Among the "yea" votes in the Senate's lopsided approval of the Obama tax deal was Minnesota Senator Al Franken, who called it "the hardest vote he's taken." He explains his decision in a short piece at the Huffington Post:
A lot of people are unhappy that the president punted on first down, and I’m one of them. Extending the excessive Bush tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires will explode our deficit over the next two years without doing anything to help our economy. I think it’s simply bad policy.
But for Minnesota’s middle class, struggling to get by in a tough economy, there’s a lot in this bill that will really help: tax cuts for working families, a payroll tax holiday, energy tax credits, and the extension of Recovery Act initiatives that are already making a difference.
And for the Minnesotans truly suffering right now — men, women, and children on the edge of economic disaster — the alternative is simply unacceptable. If we let Republicans block unemployment benefits, even temporarily, there will be a lot more pain for working families, a lot more homeless kids spending Christmas in a shelter or a car.
Franken's reasoning is persuasive, and I think skeptical progressives should think about the human cost of rejecting an extension of unemployment insurance and a payroll tax cut. In the end, our goal should be to alleviate the suffering of the least well-off, and for all of its faults, this deal is a step in that direction.
As a separate point, it's worth noting that since Obama made the deal, the conversation has turned away from the "Bush tax cuts" and toward the "Obama tax deal." If this deal becomes law, I wouldn't be shocked if the White House spends the next two years talking about the "Obama payroll tax cut," the "Obama middle-class tax cut" and the "Obama unemployment benefits." In other words, the White House is beginning to make up for its early mistake of allowing Republicans to frame the tax cut debate, even as it prepares to extend cuts for high earners.
Jeffrey Toobin on Judge Hudson's ruling against the individual mandate:
Personally, I found Hudson’s opinion unpersuasive. His invocations of Comstock were particularly misleading, in my view. But I found Hudson’s use of Comstock illustrative of a larger point. Judges, to a great extent, can do what they want. They can manipulate precedents to reach the conclusions they want to reach. In high-profile cases, the decisions are more about politics than law. If Hudson can cite Comstock for precisely the opposite of what that decision was clearly intended to do, all bets are off. The fate of health-care reform will rest not with the skill of the lawyers who will argue it—or in the words of the cases on which they will rely—but on the preferences of the nine Justices who will decide the case.
I was a bit strong in yesterday's post, so let me rephrase it: on minor issues, the Supreme Court is more likely to rely on arguments and precedent in makings its judgment. But on major issues, like the Affordable Care Act, arguments, precedent and the Constitution are nearly irrelevant; the main factor -- as Toobin writes -- are "the preferences of the nine Justices who will decide the case." The Constitution is incredibly flexible, even for so-called "originalists," and each side will find a way to read the Constitution and precedent as to favor their preferred outcome.
Again, to repeat myself, public discussions about the Supreme Court would be much better off if we all just dispensed with the fantasy that the Constitution is central in the Court's decisions.
The fledgling Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which now has almost 100 employees, just announced a new employee: Former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray, who you may remember from the robo-signing fiasco: He was one of the first state Attorneys General to take mortgage servicers to court for attempting to foreclose on borrowers without legal standing. Now, Cordray will head the enforcement division of the CFPB's implementation team, the group of Treasury officials, headed by Elizabeth Warren, currently preparing the CFPB for the full assumption of its authorities in July. Cordray, whose narrow loss in November depressed consumer advocates, now finds himself with a potentially bigger stage to crack down on pernicious business practices and predatory lending.
Republicans on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission have released their final report. The culprit for 2008's global financial meltdown? Minorities!:
“While the housing bubble, the financial crisis, and the recession are surely interrelated events, we do not believe that the housing bubble was a sufficient condition for the financial crisis,” the document states. “The unprecedented number of subprime and other weak mortgages in this bubble set it and its effect apart from others in the past.” [...]
Citing several government agencies, the document argues that “the government subsidized and, in some cases, mandated the extension of credit to high-risk borrowers, propagating risks for financial firms, the mortgage market, taxpayers, and ultimately the financial system.”
Granted, "high-risk borrowers" could mean a large variety of people. But given past Republican rhetoric, it's safe to assume they are referring to minorities, and pinning the blame on Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Community Reinvestment Act, and federal efforts to encourage minority home ownership. Of course, this flies in the face of established facts. As Paul Krugmannotes, "the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 was irrelevant to the subprime boom, which was overwhelmingly driven by loan originators not subject to the act." What's more, mortgage securitization by Fannie and Freddie dropped as the housing bubble reached its point of maximum inflation, while "securitization by private players surged." And finally, when the bubble burst, high-income earners were much more likely to default on their loans. According to David Streitfeld of The New York Times:
The delinquency rate on investment homes where the original mortgage was more than $1 million is now 23 percent. For cheaper investment homes, it is about 10 percent.
But hey, poor minorities -- they're so irresponsible!
The above comic from XKCD is instructive because I think the scenario it describes would never, ever happen. Wikileaks does not actually believe in transparency per se, but, as various analysts of founder Julian Assange's thought have pointed out, it believes that the U.S. government is fundamentally an unjust conspiracy, and that rendering its secret communications public is the most effective way to paralyze it. That's the sort of business plan that attracts employees like this.
The U.S. government has clearly done many, many things that go against the arc of justice; heck, it's founding document enshrined one of mankind's greatest evils, and Wikileaks has exposed injustices of a more recent sort in the Middle East -- though I'd argue the Abu Ghraib photos had a much stronger effect on limiting those abuses in the future. But, call me a naive if you like, I just don't believe that the U.S. government is at its heart a malevolent conspiracy.
Motivations aside, Wikileaks own lack of transparency is disconcerting. That's why I'm interested in Openleaks, founded by a group of former Wikileaks collaborators, and intended to be more transparent and also, apparently, put in place some practices to add more context to leaked documents.
What are the signs that the tax deal is a wedge issue? Well, you've got Rep. Mike Pence out there opposing it because "the American people did not vote for more stimulus." Actually, more voters supported spending to create jobs (37 percent) than did tax cuts (18 percent). That aside, Pence, a member of the Republican leadership who is stepping down next year in anticipation of a possible presidential bid, demonstrates the cleavage this deal has caused at the top ranks of the Republican party. Similarly, up-and-coming GOP Rep. Jason Chaffetz also opposes the deal, dividing his state's delegation.
For Democrats, the best possible outcome would be for House Republicans to scuttle this deal, creating an opportunity for a bigger political fight. There's still a few acts left in this drama, with the clock counting down to Christmas.
As we all know, Mitt Romney's biggest problem in the 2012 Republican primaries is that conservatives don't trust him, given that he used to be a pro-choice moderate who got health coverage for Massachusetts' uninsured. His answer to this problem has been to run frantically to the right, staking out the most extreme position he can on any issue that comes up (his latest is an attack on lazy unemployed people). But the truth is this strategy is going to fail.
What Mitt needs to understand is that voters don't make judgments based on checklists. If a true-blue conservative wants to choose his primary candidate based on ideological affinity, all the screamingly right-wing op-eds in the world won't make a difference. It's a feeling, an identification, a sense that the candidate is "one of us." And Mitt just ain't. He's going to have to find some other way to win them over.
That isn't to say ideology doesn't matter -- Romney will have to convince them that he's conservative enough, passing a threshold of ideological acceptability. But he seems to be trying to prove he's the most conservative, and that won't work. Which is why he really needs Sarah Palin to enter the race.
If Palin gets in, she'll have the crazy vote locked down, and that will take the pressure off Romney. If the only thing that matters to you is finding a candidate who hates liberals as much as you do, the choice will be clear. Voters who care about other things -- like who has a chance to beat Obama, who seems to know what he's talking about, whose jaw is the squarest -- will then be choosing between Mitt and a bunch of other candidates who are not, at this point, looking like a bunch of giants. If the race comes down to Palin v. Romney, Mitt will be in great shape, because Palin has a relatively low ceiling of support even within the party, and chances are she'll be running a Keystone Kops campaign more notable for its entertainment value than for its ability to accumulate delegates.
Whether progressives would rather have Romney be the nominee over someone else is a difficult question. He's probably the one with the best chance to beat Obama, but he may also be the one most likely to govern sanely, should he actually win. This is a question a lot of progressives I know are now asking themselves with regard to Palin -- should you want her to be the GOP nominee, given the small chance that she'd win, set against the likelihood that if by some turn of events she did, within a few months America would become a post-apocalyptic hellscape where survival depends on forging an alliance with the cannibal gangs to overcome the zombie horde?
In either case, there's no easy answer. But it's not something we'll be deciding anyway.
We had high hopes indeed for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission -- the New Pecora Commission, if you will -- when it got underway this year. But Shahien Nasiripourreports that partisanship has riven the Commission, and that the panel's Republicans, who have been limiting their participation in the effort since August, will release a dissenting minority report before the FCIC's official product is due:
During a private commission meeting last week, all four Republicans voted in favor of banning the phrases "Wall Street" and "shadow banking" and the words "interconnection" and "deregulation" from the panel's final report, according to a person familiar with the matter and confirmed by Brooksley E. Born, one of the six commissioners who voted against the proposal.
Maybe "Wall Street" is inflammatory, but "interconnection"? "Deregulation"!?
There are clearly key political disagreements between Republicans and Democrats about what caused the financial crisis, but these members were supposed to set them aside. More than that, though, there is plenty of blame to go around, and though I put more weight on the private sector, any objective observer could identify a variety of government policies that helped drive the crisis, from monetary policy to long-term housing subsidies. Heck, blaming "deregulation" isn't even a partisan position -- much of the deregulation was driven by Democrats under the Clinton administration.
All of which is to say: there should have been room for agreement here, or at least single product that included dissenting views. Splitting the commission's efforts robs the public and policymakers of a clear narrative of the crisis. According to Nasiripour, the Republicans' account essentially says the crisis was averted until Lehman Bros. was allowed to fail. While that decision catalyzed the crisis, it doesn't get to the heart of the decisions, going back decades, that set the stage for the housing bubble's collapse.
This is sad news. This panel was charged with figuring out what happened, not setting policy, and we should at least be able to agree on the facts. The troubling trend of epistemic closure marches on.
Matthew YglesiassaysRichard Holbrookerepresents a bygone era when America was represented primarily by diplomats, not generals.
Indeed, in some ways Holbrooke seems almost like the last statesman, a figure plucked from a time when diplomacy really mattered and America was represented abroad primarily by diplomats rather than generals. But no one who was so deeply involved in formulating and articulating the Democratic Party's foreign policy vision for so long could be immune to its pathologies.
In today's Playbook, Mike Allen notes that Obama is meeting with a large group of business leaders in a "CEO summit":
President Obama holds CEO summit at Blair House, 9-2 - Morning Money reports that the format includes "five or so main discussions, each led by one or more of the 20 executives expected to attend.
Ironically enough, this comes as another group of business leaders complains to The New York Times about Obama's occasional willingness to hurt their feelings:
Nearly halfway through Mr. Obama’s term, the dearth of business and Wall Street types in his administration rankles many executives, if only as a proxy for their unhappiness with his policies and occasional antibusiness political speech.
This is getting ridiculous. Obama might not be as personally pro-business as George W. Bush or Bill Clinton, but he rescued the financial industry from total collapse, General Motors from oblivion, and gave millions of new customers to health insurers and pharmaceuticals. Wall Street nearly destroyed the global economy, and Obama refrained from nationalizing the banks and selling off their assets. Corporate profits have been growing like gangbusters, but business leaders are still mad that they aren't well-represented in the administration? Really? If they could hear themselves, they'd know that they sound less like Galtian lords of capitalism and more like spoiled children, angry that they can't have that fourth scoop of gold-flaked ice cream.
Anecdotal evidence suggests sexual assault rates in the military are high, with as many as one in three women being sexually assaulted during their service. Neither the Department of Defense nor Veterans Affairs releases data on reported cases, though, so the exact extent of the problem is unknown. Now, frustrated by rejected Freedom of Information Act requests, the Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have filed a lawsuit in federal district court demanding the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs release the data and disclose what they’re doing to treat victims and prevent future abuse.
Military Sexual Trauma (MST), which includes rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment, is devastating to victims. Many women who experience MST leave the military and experience post-traumatic stress disorder, but are denied treatment or support from the VA because they can’t prove they were abused. They are more likely to experience health problems, depression, substance abuse, and homelessness. The problem seems to be growing: From the limited data the ACLU has been able to obtain from DoD, reported sexual assaults increased 73 percent between 2004 and 2006, and 11 percent between 2008 and 2009.
The plaintiff's complaint makes the important connection between the high incidence of sexual assault and the government's apparent unwillingness to take the issue seriously. The issue resembles the problems inherent in "don't ask, don't tell," which enforces the rigid social norms that put women at risk of being abused while discouraging them from reporting it. So the problem isn't just on an individual basis; it's military policy (or lack thereof) from top to bottom. If the military is going to commit to providing a safe and open environment to all those who serve, it needs to do more than repeal DADT; the military will need clear policies to combat and punish sexual assault coupled with dedicated support for victims.
TAPPED readers, please welcomeTova Wangas an occasional contributor to the blog. Tova is a nationally known expert on election reform and political participation and a senior democracy fellow at Demos.
New Census data released yesterday shows more than ever that there is a need for English language education. Yet despite moves by states to make English the "official" language, when it comes to providing opportunities for immigrants to learn English -- including naturalized citizens and those who seek to naturalize -- they're not quite as zealous.
According to Census figures, 78 percent of naturalized citizens speak a language other than English at home compared with 19.6 percent of the overall population. Of those speaking a language other than English at home, 44 percent reported that they did not speak English "very well," while 8.6 percent of the total population does not speak English very well.
Politicians and activists pay a lot of lip service to the importance of English. Just this November, Oklahoma voters passed a referendum making English the "official language" of the state, joining several others that already have such provisions. This means no state business can be conducted in another language -- even potentially when it comes to providing medical services and information about education and voting.
At the same time, these state legislatures and the "English only" promoters don't seem too concerned about the reality of English language instruction. According to a 2007 report by the Migration Policy Institute, many states report long waiting lists for English classes, indicating high levels of unmet demand:
In recent years, the federal government has provided an estimated $250 to $300 million a year for adult ESL as part of Adult Basic Education grants to states. States have contributed an estimated $700 million a year for adult ESL. Federally funded ESL programs are currently serving about 1.1 million adults in the 50 states and District of Columbia.
But MPI estimated that, even in a best-case scenario, an additional $200 million per year for six years would be needed to meet demand. That's because they estimate that several million immigrants need English language instruction to pass the naturalization exam and/or to have the necessary skills to participate in the country's civic life.
Most immigrants are yearning to learn English. They know how important it is. And even with differences over immigration reform, Americans can all agree that people living here should have the opportunity to learn enough English so that they can be active participants in our communities, and we can all succeed economically.
We have got to step it up when it comes to providing instruction in English by making it an integral part of federal and state budget plans. And states should stop passing silly English-only laws that threaten the health, safety, and democratic rights of millions.
We've heard a lot in the past few days about how the tax-cut compromise between President Obama and congressional Republicans has divided Democrats. But guess what? It's dividing Republicans as well. While 31 Senate Republicans voted for cloture on the deal, moving it toward a vote, opposition on the right has been building. Rush Limbaugh is railing against it, Sarah Palin has come out against it, and so has Mitt Romney, whose antennae are finely tuned to any opportunity to pander to the right.
But here's something weird: Crossroads GPS, the organization started this year by Republican super-operatives Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie to air ads attacking Democrats all over the country, is not just in favor of the tax compromise, they're actually airing radio ads attacking some Democrats for ... well, not for opposing it but for maybe not eventually supporting it:
This ad is a little confusing -- "Nancy Pelosi is blocking the bipartisan plan"? Huh? Actually, Pelosi is going to be performing some sort of as-yet-undetermined legislative needle-threading to get this thing passed (just you wait). But the point is, Rove and Gillespie are trying to get people mad at a Democratic congressman for not supporting something Barack Obama is going to be begging him to support.
Part of the reason they're airing this ad is accounting -- as a 501(c)(4) organization, Crossroads GPS can engage in political campaign activity, but its primary purpose is supposed to be supporting the public welfare. Advocating on legislation counts as the latter, and if they spend enough money on it, they can keep the IRS off their backs and keep their donors secret. Since they're reaching the end of the year, they have to get some "public welfare" spending on their books. But the fact that they choose to do so on this issue, one that is dividing the Republican establishment (for the deal) from its Tea Party base (against it) is kind of interesting.
Of course, it could be that this is all some sort of clever bank shot to sow Democratic division by convincing Democrats that Republicans support the tax cut compromise. Who knows?
This week, Hearst newspapers in Connecticut (my former employer) published an investigative piece on a voting debacle during the Connecticut governor's race in November. Bridgeport, the state's largest city, ordered too few voting ballots, and ultimately had to fill out photocopied versions of the scanner ballots that had to be counted by hand.
The papers found a lot of miscounted votes and discrepancies, most of which probably would have been avoided if the city's registrars had ordered enough ballots in the first place.
If you cast a photocopied ballot in last month's gubernatorial election in Bridgeport, there's a 1 in 4 chance your vote was miscounted.
A recount of the Bridgeport governor's vote from the chaotic Nov. 2 election shows that about 1,500 of the nearly 6,000 photocopied ballots used when polls ran out of regular ballots were incorrectly counted, never counted at all or misrepresented on the city's final returns. The photocopied ballots were a part of the overall 24,000 cast in the governor's race.
In three precincts, the photocopied ballots weren't even included in the city's final report.
The city is heavily Democratic and, since it has an African American population of 30 percent, more so than other towns in Connecticut, it was a serious issue for the Democratic candidate Dannel Malloy and a potentially serious issue of black voter disenfranchisement. It's not just disturbing that some votes were miscounted but that some votes might not even have been cast because potential voters heard about troubles at the polls. The problems threw the governor's race into uncertainty for a couple of days.
Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz wants the General Assembly to pass a law requiring it to request enough ballots for every registered voter in the district to prevent something like this from happening in the future. The miscounted votes and the problems didn't change the outcome this time, but they likely did enough damage to erode some faith in the electoral process.
The prospect of having two libertarian candidates in the 2012 Republican presidential primary would, I agree, increase the profile of libertarianism in Republican politics, but I very much doubt it would substantively change the GOP's continuing descent into nationalistic populism. It's easy to co-op popular sentiment about tax rates or "runaway" government spending, but ultimately they're just slogans, not an endorsement of the total libertarian package.
As Jonathan Capehartreminds us, there's a lot more to mounting a third-party presidential bid than raising money and getting votes. There's winning the electoral college. There's the challenge of getting on the ballot in all 50 states. And regardless of whether Matt Bai believes it, political parties matter. A third-party president will still have to deal with Democrats and Republicans in Congress. Partisanship won't disappear unless the No Labels crowd gets their benevolent despot in office, and that's simply not going to happen.
Veronique de Rugy dares to dream a little dream: "There is a revolt brewing in America, the goal of which is to finally expose the abuses and the negative impacts that public-sector unions impose on taxpayers." I have no doubt that decades of conservative union-bashing and demonization of government has created a hardened set of libertarian and Republican voters who are partial to this sentiment. But suffice it to say, a positive economic environment endears people to government and a negative economic environment generates hostility to government. This principled "revolt" has little traction outside of de Rugy's mind.
Remainders: ViaRobert Farley, a fabulous essay on the consequences of the volunteer army; Pew excavates some fascinating polling from the "socialistic" 1930s; and Roger Simon stands up for the rich, tells the kids to get off his lawn.
Former Massachusetts Gov. and probably 2012 Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney today made a states' rights argument to argue that the Massachusetts health-care law he signed, which includes an individual mandate, was just while the federal government's attempt to do the same thing was unconstitutional.
To hear Republicans talk these days, the individual insurance mandate contained within the Affordable Care Act is an act of socialist tyranny so horrific that just thinking about it is almost enough to make blood pour from your ears, which is bad, because some government bureaucrat might say you can't get care for bleeding ears. To take one of many examples, Ron Johnson, the novice politician who defeated Russ Feingold to win a Senate seat from Wisconsin, called, the ACA "the greatest assault on our freedom in my lifetime." This, about an idea that originated with Republicans who wanted to make sure the American health-care system stayed as private as possible.
As Ezra Klein reminds us, that's kind of the whole point of the individual mandate. In a single-payer system where the government is providing insurance to everyone, you don't have to insist that everyone get coverage, because everyone is covered automatically. It's only in a private system that you need to push people to get coverage in order to get everyone into the system. And if conservatives convince the Supreme Court to rule that the unpopular individual mandate is unconstitutional, but the popular provision outlawing exclusions for pre-existing conditions remains, the private-insurance market would implode very quickly. Everyone would wait to get insurance until they're hit with a major illness or accident, meaning the insurance companies would be paying huge claims while getting much less in premiums than they are now. As a result, they would either raise premiums astronomically, or just go out of business.
You can argue that the result of the ensuing chaos would be an irresistible push for the government to step in and just give everyone insurance already, and bammo, you've got the single-payer system liberals have long dreamed of. Maybe. Or maybe, Democrats worried about the potential for enormous human suffering until we get that single-payer plan would join with Republicans eager to restore the status quo ante to repeal the pre-existing condition ban. And then it would be almost like the ACA never happened.
Adam Serwer has done excellent blogging on the court challenges to the Affordable Care Act, and I recommend you read it all, but I wanted to highlight this particular point:
My personal belief is that Republicans hate the law and want to see it gone, and so the conservative justices on the court, with the possible exception of Anthony Kennedy, will happily oblige them. The justices' identities are simply more partisan than we acknowledge -- does anyone remember Scalia decrying the 17th Amendment before it became a Tea Party cause?
Public discussions about the Supreme Court would be a lot better off if we all just dispensed with the fantasy that the Constitution has anything (or much) to do with Court decisions. Granted, it does in some cases -- usually those on the margins -- but for issues that fall within the public discussion, you can reliably assume that Justices will follow the path of public opinion and ideological preference. In other words, the Affordable Care Act will be safe for as long as the public finds it broadly acceptable.
Relatedly, if the courts are just another stage for political and cultural fights, then liberals would do themselves a favor by refocusing their efforts on the judiciary, and in particular, pressuring Democrats to nominate and confirm judges who fit broadly within mainstream liberalism.
The public loves the Obama tax deal but of the components, isn't too thrilled about the payroll tax cut:
Megan McArdle is baffled by the results, but they seem pretty straightforward: The public is already hostile to Social Security cuts, and when a pollster asks about "Social Security payroll tax cuts," it's very likely that the respondent hears "Social Security cuts." Add that to liberals worried that a deal will eventually gut Social Security, and you have a sizable number of Americans who are skeptical about the payroll tax cut, despite the fact that they will directly benefit from it.
For what it's worth, I think Social Security concerns are a little unfounded; the funds for a payroll tax cut will come out of general revenue, leaving the program untouched. Besides, Republicans will attack Social Security regardless of any deal, or lack thereof. Given that this is the last chance for the economy to receive any stimulus, it's probably best for liberals to take the current deal and move on to prepping for the battle in 2012.
At Slate, Daniel Sarewitzposits that the dearth of Republicans in scientific fields is bad for the country. After all, diverse political viewpoints foster debate, right?
Consider the case of climate change, of which beliefs are astonishingly polarized according to party affiliation and ideology. A March 2010 Gallup poll showed that 66 percent of Democrats (and 74 percent of liberals) say the effects of global warming are already occurring, as opposed to 31 percent of Republicans. Does that mean that Democrats are more than twice as likely to accept and understand the scientific truth of the matter? And that Republicans are dominated by scientifically illiterate yahoos and corporate shills willing to sacrifice the planet for short-term economic and political gain?
Or could it be that disagreements over climate change are essentially political—and that science is just carried along for the ride? For 20 years, evidence about global warming has been directly and explicitly linked to a set of policy responses demanding international governance regimes, large-scale social engineering, and the redistribution of wealth. These are the sort of things that most Democrats welcome, and most Republicans hate. No wonder the Republicans are suspicious of the science.
What's missing from this "analysis," though, is the idea that there actually isn't a debate among scientists and that scientists may have abandoned the Republican Party because the Republican Party has abandoned them. What we should do about climate change is up for some debate, but the facts on climate change are not. The Republican Party has, for many years, attacked basic scientific knowledge on everything from evolution to stem cells and stymied policies that are meant to handle our evolving knowledge of the ways in which we interact with the world. Scientists are likely scientists first and Democrats second, like most people, and not the other way around. The high correlation isn't evidence that scientists are working to provide rationale for Democratic policies, but that Democrats are listening to them.
ViaObama Foodorama, the Obama administration released the above sample menu of the changes that will be made to school lunches under the Childhood Nutrition Act, which Obama signed into law yesterday. These are simple and sensible; it's only disappointing that it took an act of Congress to stop serving something called pizza sticks in favor of chef salad.
It turns out that ridiculous story from The Daily Caller about how people use food stamps -- in which "reporter" Matthew Boylemisled the government to receive food stamps and spent all his benefits on one expensive meal at Whole Foods -- had something of an antecedent drudged up by the blog A Black Girl's Guide to Weight Loss. This, though, was a more thoughtful look at a phenomenon caused by the recession, titled "Hipsters on Food Stamps." It's about how struggling and out-of-work artists used their new benefits to maintain their organic, locally produced, socially conscious consumption lifestyles.
Young artists, many of whom probably went to college, on food stamps doesn't fit our assumptions about who needs assistance and what they purchase. None of them are poor, struggling widowed mothers buying meat and potatoes, which, judging from comments on this story and others, is the only type of person allowed to rely on the government for help purchasing food. The same people railing against the erroneous idea that poor people make the least nutritious food choices possible -- like buying soda and french fries with government money -- also think using government benefits to buy locally grown fruits and vegetables and meat alternatives is luxurious. One of the women told the reporter, Jennifer Bleyer, "I'm eating better than I ever have before. ... Even with food stamps, it's not like I'm living large, but it helps."
As Erika points out in her post, though, this is what's supposed to happen with food stamps: People are supposed to have better access to nutritious food than they would otherwise. And as she also points out, the fact that processed foods are cheap is actually the result of government largess, way more so than any food-stamp purchases.
But also, I need to correct myself for reposting a Christian Science Monitor graph that many commenters here and elsewhere found misleading, and made the data look more sensational than it should. Above is a new graph using the same data by Max Weselcouch, also to be found here.
Slate's Chris Beam has the best take on "No Labels":
Perhaps the greatest achievement of No Labels is to show why labels exist in the first place. They're so busy talking about what they're not—not Republican, not Independent, not conservative, not liberal—you never get a handle on what they are. Labels are a useful shortcut for voters who want to know what a group is all about. The lack of a positive mission beyond bipartisanship and civility (which both Republicans and Democrats also call for) makes it hard to know what they really want.
If there is a case to be made for partisanship, it's that voters deserve a clear choice. It's easy to long for a time when the parties could work together on everything under the sun, but as Beam points out, this was terrible for voters; if you could count on the same policies regardless of who you voted for, what's the use in voting? Why should you participate when your vote has no impact on the behavior of your elected officials?
Ideologically coherent parties are bad for bipartisanship, but they are good for democracy. With clear choices, voters gain certainty, a real reason to join the process, and a lot more accountability; because the GOP is an unambiguously conservative party, voters can expect conservative representatives, and punish deviations when necessary.
Admittedly, this is something of a simplification. Still, it's useful to see how partisanship benefits our politics, and even more useful to see how the fervent anti-partisanship of groups like "No Labels" is an attempt to make politics distant and remote to the good majority of Americans.
Wharton finance professor Jeremy Siegelargues that the second round of quantitative easing -- or QE2, the Fed's effort to purchase bonds in search of looser monetary policy -- is working because Treasury rates are rising:
Long-term Treasury rates are influenced positively by economic growth—which encourages consumers to borrow in anticipation of higher incomes and causes firms to seek funds to expand capacity—and by inflationary expectations. Long-term Treasury rates are affected negatively by risk aversion: Seeking a safe haven, investors pile into Treasury bonds, running up their prices and lowering their yields. ... The Fed's QE2 program has raised expectations of growth and inflation, sending long-term Treasury rates up. It has also lowered risk aversion, which implies rising long-term rates.
I made the graph above with one of the Terasury Department's new widgets, and it shows the increase beginning shortly after the Fed changed its policy in the days after the election. Basically, one of the problems in the economy is that there is not enough investment; too many people are holding cash or Treasuries rather than putting that money into the economy. By increasing inflation expectations, the Fed is creating an incentive to spend money now rather than waiting -- hopefully spurring growth, as Siegel argues. So far, we're seeing the results the Fed had hoped for, and if the tax deal ends up getting some fiscal stimulus into the economy, we'll finally have some bare-bones coordination between monetary and fiscal policy, and that's not bad news, either.
Paul Waldmansays that for Democrats to win on taxes, they need to propose substantive reforms -- not just battle over the existingBushtax cuts.
When Barack Obama took office two years ago, four far-reaching problems stood above all others he had to face: the free-falling economy, the war in Iraq, the health-care crisis, and the threat of global climate change. If he could make real progress on those four, his presidency could stand among those of Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Ronald Reagan as the most consequential of the last hundred years, no matter what else he did or didn't do.
So far, the record on these grand priorities is mixed. The economy is recovering, but far too slowly; we are no longer fighting in Iraq, but Afghanistan has shown itself to be even more of a quagmire; Obama did pass historic health-care reform; and action on climate change has effectively been shelved. But as Obama looks toward the second half of his first term, there is another way for him to do something historic: reform the American tax system.
Tim Fernholzasks whether the nation's largest community bank collapsed because of its social-justice mission -- or its financial ambitions.
ShoreBank became a symbol of community-development finance -- politicians associated themselves with the bank, and other financial institutions modeled themselves after it. Federal legislation sought by progressives during the Clinton administration gave government support to organizations like ShoreBank. These Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) must make a large percentage of their loans in underdeveloped low-income areas, and in return, receive tax breaks and access to special development funds.
As we move toward some kind of resolution of the tax debate, I thought it might be worthwhile to put some things in context, particularly the question of the top marginal tax rate. That's the one conservatives are so desperate to keep low, and part of the reason liberals in Congress are rebelling against the compromise reached by President Obama and Mitch McConnell.
The American income tax was established via the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, which was ratified in 1913. Since then, the top rate has varied, but it has been falling pretty much since World War II. Let's look at a chart:
In 1944 and 1945, the top rate was an astounding 94 percent. Throughout the 1970s it was 70 percent. For most of the 1980s it was 50 percent. Today it's at 35 percent, and if there is no deal and the Bush tax cuts expire, it will rise back to 39.6 percent, where it was after Bill Clinton raised it in 1993.
But that's not all the story. The income level at which the top rate kicks in has varied hugely. That 94 percent in 1945 applied to incomes over $200,000 (or about $2.3 million of today's dollars). In 1936, when the top rate was 79 percent, the income threshold was $5 million, or over $78 million in today's dollars. For the last couple of decades the income level at which the top rate kicks in has been indexed to inflation; this year it's $373,650. Let's look at another chart (the underlying data can be found here; I converted everything to 2010 dollars using the BLS's inflation calculator):
So what are we left with? By historical standards, we have a relatively low top rate, combined with a relatively low threshold for that top rate. Which makes a fairly strong argument that we ought to have more rates, as Slate's Tim Noah has argued. There really isn't any reason someone making $400,000 a year ought to be paying the same rate as someone making $400 million a year, but that's how the system works now. And interestingly enough, every tax reform proposal I've seen calls for reducing the number of rates from the current six down to three or four. Which will mean that the super-rich will likely do even better.
It's just twoexamples, but it's a testament to the GOP's message machine that the press overwhelmingly favors the narrative that Republicans are deeply concerned about the deficit while Democrats regularly blow money on the the nation's credit. Likewise with the belief that Democrats get bogged down in policy-making because they accede to the demands of their ideologues, which is coincidentally the precise charge made by the GOP. A better political press, please.
On second thought, you can hardly blame reporters for parroting Republican mythology given how many Democrats have already conceded the argument to conservatives. Here's 2008 DNC keynote speaker Mark Warnerclaiming that the "uncertainty" in the economy is due to all those burdensome regulations repressing the spirit of entrepreneurship. I wish someone would ask Warner why he is a Democrat. What made him think, "I want to be a Democratic politician." Or better still, why he believes Democrats are the party of business.
It's little wonder that "centrists" like Evan Bayh would share an affinity for Glenn Beck-style "9/12" unity through a horrific national disaster, given their loathing of democratic representation and predilection for the authority of plutocrats. But assuming that catastrophe does breed unity, I have to ask what the threshold is. At what point in the death tally is the critical mass of "unity" reached? Is it possible to have unity in the absence of mass murder? I only ask because millions of unemployed Americans is apparently not a disaster to these people.
Weekend Remainders: It's nice to see there are decent people out there willing to countenance vicious hatred masquerading as righteousness; a bigger problem with making morality incumbent on religion is that it suggests the state should be endorsing a particular religion; I'd wager that the lack of female libertarians can be partially explained by things like this; and Time has an "exclusive" cover story that is indistinguishable from transcribing a Facebook page.
Ken Cuccinelli, the attorney general of Virginia, struck a major symbolic blow against the Affordable Care Act today when a judge ruled the individual mandate unconstitutional.
President Obamasigned into law the new Childhood Nutrition bill today, which increases the federal reimbursement rate for school lunches by 6 cents, increases the number of meals served through schools, and makes those meals healthier.
Over at the blog Obama's Foodorama, they're saying, "The bill is without question the most historic child nutrition legislation to emerge from this or any other administration in decades." Well, maybe, but only because the act hadn't been substantially changed in many years. It's a necessary bill that makes modest but important changes to the ways in which we feed children at school, and first lady Michelle Obama's anti-obesity initiative, of which this is a part, addresses a long-standing problem of poor nutrition and inactivity for children.
But whether this is a real game changer remains to be seen, and overall food policy in the country has favored the sorts of systems school-lunch administrators simply succumbed to; processed food is cheaper and easier than more nutritious fresh food, and fresh food is not only more expensive but more costly and time-consuming to prepare. American families are hungry because they don't make enough to live on, very few grocery store chains -- if families are lucky enough to have access to them -- have control of most markets, and food-stamp benefits remain too low. Good thing, then, that the childhood nutrition bill's cost was partly offset by ending an increase in food-stamp funding early.
Via Sociological Images, by way of The New York Times, is the last slave census taken in the United States, dated 1860:
The shading indicates what percent of the county's population was enslaved, with darker shades indicating a higher percentage of enslaved people. As you can see, some counties along the coasts and near the Mississippi have slave populations as high as 80 percent. The map also included information on the overall population and percentage enslaved on a state level. You can see that image here. The numbers are astounding, to say the least; in Mississippi and South Carolina, slaves were 55.1 percent and 57.2 percent of the population, respectively. In raw numbers, Virginia had the largest population of slaves -- 490,887 enslaved persons -- but they were "only" 30.7 percent of the total population.
You can safely say that fear -- as much as ideology -- drove Southern planters away from the Union. If anything else, emancipation meant a huge population of former slaves, and to many planters -- who knew of past slave rebellions, at home and abroad -- this was nothing less than an existential threat. The same is true of the South's rapid descent into Jim Crow and racial terrorism following the end of Reconstruction. With so many former slaves, control was the first item on the agenda.
Right now, the legal machinations regarding the Affordable Care Act are kind of like the overture you hear before a musical starts. It's a little preview of the different songs to come, but it isn't really the show itself. So today, Judge Henry Hudsonruled that the individual mandate is unconstitutional, in contrast to a series of other judges in other jurisdictions who have found the opposite.
Should you be worried? Well yeah, but not because of this ruling.
Hudson was hearing the case because Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli did some judge-shopping and decided to file his suit against the ACA with a judge he predicted would be sure to rule against it. Hudson was a good bet, since he's been a prominent Republican for some time and was appointed by George W. Bush. But Hudson didn't go as far as he could have -- he ruled against Cuccinelli's request to suspend all work on implementing the ACA while the case is being appealed. That means officials in the Department of Health and Human Services can continue to prepare for when the law takes full effect in 2014.
Even more important, Hudson ruled that striking down the mandate didn't mean the rest of the law was also unconstitutional. This is a preview of what could become a key issue if the Supreme Court agrees that the mandate is unconstitutional: "severability." In a rather astonishing display of incompetence, Democratic staffers writing the bill forgot to include a severability clause stating that if any part of the bill was declared unconstitutional, everything else would remain intact. That doesn't necessarily mean the whole bill goes down if the mandate goes down, but it does give the Court leeway to pull other provisions out along with the mandate. All of this will be decided when this lawsuit and all the others eventually wind their way up to the Supreme Court.
And when they do, the only thing that will matter is how Anthony Kennedy feels about all this. We can be almost certain that Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and John Roberts will put on their activist hats and take any means they can to strike down the most important piece of progressive social legislation passed in decades. The four liberals will almost certainly vote to uphold it. And that leaves Kennedy, who holds the fate of the country's health-care system, and that of the millions of people without coverage and millions more who might lose it in the future, in his hands. And yeah, that should make you worried.
New tapes of President Richard Nixon, made during his presidency, have been released:
“The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy,” [National Security Adviser] Henry Kissinger said. “And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”
“I know,” Nixon responded. “We can’t blow up the world because of it.”
I think we basically knew that Nixon was anti-semitic and that influenced the management of his administration (Fred Malek, anybody?) but this is still chilling to read.
Today's decision by George W. Bush appointee Henry H. Hudson finding that the individual mandate provision of the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional has attracted a great deal of attention. Hudson didn't issue an injunction preventing the act from being enforced, so the decision is meaningful only in terms of what the Supreme Court might do. The key word there, as Ezra Kleinpoints out, is "provision." Hudson held that the individual mandate (which he ruled to be unconstitutional) can be legally "severed" from the rest of the ACA. That is, he found the individual mandate to be unconstitutional, and even if higher courts agree, the rest of the bill would be upheld -- even most opponents of the ACA concede that the rest of the bill is constitutional.
As long as the individual mandate can be severed from the act, it sets up a situation where (to paraphrase Joey LaMotta) if liberals win they win, and if they lose, they still win. Given that repealing the popular requirement that insurance companies not deny people based on pre-existing conditions is a near impossibility politically, if the Supreme Court adopted Hudson's reasoning, the result would probably be the death of private insurance rather than a return to the pre-ACA status quo. Like most liberals, I would actually regard this as an improvement. This is perhaps the key reason I've never thought that the Supreme Court will strike down the individual mandate. And while it's theoretically possible that a Supreme Court majority could simply avoid this problem by striking down the whole bill, if a conservative Bush appointee wouldn't do it even in a case where the ruling would be immediately enforced, it's hard to imagine Anthony Kennedy doing so.
Mike Huckabee hasn't made up his mind about another run for president, but he is confident about his appeal to "ethnic" voters:
The real question for me is, do I get through the nomination process? I feel better about getting through the general election if I were the nominee. I think I would be one of the best at drawing real contrasts with President Obama. A lot of the polls show I do exceptionally well, far better than any Republican candidate, with my support with women. I got a significant vote from African-Americans when I was governor--I got 28 percent of the African-American vote in my state, and very few Republicans are able to do that. I'm not suggesting I could do that in a national election, especially against Obama, but I would have a much better opportunity to bring in ethnic voters than most Republicans.
I actually think this is true, for the simple reason that Huckabee knows how to talk about poverty and other issues that disproportionately affect minorities in a way that evades most Republicans. At the Values Voter Summit this year, Huckabee spoke passionately about poverty, citing recent statistics and noting that it costs more to put a person in prison for a year than it does to pay for their college education. Granted, he speaks from a conservative frame, but it resonates with a lot of people, minorities included.
I'm not sure that Huckabee could draw many African American or Latino votes from Obama, but I can easily imagine a scenario where he outperforms Republicans among minorities against a white opponent. Of course, odds are slim that he'll end up the nominee in 2012, to say nothing of the fact that he'd be facing Obama. Still, it's something to think about.
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