The return of austerity on the Democratic side of the aisle

Paul Krugman reviews the baneful effects of austerity on the current economic recovery. His essential case is that:

Under President Obama, however, the dire fiscal condition of state and local governments — the result of a sustained slump, which in turn was caused largely by that private debt explosion before 2008 — has led to forced spending cuts. The fiscal straits of lower-level governments could and should have been alleviated by aid from Washington, which remains able to borrow at incredibly low interest rates. But this aid was never provided on a remotely adequate scale.

This policy malpractice is doing double damage to America. On one side, it’s helping lose the future — because that’s what happens when you neglect education and public investment. At the same time, it’s hurting us right now, by helping keep growth low and unemployment high.

So, with austerity policies doing a double whammy on America, what is the proposed course of action by House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer? Why of course, he's pushing for austerity! I mean, naturally, what else should one do under these circumstances? America is suffering, as Krugman points out, because the Federal Government is refusing to take advantage of very low interest rates to borrow money and then give that money to state and local governments.

As any parent knows, you can't re-do years of a child's life. Once their third grade has passed them by because the local government couldn't afford to keep their school in operation, you can't just hit a re-set button and re-do that year once properity returns. That year of the child's life is gone forever and the child will simply have to work harder to simply keep up with his or her peers who weren't deprived of that year of education.

Columbia University put out a study (PDF) on the job losses of the 1982 recession, showing that the long-term effects were quite bad and that they've lasted to this day. Earning losses for people who lost that year of employment were 30% and after 15 to 20 years, were still 20% lower than for their peers in similar economic circumstances.

But, the right wing says, we don't want to be "another Greece," now, do we? Greece is currently sufferings lots of economic troubles, true, but the CEPR pins the blame for those troubles on European Finance Ministers.

"Given the underestimation of Greek losses so far, and the recessionary impact of budget tightening, mass layoffs, a 20 percent reduction of the minimum wage, and other austerity measures – I think the pessimistic scenario outlined in the leaked document is a very plausible scenario," said Weisbrot.

...

"The bottom line is that you can't shrink your way out of a recession – you have to grow your way out. What they are doing to Greece really makes no economic sense. At this point, it looks like the economy would do better if Greece were to exit from the euro, as opposed to enduring indefinite recession and stagnation, extremely high and persistent unemployment, and increasing poverty. The European authorities are certainly pushing Greece toward the exit and default option." [emphasis added]

How's the American economy doing at this point? It's doing relatively okay, but not great and there might be serious trouble on the horizon. This is hardly the time to be engaged in budget-cutting and "other austerity measures," but that's apparently just what Hoyer is determined to do.

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Monday that he and other House centrists are working to put together a “concrete” deficit-reduction compromise...

What Hoyer wants is to contract the American economy at a time when we're hardly out of the woods, when we're nowhere near full recovery and when contractionary policies are absolutely the worst possible option on the menu right now. The recent announcement of the centrist Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME) that she will retire prompted me to review how the centrists generally have done as far as progressives are concerned. Quite frankly, I think they've been pretty gosh-darned worthless and far too concerned with their own short-term political fortunes to give a hang about how America in general is doing.

Blue Dogs and the budget

A Blue Dog Democrat said:

"...we've got to get our fiscal house in order," Shuler said. "We're at 15 percent of GDP in revenue and 24 and a half percent of expenditures. You want to take that 15 percent to 13 percent and increase spending to 27 percent.... I've ran a business, that doesn't go good on my balance sheet. I'm in the red when that happens."

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities agrees with these percentages and also points out that the US is spending nearly half a trillion dollars on safety net programs. Where does our Blue Dog intend to make a cut so that our budget goes down from 15% to 13%? The safety net programs are a pretty tempting target because safety net money normally goes to constituents that don't write big checks to politicians, that the politicians then spend on re-election campaigns.

Well, aren't there expensive programs that everybody agrees aren't all that useful? Back in 1981, President Reagan's first year in office, there were a few small cuts that everybody could agree on. The US was publishing an estimate every year of how much coal remained in the ground. The estimate ran into the hundreds of years worth. That publication was canceled. Problem was, despite the Golden Fleece Award given out by former Senator William Proxmire (D-WI) from 1975 to 1988, there just wasn't much of what politicians refer to as "low-hanging fruit," so after mid-1981, there simply haven't been any serious budget cuts.  There was a slogan that David Stockman, Reagan's first Budget Director, liked to cite "We're against weak claims, not weak clients." Great slogan, but one that was very difficult to stick with in practice, because those who write big checks for re-election campaigns have a pretty powerful and persuasive voice when it comes to budget priorities.

It's far from clear where Blue Dogs want to make cuts in the budget, but it does appear pretty clear that their preferred route is not to get more Americans employed, but to slash expenditures. As the Daily Kos piece says, what the Blue Dogs want is "not just bad politics, it's bad policy." The essential problem that Blue Dogs don't appear to understand is that the government is not a business.

Governor Rick Scott of Florida (R), tried to run Florida's government as though it was just another private, for-profit corporation and quickly learned that

The inclination is to give a new governor the benefit of the doubt and let him settle into office a bit. Scott squandered that with his arbitrary decisions and disregard for other institutions, including the Cabinet, Congress, the voters and the media.

Scott is used to running an enterprise as a one-man show, where he's not answerable to anyone. State governments don't work that way and there's no reason they ever should. It's extremely important to remember:

Democratic Government is not structured to make a profit. It's job is to spend the pooled contributions of the citizens (taxes) to provide services to those citizens - health, education, defense, infrastructure. There is no profit, as we, the People, are supposed to run this country, and are not selling these services to ourselves.

It's simply a contradiction for the Democratic Party to include Blue Dogs, who just don't appear to understand this. There's a very strong argument that the Democratic Party has been too much of a big tent party and that it needs to shrink down by kicking all of their Blue Dog Democrats out. Let those guys form their own party. Will that make Democrats a minority? Probably, yes. The advantage, however, is that Democrats would speak with one, consistent and unified voice. In contrast, what we have is a party where someone says something like this:

I am a former prosecutor. I put people in the electric chair. I have a gun. I believe in capital punishment. I believe in this war on terror. And I'm a Democrat.

As Digby says:

According to this fellow, I'm not a member of the Democratic Party and nobody gives a damn what I think. I get that, and I believe it. But considering his list of identifiers there, the real question is, why is he?

As to the policy front, the contractionary austerity policies that Blue Dogs appear to favor is opposed by no less an institution than the International Monetary Fund (IMF). As an anti-globalizer, (A popular policy position in the 1990s-early 2000s, it's very highly skeptical of the financial sector and strongly suspects that the MOTUs don't really know what they're doing, but capitalism is far from dead or useless) is a political position that I strongly identify with and the IMF has long been a e-e-evilll boogeyman to the anti-globalization movement, so I thought it was very interesting to see the IMF put out a very useful and informative study of contractionary policies. The IMF looked at 173 instances in 17 countries to gauge the effectiveness of contractionary or "consolidation" policies.

The challenge facing the United Kingdom and many advanced economies is how to bring debt down to safer levels in the face of a weak recovery. Will deficit reduction lead to stronger growth and job creation in the short run?

Recent IMF research provides an answer to this question. Evidence from data over the past 30 years shows that consolidation lowers incomes in the short term, with wage-earners taking more of a hit than others; it also raises unemployment, particularly long-term unemployment.

In other words, no, contractionary policies are pretty worthless. The IMF was unable to identify any positive results from those 173 instances. The recent orgy of budget-cutting in the US has been followed by an economic downturn, with employment gains going flat. There's nothing mysterious or coincidental about that. One led very directly to the other.


Seriously, there's absolutely no reason for liberal Democrats to do anything to keep Blue Dogs in the party.

Jonathan Chait's case for Obama

I guess what really annoys me about the last paragraph in Jonathan Chait's “What the Left Doesn’t Understand About Obama” (Sep 2), is that the piece as a whole reminds me of how my brother-in-law described Colin Powell's 2003 speech at the UN, warning us all of Iraq's mythical Weapons of Mass Destruction. He told me that “Yeah, it was real convincing, provided of course, that you had no prior knowledge of the debate and had no knowledge of the issues. Other than that, yeah, it was really persuasive.”

Chait's final paragraph was:

Liberal critics of Obama, just like conservative critics of Republican presidents, generally want both maximal partisan conflict and maximal legislative achievement. In the real world, those two things are often at odds. Hence the allure of magical thinking.

This might be convincing if President Obama had truly “left everything on the road,” had he truly made a genuinely maximal effort to achieve the goals he said he was committed to. “Liberal critics” were very much aware that the legislative option of “reconciliation” was available for passing the Affordable Care Act in the Senate, meaning that it was completely unnecessary to have a supermajority of 60 Senators to bypass the Senate's filibuster rule (The House operated by plain old majority rule, so there was no need for any bypassing there). The filibuster is, by the way, nowhere mentioned in the Constitution. Chait's statement:

Yes, Bush passed his tax cuts — by using a method called reconciliation, which can avoid a filibuster but can be used only on budget issues.

But that's a rather bizarre observation, considering that reconciliation was used after the Senate passed the Affordable Care Act, but before it went to the House for final passage of various fixes. It simply wasn't necessary for Obama and his people to permit the Blue Dog Democrats to act as though they had veto power over what went into, and what got thrown out of, the bill. Sure, Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) was a terrible fellow for getting the public option deleted from the ACA, but Speaker Pelosi made it clear that, although she was in favor of re-introducing it “...the Obama administration [had] shown no interest in the public option over the past year.“


Yes, President George W. Bush conducted a PR campaign to gut Social Security and feed it to the sharks of Wall Street, but I paid pretty close attention to the 2004 campaign for Bush's re-election, but after that campaign and vote, the introduction of his plans concerning Social Security came as a complete surprise to me. Bush had successfully convinced America that Senator John Kerry (D-MA) couldn't be trusted to be our President, but that's pretty much all that the 2004 campaign was about. It was also clear that Bush wanted to continue the Iraq War and that Kerry was a bit less enthusiastic about that, but Social Security was simply never an issue in the campaign. So yes,

Bush did have one episode where he tried to force through a major domestic reform against a Senate filibuster: his crusade to privatize Social Security. Just as liberals urge Obama to do today, Bush barnstormed the country, pounding his message and pressuring Democrats, whom he cast as obstructionists. The result? Nada, beyond the collapse of Bush’s popularity.

But this episode says absolutely nothing about the filibuster and nothing about the ability of Presidents to force Congress to do as they urge it to do through PR campaigns. If Bush had a mandate, if he was describing reality by saying "I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style." then yes, one could draw conclusions about how effective it is to barnstorm the country on a PR campaign. But a far better example would be Harry Truman's Whistle-Stop Tour, where he reminded the public what the Democratic Party stood for:

I'm asking you just to read history, to use your own judgment, and to decide whether you want to go forward with the Democratic Party or whether you want to turn the clock back to the horse and buggy days with such people that made up that "do-nothing" 80th Congress.

That Congress tried its level best to take all the rights away from labor. That Congress tried its level best to put the farmer back to 1932. That Congress tried its level best to put small business out of business. For what purpose? To help the big interests which they represented.

Note that Truman was successful precisely because he wasn't trying to ram through a deeply unpopular proposal. He was, instead, reminding people of what they already liked about the Democratic Party. Sorry Chait, but if Obama tours the country, advocating a jobs program, then I think Obama's job would be far more similar to Truman's tour than to Bush's.

Perhaps the oddest feature of the liberal indictment of Obama is its conclusion that Obama should have focused all his political capital on economic recovery. “He could likely have passed many small follow-up stimulative laws in 2009,” Jon Walker of the popular blog Firedoglake wrote last month. “Instead, he pivoted away from the economic crisis because he wrongly ignored those who warned the crisis was going to get worse.”

Nothing the slightest bit “odd” about it. Historically, a high unemployment rate has doomed presidential re-election chances. Getting Americans back to work was and remains a top-of-the-line political priority.

Rather than deploy every ounce of his leverage to force moderate Republicans, whose votes he needed, to swallow a larger stimulus than they wanted, Obama clearly husbanded some of his political capital.

Sorry, but I saw that in early 2009 and continue to see it today as an extremely poor strategic choice. That political capital did Obama no good whatsoever in passing the ACA and winning over “moderate” Republicans (Whose voting records tend to be indistinguishable from their more hard-line colleagues in any event) has been a complete bust. Obama saved his political capital for nothing.


But by far the most serious problem, as the economist Brad DeLong points out, was that Obama pivoted to deficit reduction far, far too early. Appointing the Bowles-Simpson Deficit Commission (Progressives popularly refer to it as the “Catfood Commission” and it's second iteration, the “super committee” created by the debt-limit deal, as “Catfood Commission II”) was a true stinker of an idea that, among many other problems, made it politically impossible to ask Congress for another stimulus without the Obama Administration appearing to be a bunch of incompetents. This was an entirely unforced error that has severely hamstrung the Obama Administration, turned them away from their own best interests and aided and abetted their political opposition by making it appear that their favorite issue since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, deficit reduction, was more important than putting people back to work, addressing Global Warming or addressing Peak Oil. All three of these issues are many, many times more important than deficit reduction is, was or ever will be.


No, I disagree with Chait's title, I think the left understands Obama just fine. Obama's a moderate Republican. He's in the wrong party and his errors have probably made a second term impossible. He needs to disband Catfood Commission II and he needs to adopt a full-blown campaign to get Americans back to work. He needs to put deficit reduction on the far, far back burner until other priorities are addressed and are well on the way to being solved.

The 2010 Mid-terms: Is there a silver lining?

One would think that if progressives being too progressive was the problem with the Democratic Party, then the "fiscally conservative" Blue Dog Democrats would have done better than progressives. They didn't. Blue Dogs got absolutely hammered at the polls.

As far as The Democratic Party is concerned, there actually is a silver lining to the 2010 mid-term election. In 2006, Senator Joe Lieberman was a Democrat from Connecticut and not just some meaningless Joe Schmuckatelli, he was very recently (2004) the Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate. So when Lieberman stepped all over Democratic messaging:

Lieberman claims to be a staunch supporter of affirmative action, when in fact he has always added the caveat, "but I oppose quotas"
[...]
Lieberman is also the strongest Democratic supporter of faith-based bribery in the Senate.

Democrats found that the Republican retort of "But Joe Lieberman, a Democrat in good standing, says..." was very difficult to refute or ignore. The inclusion of Lieberman in the Democratic Party did Democrats far more harm than good, so Democrats were well rid of him (Ned Lamont won the Democratic primary, but lost the general election, so Lieberman is still a Senator, but as an Independent).

Lieberman was a "Blue Dog Democrat," a group that was strongly favored by the President's former Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel and is favored today by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer. Their message of "fiscal discipline" was one that was problematic for Democrats in the best of times, but during an economic crisis like the present one, is downright destructive. The identification of Democrats as free spenders compared to the Republicans as being tight with a dollar is one that is challenged by the Republican desire to keep the younger George Bush's tax cuts going for those making over $250,000 annually, but has been a reasonably good shorthand description of how Democrats manage the economy versus how Republicans manage it.

So the good news from the mid-term election of 2010? The Blue Dogs took it on the chin! Blue Dog losses far outnumbered Progressive losses.

23 of the 46 Blue Dogs up for re-election went down on Tuesday.
[...]
Half of the Blue Dog incumbents were defeated, and by themselves accounted for close to half of the Democratic losses. [emphasis in original]

[...]
the worst possible choice Democrats can make is to run as GOP-replicating corporatists devoted above all else to serving corporate interests in order to perpetuate their own power: what Washington calls "centrists" and "conservative Democrats." That is who bore the bulk of the brunt of last night's Democratic bloodbath -- not liberals.

One thing I'm very cheerful about is that Blue Dogs who ran against the Speaker of the House fared particularly poorly. And obviously, if the "Cat Food Commission" takes a meat-ax to Social Security as progressives suspect they will, the Blue Dogs will be playing a major role in lending the credibility of the Democratic Party to such a destructive project. That's why it's particularly important to diminish the role of Blue Dogs immediately and not to approach that project in a casual manner.

Representative Alan Grayson (D-FL) may have lost his seat, he was a particularly energetic progressive who caused many members of the traditional press corps to grab at their hearts and retire to the fainting couch, but the Democratic next-door-neighbor of Grayson lost too.

Regarding Grayson,well we have a little controlled experiment. His neighboring first term Democratic congresswoman Suzanne Kosmas, in a very similar district, took the opposite approach to Grayson. She ran as hard to the right as she could get away with, never had a controversial thought much less uttered one, was rewarded with big money and support from the DCCC --- and she lost too. This race was bigger than both of them. Florida is turning hard right.

So it's far from clear that Grayson's aggressiveness and ill manners explain much of anything.

So the lesson on how progressives should proceed seems pretty obvious to me. Get rid of the danged Blue Dogs even if it means losing the Democratic majority. Let Democrats earn majority status the hard way, by campaigning as unapologetic progressives who have no problems with the label of being free spenders and who oppose unnecessary wars and racial hatred (Both against American minorities at home and Muslims overseas) and excessive corporate power just because, well, just because that stuff is wrong.

Let Democrats stop making excuses for being Democrats!

Taking triangulation too far

In 1992, Bill Clinton picked a fight with Sister Souljah, a little-known rap singer. Clinton was deliberately throwing the community of African-American activists under the bus in order to ingratiate himself with wealthier and more powerful constituencies. Clinton continued to triangulate against one group or another. It's far from clear that this practice strengthened the Democratic brand. I and many other progressives noticed at the time that the Republicans never did this. It really bothered me and many others that there were, according to the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), "good" and "bad" Democrats. In fact, the Democratic brand was so weak by 2002 that the party actually lost seats in a mid-term election. Normally, the party out of power picks up seats in a mid-term.

Democratic fortunes began changing in 2004 when unapologetic progressives began muscling the triangulators of the DLC aside and spoke of their fellow Democrats as trusted and honored partners. 2006 and 2008 were very good years for Democrats as progressives were firmly in the drivers' seat and triangulation was a thing of the past.

Unfortunately, triangulation appears to be making a comeback. It's far worse now than it ever was under Clinton as now, conservative Democrats are openly disrespecting the Speaker of the House. This strikes me as a really, REALLY bad idea! It was really bad when Clinton disrespected powerless groups as that strategy hurt Democratic unity and muddled any message Democrats might have had, but when regular Representatives advertise how independent from the Speaker they are, WTF!?!?!?! This just sounds like the most horribly anti-unity and anti-common cause strategy I ever heard of.

Far better, in my humble opinion, to have a smaller party of people who are actually together on the issues and who are truly together because they have many beliefs in common rather than to have people who band together merely because they can pursue their own separate agendas more effectively with a "D" after their name than with an "R."

Blue Dog Democrats bite Democratic Party

This is a very serious reason why progressives never liked Rahm Emanuel, the President's Chief Of Staff. Emanuel likes to recruit DINO's (Democrats In Name Only) to run against Republicans. This strategy results in not giving voters much of a choice. They can take the real Republican supplied by the Republican Party or they can take one of Rahm's pseudo-Republicans. In the video on this blog post, Fox News (I don't blame Fox News in the slightest for re-running this Democratic ad as they're simply pointing out Emanuel's stupidity) runs the ad of a Democrat who positions himself as an independent by trashing both Republicans and Speaker Pelosi.

Not only is this a complete failure of Democratic Party messaging ("Our guy is smarter/more moral/better than the Democratic Speaker of the House") and not only does it severely weaken the Democratic brand as a whole, but it doesn't even result in Senators or Representatives who toe the party line when they're called upon to do so.

We can see in this table that some Democratic Congresspeople who voted against the Affordable Care Act in early November 2009 had good reason to do so. Democratic Representative Chet Edwards (TX-District 17) won his last election by only eight points, but McCain won that district by 35 points. Walt Minnick (ID-District 1) squeezed into office by one point, but McCain won his district by 26 percent. Others are less explicable. Larry Kissell (NC-District 8) won by a comfortable eight points and Obama won his district by five points. John Barrow (GA-District 12) won by 32 points and Obama by 11. Why aren't these people loyal to the Democratic Party platform? Why can't they put their votes with the party that put them into office? In all, there are 30 Democrats who won their races by over 10 points, but who nevertheless sided against the Democratic Party on a major issue.

Seven Democratic Senators and one Independent tossed up a temporary roadblock to the ACA, all of whom fall into the Blue Dog category. Eventually, all eight Senators voted for the bill, but:

The idea of a full-blown government-run insurance option, heatedly debated for months, would be jettisoned under the tentative agreement reached by Senate Democratic liberals and moderates and announced Tuesday night. In its place would be the expansion of Medicare, as well as new nationwide private plans to be run by the same agency that oversees the system that lawmakers use for themselves and their families.

As we now know, the Medicare buy-in plan was also jettisoned. It's really far from clear what the Democratic Party gains by getting Blue Dog Democrats into office. I mean, yeah great, they get to say that they're in the majority (Which does indeed have some worthwhile perks) and some bills get passed, but those bills get through the process all chopped and sliced and cut up.

Emanuel's strategy just looks to me like an extremely flawed strategy that includes some serious drawbacks. When Blue Dog Democrats win races, it's far from clear that the Democratic Party can really say that it's come out ahead. There's simply no assurance that the Democratic party has gained a reliably Democratic vote. And as we can see in the ad that was re-run by Fox News, neither is there any assurance that a Blue Dog Democrat won't disrespect the Democratic Party leadership in the process of ensuring their own political survival.

Obama Administration facing crisis

The WaPo puts out a truly subservient, hero-worshiping, fanboy-type piece on President Obama's Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel. Emanuel is clearly meant to be viewed as having a halo around his head, he's described as being the "White House voice of reason." What, pray tell, is this awesome "reason" based on? The first one given (The same point was made earlier by another WaPo reporter) is:

In December 2008, Obama, Emanuel and Republican Sens. John McCain (Ariz.) and Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) met in Obama's transition headquarters in Chicago to discuss detainee policy. According to Graham, Obama turned to him at one point and said, " 'I'm going to need your help closing Guantanamo Bay. . . . I want you and Rahm to start talking.' " They did, and as the discussions progressed, Emanuel grew wary that closing the U.S. military prison in Cuba was possible without opening a slew of other politically sensitive national security problems " 'This stuff is like flypaper,' " Graham recalled Emanuel saying. " 'It will stick to you.' "

Graham said Emanuel was well aware that his and any other Republican support for closing Guantanamo Bay hinged on keeping alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed out of civilian court.

A blogger asks:

Lindsey Graham is one of 41 Republican senators. He has the capacity to be reasonable. And yet when he’s faced with people who know more than he does, he acts like a baby, as with his petulant treatment of longtime FBI counterterrorist Ali Soufan last year. He is not the chairman of anything. He is not the ranking member of anything. He controls no money. If you believe he has the power to rally along GOP votes, ask how that climate change bill is coming. There is absolutely no legal or procedural way that the road to shutting Guantanamo down runs inexorably through Graham’s office. That’s a political choice.

The WaPo piece makes no attempt to explain the blogger's question as to why Senator Graham is so important. Keep in mind that the blogger's piece came out on February 15th whereas the WaPo piece came out on March 2nd. It's not like the WaPo stenographer/reporter didn't have time to ponder the question.

Nor is there any legitimate, established reason as to why Republicans want to avoid a civilian trial for Khalid Sheik Mohammed. If Emanuel were trading in legitimate concerns and balancing them off against one another, that'd be one thing. He's instead, balancing off a reason that Graham and McCain more or less just plucked out of thin air versus a legitimate legal reason based on legal tradition and the Constitution.

There is simply no requirement for an accused terrorist to be tried outside of America's judicial system.

The position staked out by Lindsay Graham et al. favoring military commissions over federal criminal trials for the Gitmo detainees we plan to charge with wrongdoing as the “best way to render justice, win this war and protect our nation from a vicious enemy,” is not especially more coherent. Among other things, after 8 years, the commissions have convicted 3 defendants, 2 of whom are already back on the streets. In the same time, according to NYU, the criminal justice system has pursued 800 terrorism prosecutions with a conviction rate of 90%. The new and improved commission process is certain to generate just as much litigation as the last one – and commission defendants will enjoy a host of potentially powerful defenses to their prosecution they won’t have in criminal trials.

The piece goes on to point out that the Rahm Emanuel-induced moral and political compromises that the Obama Administration is now making are absolutely killing the Administration's credibility on the whole issue of how to deal with terrorism suspects.

But it’s hard to have a coherent much less dominating message when talking out of all sides of the mouth. It is not news that the Obama Administration seems to have been struggling for some time with internal divisions on these issues.

It's not as though the rest of the world hasn't noticed either, that the US policy on terrorist suspects is morally bankrupt. A blogger points out that Pakistan, a country far more on the front lines of terrorism than the US ever will be, is nevertheless applying due process.

Yet what happens when they want to imprison foreign Terrorism suspects? They indict them and charge them with crimes, put them in their real court system, guarantee them access to lawyers, and can punish them only upon a finding of guilt.

The US stands with an inferior, scotch-tape-and-band-aids, carelessly-constructed system that doesn't even deliver convictions. I have to say, I'm completely baffled as to why Emanuel thinks this case shows him as anything other than a hopeless clown. He's constructed a lose-lose scenario whereupon Democrats surrender upon matters of deep and serious principle, end up looking completely without morality and gain absolutely nothing in return. McCain and Graham continue to filibuster along with their fellow Republican Senators each and every single time they possibly can. Where and how they're doing anything to help the Administration is a complete mystery.

It's not like the policy on terrorism suspects is isolated, either.

We’ve already seen the Administration’s energy/climate change initiative so watered down in the House that it caused deep splits in the alternative energy/environmental community. Those who pleaded for pragmatic patience on the House Bill are now tearing their hair out watching the Senate become a bastion of delay and denialism, with little effective push back from the Administration.

Again, we're seeing a complete lack of principle and coherency from the Administration. Again, we're seeing a lose-lose situation from people who are allegedly smart. Obviously, President Obama is a grown-up and obviously, Emanuel was appointed by Obama and has Obama's full confidence. But Emanuel's fingerprints are apparent.

The head man of "The Village," David Broder, got very snippy and aggravated about Emanuel's obvious disloyalty being on display with all the planted stories about President Obama being to blame for the poor performance of his Administration (Not that Broder would actually accuse Emanuel of doing the leaking, o-o-oh no-o-o!!!) and made a very interesting charge:

The underlying problem, in their eyes, is a badly damaged economy that has sunk Obama's poll numbers and emboldened Republicans to blockade his legislative program.

Okay, let's take Broder's word for this. It's not like the economy was considered to be in good shape when Obama took the oath of office. But what happened? The stimulus package passed in February 2009 was too small. And why was it too small? "...Obama and the U.S. Congress - driven by centrist senators from both parties - have decided..." (emphasis added). And who is the great champion of "centrism"? Yup, his name is Rahm Emanuel.

I don't see Emanuel as exercising some mysterious, nefarious, Rasputin-like influence. I think it's far more likely that Emanuel sincerely believes that centrism and compromising principles in return for fleeting, evanescent advantage is the way to go. I believe Obama trusts that Emanuel knows what he's doing. What's also obvious to us DFH's, the dirty hippie bloggers, is that Emanuel's strategy simply isn't working. It never was working and it never will work. I'm not sure whether Emanuel should be fired or simply overruled, but either way, the Obama Administration has to do something and has to do it soon.

Democratic leadership and primaries

Y'know, I've felt this way for a long time anyway, but I think it needs to be re-stated upon the President's endorsement of Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) to be re-elected. The Democratic National Committee (DNC), the House and Senate Democratic Campaign Committees (DCCC & DSCC) need to stay out of primary races. They should never express any sort of opinion and they should never chip in as much as a nickel to any primary campaign.

First off, it's not the slightest bit surprising that in each and every single, solitary case that the White House and the rest of the Democratic leadership group will habitually support the incumbent in their primary battles. I mean, that's just a given. Obviously, these groups want to continue working with people that they've gotten to know. Obviously, they feel that "our buddy" has contributed to "the fight" and will continue to do so, whether or not they've actually contributed very much or, in the case of Ben Nelson (D-NE), they've actively worked against the better interests of the Democratic Party as a whole and used up money that could have been put to more worthwhile purposes.

I have nothing but good things to say about how MoveOn has responded to the Blanche Lincoln-Bill Halter primary. MoveOn appears to understand why primaries exist.

Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln is one of the worst Democrats in Washington, siding with corporate interests to obstruct progress.
----------------
Bill Halter is the progressive lieutenant governor of Arkansas. Halter has fought to make sure every child in Arkansas can afford to go to college, has helped organize free clinics to offer health care to people without insurance, and opposed vicious anti-gay ballot measures.

The Nation finds Lincoln very uninspiring:

Senator Blanche Lincoln, the exceptionally uninspired (and uninspiring) Arkansas Democrat who has dragged her heals [sic] on health-care reform, labor-law reform and just about every other major issue that matters to grassroots Democrats while at the same time backing bank bailouts and trade policies that batter Arkansas workers and farmers, will face a serious primary challenge from the state's lieutenant governor.

Bill Halter, who was elected to Arkansas' No. 2 job with 57 percent of the vote in 2006, has positioned himself as a far more progressive player on education, health care and, above all, economic issues than Senator Lincoln.

The Nation feels that "old-fashioned populism is the only message that will keep Democrats competitive in states such as Arkansas" and clearly, if the Democratic leadership group is not going to be part of that populist initiative, they'd better get out of the way and let the more progressive, energetic people take charge.


Rachel Maddow agrees and questions DNC Chairman Tim Kaine about this. The piece with that video also runs a quote from Steve Rosenthal, a veteran Democratic strategist and former top AFL-CIO official: "People voted for change in ’08 and feel like they’re not getting the change they voted for.”

Heartening news

[I wrote this for the Organizing For America/MyBarackObama website - Rich]

I was extremely heartened to see this in Daily Kos:

Charles Blow:

Since the State of the Union address, the president has been bounding about, displaying a new sense of vigor and confidence and a fighter’s spirit. He almost looks like the president people thought that he would be — a paladin, not a pacifist.

Why? Simple. Doing it Rahm's way didn't work, so now he's doing it his way.

I've never been impressed with Clintonian centrism. I've always felt that being successful on your own terms is vastly more useful to America and vastly more appreciated by voters than trying to slice ever-thinner slices of baloney and trying to target ever-more precisely that elusive middle-of-the-road voter's opinions. Centrism has proven over and over again to be an utter failure. The V-Chip was a much-appreciated centrist issue, a bloodless, technocratic, passion-free solution that President Clinton was happy to use. It was a good-enough campaign issue for 1996, when Clinton was up against Senator Bob Dole, a guy even my Republican father felt was simply too old for the job and a Right-wing vote that was split with Ross Perot. It was a fair-weather solution that was appropriate for good, sunny, trouble-free times.


Of course, it was obvious at the time that Clinton had no coattails and that for a politician to declare "I'm a loyal Clintonian" meant nothing of substance to voters. I noticed at the time that no one ever followed the collapse of Hillary Clinton's health care plan by trying to appeal to what she tried to do. There was no glory to recall, no battle-cry to revive. When the plan was defeated, it simply sunk without a trace. I felt that 2002 saw the complete and utter collapse of the DLC strategy. It's quite rare for an out-of-office party to actually lose seats in a mid-term election, but the DLC managed that highly unusual feat. I simply can't imagine why the DLC or its centrist strategy has had any credibility since then.


Apparently, the loss in Massachusetts has jolted the Obama Administration to realize anew the sheer folly and bankruptcy of trying to appeal to some mythical centrist voter that no one can ever locate precisely anyway. Obviously, Massachusetts would never have been a loss had the Democratic Party still been using Howard Dean's 50-State Strategy. Rahm Emanuel clearly thought Dean's ideas were no longer relevant. I'm happy to see the Obama Administration learn from its mistakes and that Emanuel simply does not have the better strategy.


As a proud DFH blogger, I strongly urge the whole Obama Administration to keep going on their new path. Whack the Republican obstructionists at every opportunity. Don't play the victim, but keep pointing out to the voters where the problems in Washington are and that you're trying your best to overcome the obstacles that Republicans keep throwing in your way. Getting all 60 of the Senators in the Democratic Caucus to vote for everything in the health care bill was an awful idea as getting those last few votes from Senators Joe Liebeman and Ben Nelson resulted in tearing the guts out of the bill and leaving just the really unpopular parts behind.


And remember, above all else keep this constantly in mind, the press corps is not your friend. These are a bunch of silly, vapid, go-along-to-get-along, mindless fashion victims who know nothing outside The Village, outside their Versailles-on-the-Potomac. Sure, go ahead and "consult" them, do what you must to stroke their egos, but please don't let yourselves be fooled into thinking they have any worthwhile insights to impart.

Special election in Massachusetts lost

Well, Al Franken was sworn in as the Democrats' 60th Senator on the 7th of July 2009 and a bit less than 200 days later, on the 19th of January 2010, Democrats lost the special election held in Massachusetts in which the late Senator Ted Kennedy was replaced. As the fake-news comedian Jon Stewart put it, "the Democrats won't be able to pass health care reform with an 18-vote majority," a majority that George W. Bush NEVER had and remember, he could do whatever the %#@ he wanted to do!!!

Is this all bad news? Hmm, not necessarily. The Senate could give up the pipedream of getting things through with a filibuster-proof majority and could concentrate on using tactics like reconciliation and possibly modifying the filibuster rule (It's not in the Constitution, so it won't require a Constitutional amendment to remove or modify it) so that it would be a great deal tougher for the minority party to stop up progress and toss all sorts of obstacles in the way. It means that Democrats would no longer have the excuse of having to cater to minority Senators from small states like Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Max Baucus (D-MT) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME). There's strong evidence that spending time and attention on these fringe players and specifically, that re-working the health care bill to meet their demands has crucially deflated the morale of the Democratic Party's progressive voter base.

Progressive bloggers in general didn't feel appreciated and most certainly weren't listened to. As the late Molly Ivins put it, quoting an old Texas saying "Ya dance with the one who brung ya." Obama and his people didn't spend any time "dancing" with progressives, they were too busy chasing "centrist" (Read: "fringe" i.e., off to the right of where the party's base voters are) votes to see to it that progressive voters felt that the Democratic Party was concerned about their priorities.

What do liberals/progressives have to show for our roughly 200 days of a filibuster-proof majority? Damn little. There's very little that we can put up on the wall to say "See? We accomplished that with our filibuster-proof majority!" Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) admitted a few days ago that trying to get Senator Snowe to vote for the health care bill was a complete waste of time. Yeah, it would have been great to have had a least one Republican vote so that Democrats could claim a "bipartisan" victory, but

"As I look back it was a waste of time dealing with [Snowe]," Reid is quoted as saying

The House health care bill was voted out of its various committees right before the August recess and got their combined bill out by early November, but the final Senate committee didn't get its bill out until October and the Senate didn't get their combined bill out until late December. So the Senate was very significantly slower than the House and it made a great many more compromises, compromises which might significantly affect how well the final bill might work in practice. As progressives have pointed out, the public option, which was jettisoned to get Senator Lieberman's vote, is not just a "nice to have" feature, it's absolutely critical if the health care bill is to work.

"Our priority on the public option, the emphasis was not on 'public' - the emphasis was on 'option,' on something 'other than,'" [Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)] said. "The president said from the start, 'I believe that the public option is the best way to keep the insurance companies honest and increase competition. If you have a better idea, put it on the table ... So we will see what they have on the table."

Critics such as Dr. Quentin Young, of Physicians for a National Health Program, see a public insurance plan as having been sacrificed for conservative Democratic votes. "We are very dissatisfied with the way the end of stage negotiations are going," he said. "It seems to use from the very first day the administration has made concessions to the conservative wing who dominates the Senate."

Solution? Dump the provisions that the Senate's rogue, fringe (allegedly "centrist") Senators insisted on, restore the public option and dump the anti-abortion provisions. Make this bill something progressives can be proud of and ignore the beltway press when it squeals "You're not being bipartisan!" Just tell the press corps "No, we're not being bipartisan, we're seeing to the needs of the American people. That means we have to toss this idiotic bipartisanship fetish out the window and concentrate on producing good policy."

More on health care disruptions

Lou Dobbs makes a complete idiot out of himself by saying about Howard Dean that:

"I thought we had gotten rid of this left-wing pest for a while," Dobbs said of the former Vermont governor. "But I guess he is just resurgent.... He's a bloodsucking leftist. I mean, you gotta put a stake through his heart to stop this guy."

Dobbs sorta, kinda, not really walked his statement back a wee bit. What strikes me is that Howard Dean is not at all any sort of failure. He's not some fringe figure that never accomplished anything. Dean was the author of the "50 State Strategy," the idea of "Let's contest EVERY seat everywhere." This was a strategy that put Democrats firmly into the driver's seat.

Dobbs' ranting and raving has caused a great loss of credibility for the media critic Howard Kurtz. Dobbs and Kurtz both receive paychecks from CNN. When Dobbs makes insane statements, Kurtz's silence is deafening.

The Inky today did a front-page piece about the birthers/teabaggers/anti-health care people who are screaming and yelling and disrupting town hall events across the country.

The piece does indeed bring up the astroturf organizations Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, in the story's eighth paragraph and stating that they have organized "some" of the protests. The evidence is that they've been the driving force behind ALL of the protests. No other coherent reason is given for the over-the-top opposition to health care in the piece.

Amazingly, a Blue Dog Democrat (Blue Dogs are frequently given the positive "purr-word" designation of "moderate" or "centrist" and it's usually an undeserved accolade) talked some common sense on the subject:

“When people say, oh, we don’t want the government programs I ask how many of you are on Medicare, how many of you are veterans. When the hands go up I say, I don’t know if y’all know this but those are both government-run programs,” Cuellar said.

A few conservatives have whined and moaned and groaned "Wa-a-ah, sob, sniffle, the bill is much too long to read!!! Obama is trying to put one over on us!!1!!" Wel-l-l-l, a single individual somehow didn't seem to have any trouble going through the entire bill and finding all sorts of "awful" things in it. He gives a very detailed list of all the "problems."

Oh, and BTW, not all faith-based political movements are conservative. A group of progressive Christians says:

5PM EDT Wednesday, August 19th, the faith community is hosting a national call in and audio webcast on health care reform and President Barack Obama has accepted the faith community’s invitation to join the call.

Governor Jindals' health care proposal

The Republican Governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, proposed the following for a national health-care policy:

Insurance reform. Congress should establish simple guidelines to make policies more portable, with more coverage for pre-existing conditions. Reinsurance, high-risk pools, and other mechanisms can reduce the dangers of adverse risk selection and the incentive to avoid covering the sick. Individuals should also be able to keep insurance as they change jobs or states.

Problem: The failure to provide "more coverage for pre-existing conditions" is not, as the computer guys say, a bug, but a feature of private, for-profit health insurance. It's an inherent, built-in tendency that no "guidelines" will ever eliminate from the picture. It is in the financial interests of these companies to not pay claims. Nothing will ever "fix" that as asking them to ignore that fact is to ask private, capitalist companies to disregard their very nature.

Consumer choice guided by transparency. We need a system where individuals choose an integrated plan that adopts the best disease-management practices, as opposed to fragmented care.

If it were in the financial interest of private, for-profit companies to provide such transparency, they've had decades to provide it. If there is no such transparency currently being provided, there's very probably a good (financial) reason why not. It's very highly likely that even if such transparency is mandated, companies will find ways around it, thereby making phone-book size regulations inevitable. BTW, the Blue Dog Democrats are no better on the issue than Republicans are. Again, their reasons are mostly financial.

Aligned consumer interests. Consumers should be financially invested in better health decisions through health-savings accounts, lower premiums and reduced cost sharing.

Lower costs are precisely what's being offered by the Democrats.

A new study from the Commonwealth Fund finds that the public option could save the country $265 billion. The same study found that Grassley's favored approach--allowing insurance companies to maintain their near-monopoly status--would cost the country $32 billion.

In short, Jindal is offering absolutely nothing that even begins to address the problems caused by overreliance on private, for-profit health care insurance. What are his critiques of the Democratic approach?

Second, the Democrats disingenuously argue their reforms will not diminish the quality of our health care even as government involvement in the delivery of that health care increases massively. For all of us who have seen the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to hurricanes, this contention is laughable on its face.

Keep in mind that in August 2005 when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the Presidency, the Senate and the House were all in Republican hands. Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco declared a State of Emergency on Friday, 26 August. President Bush was fully and properly informed by the Governor on Saturday, 27 August that Federal assistance was required. The hurricane struck late on the night of Sunday, 28 August.

8PM CDT [Monday 29 Aug]— GOV. BLANCO AGAIN REQUESTS ASSISTANCE FROM BUSH: “Mr. President, we need your help. We need everything you’ve got.” [Newsweek]

LATE PM — BUSH GOES TO BED WITHOUT ACTING ON BLANCO’S REQUESTS [Newsweek]

New Orleans was not submerged because "government" was inherently incapable of action. It was submerged because the government was in the hands of people who didn't believe they were responsible for assisting their fellow citizens in a crisis.

Far better examples for Jindal to use to look at how the government would handle health care would be to look at institutions like the VA Hospitals (I stayed in two VA Hospitals in 2000 and was satisfied with their services) and the Post Office (The number of letters that I didn't receive despite their being properly addressed, I can count on one hand).

Republican Representative Michele Bachmann agrees with Jindal's first point, that

If a so-called public option is part of health-care reform, the Lewin Group study estimates over 100 million Americans may leave private plans for government-run health care.

See above, where I explain that private, for-profit companies will inherently and by definition, always seek to pay out as few claims as they can possibly get away with. A government plan will not have that incentive. Note Bachmann's reasoning as to why a government plan will be less expensive:

...because the taxpayer-subsidized plan will be 30 to 40 percent cheaper.

Not because the government can make it cheaper, as Jindal claims it will unfairly do, but it will just be inherently cheaper as the government pays their senior people far less than executives at private companies make and the government doesn't have to pay for advertising or any other type of competition with other providers.

In short, Jindal makes an extremely unconvincing case for maintaining private, for-profit health insurance. I recommend "single-payer" and believe that "public option" would be a reasonably satisfactory substitute, at least for now.

Assessment of President Obama

I think with this description of the detention powers that the Obama Administration claims it has, I can definitely say that, as an Obama supporter, I'm definitely of the "Cafeteria Catholic" variety. I think some of the stuff our President has done has been wonderful, specifically his Iran policies, his administration's attitude towards Missile Defense and his economic stimulus policies, but I have absolutely no respect whatsoever for his War on Terrorism policies (Yeah, he's retired that term, but has kept the substance of those policies). Even a right-winger who supports Obama's WOT policies

... policies of indefinite detention and denial of due process...

is uncomfortable with the idea of keeping prisoners locked up even after they're declared innocent of all charges

...there is something Orwellian about this administration's attempt to have it both ways -- to get the credit for putting detainees on trial only to disregard the outcome if they don't like the verdict.

In the same post, the NPR Ombudsman demonstrates that, while discussing the question of the torture of prisoners, she suffers from complete and utter obliviousness. Essentially, the US is "good" and can therefore never perform any act as unequivocally awful as torture. Our enemies and countries we're not interested in defending are all "bad" and so are perfectly capable of committing the terrible, morally indefensible act of torture. Is torture a bad thing? Wel-l-l-l, that depends on who's doing it.

I agree with this assessment that these administration statements on the stimulus are puzzling, especially because they're so completely unnecessary

In other news, in answer to a question about whether the stimulus was adequate, Biden also said that everyone had misread how bad the economy was back in January, which I think is nonsense. Everyone knew that the economy was in very, very deep trouble. It was politics that made the stimulus inadequate, not imperfect knowledge.

I understand why he would say it, but I don't think it rings true considering all the talk about the "worst economy since the Great Depression" at the time. Plus, I think it's a weak play. They knew that even the best stimulus would take time to kick in --- they said so then --- so they should just stick to their guns. "No one could have predicted" excuses are lame in most cases, but especially lame in this one.

Seems to me the stimulus policies are good, but the administration appears to be defending the Blue Dog Democrats who weakened the stimulus by bellyaching about the cost and stripping it of many needed billions of dollars. It's especially a source for grim humor that Republicans are whining and crying about how long the stimulus is taking to work. Remember that virtually no Republicans voted for it, so it's not like they can claim any credit for it if it does work.

Obama's policies on health care? Good grief, don't ask! With his Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel going all wobbly on whether he supports the "public option" (American citizens prefer Single Payer, but Public Option is a reasonable substitute). So I'm not sure I can put any faith into that team on their major domestic priority.

Update: The Inky ran a piece today (July 10th - Page A7) on the Obama Administration defending how the Presidential administrations briefed/briefs Congresspeople on what the intel agencies are up to. As the blogger emptywheel points out, the current briefings to Congress are a hopelessly broken mess that require deep and serious reforms.

In order to maintain proper separation of powers and to ensure that intel operations are legal and effective, the briefings must be seriously reformed.

Round-up piece on the news

Excellent piece on the assassination of abortion provider George Tiller

This person apologizes for her lack of eloquence in describing the kind of doctor that George Tiller was, but I think she did a great job

Kansas TV station 12 has the latest on the hunt for the killer


Speaking of ranting, raving hatemongers, George Miller, the highest-ranking Republican officeholder (Senate Minority Leader), refuses to condemn Rush Limbaugh, et al, who are making wild, hysterical claims about Judge Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court nominee

Obviously, Miller is absolutely terrified to get on Rush's bad side.

People are suggesting that Sotomayor, as a member of the National Council of La Raza, is thereby a member of a hate group, akin to the Nazis and the KKK. Here's their side of the story

Rachel Maddow takes that talking point apart

Ed Rendell does not wish to see Joe Sestak run for Arlen Specter's seat

Oh, and I did a piece on different computer operating systems and how they interface with each other. Short answer - you can work with documents that are created on other operating systems, but you can't move programs that are designed for one operating system to another. You can work with a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet on Linux Ubuntu (add to it, delete from it, print it and save it), but you can't move the MS Excel program to Ubuntu.

Strange Bedfellows

Concerns FISA and the Democrats who act as traitors to the Democratic Party and the US Constitution.

Tell Congress "No Deal on Telecom Immunity!"

Further info on Congress' attempt to set aside US Constitution on the warrantless wiretapping issue.

Update: ACLU's press release

Contributions as of Wednesday at 5:00pm have raised $90,000 in the past 24 hours ($170,000 total) The campaign the money will go towards is aimed at three backers of the bill.

Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) "is now offering the excuse that he had no choice but to negotiate it because 'conservative' Democrats were threatening to support the Rockefeller/Cheney Senate bill and Hoyer was thus forced to negotiate the best deal he could." This excuse is ridiculous.

Update: Many Congresspeople less than pleased with "compromise"

New wiretapping bill dubbed ‘repugnant’ and ‘a capitulation.’

"The Beltway establishment needs to be trained to understand that there is a real constituency for defending our constitutional framework."

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