns, who see it as an attack on medical expertise. 'I'm about to do an abortion for a woman with a hole in her heart,' Dr. Anne Davis, medical director of Physicians for Reproductive Choice and a practicing ob-gyn in New York City, told The Daily Beast. 'If she were to stay pregnant, there's a 75 percent chance that she wouldn't make it. When people want to stay pregnant no matter what the risks, we hang in there with them and do whatever we can do for them. But it doesn't always turn out well.'
-- Monica Potts
