President Obama hopes his bipartisan health care summit on Feb. 25 won’t degenerate into “political theater.” Too late: the partisan jockeying over health care reform already has turned into a farce worthy of Moliere.
It’s bad enough that Democrats, despite holding the White House and commanding majorities in Congress, can’t pass their top domestic priority. They look as feckless as Moliere’s cuckolded husbands.
But now Republicans are trying to dictate health care policy, despite having been soundly whipped in the last two national elections. As piously as one of Moliere’s hypocrites, they profess their devotion to covering the uninsured and restraining health care costs in a market-friendly way, though somehow they never got around to pushing a serious proposal when they held power.
Republican leaders have warily agreed to attend the summit, for fear that a no-show would cement their image as the party of “no.” But they are telling reporters it will be a waste of time unless Obama agrees to jettison reform bills that have passed both Houses of Congress and start over from scratch.
“Why would they want to keep pushing something that the public is overwhelmingly against?” GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell asked rhetorically after meeting with Obama this week. “Really, right now, it’s up to the President and Speaker Pelosi to start listening to the American people,” chimed in Eric Cantor, the No. 2 House Republican. “If they don’t, there’s not much to talk about.”
They may be the minority party, but Republicans are effectively claiming a new mandate on health reform – from opinion polls.
True, public opinion has turned against the health reform blueprints that emerged after many months of haggling and horse-trading on Capitol Hill. Obama says Americans were turned off by the “process,” but then, he was the one who decided to offer only the most general reform guidelines and let lawmakers fill in the blanks.
But public opinion is mutable, even fickle. Most Americans were strongly for health reform before they were against it. And it’s highly unlikely they oppose it because they’re intimately familiar with the complex provisions of the House and Senate bills. The way they were put together – basically, by paying off powerful interests and hold-out lawmakers – no doubt was a factor, but polls indicate that worries about the economy and jobs were a bigger one.
Public opinion may yet be turned around by a decisive show of political leadership. That’s why Obama is right to keep pressing for reform, even if in the end he has to settle for less than he wants or the country needs. And the coming summit is shrewdly conceived to give Republicans a chance either to win some substantive points – Obama is already talking about adding tort reform to the mix – or to show their overriding motive is to defeat a Democratic president, not fix health care.
In any case, shifting polls, tea parties and a single U.S. Senate victory in Massachusetts don’t give Republicans the right to speak for the country, much less shape the nation’s health care agenda. That would turn a farce into a tragedy.
A new ABC News/Washington Post poll confirms what we already knew: Republicans may be hammering away at Obama for being soft on terrorism, but the public isn’t listening.
Since the Christmas Day bombing attempt, the percentage of Americans who approve of the White House’s handling of terrorism has actually increased by 3 percentage points, from 53 to 56 percent between November and now (39 percent disapprove). Respondents also gave the president a five-percent edge over Republicans on the question of who is more capable of handling terrorism issues. Public attitudes have shifted, however, on the issue federal courts vs. military tribunals — the number supporting federal courts has slipped a full eight points since the end of last year.
It’s slightly curious that Republicans view terrorism as such a winner, especially because the only effect they’re having is on the electorally dubious issue of which mechanism should be used to try suspects. Even there, the administration has made arguments in favor of federal trials (like the one that sentenced shoe bomber Richard Reid to life) that are only now taking hold.
So why are Republicans continuing to hammer away? I imagine its a bunch of factors. The anti-Obama sentiment has them pushing back on absolutely everything (even if they supported the same policies under Bush), they really believe Obama is a weakling, and they fundamentally misunderstand national security in the 21st century. It’s also an issue that really fires up the conservative base almost as much as taxes, and that will be important to motivate volunteers and donors in an election year.
Take Sarah Palin’s remarks at the Tea Party Convention. She said, “We need a commander-in-chief, not a professor of law.” The truth is that in the fight against terrorism — if we really stand a chance at long-term American security — we need the president to be both. And a clear majority of the public believes he is.
Sometimes significant political news stories involve dogs that don’t bark. That’s just happened in Iowa, where Republicans in the legislature have failed to force a vote on a constitutional amendment to overturn the state Supreme Court’s 2009 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage. Under Iowa’s constitution, amendments have to be enacted by two consecutive legislatures (which meet for two years), and then face ratification by voters. So barring some unforeseen development late in the current session, the earliest an amendment could be sent to voters would be in 2014.
Aside from the fact that this gives same-sex marriage a new lease on life, this non-barking dog also preserves the issue as a source of political controversy in Iowa for two more election cycles. But it also means that it won’t be directly on the ballot during the 2012 presidential contest.
Same-sex marriage has become a heavily partisan issue in Iowa, with virtually all Democratic officeholders supporting the Supreme Court decision and virtually all Republicans opposing it. But it’s also a bit of an intraparty issue for Republicans, since elected officials and candidates deemed insufficiently obsessed with efforts to overturn the court decision (e.g., former Gov. Terry Branstad, the favorite in this year’s GOP gubernatorial primary) have faced angry criticism from the Cultural Right. And the issue could spill over into the 2012 Republican presidential caucuses, where Iowa, as always, will have the first say, and where the Cultural Right (viz. Mike Huckabee’s 2008 victory) has always been very strong.
Perhaps being snowbound for the third day in a row has left me in an ornery mood, but this 37-second snippet of House Minority Leader John Boehner speaking after yesterday’s jobs bill meeting left me fuming.
Asked to comment on the upcoming bipartisan health care summit that President Obama proposed, here’s what Boehner said:
It’s going to be very difficult to have a bipartisan conversation with regard to a 2,700-page health care bill that a Democrat majority in the House and a Democrat majority in the Senate can’t pass. So why are we going to talk about a bill that can’t pass?
First of all, health care legislation did pass. In both chambers. The House passed its bill. The Senate passed its bill. They were in the process of reconciling their bills when the Senate lost its 60th seat to Scott Brown. Now, because the Republican strategy calls for total obstruction of any major legislation that is not 100 percent Republican, a Democratic majority in the Senate can’t pass whatever emerges from a House-Senate conference even though Dems hold 59 out of a 100 seats. (And Rep. Boehner, it’s “the Democratic majority,” not “Democrat.” But you knew that already.)
But there’s another part to the clip that set me off. It comes in the last few seconds when a reporter outside the frame asks Boehner, “Do you think [Obama’s] sincerely listening to your concerns?” “We’ll see,” Boehner solemnly intones.
Perhaps the most infuriating thing about our discourse today is the pretense among the media and the commentariat that these Republicans are open to discussion — that there actually is a meeting point in the middle, or even right of the middle, where the Republicans finally say, “OK, it’s a deal.” There isn’t. The Republican objective isn’t to shape policy with their own ideas — it’s to make sure policy doesn’t get made at all.
One suspects that many in the media know this. But for some reason, they have to engage in the kabuki theater of pretending that Republicans actually do want to participate in governing, when obstructionism in the pursuit of regaining power is clearly their game plan. Just once I’d like a journalist to ask of Republicans, “You have asked Democrats to drop some of their priorities to achieve compromise. Which of your priorities are you willing to drop?” Or, “If the president accepts your pet provisions for health reform, which of his provisions would you accept?” But in the current media narrative, all the onus to achieve bipartisanship is on Obama and the Democrats. Bipartisanship will be measured by how much they give in to a Republican Party that doesn’t have to budge at all.
Over the last couple of weeks, Republicans have been going hard against the administration over its handling of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian man being held for attempting to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day.
On January 26, several high-ranking Senate Republicans sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder asserting that the administration rushed into giving Abdulmutallab constitutional Miranda rights without first coordinating with all necessary national security agencies and ignored him as a possible “intelligence resource.” This week, Newt Gingrich appeared on “The Daily Show” to slam the “mirandizing” of Abdulmutallab (falsely claiming that the same treatment for “shoe bomber” Richard Reid was fine because he was a U.S. citizen — Reid is British), while Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) called for the removal of John Brennan, the White House’s top counterterrorism official.
Last week, Holder wrote a five-page letter to Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, defending the administration’s actions. Holder cited numerous incidents in the past in which terrorists had been apprehended, given constitutional rights, and then successfully cultivated as intelligence assets.
Despite what the Republicans claim, authorities can, in fact, obtain intelligence from terror suspects after Miranda rights are given. Moreover, there is a legal provision that could allow them to question terrorists before granting them their Miranda rights. As Holder stated in his letter, there is a public safety exception to the Miranda rule that allows authorities to question a suspect before reading him his Miranda rights if they believe an immediate danger to public safety exists.
Here’s how it works. Authorities on the scene of a terrorist act or attempt can make the determination whether or not a danger to public safety exists. If authorities determine that such a danger exists, as would be the case in almost any terrorist attack or attempted attack, they could invoke the public safety exception to allow them to question the suspect for some time before reading them their Miranda rights. After authorities are satisfied that they have gathered the information necessary to protect against imminent threats, the prisoner can then be given his rights. The suspect can challenge the use of the public safety exception and the length of questioning in a subsequent court hearing, where it would be up to a judge to decide whether use of the exception was justified. In clear-cut cases like Abdulmutallab’s, the exception would almost certainly always be upheld.
The public safety exception to Miranda was used in Abdulmutallab’s case. But in a way, that’s beside the point: Reports indicate that Abdulmutallab continues to give up valuable intelligence even after his rights were read to him. It’s an important point to remember: the public safety exception need not be a precondition to extracting information from suspected terrorists. Questioning after Miranda can take place with the suspect’s attorney present, which obviously can yield good information, as is reportedly the case with Abdulmutallab.
I tire of the notion, so often trumpeted by conservatives, that protecting constitutional rights and protecting national security are diametrically opposed ideas. Holder’s letter points out that even the Bush administration charged over 300 people with terrorism-related charges under the civilian justice system, with all traditional constitutional rights respected. We’ve used existing civilian law to combat terrorism in the past, and there is no reason to discontinue the practice now. America’s principles have endured for more than two centuries. Compromising them now is unnecessary and it will not make us safer.
The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of the Progressive Policy Institute.
President Obama has now thrown down the gauntlet to Republicans to demonstrate that their alleged willingness to work with him on big national challenges is not just a pose.
On one very high-profile track, Obama has invited congressional Republicans to participate in a public forum on health care reform. After some talk among GOPers of insisting on preconditions like abandonment of the current House and Senate bills, and of any intention of using reconciliation to enact health reform measures in the Senate, it now looks like Republicans will show up. That’s probably in part because a new ABC-Washington Post poll shows Americans blaming the GOP much more than the president for intransigence.
Despite Democratic fears that Obama is going to screw up the highly fragile prospects for final congressional action on health care reform, all he’s publicly said in the way of concessions to the GOP is that he’s willing to take action on medical malpractice insurance reforms if Republicans are willing to get out of opposition to serious action to cover the uninsured. That’s probably not a deal Republicans will seriously consider.
Meanwhile, on another front, the White House is pushing Republicans to make a deal on jobs legislation.
This is a really tricky proposition for Republicans. They’ve spent months attacking any jobs bill as a “second stimulus” bill, which in their vocabulary is a deadly insult. And they’ve certainly boxed themselves into a proposition that any bill significantly increasing budget deficits is a no-go.
But on the other hand, the administration has made it clear that targeted tax cuts for businesses creating new jobs would be the centerpiece of a jobs bill, and it will be difficult for Republicans to reject that in the current environment. At the same time, though, GOPers have consistently argued that across-the-board, not targeted, tax cuts, is what they demand, even though across-the-board cuts benefit big corporations and/or wealthy individuals, and tend to cost a whole lot.
It’s pretty clear the White House is playing chicken with the GOP: offering bipartisan cooperation, but in a way that either exposes Republican self-contradictions and hypocrisy, or makes them finally cooperate on more-or-less the president’s terms. This may represent a revival and intensification by Obama of his controversial “grassroots bipartisanship” strategy, just when most observers in both parties thought it was dead.
The stakes in this game of chicken are very, very big.
The following is a guest column from Major General Donald Edwards, Vermont Army National Guard (Ret.), who served in the military for 37 years.
Just last week, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair declared with certainty that there will be another terrorist attack aimed at the United States within the next six months. With the Obama administration pursuing record numbers of drone attacks and taking out top al-Qaeda leaders, it’s hard to understand how this could be the case. But the paradox becomes clearer if we take a quick trip back through time to examine the track record of one particular individual: Vice President Dick Cheney.
As a former military officer, it is immensely difficult to speak out against our former vice president. While he was in office, I believed that it was inappropriate to criticize Dick Cheney. But now that he is no longer in government, I am compelled to speak my mind about his disastrous national security policies.
In the days and years following September 11, 2001, Vice President Cheney stood out as the chief architect of a calamitous approach to U.S. foreign policy that resulted in a weakened United States and the recruitment of a new generation of terrorists dedicated to anti-American jihad. The Bush-Cheney contribution to terrorist recruitment is clear from the numbers: In 2000, there were 423 international terrorist attacks. The Iraq War heralded a sharp spike in terrorist attacks, which continued with a 607 percent average yearly increase. Eight years later, there were 11,770 international terrorist attacks, as the terrorists birthed by the Bush-Cheney policies grew up.
Unlike Dick Cheney, who glorifies conflict but has never put his own body on the line, I am a retired military officer. I know firsthand the long list of security threats that our country faces. And I know that Cheney’s reckless strategy, out of touch with today’s threats, made that list longer. The first rule of grand strategy – from Sun Tzu to General Petraeus – is to choose your own battlefield. On September 12, 2001, the United States was in a position to frame the security threats of the new century as the world united against violent, radical extremists. Osama bin Laden, on the other hand, was eager to frame his battle as the West versus Islam. The Bush administration walked onto al-Qaeda’s battlefield and began fighting Osama bin Laden’s war.
As even former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld realized, winning the fight against al-Qaeda requires killing more terrorists than we create. Instead, Cheney served as a prime recruiter for our enemies. Al-Qaeda featured Guantanamo Bay in its recruiting videos, citing its evasion of the Geneva Conventions as “evidence” of American’s lack of moral standing and antipathy toward Islam.
Defeating al-Qaeda turns on human intelligence, which requires careful infiltration, relationship-building, cultural research, and triangulation of information. But conservatives based their intelligence-gathering tactics on Hollywood movies: bust a knee cap hard enough, and the truth will pour out like blood. In reality, interrogators rarely know whether they have the right knee cap — and even if they do, actual intelligence agents know that busting it is likely to yield a string of lies, misinformation, and false leads. Instead of generating information and creating leads, Cheney’s strategy led to an Arab generation growing up on images of Abu Ghraib.
Finally, quashing al-Qaeda requires focusing on the countries where the movement had built relationships and infrastructure. For over a decade, al-Qaeda’s senior leadership had lived in and erected training camps along the Afghan-Pakistan border. Meanwhile, Bin Laden’s roots lie in Yemen, and he repeatedly recruited the radically loyal tribes originating in that country for his riskiest missions. Yet the past administration ignored Yemen and starved Afghanistan for troops in order to launch a war in Iraq, where there were no terrorists. Terrorist attacks spiked following the invasion of Iraq, and have continued to grow since.
For a generation of young Arabs now in the prime terrorist age range of 18-25, September 11 was their first political memory. The Bush-Cheney strategy handed Al Qaeda the colors they needed to paint a false picture of “America versus Islam.” It produced hundreds of terrorists who learned that they could be heroes by fighting the West — the West that tortured and indefinitely detained Arab brethren and killed women and children.
And to think we had an opportunity, in the wake of 9/11, to bring about a smarter, more hopeful strategy. America was unified and ready to sacrifice on September 12. If our leaders had called on the best and brightest to learn Arabic or join the CIA, we would now have a flood of fresh intelligence experts. If they had asked us to declare our independence from oil – demanding that auto companies innovate and asking environmentalists to accept a resurgence of nuclear power – we would have stopped funding the bullets that are now going into terrorist guns.
We have not heard the last from Cheney’s terrorists. We cannot waste another day. We must act immediately to build the covert networks we need to fight terrorists. We must prioritize shutting down Guantanamo — a gift that keeps on giving for Al Qaeda — and not make it a political football. And we must understand that, as we did during the fight against the Soviet Union, claiming the higher ground in the debate is strategically important. Cheney sold America’s greatest weapon – our moral authority and our freedoms — on the cheap. Let’s win it back, before more of Cheney’s terrorists strike again.
Update: The original version of this piece did not include the author’s full rank and title. We regret the error.
I’d be remiss if I let Jack Murtha’s (D-PA) passing go unnoticed.
It’s easy to sneer that Murtha represented the worst of Washington business. While it’s true that Murtha had some extraordinarily close ties to the defense industry, focusing on his dealings at the time of his death misses much of his otherwise extraordinary life story. Not only was he the first Vietnam veteran to serve in Congress, but he had the gumption to join the military twice. It’s true — after serving as an enlisted man in Korea, he went to the University of Pittsburgh on the G.I. Bill, and then became an officer before being shipped off to Vietnam.
But to me, the most impressive part of his military career might have been his stint as a drill sergeant in Parris Island, S.C. Parris Island, you see, is the United States Marine Corps’ boot camp, and I’ve heard plenty of horror stories about the place from my father, a former Marine who lived in fear and dread of flunking out of Officer Candidate School and ending up in the South Carolina swamp. Rep. Murtha may have looked like a teddy bear, but I assure you that he’s caused his fair share of 18-year-olds’ bed wetting.
As a congressman, Murtha endorsed the use of force in Iraq in 2002, but then turned on the Bush administration, saying the campaign was “a flawed policy wrapped in an illusion.” He also did the right thing by speaking out against his own USMC’s excessive use of force in the 2005 Haditha killings. It’s probably for these reasons, as much as anything else, that Secretary of Defense Gates called Murtha “a true patriot” upon his death.
Ah yes, and then there were those ties to the defense industry. I couldn’t sum them up better than my friend Brian Wingfield at Forbes.com:
Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., who died Monday at age 77, was an old-school, dealmaking politician and a master of the earmark. Some watchdog groups, like Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, called him “corrupt.” Murtha just said he was good at his job, and obtaining government money for the folks back home came with the territory.Obtain he did. According to the annual “Pig Book,” a listing of pork projects, published annually by Citizens Against Government Waste, Murtha had a hand in 50 earmarks totaling $132 million–last year alone. The year before, he was responsible for 73 earmarks worth $159 million. Years prior are similar. …
Murtha will undoubtedly be remembered most for his skill at acquiring earmarks, for good and for bad. During the past several years, his reputation was tarred by his association with the PMA Group, a lobbying firm that was the fifth most generous donor to Murtha’s campaigns since 1989. According to press reports, Murtha helped direct $137 million on federal contracts to PMA’s clients, who helped fill the Pennsylvania congressman’s campaign coffers. The Office of Congressional Ethics last year dropped its investigation of Murtha.
Murtha once said, “I know better than those damn people in the White House what needs to be done in my district.” It’s a valid point, but one that is symptomatic of the problem in today’s politics.
In a new post on his blog, Harvard economist and PPI contributor Robert Stavins surveys the dismal political landscape for cap-and-trade and finds reason to be optimistic. Acknowledging that cap-and-trade as laid out in the Waxman-Markey bill is dead, Stavins surveys the remaining alternatives.
First he looks at the increasingly likely option of a stand-alone energy bill, which as he accurately describes it lops off the best thing about Waxman-Markey (a cap-and-trade scheme) and preserves the worst (a cocktail of standards and subsidies that will do very little at high costs).
Then he takes a look at EPA regulation as mandated by the Supreme Court. Stavins argues that going that route would be “relatively ineffective and terribly costly for what is accomplished.” Moreover, it promises a political backlash, with the EPA’s enforcement becoming the embodiment of regulatory overkill that can be used by the right to defeat sensible climate policies.
But Stavins does like one alternative lurking out there: a so-called “cap-and-divided” system whose appeal lies in its populist politics. Stavins explains:
This could be done with a simple upstream cap-and-trade system in which all of the needed allowances are sold (auctioned) – not given freely – to fossil-fuel producers and importers, and a very large share – say 75% – of the revenue is rebated directly to American households through monthly checks in a progressive scheme through which all individuals receive identical payments.
Such an approach could appeal to the populist sentiments that are increasingly dominating political discourse and judgments in this mid-term election year. Such a system – which would have direct and visible positive financial consequences (i.e., rebate checks larger than energy price increases) for 80% of American households – might not only not be difficult for politicians to support, but it might actually be difficult for politicians to oppose!
Such a system has already been proposed in Congress, with Sen. Maria Cantwell’s (D-WA) Carbon Limits and Energy for America’s Renewal (CLEAR) Act. Also sponsored by Republican Sen. Susan Collins (ME), the bill has the advantage of being bipartisan as well as populist. Stavins warns that changes still need to be made. For instance, the bill restricts the creation of a broad market for CO2 allowances, making it less efficient and needlessly driving up costs. (David Roberts at Grist has a more detailed — and I must say persuasive — critique of the CLEAR Act here.)
In actuality, a cap-and-dividend system as Stavins lays it out is little different from a cap-and-trade system. The main difference is optics. Waxman-Markey has now been (unfairly) painted as an unwieldy sausage of backroom deals and industry giveaways. By calling for auction revenues to be returned to consumers, a cap-and-dividend certainly might be more palatable in a populist period.
But one thing that supporters of cap-and-dividend forget is that Waxman-Markey did not give away free allowances because the bill’s authors like industry. Rather, they did it because they needed industry to buy in. Can a bill that withholds those incentives from utilities and other affected companies actually make it through the legislative process? I have my doubts.
If you didn’t watch Sarah Palin’s speech at the National Tea Party Convention on Saturday night, you should definitely give it a gander. It was in some respects an unprecedented opportunity for her: a prepared text (obviously her best format), but not one scripted by a campaign (unlike her 2008 Republican Convention address), and guaranteed major media attention. As a private citizen, she was in a position to say pretty much whatever she wanted. Yes, the venue was a bit tricky, because of the widespread criticism of the Tea Party Convention itself, but not remotely as perilous as her resignation speech as governor of Alaska.
She used her own Saturday Night Live opportunity to perform four tasks: general cheerleading for the Tea Party Movement (while making it clear the immediate venue and the controversial for-profit organization that sponsored it was a small piece of that Movement); a quick tour d’horizon of global hot spots to begin addressing one of her most glaring weaknesses, a lack of foreign policy chops; an assortment of crowd-pleasing snarky attacks on the Obama administration, not very original but pretty well-delivered; and an extremely conventional recitation of time-honored conservative themes, punctuated by ritual invocations of the Holy Name of Ronald Reagan.
Anyone who thinks the Tea Party Movement is vastly at odds with the dominant conservative wing of the Republican Party should observe that this speech could have been delivered at a Lincoln Day dinner pretty much anywhere in the country, and would have received the same rapturous audience reaction.
Indeed, the speech is a good illustration of why Palin creates such dramatically different perceptions among different groups of politically active people. To most progressives, every other line in the speech was something of a howler, thanks to the exceptionally unselfconscious way in which she glides over self-contradictions. She genuflected at the altar of constitutional supremacy even as she mocked the president as a law professor. She called for a radical attack on budget deficits while she demanded more tax cuts, often in the same sentence. She repeatedly assaulted the lack of transparency in Democratic policy formulation, but failed to offer any policy prescriptions other than minor (and frankly, stupid) conservative pet rocks like interstate health insurance sales or her own well-rehearsed pet rock of expanding fossil-fuel exploration. She redundantly assailed Wall Street bailouts that she endorsed when they were actually happening. And with every breath, she posed as just another citizen-activist fighting against political elites and media persecution, even though she was a professional politician lifted from obscurity by Washington-based Republican political professionals and then made a national celebrity by constant media attention.
But to conservative ideologues, Palin is simply expounding Revealed Truth, in the uncomplicated manner attributed to the sainted Reagan, and her red meat attacks on Democrats, her allusions to persecution by “elites,” and her pose of independence from the GOP establishment, are all projections of their own feelings, cultivated over many years.
And that’s why having watched Palin’s act in Nashville, I disagree more strongly than ever with those who assert she can’t possibly launch a viable campaign for the presidency in 2012. No, I don’t think she will be elected president, but yes, I think it’s possible she could win the Republican nomination.
To assess this question, you have to appreciate the psychology of movement conservatives at this particular moment of political history. Most of them have believed all along that there is a “hidden majority” of conservatives in America that can only be crystallized by the most rigorous conservative candidates and messages. After 1964, at least, conservatives have attributed every single Republican presidential defeat to a combination of RINO machinations, “moderate” policy prescriptions, and an unwillingness to exploit the opposition’s vulnerability by any means necessary–all mistakes imposed by Republican “elites” who contemptuously betray conservative interest groups and causes. These are the kind of people who started showing up at McCain rallies in the autumn of 2008 to upbraid their candidate for failing to talk about Jeremiah Wright and ACORN, and who empathized viscerally with Palin’s public frustration about the campaign’s unwillingness to “take the gloves off” (a frustration she alluded to in her Nashville speech).
I don’t think most progressives fully appreciate how vindicated conservative activists feel right now. Since the 2008 elections, their party has executed the most remarkable turn away from the political center any losing party has probably ever undertaken. RINOs have been intimidated and silenced; Republican Members of Congress have been whipped into highly disciplined submission; policy positions on issues ranging from health care to climate change to foreign policy that were highly respectable in GOP circles just a few years ago are now “socialist” anathema. And in consolidation of earlier conservative victories within the GOP, legalized abortion is now almost universally considered murder; “moral relativism,” including homosexuality, is regarded as an abomination inflicted on a suffering “real American” population by decadent elites in Sodom and Gomorrah enclaves on the coasts; and any suggestion that Islamic jihadism is less than an Cold War-level existential threat is treated as “hate-America” semi-treason.
And lo and behold, even as Republicans finally take hard-core conservative advice, their electoral prospects are blossoming. A Tea Party ally has won Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat! Even liberal media villains expect a big Republican victory in 2010! With every day, more American are beginning to blame Obama and the Democrats for the economic crisis, and Republican discipline in the Senate ensures he can’t do much about it. And moreover, the most vibrant popular political movement in the country, the Tea Party Movement, is pushing Republicans (and perhaps the country) even further to the right, aiding materially not only in the savaging of Obama, but the ongoing purge of RINOs and “moderate” squishes.
This is the context within which any assessment of Sarah Palin’s immediate political future needs to be conducted. It’s a context in which vast and largely sympathetic media coverage is devoted to an amateurish, financially-questionable convention in Nashville where people like Tom Tancredo and Roy Moore really don’t stand out. It’s a context where Sarah Palin is firmly in the mainstream.
So why wouldn’t this sudden mega-celebrity, who believes her career is the object of divine favor, and who is surrounded constantly with adulation made even more intense by any mockery of her misteps, run for president? Why not take a chance on completely eclipsing Mike Huckabee and utterly destroying Tim Pawlenty in the Right-to-Life dominated caucuses in Iowa, a state where a newDes Moines Register poll shows one-third of all voters supporting the Tea Party Movement?
That’s all a long way off, and a lot could change. 2010 may not after all represent the great gittin’ up morning that conservative expect. At some point, conservative activists may finally get tired of Palin’s maddening lack of specificity, or tumble to the fact that Democratic horror of Palin does not actually represent fear of her general-election appeal. Maybe she really doesn’t want anything other than her current level of fame or her very manageable political work-load. And perhaps her fans will find a new, or old, champion (her Fox colleague Glenn Beck, for example, seems to think Rick Santorum is The Bomb).
But it’s far past time to stop pretending that Palin is just a joke. If her performance in Nashville was taken seriously by the kind of people who tend to dominate the Republican nominating process–and it was–then she’s got a political future that she can only enhance by continuing to pose as the personification of grassroots conservative activism, “you betchas” and all.
A viewing tip for this evening: Filmmaker Aaron Woolf, director of the acclaimed King Corn (2007), turns his camera on America’s dilapidated infrastructure system. Blueprint America: Beyond the Motor City explores how the plight of Detroit, long the emblem of American manufacturing might, now its most damning symbol of urban and infrastructure disrepair, is actually a microcosm of a larger national failure.
Perhaps the most compelling takeaway from the film is its gentle suggestion that the country is missing a vision for infrastructure. Harking back to Albert Gallatin in the 19th century and the Interstate Highway System in the 20th, the movie makes the point that the absence of a unifying and coherent vision for binding the nation together with infrastructure lies at the heart of American decline.
Beyond the Motor City also puts the issue of global competitiveness front and center. Some of the film takes place in Spain, home to one of the world’s most advanced high-speed rail networks and to six of the world’s top 10 public works companies.
The movie airs tonight at 8:00 pm on PBS, though check your local listings. Here’s a preview:
An onside kick to start the second half may have been the biggest play call of the night, but President Obama’s audacious gambit to jump-start the stalled health care reform effort was not far behind. In an interview with Katie Couric, the president announced that he would like to hold a bipartisan health care summit in front of TV cameras at the end of the month.
Perhaps emboldened by his masterful performance at the televised House GOP caucus retreat — by consensus one of the most compelling pieces of political theater this country has seen — the president goes to the well for the second time in a month.
It’s a brilliant but risky move. The risk comes in putting health care at the forefront of the public agenda when the public would rather fixate on one thing: jobs. That impatience translates into Democratic jitteriness, which could lead to a further decline in legislative support to get something passed. Plus, Obama’s talk of bipartisanship could incense some progressive allies, who at this point are so fed up with Republican obstructionism that they see any attempt to reach out across the aisle as a sign of naivete, even weakness.
But I’m betting that Obama’s play will actually pay off. As Steve Benen notes, it’s a “call-the-bluff moment.” For months now, Republicans have complained that they have been shut out of the process. (False — remember the interminable Senate Finance Committee deliberations? And, let’s be clear, to the extent that they not been included, Republicans themselves closed the door from the outside.) Well, here’s their chance to participate, in as high-profile a setting as they can ask for. Obama’s basically saying, “Fine — you like your ideas so much? Let’s sit down and talk about them for all of the American people to see.”
It has the makings of a no-win situation for the GOP because a) they don’t really have a workable and realistic idea to reform health care and b) it’s much easier to lie about the other side when the other side isn’t there to call you on it. And as Obama demonstrated at the GOP caucus, he has the ability to confront GOP mendacity with equal measures of assuredness, intelligence, and good faith.
You can tell the Republicans are worried — and that they already have the outlines of a strategy. House Minority Leader John Boehner (OH) said in response to the president’s announcement, “The best way to start on real, bipartisan reform would be to scrap those bills and focus on the kind of step-by-step improvements that will lower health care costs and expand access.” But starting over is not an option for Obama. As a White House official said, “We are coming with our plan. They can bring their plan.” And that is how they should continue to frame it.
I wouldn’t put it past the GOP to keep humping the scrap-the-bill note and demand that the only way they can agree to a sit-down with the president is if he starts from scratch. Of course, Obama should call their bluff. Could there be a better image of Republican irresponsibility than a bipartisan summit on health care called by the president, with Democrats and the president exchanging ideas, and all those empty chairs where Republicans should be? Then again, considering how utterly uninterested they are in governing, and how the risk of revealing that fact in a nationally televised forum is too high, not showing up for the game might actually start looking like the less painful option.
The following op-ed ran in today’s Cleveland Plain Dealer:
One homeland security item that jumps out in the president’s 2011 budget is $700 million to buy an additional 1,000 full-body scanners for airports. The decision underscores the new politics of security in the wake of the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a U.S.-bound Northwest Airlines flight.
The scanners will help for now, but it’s only a matter of time before a terrorist comes up with a way to get around them. A cheaper and more effective alternative exists — smart screening. And smart screening doesn’t take naked pictures of everyone trying to board a plane.
First, we have to understand the failings of the system. Following the bombing attempt, the intelligence community came under fire for failing to “connect the dots” that could have stopped Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. But that’s not right — there weren’t any dots to connect.
To be sure, “signs” existed that Abdulmutallab could pose a threat to American citizens. But “signs” are very different from “dots.” Signs are vague indicators of potential danger based on sources of unknown credibility, while dots are corroborated pieces of intelligence.
Think Abdulmutallab’s father’s visit to the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria was a “dot”? In hindsight, it sure looks like one, but it was a sign.
That’s because “walk-in” informants will nearly always be evaluated as noncredible sources of intelligence. Why? There are hundreds upon hundreds of walk-ins to American embassies worldwide every day. More than 99 percent are lying, confused or not knowledgeable about the issue at hand. Dedicating limited resources to verify every walk-in would severely hamper ongoing investigations involving other, more credible intelligence operations. Relatives, like the father, can be the worst transgressors. Can’t settle that intra-family dispute? Ratting out your kin to the Americans might make the problem vanish.
Then there was the NSA intercept about the Yemen-based al-Qaida affiliate using a “Nigerian” in an unspecified attack. Dot? Nope. Sign? Yes — but still a very vague one. Without specific details like the alleged attacker’s name, location or itinerary, there’s little an analyst can do aside from lump the information within the general threat environment. This is assuming, of course, that the intercepted callers aren’t speaking in code.
The bottom line? There is not — nor will there ever be — an analyst within the intelligence community who would have read a report of unknown credibility and concluded that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was an urgent priority, especially considering the many other confirmed bad guys under investigation.
It’s time to construct a security apparatus that intelligently accounts for signs of potentially dangerous passengers while balancing risk, passenger inconvenience and privacy concerns — and saves money in the process.
Rather than purchase enough body scanners to take naked pictures of everyone boarding a flight, the TSA and National Counter Terrorism Center should review one of the least discussed but potentially most effective devices it already has on the books: the “selectee” list.
This differs from the 4,000-person “no fly” list, whose members are permanently barred from flying. Those on the selectee list can fly, but only after additional on-site screening. The problem is that the screening generated by the current the selectee list is inefficient — the entry “Elizabeth Kennedy” gets all Elizabeth Kennedys searched every time, no matter their destination or threat environment.
It’s time to let the selectee list think for itself. With technological innovation, the list could be transformed into a “smart” anti-terrorism tool: Allegedly dangerous individuals would be added, but additional passenger screening is triggered only when an algorithm connects potential attackers to a suspect travel itinerary and during periods of elevated, if vague, threat levels. Individuals selected for additional screening must be shared with the airlines.
For example, if an allegedly dangerous Elizabeth Kennedy is set to travel from Dublin to the United States, her profile would trigger additional screening only when the list automatically connects her name, travel itinerary and an ongoing Ireland-based threat. If the threat is based out of, say, France, or once an analyst determines it has lapsed, she would undergo standard security procedures.
America’s security apparatus can’t become airtight against vague and unsubstantiated threats. When compared to the expense, invasive delay, and certain obsolescence of a full-body scanner, the “smart selectee list” is a winner. It costs less, protects privacy concerns, and reduces security wait-times by eliminating needless searches.
Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Administrator Cass Sunstein
While virtually all national attention has been focused on the difficult straits of the higher-visibility items of the Obama administration’s legislative agenda (and even there, according to the Brookings Institution’s Thomas Mann, his record has been vastly underappreciated), on the domestic matters that a president actually has some control over, the federal government’s regulatory apparatus, the administration has quietly undone many years of Republican mischief.
That’s the message of an important piece by John Judis that appeared in The New Republic earlier this week.
Judis places Obama’s accomplishments on the regulatory front into three main categories. First he’s appointed (where Republicans in the Senate have allowed him) officials who actually believe in the missions of the agencies they work for, and are qualified for their jobs.
Given the habits of Republican administrations, that’s no small thing:
Reagan chose Thorne Auchter, the vice president of a construction firm, to head OSHA. Bush appointed a mining company executive to head the Mine Safety and Health Administration and a trucking company executive to head the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. To lead OSHA, he named Edwin G. Foulke Jr., a longtime foe of the agency who had advised companies on how to block union organization. Some of the Republican appointees weren’t business types, but ideologues or hacks who were utterly unqualified for their positions. Anne Gorsuch, whom Reagan nominated to head the EPA, was a rising member of the Colorado House of Representatives, where she was part of a conservative group known as the “House crazies.” Michael Brown, whom Bush appointed to run the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), had previously been commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association.
Obama’s approach, says Judis, couldn’t be more different:
[T]he flow of expertise into the federal bureaucracy over the past year has been reminiscent of what took place at the start of the New Deal. For instance, as a replacement for Foulke at OSHA, Obama chose David Michaels, a professor of occupational and environmental health at George Washington University. In 2008, Michaels published a book, Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health, detailing how businesses had delayed regulations by “manufacturing uncertainty” about scientific findings.
To manage the EPA, Obama appointed a slew of highly experienced state environmental officials. (As Bill Becker of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies explains, state officials are ideally suited for the EPA because they have firsthand experience in how regulations are enforced and how they work.) Obama’s choice to run the agency was Lisa Jackson, a chemical engineer who led the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. Her deputies include the former secretary of the environment in Maryland, as well as the former heads of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection, the Massachusetts Bureau of Resource Protection, and the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality.
Meanwhile, Obama chose as his Food and Drug Administration (FDA) chief Margaret Hamburg, who achieved renown during the 1990s as health commissioner of New York City, where she developed a program for controlling tuberculosis that led to a sharp decline in the disease. Her number two is a former Baltimore health commissioner who, in 2008, was named a public official of the year by Governing magazine.
Second, says Judis, Obama has decisively reversed the Reagan-Bush 43 habit of undermining regulatory agencies by starving them of administrative funds and personnel:
Even in the face of the recession, he proposed and got funding increases for numerous regulatory agencies–some of them dramatic. He asked for $10.5 billion for the EPA for 2010–a 34 percent jump over 2009, and the first time in eight years that the budget had increased. He also requested a 19 percent increase in the FDA’s budget, the largest in its history; a 10 percent increase for OSHA, which will allow it to hire 130 new inspectors; and increases of 5 percent, 7 percent, and 9 percent for the Federal Trade Commission, the SEC, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Finally, Obama has ended the application by Republican administrations of a skewed approach to cost-benefit analysis of proposed regulations that makes short-term costs to businesses an overriding consideration. His most important step was probably appointing progressive law professor Cass Sunstein to head up the White House “super-agency” that reviews federal regulations, which under Bush became a major obstacle to the ability of regulatory agencies to do their work.
Judis warns that continued progress on this front is one of the little-appreciated stakes involved in this November’s elections:
In 1993, Clinton, too, attempted to revive the regulatory agencies by appointing well-qualified personnel and increasing funding. But, after Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, they managed to cut Clinton’s budget proposals and delay or block the implementation of regulations. If Democrats lose Congress this November, the same thing could happen again.
That’s something for progressives “de-energized” by the events of the last year, and inclined to sit on their hands this election cycle, to keep in mind.
Here I sit in my soon-to-be snowbound DC office, preparing for the certain doom that lurks behind the next menacing cloud. I should be standing in line with 542 of my neighbors at Safeway, buying two weeks’ worth of bread, milk, frozen pizzas, and Miller Lites for this 36-hour storm, but instead, I’m too busy brooding on the notion that the Obama administration has to do a better job on human rights.
A few days ago on Iranian television, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad let it slip that after months of heel-dragging, outright refusal, and/or disinterest, he was suddenly intrigued by a long-dead international uranium swap, designed to remove low-enriched uranium from Iran in exchange for higher-enriched uranium needed by Iran’s medical facilities. I’m brushing over the details, but the goal of the exchange was to provide Iran with uranium required for humanitarian purposes while denying Tehran the practice of performing the enrichment — an experience that could be applied to making a nuclear bomb.
Ahmadinejad isn’t really serious about suddenly embracing the international community’s offer, of course. But by appearing interested in continuing dialogue, Iran was attempting to drive a wedge between members of the UN Security Council as talk of new sanctions against the regime are discussed. Guess what? It’s working. China, a veto-wielding member of the Security Council that isn’t too hot on punishing a fellow despotic regime, has reacted positively to Ahmadinejad’s overtures, calling any discussion of sanctions now premature in light of a possible diplomatic solution.
It’s a critical juncture — any diplomat worth his salt knows that the international community shouldn’t back away, but should keep pushing sanctions to force Tehran to prove its seriousness. But China is letting them off the hook. Why? In part, it’s because China has the U.S. back on its heels.
Consider two recent events: The U.S. agreed to sell $6.4 billion of military equipment to Taiwan, and President Obama set a meeting with the Dalai Lama. The Chinese continue to warn that such actions endanger U.S.-China relations and they profess to be deeply offended. The pattern of events is clear — the U.S. does something, China gets offended, and the U.S. is thrown on its heels.
It’s time to level the playing field. Instead of having to explain or apologize for American actions, the Obama adminstration should knock China off the offensive by opening another diplomatic front: human rights. Every time China is offended for something we’ve done, the Obama administration has to hit right back, and hard, about China’s disregard for basic rights and freedoms. Secretary Clinton’s speech on Internet freedom was a good start, but the issue needs to be highlighted every time the Chinese take offense at an American decision. It puts China on the defensive by having to explain their actions, and would free the White House to pressure China on other issues, like Iran — another candidate for the same human rights treatment.
Paul Krugman wants Americans to stop worrying and learn how to love the bomb – the fiscal bomb that is.
Just as Dr. Strangelove in the eponymous film classic assures the president that America can survive thermonuclear war, Krugman professes blithe disregard for the impact of massive government borrowing on U.S. fiscal stability.
The public and a good many economists may beg to differ, but what do they know? Voter concern about deficits has grown salient over the past year, as Washington has spent trillions to prop up the economy. Last March, a slight majority approved of President Obama’s handling of the federal budget deficit; in January, a CNN/Opinion Research poll found that 62 percent disapprove.
Krugman dismisses such concerns as “hysteria” and puts them down to a combination of economic ignorance and Republican propaganda.
On one point, the intensely partisan Krugman is dead right: GOP credibility on fiscal discipline is shot to pieces. The Bush Republicans squandered the budget surplus President Clinton bequeathed them on tax cuts and profligate spending. In 2003, they rammed through Congress a trillion-dollar prescription drug benefit for Medicare recipients but somehow forgot to pay for it. Quite a contrast to President Obama, who took pains to insist that Congress fully offset the costs of his health reform plan – with Republicans all the while hooting inanely about “socialism” from the peanut gallery.
But on the fundamental question – whether progressives should ignore America’s huge and growing fiscal imbalances – Krugman is flat wrong. GOP hypocrisy aside, plenty of progressive economists are sounding the fiscal alarm.
Jeff Garten, for example, believes America’s ballooning national debt will lead to “the slow but inexorable decline of the U.S. dollar,” undermining a key source of U.S. prosperity and influence in the world.
In a compelling Time essay, Jeffrey Sachs argues that the mounting public debt is symptomatic of a breakdown in political responsibility in Washington that stymies the nation’s progress. Republicans won’t abandon their anti-tax fetish, Democrats won’t rein in spending, especially on fast-growing entitlements, and the result is paralysis. “Until both political parties make a serious effort to improve the performance of government while shrinking its swelling deficits, Americans will watch both their quality of life and their country’s standing in the world erode,” he maintains.
Liberals, says Sachs, are wrong to cite deficit spending during the New Deal as proof that Americans shouldn’t worry about government borrowing today. During the height of the Depression, he notes, the federal government was running deficits of around about 5 percent of GDP as opposed to 10 percent today. Back then, he notes, we financed our debts domestically. Today about half of our national debt is held by foreign creditors, especially China and Japan.
Now, Sachs is neither an economic ignoramus nor a Republican stooge. He believes, as Krugman does, that public investment is an imperative to create jobs, rebuild U.S. infrastructure, and restore shared prosperity. But unlike Krugman, he recognizes that Washington’s unwillingness to defuse the public debt bomb is relentlessly squeezing out fiscal space for such investment.
President Obama gets it too. He is trying to strike a balance between massive, short-term spending (although not massive enough for Krugman) to stimulate the economy, and the need to restore fiscal discipline over the long haul by freezing domestic spending and creating a bipartisan commission to tackle entitlement reform.
That’s not easy, and he deserves more help than he is getting from liberals like Krugman who pose a false choice between progressive reform and fiscal responsibility.
President Obama hopes his bipartisan health care summit on Feb. 25 won’t degenerate into “political theater.” Too late: the partisan jockeying over health care reform already has turned into a farce worthy of Moliere.
Sometimes significant political news stories involve dogs that don’t bark. That’s just happened in Iowa, where Republicans in the legislature have 
Perhaps being snowbound for the third day in a row has left me in an ornery mood, but this 
The following is a guest column from Major General Donald Edwards, Vermont Army National Guard (Ret.), who served in the military for 37 years.
I’d be remiss if I let Jack Murtha’s (D-PA) 
In a new post on his blog, Harvard economist and PPI contributor Robert Stavins 
An 
The following op-ed ran in today’s Cleveland Plain Dealer: 
Paul Krugman wants Americans to stop worrying and learn how to love the bomb – the fiscal bomb that is.