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Confessions of a Centrist in Exile

August 1, 2011 – 11:27 am

The Center is my home. But I can’t live there any more.

Re-assembling the elephant. Whenever I describe what I’m trying to do with my writing, two ideas rise to the top: First, whatever the subject, I’m trying to find the simplest explanation that is both accurate and sensible. And second, I’m trying to “re-assemble the elephant”.

That piece of my internal slang comes from The Blind Men and the Elephant: Each blind man touches a part of the elephant, and they come up with wildly incompatible descriptions. The elephant is like a wall, a spear, a snake, a tree, a fan, and a rope. Re-assembling the elephant means taking different people’s experiences seriously, and finding an underlying truth that makes sense of all their accounts.

As a dedicated elephant-assembler, I naturally view myself in the middle, between opposing worldviews. My best work builds bridges: Red Family, Blue Family (which led to magazine articles here and here), explains to liberals how the life experience of people on the religious right leads them to their very different notions of family values. Meeting at Infinity bridges the theist/atheist divide. Supporting My Troop is about the decades-long relationship between a peacenik (me) and a career Marine (my best friend from high school). Spirituality and the Humanist interprets religious language for people of a rational/scientific bent. Change in My Lifetime explains to people younger than me why racism means something different to so many whites older than me.

Defending the Center. In Terrorist Strategy 101, I went a step further. That essay didn’t just explain Bin Laden to Americans, it downgraded the Us-against-the-Terrorists framing in favor of Extremists-against-the-Center, and concluded with an exhortation to defend the Center against both Neocons and Islamists.

Most of all, we Americans need to keep a leash on our own radicals. They are not working in our interests any more than Bin Laden is working in the interests of ordinary Muslims. The extremists on both sides serve each other, not the people they claim to represent. The cycle of attack-and-reprisal strengthens radicals on both sides at the expense of those in the middle who just want to live their lives.

In the face of the next attack, be slow to embrace radical, violent, or angry solutions. The center must hold.

People who started reading the Weekly Sift recently are probably surprised that I ever thought of myself as a defender of the Center. Because although I didn’t even call myself a Democrat until the Clinton impeachment, I’ve radicalized over the last 2-3 years. Now, if I’m explaining why somebody isn’t as crazy as you think, I’m more likely to be talking about Karl Marx than Ayn Rand — or even John Boehner. Most of the bridges I’m building these days go further to the Left, not back towards the Center.

Because I’m not going back. For a long time I didn’t admit that to myself, but now I do. On special occasions I may raise a glass to the Center like a Boston Irishman remembering the Auld Sod, but I’m not going back for a long, long time. Maybe ever.

I’m a native-born Centrist in exile on the Left.

What happened? Two years ago, when I reviewed David Michaels’ Doubt is Their Product, I described it as “a radicalizing book”. Based on many examples over a period of decades, it describes the standard operating procedure of corporations — tobacco companies, asbestos companies, and even microwave popcorn companies — who realize they are killing people.

The procedure does not start with “stop killing people”. That is a last resort, an option to be taken if all else fails. More favored tactics are denial, hiding facts, manipulating research, manipulating public opinion, foot-dragging, lobbying regulators to set unreasonably low standards, and ultimately hiding behind those standards in court to avoid paying damages to victims’ heirs.

This isn’t what bad corporations do. It is standard procedure. There’s a whole industry of specialists to guide CEOs through the profit-from-killing-people process.

[The more recent Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway tells a similar story about corporate propaganda campaigns on political issues: the ozone hole, global warming, and so on.]

Since then, I have had another lens through which to view current events. Not Left vs. Right, or even Center vs. Extremists, but Corporations vs. Humans.

And that brings me back to my first self-identification. Of all my lenses, which provides the simplest view that is both accurate and sensible?

Corporations vs. Humans. More and more I believe that’s the central struggle of our time.

Bridges to nowhere. Between the corporate view and the human view, there is no bridge to be built, no elephant to re-assemble. The corporate worldview involves no subtle mystery: They see us as sheep and want to consume us. And there’s no point explaining any human worldview to corporations, because they don’t care. They can’t care. It’s not in their DNA. (I wrote this up last December in Corporations Are Sociopaths.)

The point of bridge-building is that people can change their minds. Humans can be a defensive, xenophobic species, but we also are driven to understand each other. Once you understand someone else’s experiences, it’s hard not to sympathize. And once you sympathize, it’s natural to look for ways we can live together and all get some of what we want.

Humans can be hard-hearted, self-interested, and downright evil. But history tells remarkable stories of people who change their minds. Slave-owners and slave-traders may become abolitionists. Male chauvinists may fight for their daughters’ rights. Warriors become peacemakers. Tyrants become liberators. It’s rare, but it happens. No human is so far gone that you can be 100% sure they’ll never change.

But corporations respond only to carrots and sticks, not to new sympathies, new evidence, or new moral understanding. When the tobacco companies figured out that smoking killed people, they defended their profits by arguing that it didn’t. Ditto today for fossil-fuel companies and global warming. Gathering evidence to convince them is a waste of time.

Arguing with humans. Someone is bound to point out to me that all actual arguments are between humans. The TV talking heads, newspaper columnists, politicians, think-tank intellectuals — they’re all people, not corporations. Their minds could change.

But more and more, those people are just tongues. If they say the wrong words, new tongues will say the right words. A corporate-funded politician repeats a sound-bite written by a corporate-sponsored pundit based on the research of an academic at a corporate-endowed think tank. None of those people have any real influence on the message. If you changed their minds, you might convince them to quit their jobs. But you would not change the message, because the message does not come from people.

And so we hear nonsense like this: Defending a House appropriations bill that guts environmental protection (banning the Bureau of Land Management from adding to protected wilderness areas, the Fish and Wildlife Service from naming new endangered plant and animal species, etc. — all regardless of any new events or research) Idaho Republican Mike Simpson said on Tuesday: “Many of us think that the overregulation from E.P.A. is at the heart of our stalled economy.”

Not the mortgage companies who loaned money to people with no assets or income, not the investment banks who packaged those loans into deceptively marketed collateralized debt obligations, not Moody’s and S&P who AAA-rated the toxic CDOs, not the unregulated credit-default swap market that built towers of speculative side-bets on each toxic CDO, and not George W. Bush or Alan Greenspan who failed to regulate any of it. The E-frigging-PA.

This idea enters the public debate not because it makes sense to Rep. Simpson or anybody else — that’s irrelevant — but because the EPA hurts the profits of polluting corporations who spend money on lobbying, electioneering, and other propaganda. No matter what evidence you assemble in its favor, the EPA will still hurt those profits, so it will still be blamed for whatever problem people are currently worried about.

The Center is occupied territory. Tuesday, Paul Krugman blogged on The Cult that is Destroying America, and followed it up in Thursday’s column The Centrist Cop-Out.

What’s destroying America, he says, is not crazy right-wingers. (We’ve always had them.) What’s comparatively recent and more dangerous is the media’s “cult of balance”. No matter what positions the two parties take, they will be covered as if they were equally extreme and irresponsible.

What all this means is that there is no penalty for extremism; no way for most voters, who get their information on the fly rather than doing careful study of the issues, to understand what’s really going on.

Standing in the middle, seeing reason (or blame) on both sides — that makes sense when you’re arguing with public-spirited fellow citizens who happen to disagree with you. It doesn’t make sense when the driving force behind an argument is a corporation.

Logic will not convince the Ford dealer than you don’t need a new truck; at some point you just have to leave. Similarly, we can’t persuade corporations not to consume us. We have to take their power away. That won’t be a conversation, it will be a fight.

The Left is not totally free of corporate corruption, but it is the only remaining place to fight from. The Right is completely co-opted. Its frames, sound bites, ideologies, and pseudo-facts are corporately generated and would collapse without the media/academic infrastructure that corporate money buys. And to be in the Center is to collaborate, to pretend that the corporate how-to-serve-man cookbook is a viable plan for the future.

The Center is my homeland, the Jerusalem I will always hope to return to. But for the foreseeable future it is occupied territory, and I refuse to collaborate. So I will stay here, in exile on the Left.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (10)

The Dog Whistle Defined

July 25, 2011 – 11:02 am

I’ve been ignoring Tim Pawlenty’s candidacy because the voters are. But this campaign video is worth watching purely for educational purposes. If you’ve ever wondered what the term dog whistle means, this is it:

According to Wikipedia, a dog whistle is “coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has a different or more specific meaning for a targeted subgroup of the audience.”

The targeted subgroup here are evangelical Christians. The general public will find the intro (where Pawlenty and his wife testify to their faith) dull but unobjectionable. The Pawlenties believe in something; good for them. Most will get bored and stop watching. But this lengthy testimony tells Evangelicals to get out their codebooks to decrypt phrases that will follow, like:

  • people of faith. If you’re a Muslim, Jew, liberal Christian, or even a Catholic, you may think you’re a person of faith. You aren’t. Evangelicals do not use people of faith in this ecumenical way. To them, the phrase is a synonym for evangelical Christian.
  • God. Similarly, you may think that the Pawlenties are talking about your God. They aren’t. If you worship somebody other than the Lord Jesus Christ (as He is envisioned by conservative Protestants), you don’t believe in God.
  • nation under God. Not the ecumenical meaning (that America is united under a larger truth rather than divided among warring sects). Instead, this means that only a government dominated by right-wing Christians is legitimate.
  • the Founders. Not the historical politicians who wrote the Constitution. The Founders are latter-day prophets who were inspired by God to create a Christian nation. They wielded a divine authority similar to Moses or St. Paul.
  • faith in the public square. Rather than every American’s right to profess his or her beliefs in public, this phrase refers to the special right of Christians to commandeer public resources to promote their religion.

So later, when Pawlenty says:

The separation of church and state was intended to protect people of faith from government, not government from people of faith. … I think the Founders of this country made it very clear: We were founded as a nation under God. … So it’s very clear what roadmap they put out for us as it relates to faith in the public square.

codebook-holders hear him agreeing that Evangelicals have inherited the prophetic authority of the Founders. America is their country, the power and resources of the government are theirs to use, and the rest of us should be grateful for their tolerance, such as it is.

Evangelicals want to hear that message from a candidate, but Pawlenty knows he’ll offend the general public if he says it in so many words. Hence the dog whistle: They hear it; you don’t.

Another dog-whistle to the Religious Right is Rick Perry’s 1-minute invitation to “The Response“, a “call to prayer for a nation in crisis”.

This event will sail under most voters’ radar, because it sounds just like the prayer breakfasts and days-of-prayer that politicians are always associating themselves with.

But true believers will hear something different. Perry has modeled the Response after what “God called the Israelites to do in the Book of Joel”. If you haven’t read Joel lately, you probably don’t realize how apocalyptic it is. Invoking Joel implies not just that America is having hard times, but that God is smiting us for our sin.

Alas for the day! for the day of the LORD is at hand, and as a destruction from the Almighty shall it come.

Given that the Response is hosted by the American Family Association, we can guess what that sin is: tolerance of homosexuality.

A little of that apocalyptic flavor comes through in the official Response promo video, which most voters won’t bother to watch.

And then there’s the Response’s page of “endorsers”. (The Endorser link from the home page was dropped after it started getting attention, and then the page disappeared altogether.) Chances are you’ve never heard of them, but they include some of the most dangerous religious nuts in the country.

Here Mike Bickle, for example, warns his flock about “the Harlot Babylon movement”, which is “preparing the nations to receive the Antichrist”.

I believe that one of the main pastors, as a forerunner to the Harlot movement — it’s not the Harlot movement yet — is Oprah.

Oprah is the forerunner to the forerunner to the Antichrist. Who knew?

Another official Response-endorser, C. Peter Wagner, believes that the Japanese Emperor has had sex with a Sun Goddess/Demon, and that this event had real consequences for the Japanese economy.

Since the night that the present emperor slept with the Sun Goddess, the stock market in Japan has gone down. It’s never come up since.

And of course there’s John Hagee, whose endorsement John McCain had to renounce in 2008 because of Hagee’s anti-Catholic bigotry. His picture was also up there on the Endorsers’ page.

Rachel Maddow collects more of this kind of insanity from Perry’s endorsers/allies.

It’s not clear yet how many of these people will appear on stage with Perry at the Response. But their followers know that Perry’s event is their event. You should know it too.

The Response-hosting AFA is not just ideologically conservative, it is partisan for Perry. Tuesday, the AFA’s Bryan Fischer wrote that Michele Bachmann’s migraines “make a Rick Perry candidacy both inevitable and necessary.”

Liberals, interestingly enough, are not the ones piling on this issue. “I thought Hell would freeze over before I defended Michele Bachmann,” Dana Goldstein writes.

The Texas Observer describes Perry’s connections with the New Apostolic Reformation, a movement founded by the same C. Peter Wagner. The movement’s leaders talk about “infiltrating” government because “the church’s vocation is to rule history with God.”

Contrast Pawlenty’s and Perry’s dog whistles with Herman Cain, who just lays it out there for everyone to see, as during this interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace:

WALLACE: You’re saying any community, if they want to [can] ban a mosque?

CAIN: Yes. They have a right to do that. That’s not discriminating based upon religion.

And draws this response from Minnesota’s Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison:

It’s reprehensible that [Cain] just will not relent with this bigotry and that he actually thinks it’s going to enhance his chances to get the Republican nomination. If I were a Republican, I would be outraged.

But by talking in code, Pawlenty and Perry make no headlines and leave their opponents nothing to quote.

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Digging into the Deficit

July 25, 2011 – 10:58 am

At the heart of the debt-ceiling debate is the question: How did the deficit get so high? It’s really pretty simple: We cut taxes, and healthcare got expensive. It all boils down to the next two charts.

The first chart refutes John Boehner’s mantra: “Washington has a spending problem, not a revenue problem.” We’ve got both.

spending and revenue

[Source: economist Jared Bernstein, who says he got it from the Office of Management and Budget. Here at the outset, I should justify the scales. I think there are only two legitimate ways to track government spending through time: as a percentage of GDP or inflation-adjusted per capita. A common conservative trick is to show raw revenues/expenditures tracking ever upward, which just proves that the country is getting bigger.]

Revenue (in blue) peaks just before the Bush tax cuts take effect, and then takes a second plunge when the Great Recession starts in 2007. Spending (red) is in a slow downward trend from the beginning of the graph until 2000. There’s a bump in 2000-2002 that could be blamed on a recession. (Recessions not only increase safety-net spending like unemployment insurance, they lower GDP. So spending-as-a-percentage-of-GDP gets a push from both sides.) But spending stays up (probably due to the Iraq War) during the tepid “Bush Boom” of 2003-2007, before jumping again when the Great Recession hits in 2007.

The second chart focuses entirely on spending.

health care spending

[Source: Christopher Conover at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, who attributes his numbers to the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis. This chart is about total government spending — state and local as well as federal — so the percentages of GDP are higher than in the first graph. It also goes back much further. The big spike is World War II.]

Conover notes:

Between 1966 and 2007, the entire increase in the size of government relative to the economy resulted from growth in tax-financed health spending.

And Matt Yglesias draws the obvious conclusion:

[G]rowth in government spending is overwhelmingly not the consequence of grasping liberals coming up with evermore things for the government to do. Instead, the government has for a long time shouldered responsibility for health care finance, and health care is very expensive.

So a more precise statement of the deficit problem is: We have a revenue problem and a healthcare spending problem.

Now let’s dig deeper into revenue. This chart shows revenue by type of tax:

taxes by type

[Source: The Department of Numbers blog. The vertical scale is percentage of GDP.]

Income tax stays within a range, with a blip up to create the Clinton surplus, and then a dive from the Bush tax cuts. (BTW: Unless you are willfully blind, it should be obvious that tax cuts do not increase revenue.) When this chart ends in 2007 we’re near the bottom of that range.  Payroll taxes (Social Security and Medicare — in yellow) go steadily upwards, while corporate taxes go steadily downwards from nearly 6% of GDP under Eisenhower to less than 2% now.

OK, so at the very least we have a corporate tax revenue problem.

Now let’s look at income tax. Conservatives make a big deal about how much tax the rich  pay — more than ever, by just about any measure.

tax burden of the rich

But that’s mostly because they are raking off a much higher percentage of the total national income. (In 50 years, when one guy is making all the income, he’ll necessarily pay all the income tax. Wouldn’t you hate to be him?)

In fact, the effective income tax rate (i.e., what they actually pay) has dropped considerably for the very rich, even as their income has shot up.

income and tax rates of the rich[Source: Ezra Klein, who attributes it to the economists listed at the bottom of the graphic.]

So: We have a problem getting revenue from corporations and the rich, and a healthcare spending problem.

Finally, let’s delve into that healthcare problem. Part of it isn’t a problem at all. As a society, we’re spending more on healthcare partly because the healthcare industry has better products than it used to.

A century ago, hospitals couldn’t do much more for you than a dedicated family member could do at home. Today, they can. People who a generation ago would have died in their 50s from heart attacks and cancer are surviving into their 80s and dying in nursing homes. It costs more, but personally, surviving into my 80s is precisely what I want to spend my money on. The option to buy a longer life is an opportunity, not a problem.

But there is a related problem: Compared to other countries, we’re not getting what we pay for.

Americans spend more, live less

[Source: University of California Atlas of Global Inequality. This data is from 2000, but things have only gotten worse since then, as the next chart will show.]

For all our healthcare spending, we live about as long as Cubans — four years less than the Japanese, and even two years less than our Canadian neighbors. (You might picture the Japanese living some spartan lifestyle we’d find unacceptable. But Canadians?)

And while all nations are spending more on healthcare — because everybody wants a longer life — the U.S. is pulling away.

rising American costs

[Source: Ezra Klein. The vertical scale is inflation-adjusted dollars per capita.]

And that’s the worrisome issue: If we’re on a higher exponential-growth path than everyone else, eventually healthcare spending will swamp the rest of our economy.

Total cost vs. government cost. Maybe you noticed I pulled a switch: The last two charts have been about total healthcare spending, not just government healthcare spending. Only about half of our healthcare spending goes through the government (Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans Administration, etc.).

If you think that government healthcare spending is the whole problem, then you do what Paul Ryan proposed: Replace Medicare and Medicaid with capped private health-insurance subsidies. The cap can be wherever the budget needs it to be, so the government-spending problem is solved.

But if total healthcare costs stay on their exponential path, they swamp the economy anyway. Eventually the government subsidies are tiny compared to the real cost of healthcare, and middle-class people start dying of curable diseases because they can’t afford treatment.

To an extent, it already happens. The U.S. performs badly in what public-health professionals call amenable mortality — i.e., preventable deaths.

preventable deaths by country

Now, I can’t see any democracy allowing middle-class people to die for lack of care, so either we’ll scrap democracy or government will end up paying for care no matter what Ryan’s projections say. And that’s why I focus on the total cost of healthcare.

Single-payer. Paul Ryan believes dialing back government funding will slow the rising costs, but his justification is a combination of wishful thinking and just-so stories about the market. The countries that get better results do the exact opposite: Virtually all their healthcare spending goes through the government.

All the evidence of actual countries tells us this: Government healthcare is more efficient than private healthcare.

In the private part of our healthcare system, the easiest way to make money is to shift costs to somebody else  — insure the people who don’t get sick — not lower the cost of care. (Ryan’s plan is similar — it shifts costs from the government to individuals.) Only single-payer systems, where there is nobody to shift costs to, deal with the real problem.

So the long-term answer to the healthcare spending problem is paradoxical: Extend Medicare to everybody.

In the short run, it will essentially double government healthcare spending. (Done right, this would be invisible to both the federal deficit and your personal budget. What you pay now in health-insurance premiums you would instead pay as taxes.) But in the long run, a single-payer system would get our costs (and outcomes) in line with countries that do healthcare much better than we do.

Summing up. So that’s my answer to the long-term deficit: End the Bush tax cuts at least for the wealthy and maybe for everybody (because the economy did fine with the Clinton tax rates). Close loopholes until corporate taxes get back to Eisenhower-era levels. And move to a single-payer system to get healthcare costs under control.

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Welcome to the New WeeklySift.com

July 18, 2011 – 11:53 am

This week I moved the Weekly Sift to its new home at weeklysift.com. I’ve been meaning to do that for a while, and I’ve simultaneously included changes that I hope make the blog easier to find, more accessible to new readers and commenters, and easier to navigate.

People who get the Weekly Sift directly from me by email shouldn’t notice any difference. During a transition period, I’ll post weekly summaries at the old URL. If you’re reading via Google Reader or some other RSS subscription, this would be a good time to change the subscription to weeklysift.com.

If you read the Sift online, the biggest change you’ll notice is that each week’s Sift is now divided into 4-6 separate posts that come out more-or-less simultaneously. The last post of each week is the Weekly Summary, which looks like the header of the old-style Sifts, and should sit on top of the blog all week. The new structure is intended to make it easier for people to find, link to, forward, or comment on the specific article they want.

Undoubtedly there will be glitches as I deal with new tools and settings. (The blog also moved from Blogspot software to WordPress software, which should be invisible to the reader.) If anything doesn’t work, either leave a comment on the blog or write to me at weeklysift at gmail.com.

Some things are definitely not going to change: the purpose, quantity, and integrity of the content. The Sift still comes out on Mondays and still has a target total length of 3000 words (not counting the summaries). I haven’t changed my target audience, my writing style, or my point of view.

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Meet ALEC

July 18, 2011 – 11:28 am

The Republican landslide of 2010 swept into office governors like Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Rick Scott of Florida, Rick Snyder of Michigan, Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania, and John Kasich of Ohio. All replaced Democrats except for Scott, who replaced moderate Republican Charlie Crist.

All five of these governors ran fairly vague campaigns about cutting waste and shrinking government, but after the election each hit the ground running with a detailed and radically conservative agenda — coincidentally, the same agenda.

Some of that agenda was predictable from campaign rhetoric: budget cuts in education and medical care, tax cuts for corporations, and loosening regulations that protect consumers and workers from corporations. Voters may not have guessed the specific cuts from the ads they saw, but anybody who has been paying attention knows that when Republicans say “waste” they mean schools and medical care. And when they say “growth” or “jobs” they mean give-aways to corporations.

Strangely, though, much of the one-size-fits-every-state agenda wasn’t even hinted in the campaigns: breaking the state employee unions, for example. It is predictable that governors who want to cut education will drive a hard bargain with teachers. But in November nobody was talking about taking away collective bargaining rights or de-certifying unions. And then suddenly in February they all were.

Just as suddenly, the new governors were talking about making it harder to vote. And harder to sue. And easier to carry concealed weapons. Similar plans to start or expand private-school voucher programs appeared.

Hardly anybody ran on those issues. But on Day 1, Republicans were ready to move on them.

Even the predictable parts of the unified agenda were being pursued in suspiciously similar ways. All over the country, conservative governors decided to go big, hit hard, and push their opposition to the wall. At one point Illinois was hosting refugee legislators from both Wisconsin and Indiana.

This level of similarity would make sense if there had been some public Contract With America II that they had all signed. But there wasn’t.

Clearly, governors (or leaders of Republican legislatures in states with Democratic governors) were not calling in their local advisors and having independent conversations that all happened to reach the same conclusions.

The hidden common thread was the American Legislative Executive Council (ALEC). ALEC is an organization where corporate representatives and conservative politicians meet together in secret to draft legislation that the politicians can then take back to their home states. American Radioworks claimed in 2002 that about 1/3 of state legislators are ALEC members.

ALEC has existed since conservative activist Paul Weyrich founded it in 1979, and it has been written about for years. The American Radioworks piece described how the private prison industry works through ALEC to build their market by increasing prison sentences.

But [Corrections Corporation of America] does more than chat up lawmakers at ALEC meetings. On top of its membership dues and contributions to help pay the bills for ALEC meetings, the prison company pays two thousand dollars a year for a seat on ALEC’s Criminal Justice Task Force. That panel writes the group’s “model” bills on crime and punishment. Until recently, a CCA official even co-chaired the task force.

… Among ALEC’s model bills: mandatory minimum sentences; Three Strikes laws, giving repeat offenders 25 years to life in prison; and “truth-in-sentencing,” which requires inmates to serve most or all of their time without a chance for parole. ALEC didn’t invent any of these ideas but has played a pivotal role in making them law in the states, says [Edwin] Bender of the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

The piece ended with a quote from William Dickey, the former head of Wisconsin’s prison system:

I’ve always understood political people as having differences of opinion — tough on crime, soft on crime. But I’ve usually thought that whatever views were being held in that debate, they were sincerely arrived at. And to discover that there’s a group pushing criminal justice policy not because it’s in the public interest, but because it’s a way to make money, is disappointing to me.

But that’s just one industry. Recently we got our first look at the full scope of ALEC’s activities when the Center for Media and Democracy got its hands on 800 pieces of model legislation ALEC has written. You can find them on the web site ALEC Exposed.

The major pieces of the Walker/Scott/Snyder/Corbett/Kasich agenda are all there. (For example, the model “Public Employee Freedom Act” contains the union-busting provisions, and the “Voter ID Act” the vote-suppression provisions — including the ones that make no sense, like saying that an expired driver’s license does not establish your identity.)

There is, I rush to point out, nothing illegal about this. Any one can write model legislation and try to get a legislator to propose it. Liberal groups do it too. What is sinister, though, is the secrecy. Corporations have managed to remove their fingerprints from the laws they have written.

Whether an environmental group is pushing higher pollution standards or an polluting industry seeks lower ones, the public has a right to know where its laws are coming from, and what interests are being served.

You get an idea of the founding philosophy of ALEC from this 1980 clip of founder Paul Weyrich: “I don’t want everybody to vote. … Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

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Is Obama on our side?

July 11, 2011 – 1:31 pm

When Barack Obama’s 2008 landslide carried such unlikely states as North Carolina and Indiana, and swept in large majorities in Congress, many progressives imagined a transformational presidency like FDR’s. Katrina Vanden Heuval wrote:

[F]uture historians may well view Barack Obama’s victory as the end of the age of Reagan and the beginning of something substantially new.

So far, it hasn’t worked out that way.

Not that President Obama hasn’t had accomplishments. The Bush economic crisis did not become a second Great Depression, as it threatened to do. With all its compromises, the Affordable Care Act is still a historic step in the right direction. Obama’s two appointments have slowed down the rightward drift of the Supreme Court. In thousands of ways that don’t make headlines, regulatory agencies have gone back to protecting the American people. On gay rights, President Obama has not led, but at least he has not stood in the way. The Iraq War has continued to wind down, our relations with other nations in general are less belligerent, and we finally nailed Osama Bin Laden.

That’s not nothing. But by now the list of liberal disappointments has gotten long.

What haunts the Obama administration is what still haunts the country: the stunning lack of accountability for the greed and misdeeds that brought America to its gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression. There has been no legal, moral, or financial reckoning for the most powerful wrongdoers. Nor have there been meaningful reforms that might prevent a repeat catastrophe.

  • No public option. Given the public option’s popularity, a great speech might have made a difference to wavering Democrats in the Senate, but Obama didn’t give one.
  • Ratifying Bush’s power grabs. On Inauguration Day, the new president had a chance to define the Bush administration as an aberration and turn the corner. Obama could even have enforced the law and prosecuted Bush officials for ordering torture. Instead, he let his initial effort to close Guantanamo fail, and has continued to practice and has systematically defended in court many of the Bush administration abuses of power.
  • Afghanistan. To be fair, Candidate Obama portrayed Afghanistan as the good war that got ignored because we fought the bad war in Iraq. So Afghan escalation shouldn’t have been a surprise. But we still have no coherent goal or exit strategy.
  • Libya. Again: goal? exit strategy? By ignoring the War Powers Act — in defiance of the advice of his own top lawyers — he’s expanded executive power beyond even Bush.
  • Global warming. In a recent article in Rolling Stone, Al Gore credits Obama for at least starting to take action, but then says:

President Obama has thus far failed to use the bully pulpit to make the case for bold action on climate change. After successfully passing his green stimulus package, he did nothing to defend it when Congress decimated its funding. After the House passed cap and trade, he did little to make passage in the Senate a priority. Senate advocates — including one Republican — felt abandoned when the president made concessions to oil and coal companies without asking for anything in return. He has also called for a massive expansion of oil drilling in the United States, apparently in an effort to defuse criticism from those who argue speciously that “drill, baby, drill” is the answer to our growing dependence on foreign oil.

  • Taxes. When Republicans wouldn’t extend the Bush tax cuts just for the middle class, Obama had a perfect place to make a popular stand. Imagine: “I wanted to keep your taxes low, but the Republicans blocked me to protect the millionaires.” Instead he agreed to extend all the Bush cuts — and didn’t even get a debt-ceiling increase written into the deal.

And now, he seems ready to make significant concessions on Social Security and Medicare in those debt-ceiling negotiations he might have avoided. Like the public option only moreso, Social Security and Medicare are popular. There’s a significant rabble waiting to be roused, if a silver-tongued president were so inclined. So far, nothing.

Explanations. In the beginning, progressives explained these disappointments with some combination of 1) He’s doing the best he can given political reality and the power of the special interests and 2) He’s a bad negotiator who compromises when he doesn’t have to. Lately, though, a third explanation is getting louder and louder: 3) Maybe he’s not really on our side.

Bringing up Explanation 3 — even to deny it — is the surest way to start a blood feud on a liberal web site like Daily Kos. Emotions run high. Some liberals feel strongly that Obama has betrayed them, while others are just as strongly attached to him.

The problem is: All three explanations work, and each explains things the others can’t. For example, I think Obama was genuinely surprised by the popular resistance Republicans raised to closing Guantanamo. (Scary, scary terrorists were going to be housed in flimsy jails down the street from you.) Otherwise, why make a grand promise only to back off of it? And I believe he did (foolishly) expect Republicans to negotiate in good faith on vital issues like the debt ceiling.

True intentions. In spite of all the socialist and Marxist and big spender rhetoric from the Right, what if Obama has always been a centrist? Left and Right alike imagined that the centrist positions he campaigned on were masking a deeper progressive agenda, but what if they weren’t?

From the beginning, the role Obama has written for himself has been to let liberals and conservatives fight it out in Congress, and then to come in at the end with a compromise. (The problem has been that liberals are largely shut out of the corporate media — when was the last time you saw Dennis Kucinich on TV? — so the public debate has been between the most moderate Democrats and the most conservative Republicans, with Obama coming in at the end to make a center-right compromise rather than a left-right compromise.)

I think the way he has handled entitlement reform tells us a lot. The Simpson-Bowles Commission Obama appointed to study long-term deficit issues was stacked from the beginning. (Digby kept calling it “the Catfood Commission”.) When the commission was appointed, Unsilent Generation posted:

Despite protestations to the contrary, the commission exists primarily to make cuts to Social Security and Medicare. The commission’s slant is evident from the choice of its two co-chairs: former Wyoming Republican senator Alan Simpson, a long-time foe of entitlements, and Erskine Bowles, the middle-right former Clinton chief of staff.

It should have surprised no one when Simpson called Social Security “a milk cow with 310 million tits“. And it should have surprised no one that the Commission recommended Social Security and Medicare cuts.

Presidents do this kind of spadework to cover unpopular actions they want to take later. It’s where you can see presidential intention in its purest form. Obama has believed all along that Social Security and Medicare need to be cut. So while he’s not likely to get on board with the Ryan privatization plan, he’s also not likely to make a bold stand against cuts that he’s been maneuvering towards from the beginning.

Framing is another place you can see presidential intention at work. The other side can force you to accept deals you don’t like, but they can’t make you repeat their deceptive rhetoric. Recently, though, Obama has said things like:

Government has to start living within its means, just like families do.  We have to cut the spending we can’t afford so we can put the economy on sounder footing, and give our businesses the confidence they need to grow and create jobs

Paul Krugman comments:

That’s three of the right’s favorite economic fallacies in just two sentences. No, the government shouldn’t budget the way families do; on the contrary, trying to balance the budget in times of economic distress is a recipe for deepening the slump. Spending cuts right now wouldn’t “put the economy on sounder footing.” They would reduce growth and raise unemployment. And last but not least, businesses aren’t holding back because they lack confidence in government policies; they’re holding back because they don’t have enough customers — a problem that would be made worse, not better, by short-term spending cuts.

My conclusion. Consider the possibility that Obama is a Clintonian centrist whose liberal actions have been forced on him by events. I don’t think he’s a bad guy or a traitor to the cause. I just don’t think he’s ever been a progressive.

Deep down, I think Obama wants to be the president who steers the center course — fixing the long-term growth in entitlement spending without gutting the safety net. The ACA is part of that vision, because health-care inflation is the main long-term fiscal threat, and the private sector is never going to stop it. The near-depression forced a half-hearted stimulus on him, but expanding government services is not his fundamental inclination.

He never said it was.

Conservative columnist Ross Douhat on the deficit negotiations: “The not-so-secret secret is that the White House has given ground on purpose.”

Rick Perlstein was all over this more than a year ago.

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The Hard Line

July 11, 2011 – 1:28 pm

Two articles this week explained why Republicans are (depending on your point of view) either (1) able to hold together on hardline positions, or (2) unable to compromise. Turns out, it’s not just the party leadership or elected officials that are different, it’s the rank-and-file:

repchoice_pid_q26.png

NYT blogger Nate Silver looks more deeply at the polling data and concludes that while polarization is hitting both parties, it has a more profound effect on the Republicans. Republican is becoming identical with conservative, while the Democrats remain a coalition of diverse philosophies. So Democrats worry about alienating their moderates, while Republicans focus on energizing their base.

In The three fundamentalisms of the American right, Salon’s Michael Lind notes a long-term philosophical shift in conservatism. William F. Buckley modeled the mid-20th-century conservative movement after 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke, who argued that people underestimate the values embedded in traditional practices, so change should be measured and thoughtful rather than sweeping and giddy.

But increasingly, 21st-century conservatism is built around fundamentalist reaction rather than thoughtful prudence. Christian fundamentalism (the Bible), constitutional fundamentalism (the Constitution and carefully selected quotes from the Founders), and market fundamentalism (Atlas Shrugged) each have a holy scripture that teaches unquestionable Truth. And that creates a problem for democracy.

Back when conservatism was orthodox and traditional, rather than fundamentalist and counter-revolutionary, conservatives could engage in friendly debates with liberals, and minds on both sides could now and then be changed. But if your sect alone understands the True Religion and the True Constitution and the Laws of the Market, then there is no point in debate. All those who disagree with you are heretics, to be defeated, whether or not they are converted.

A Burke-Buckley conservative respects the status quo, but to a fundamentalist the status quo already represents a fall from a lost Golden Age — often an imaginary one.

It’s tempting to respond to all three types of right-wing fundamentalist with scorn, especially when they make up facts about their respective Golden Ages. But in the long run scorn may be counterproductive. Fundamentalism is a reaction to a loss of identity and community. (No one who feels at home here and now pledges loyalty to a lost era or an ancient text.) Ultimately, fundamentalists need to be healed, not beaten down further. The candidate-Obama message of Hope and Yes We Can seems exactly right to me, if we can see it through.

This move conflicts with my healing strategy, but I’ll be interested to see if it works tactically: The American Values Network points out that two of the right-wing fundamentalisms contradict each other. Jesus and Ayn Rand are not at all on the same page.

Less-extreme Republicans have finally started protesting against the hard line: David Brooks, David Frum, Kathleen Parker, Robert Samuelson.

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What “spending” really means

July 11, 2011 – 1:25 pm

Cutting government spending always sounds good until you start looking at specifics. In Wilmington, NC, “cutting spending” specifically means not replacing an ancient fire engine that tends to die when the firefighters need water pressure. In California, Arizona, and Nevada it means a shorter school year. And in parts of Idaho and New Mexico it means a four-day school week — not for any academic reason, but because (as Rachel Maddow summed up) “In America now, we can’t afford to keep all our schools open five days a week.”

This clip from Rachel’s show on Wednesday is worth watching in its entirety, because it pulls together so much.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

For example: Alto, Texas has scrapped its police force — not just furloughed a few officers, but padlocked the door and sent the whole force home for a minimum of six months. Not because they’re not needed — even when it had police, Alto’s crime rate was higher than the Texas average — but because Alto is out of money.

On the federal level, the House has eliminated funding to test American vegetables for the E-coli strain that killed 50 people in Europe. Georgia Republican Rep. Jack Kingston isn’t worried: “The food supply in America is very safe because the private sector self-polices.” But whether we’re talking food or crime, self-policing only works up to a point. Somehow, even before the testing cutbacks, 3000 Americans died each year from tainted food.

State after state is laying off teachers — not because they’ve found some better way to educate children, but because they can’t afford to pay them. We’re slashing transportation funding too, because high-speed trains belong in China, not America.

But don’t tax the rich. We are eliminating all this stuff rather than raise taxes on anybody, even the wealthiest Americans. Republicans claim they are taking this stand because, as John Boehner says, “The American people don’t want us to raise taxes.”

Except that they do. Politifact did the research:

we found a number of polls that indicate people do want the government to raise taxes. That was most clearly the case when it comes to raising taxes on the wealthy and on corporations.

Like these polls. Rachel quotes a poll saying that 81% of Americans would accept higher taxes on millionaires to cut the deficit. 68% could support eliminating the Bush tax cuts for people earning more than $250,000 a year.

The American people also want to protect Social Security, Medicare, and even Medicaid. By a 60-32 margin, they said that maintaining Social Security and Medicare benefits was more important than cutting the deficit. By 61-31 they said that Medicare recipients already pay enough of their medical costs. 58% think “Low income people should not have their Medicaid benefits taken away.”

And don’t tax corporations. A significant majority of Americans (56% on Question 36) say that corporations are not paying their fair share of taxes. And the most stunning poll result is this (Question 40): 61% say that corporations use tax breaks to pay higher dividends and bonuses; only 4% say they use the money to create jobs.

That jaundiced public perception is accurate. Rachel lists a number of large American corporations (Johnson & Johnson, General Electric, etc.) who pay significantly less than the official 35% corporate tax rate (GE: 7.4%) and have been cutting jobs rather than creating them. Moreover, American corporate taxes are low, not high: Compared to 25 other developed countries, only in Iceland are corporate taxes a smaller percentage of GDP than in the US.

Rich people, poor country. Let me sum up: House Majority Leader Eric Cantor says “the people that put us here” want to change “the way the system works so that we’re no longer spending money that we don’t have.” The question that goes unasked is: Why don’t we have that money?

Is the United States a poor country now? Can we simply not afford to have police and full-time schools and safe food? Can we not afford to take care of Americans who are sick or old? To fix our potholes and keep our bridges from falling down?

Other countries manage to pay for such things. They aren’t richer than the United States. The difference is that in America, billionaires and corporations have become so powerful that they can dictate to the government how much tax they are willing to pay. And those dictates are put forward by the corporate media as “the will of the people”, even if (when you ask them) the people say the exact opposite. So if the billionaires and corporations are only willing to pay for four days of school a week, that’s what we’ll get.

At least as long as Eric Cantor believes that billionaires and corporate CEOs are the people that put him where he is.

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Justified By Other Factors

May 2, 2011 – 2:03 pm

Due to prevailing norms of equality, most Whites attempt to avoid appearing biased in their evaluations of Blacks. … As a consequence, White prejudice is more likely to be expressed in discriminatory responses when these actions can be justified by other factors.

— quoted in The USA Today
from “Evaluations of presidential performance: Race, prejudice, and perceptions of Americanism”
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

In this week’s Sift:

  • Born in the USA. With the release of his long-form birth certificate, President Obama proved once again something that no one had any reason to doubt in the first place. The interesting question is: Why did he have to?
  • The Transformation of John Yoo. At precisely the moment when the White House passed from Bush to Obama, John Yoo discovered that the Constitution limits presidential power.
  • Short Notes. Bin Laden. Guantanamo. Atlas Shrugged tanks. Keith is coming back. The facts defeat a climate-denier. The WalMart business model creates a bad climate for WalMart. And more.
  • This Week’s Challenge. Tell me what I should be reading.
Born in the USA

Every story about President Obama releasing his birth certificate should start with this: There was never any reason to be suspicious about Barack Obama’s birth in the first place.

Now that it is out, the President’s long-form birth certificate agrees in every particular with the shorter certificate that he put on the internet during the campaign, and with every claim Obama has made about his birth. There was never any reason to suspect it wouldn’t.

Why not sooner? If you don’t start there, then you quickly fall into the next trap: Why didn’t Obama release his long-form birth certificate a long time ago? As the DumpTheDemocrats blog put it:

Perhaps the long delay in providing the longform certificate was to propagate and keep these folks in the foreground by allowing for just enough honest doubt to keep the thing going.

See? It’s his fault. Obama wanted Republicans to spread vicious rumors and make stupid accusations against him so that they would look vicious and stupid. (Karl Rove opined: “The president himself has hoped Republicans would continue to talk about it, thereby damaging their own credibility.”) He made them do it by only releasing one document to refute their baseless claims and holding back another one. See?

But everything looks different after you recognize that there was no “honest doubt”, because there was no honest question to begin with.

By law and tradition, candidates for public office are expected provide certain information. Beyond that, and absent any legitimately incriminating evidence, their privacy needs to be protected from fishing expeditions. Consider this analogy: If your prints are on the murder weapon, it looks suspicious if you have no alibi. But if you have no connection to the case at all, no one should even ask you.

The McCain comparison. An interesting borderline example was that of John McCain’s medical records. Typically, a healthy-looking candidate is presumed to be healthy; a simple thumbs-up from a doctor is sufficient. But McCain would have been older than any first-term president ever. Plus, he was a cancer survivor, and being tortured in the Hanoi Hilton probably didn’t do his longevity any good either. Nastier rumors raised questions about psychological scars.

In response, McCain did not post his complete medical file on the internet. Instead, he released a 5-page report from his doctors (not discussing psychological issues), and allowed “select members of the media” to examine the larger file for three hours, without making any copies.

Subsequently, McCain’s medical records did not become an issue in the fall campaign, and he didn’t reveal any more detail. So we still don’t know whether, say, McCain was ever treated for the clap when he was a young Navy pilot. We shouldn’t know. It’s not our business.

But given that there was much less reason (zero reason, to be exact) to wonder about the circumstances of Obama’s birth, why was he held to a higher standard?

What’s he hiding? The if-you-have-nothing-to-hide argument says that an innocent public figure would release everything anyone might ask for. The problem is that everyone has something to hide. That’s what privacy means.

Even if you have never broken the law, committed adultery, or burned ants with a magnifying glass, there is bound to be something you hope never enters the public record. For example, it is neither illegal nor shameful for married people to have sex with each other. But most of us don’t want a complete record of where, when, and how to appear in the newspaper.

If you are obliged to deny false reports, then your non-denial confirms true reports. So I am not going to publish a list of the drugs I have not taken, the diseases I have not had, or the people I have not slept with. You shouldn’t either, and neither should Barack Obama.

But if Obama has to publish his birth certificate in response to baseless speculation, then why not his student records? (Trump is already asking.) Don’t we have a right to know whether he was ever caught smoking in the boy’s room or making out behind the bleachers? How often did he skip class? And if he balks at releasing those files, doesn’t that prove they contain something embarrassing? What’s he hiding?

The comparable case here is George W. Bush and cocaine. He never denied the rumors, and yet his non-denial never festered the way the birth-certificate issue has. Why not?

Why Obama? Politico offers a benign explanation for the unprecedented aspects of the birther issue: We’re in “a new era of innuendo” in which there is “no referee — and no common understandings between fair and unfair, between relevant and trivial, or even between facts and fantasy.”

Lurid conspiracy theories have followed presidents for as long as the office has existed. Yet even Obama’s most recent predecessors benefited from a widespread consensus that some types of personal allegations had no place in public debate unless or until they received some imprimatur of legitimacy — from an official investigation, for instance, or from a detailed report by a major news organization.

… It’s hard to imagine Bill Clinton coming out to the White House briefing room to present evidence showing why people who thought he helped plot the murder of aide Vincent Foster— never mind official rulings of suicide — were wrong. George W. Bush, likewise, was never tempted to take to the Rose Garden to deny allegations from voices on the liberal fringe who believed that he knew about the Sept. 11 attacks ahead of time and chose to let them happen.

Politico blames “the decline of traditional media and the rise of viral emails and partisan Web and cable TV platforms” — and not anything personal about Obama. He’s just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

If that’s true, then the next white Republican president will suffer even worse. Anonymous Democrats will make up some baseless story about, say, President Romney. (Maybe he has a bigamous second family somewhere. Mormons do that, right?) They’ll flog it in viral emails, elected Democrats will wink-and-nod about Romney having only one family “as far as I know” while wondering “why he doesn’t resolve all this” (with, say, a paternity test). When about a quarter of the population starts to credit the story, Romney will finally give an independent laboratory a lock of his hair.

Does anybody really expect that? I think it’s absurd.

In 1999, some predicted that President Clinton’s troubles represented a new era of impeachment. The next Republican president would really have to be on his toes, because Democrats would be out for blood.

Instead, Clinton’s ordeal protected Bush. (“We don’t want to go through all that again, do we?”) Bush has confessed to ordering warrantless wiretaps and the torture of prisoners, either of which should have been impeachable (and are indictable now). But nothing happened.

No new era.

Double standards. As I see it, two things are going on: First, conservatives have — and liberals lack — both the will and the media machinery to create scandals out of nothing. (The closest conservative-victim parallel I can find is the Sarah-isn’t-Trig’s-mom theory, which even people as liberal as I am think is weird. No wink. No nod. It’s just weird.)

Second, the submerged racism of the American public makes it easy to raise baseless suspicions about blacks. When the two come together, you get ACORN, the New Black Panther Party, Van Jones, the attempted smear of Shirley Sherrod, and birtherism.

Republicans bristle at the charge that race plays any role in their thinking, but how else can the pattern be explained? An NYT editorial stated the obvious:

It is inconceivable that this campaign to portray Mr. Obama as the insidious “other” would have been conducted against a white president.

The University of Delaware’s Eric Hehman constructed a study (quoted at the top) to see if implicit racial prejudice (which can be measured like this) was related to suspicion of President Obama’s “Americanism”. To rule out simple political bias, attitudes towards Obama were compared to attitudes toward a closely related white politician: Vice President Biden. Conclusion:

higher prejudice predicted Whites seeing Obama as less American, which, in turn, predicted lower evaluations of his performance.

No evidence was required to start the snowball of suspicion rolling, because to many white Americans, blacks are inherently suspect.

The whole episode reminds Goldie Taylor of how her grandfather spent 21 days in a St. Louis jail for being black without carrying ID.

Tom Tomorrow has it nailed.

Slate gives a timeline of the birther conspiracy theory.

Stephen Colbert: “I’m just glad we can finally put to rest the crazy, fringe idea that this will end the controversy.”

The Transformation of John Yoo

Of all the extraordinary things that happened the day Barack Obama was inaugurated, surely none was more remarkable than this: At precisely noon, Republicans by the thousands and tens of thousands discovered that America has a Constitution limiting presidential power.

And of all those instantaneous conversions, surely none was more wondrous than that of John Yoo. Someday I expect Yoo’s Inauguration Day vision of the Constitution to be memorialized in great art, like St. Paul seeing Jesus on the road to Damascus, or the cross of Christ appearing in the sky above the Emperor Constantine.

Pre-inauguration, Yoo’s writings (mostly memos for the powerful Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush Justice Department) did not hint at any limits on the president’s prerogatives. President Bush, according to Yoo, could imprison people indefinitely on his own say-so. He could order them tortured, and if that violated the Convention Against Torture signed by Ronald Reagan, no problem — the president could implicitly abrogate a treaty just by disobeying it, without notifying either the other countries that signed the treaty or the Senate that ratified it.

Questioners tried in vain to get Yoo to identify anything the president could not do. Not only could the president torture a suspected terrorist, he could crush the testicles of the suspect’s child. When asked whether the president could order a suspect to be buried alive, Yoo replied only that an American president wouldn’t “feel it necessary to order that”.

Since Inauguration Day, though, Yoo has been a changed man. He may not have publicly repented or recanted any of the positions he took during the Bush years, but Yoo has frequently challenged President Obama for overstepping his constitutional powers.

Yoo’s latest broadside came in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, and denounced this dictatorial outrage: Obama wants to require government contractors to reveal their political contributions.

Since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, corporations have been able to spend unlimited amounts of money advertising for or against elected officials. They can even hide their contributions by funneling them through front organizations like the Chamber of Commerce or Americans for Prosperity. The Supreme Court’s ruling mentioned the possibility of requiring disclosure by law, but a Republican filibuster blocked such a law in the Senate. Now, by executive order, Obama wants to impose a similar requirement at least on companies that do business with the federal government.

So suppose Congressman Smith earmarks money to build a road, and then Americans for Safe Transportation spends massively to smear Smith’s opponent. Obama’s order might allow the people of Smith’s district to learn (in case they’re interested) that the money for the smear ultimately came from the contractors who built the road.

Not so fast, Tyrant. John Yoo won’t let you ignore the rights of oppressed corporations and their victimized CEOs.

If Obama’s order were carried out, people might start taking economic revenge on corporations they disagree with. If, say, you knew that Target was spending money to take away your rights, you might not shop there. And that would inhibit Target’s right to speak freely under Yoo’s newly-discovered Constitution — which requires that corporate political speech not only be as free and as loud as possible, but that it should have no adverse consequences to the corporation.

By contrast, Obama’s executive order threatens to move us out of the ranks of normal child-testicle-crushing countries and make us like Nazi Germany or something.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Yoo didn’t really change at all. You suspect he still believes in the power of Republican presidents to do the kinds of things Republicans want to do. Yoo’s Constitution only restricts Democratic presidents from doing the kinds of things Democrats want to do.

That’s a pretty cynical view, and I don’t blame Yoo for refusing to address it. What’s more, I don’t think there’s any way to make him address it — short of maybe having him buried alive or something. And to his credit, President Obama hasn’t felt it necessary to order that.

I confess to a small bit of poetic license: Yoo’s conversion actually happened sometime between the election and the inauguration. Two weeks prior to Obama’s inauguration, Yoo was already marking the proper limits of his power.

If you’re a TV talking head and find yourself onscreen with Yoo, try this line: “John, why don’t we continue this conversation in The Hague?”

Short Notes

Unless you live under a rock, you already know that Osama bin Laden is dead, killed in Pakistan by a Navy Seal attack on what an administration spokesman described as “a secured compound in an affluent suburb of Islamabad”.

At first I wondered why the Navy so quickly buried him at sea, but Time explains: In accordance with Islamic practice, the body was disposed of within 24 hours. No country had stepped up to claim Bin Laden, and the US did not want anyone turning his burial site into a shrine.

Of all the reactions, this one is my favorite.

WikiLeaks strikes again with Guantanamo-related documents. I’ll say more about this next week. Meanwhile, the best analysis is by Marcy Wheeler, starting here.

Keith Olbermann is returning to TV. His hour-long “Countdown” show will begin on Current TV on June 20.

The NYT editorializes on Republican-sponsored bills that make it harder to vote:

Kansas has had only one prosecution for voter fraud in the last six years. But because of that vast threat to Kansas democracy, an estimated 620,000 Kansas residents who lack a government ID now stand to lose their right to vote.

Overwhelmingly, the people who will now have to bring their birth certificates to government offices belong to groups that tend to vote Democratic: the young, the poor, the disabled, the non-white.

If you live in Texas and don’t have your birth certificate handy, don’t worry; your gun license will do. But your University of Texas ID won’t.

The free market has rejected the Atlas Shrugged movie.

Defenders of California’s anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8 want Judge Vaughn Walker’s ruling against the law vacated because Judge Walker is gay:

Prop. 8 supporters are specifically arguing that Walker’s acknowledged long-term relationship with a doctor should have been disclosed before the January 2010 trial because it would suggest he may have a personal interest in the right to marry.

Follow the logic through: If Prop 8 really does defend opposite-sex marriage, as its backers claim, then doesn’t a heterosexual judge also have a personal interest? Perhaps this case should be referred to a special judiciary of eunuchs.

Dahlia Lithwick stands on principle: Even a bigoted piece of crap like the Defense of Marriage Act deserves a good defense. King & Spalding may not be Atticus Finch, but nobody should have pressured them to give up the case.

Get out your crying towels: WalMart has had 7 straight quarters of declining sales. CEO Mike Duke complains that his shoppers are “running out of money”.

BuzzLightyear235 explains why: Too many companies have adopted the WalMart business model, in which you pay Americans low wages to sell stuff made (for even lower wages) in China. When one company does that, it prospers. But when they all do it, who are they going to sell to?

Oklahoma’s House just overwhelmingly passed a constitutional amendment to ban affirmative action. The measure will now go to the voters.

You don’t have to be racist to oppose affirmative action, but it helps.

Rep. Sally Kern, R-Oklahoma City, said minorities earn less than white people because they don’t work as hard and have less initiative.

“We have a high percentage of blacks in prison, and that’s tragic, but are they in prison just because they are black or because they don’t want to study as hard in school? I’ve taught school, and I saw a lot of people of color who didn’t study hard because they said the government would take care of them.”

Kern later apologized, sort of. She “misspoke” and was taken “out of context”. (The context she provides does her no credit.) And while she explicitly walked back her statement that women don’t work as hard as men (by saying “women are some of the hardest workers in the world”) she couldn’t bring herself to acknowledge that blacks work hard too. Instead, she used her membership in an inner-city church as evidence that she and her husband “love all people”. Even the lazy, shiftless ones.

If more Americans read novels, they’d know how perfect this metaphor is: The Snow Crashing of America.

A former climate-change denier admits that he has been “defeated by the facts“.

This Week’s Challenge

The main thing I do on the Sift is read stuff the average person doesn’t have time for, and call it to your attention if it’s particularly good or important. Help me do that: Tell me what blogs or web sites I don’t seem to know about, but should.

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift’s Facebook page.

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Secret Laws

March 9, 2009 – 2:50 pm
I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture and in undertaking to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment. — George W. Bush, June 26, 2003.
Ninety-nine percent of what we do is legal. — Scooter Libby, quoted by Jane Mayer in Chapter 12 of The Dark Side.

In This Week’s Sift:

  • Secret Laws: Nine Bush Memos Declassified. If the Bush administration had really believed in its theory of presidential power, it wouldn’t have been classified.
  • The Next Time You’re in the Bookstore … look for Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side. It’s the best summary of the Bush administration war-on-terror story.
  • Tigerhawk. I develop sympathy for a maligned conservative blogger.
  • Short Notes. A couple scoops from the Onion. Thomas Friedman’s biggest mistakes. Atlas Shrugged as prophesy. Is Tim Geithner starting to sound like Donald Rumsfeld? Jon Stewart vs. CNBC. And more.
Secret Law: Nine Bush Memos Declassified

By now you’ve probably heard of the nine Bush administration memos that got declassified and released by the Obama Justice Department last Monday. I’ve skimmed a couple of these memos, but haven’t gone through them all in detail, so I am relying on people who have: Scott Horton, Glenn Greenwald, and Jack Balkin. (Back in April, I went through the Yoo torture memos line-by-line, so I’m not surprised by anything I’m reading now.)

The memos, prepared by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) shortly after 9/11, say that the president can order military operations within the United States, and that the Bill of Rights would not apply to these operations. Also, according to the NYT:

the president could unilaterally abrogate foreign treaties, ignore any guidance from Congress in dealing with detainees suspected of terrorism, and conduct a program of domestic eavesdropping without warrants.

The newly released memos have gotten a lot of coverage in the press, but I think one point is so basic that it’s in danger of being missed: Why on Earth should legal opinions be classified in the first place?

In my previous life as a mathematician for the MITRE Corporation, I had a clearance and occasionally ran into classified documents. Usually, the classified pages in a document were very specific and technical — the exact specifications for some radar or communications system, for example. But you wouldn’t classify an abstract discussion of radar or communications. Those theories are in textbooks.

These secret memos, by contrast, don’t reveal detailed government plans that would be useful to our enemies. They put forward an abstract legal theory that Jack Balkin sums up like this:

The President, because he is President, may do whatever he thinks is necessary, even in the domestic context, if he acts for military and national security reasons in his capacity as Commander in Chief. This theory of presidential power argues, in essence, that when the President acts in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief, he may make his own rules and cannot be bound by Congressional laws to the contrary.

If that theory is true, then it shouldn’t be classified, it should be in Civics textbooks. We should proudly teach our children that our rights exist by sufferance of the president, who could revoke them all if he so decided.

Secret law — and when an “interpretation” stands the written law on its head, in essence it becomes a new law — runs against our entire legal tradition. As far back as the Roman Republic, the West has believed that laws should be written down and displayed in clear view.

Why did these memos have to be classified? Because they’re absurd. You never need to classify the fact that 2+2=4. But if you want the government to operate under the assumption that 2+2=5, then you do have to classify it, because your government will be a laughing stock otherwise.

Background. If you’ve been reading the Sift for a while, you have run into the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) before. It is the highest legal authority inside the executive branch of government. Unless and until the courts directly contradict it, the OLC’s interpretation of the law is official. So if lawyers from the Navy disagree with lawyers from the State Department, an OLC opinion settles the matter in the same way that a Supreme Court opinion settles disagreements between lesser courts

Like the Supreme Court, the OLC can be extremely powerful if it falls into the wrong hands. It can declare that black is white, and (so long as the issue stays out of the courts), the rest of the government is forced to go along with the assumption that black is white.

Bush defenders frequently ask some version of this legitimate question: Shouldn’t the president be able to respond to whatever comes up, even if the law or the Constitution didn’t foresee this exact situation? If you get into one of those ticking-nuclear-bomb scenarios, you don’t want the president waiting for an act of Congress before he does anything about it.

In such a situation, the president should act more-or-less the way Lincoln did: Do what you need to do, then go confess your sins to Congress. At that point Congress can either retroactively approve your actions or start impeachment proceedings. Instead, the Bush administration made up bogus legal theories about why they didn’t need anybody’s permission or approval. Consequently, we (and Congress) still don’t know most of what they did.

The Obama administration doesn’t want former enemy combatant Jose Padilla to be able to sue John Yoo for his mistreatment.

Glenn Greenwald looks at Britain’s reaction to the allegations that Binyam Mohamed, a British resident recently released from Guantanamo, was tortured there with the knowledge and assistance of the British government. He finds their public discussion strikingly different from ours.

the tacit premise of the discussion is that credible allegations of criminality — even if committed by high government officials, perhaps especially then — compel serious criminal investigations. Imagine that. How shrill and radical.

The Next Time You’re in the Bookstore …

… look for The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals by Jane Mayer.

Mayer has been covering civil-liberties issues for the New Yorker all through the Bush administration. I find I agree with the WaPo review by Andrew Bacevich: This book’s “achievement lies less in bringing new revelations to light than in weaving into a comprehensive narrative a story revealed elsewhere in bits and pieces.”

I’ve read a lot of the Bush administration books and articles, and reviewed some of them here on the Sift, so few of the specific events in the book were new to me. But seeing them all laid out in order from 9/11 to last April provided a new depth and perspective. If you’ve been reading reviews of the various war-on-terror books and thinking you should get around to reading one someday, put those aside and read this one.

Seeing the whole story in one place deepened my feel for the characters. Mayer’s Dick Cheney, for example, is not a one-dimensional Dr. Evil. Instead, he seems like a man afraid to admit that he’s out of his depth. Cheney came to office with no background in terrorism, the Muslim world, counter-insurgency, interrogation, constitutional law, or any of the other issues that instantly became central after 9/11. Suddenly, the country needed a strong vision from its leadership, and no one else was in a position to provide one — certainly not President Bush, who hated briefings longer than five minutes.

The emergency post-9/11 mentality was in part an overreaction to the administration’s neglect of terrorism pre-9/11, coupled with an administration-wide character flaw that didn’t allow them to admit or learn from their mistakes. The true story of 9/11 is that collectively the government had all the information it needed to prevent the attack, it just didn’t route those bits of information to people who could have put them together and acted on them. 9/11 was a failure of management, not of power. But the administration was congenitally incapable of telling the story that way, even to itself. Instead, 9/11 was always invoked to support the government’s push for more power: the power to spy, to torture, to invade.

Much of the book follows the lawyers of what became known as “the War Council” — essentially a shadow government consisting of the major players’ legal counterparts: David Addington (Cheney), Alberto Gonzales (Bush), Jim Haynes (Rumsfeld), and John Yoo (who technically was under Ashcroft, but was really a loose cannon). Addington (like Cheney) dominated the group, while Gonzales (like Bush) was a lightweight who never really wielded the power he had on paper. It’s doubly interesting who was left out of the group: Ashcroft, as well as the top lawyers of the FBI, the State Department, or the military judge advocate generals (JAGs).

this insular, unelected, self-reinforcing group, with virtually no experience in law enforcement, military service, counterterrorism, or the Muslim world, was in position to make many of the most fateful legal decisions in the post-9/11 era. … “Addington spoke authoritatively about what the President decided in 2002, but he wrote the document, and it was probably his decision,” a former White House official said later.

The War Council’s lack of relevant experience led to some major mistakes. For example, the original Guantanamo military tribunals were based on tribunals convened by FDR — ignoring the subsequent Uniform Code of Military Justice established in 1951. Any military lawyer could have told the War Council that the JAGs would consider this a return to the Bad Old Days — but no military lawyers were present when the decision was made.

The torture policy was based on a similar lack of experience. This story is worth repeating in its entirety:

The FBI had an embarrassing firsthand reminder of why such tactics are illegal when, immediately after September 11, they coerced an Egyptian national who had been staying at a hotel near the World Trade Center into falsely confessing to a role in the attacks. Abdallah Higazy, like the other hotel guests, fled when the hijacked planes smashed into the towers. Soon after, the hotel told the FBI it had found in his closet a radio communication system for air pilots. The FBI took Higazy into custody. According to Higazy, an FBI agent told him that if he didn’t confess that the equipment was his, and that it connected him to the Al Qaeda attacks, his family in Egypt would be tortured. After first denying the charges, Higazy confessed under the pressure. Luckily for him, an airline pilot who had also been a guest at the same hotel soon returned to ask for his radio back.

Again and again, torture led to false testimony. (Colin Powell was convinced to make his famous presentation to the UN after he was unknowingly given false testimony produced under torture.) That was entirely predictable: The enhanced interrogation techniques came from the SERE school whose purpose was to train American soldiers who might face torture if captured. Ultimately their techniques were copied from the KGB, who intended to produce false confessions.

The program and their claims were never subjected to any independent analysis. They always went back to the same people who were running the program at the Agency to ask if it was working, and they always said it was.

My takeaway from The Dark Side is to be more convinced than ever that President Bush himself needs to be put on trial. The only motivation lawyers have to tell their clients things they don’t want to hear is to keep those clients out of jail. If presidents can’t go to jail, no matter what they do, no one will ever tell them No.

I haven’t gotten around to reading David Kilcullen’s new book about counter-insurgency yet, but Andrew Bacevich has.

Tigerhawk

Sometimes I don’t understand my own liberal-blogger tribe. A minor conservative blogger named Tigerhawk put up a video explaining that well-to-do professionals like him (the over-$250,000 folks whose taxes Obama wants to raise) work extremely hard and are not the villains of this financial crisis. He recommends that Obama come to them with more of a your-country-needs-your-help message than a you-haven’t-been-paying-your-fair-share message.

Reasonable stuff, as far as it goes. (I’m sure lots of minimum-wage people work hard too, when you lump their three part-time jobs together.) But I wouldn’t have found this video at all if the liberal blog Sadly, No! hadn’t picked it out as an example of rich people’s whining arrogance. I didn’t react that way at all. In fact, wandering around Tigerhawk’s blog, I realized this was gold as far as I’m concerned: a conservative blogger who seems to have some standards about facts and logic. No ranting about Obama’s birth certificate or how we need to have an armed insurrection to keep the country from going Communist. (I think it helps that we’re both Big Ten fans raised in the Midwest. The “hawk” part of his name comes from the Iowa Hawkeyes.)

I’ve recommended a lot of liberal blogs, but I think it’s important that we not become an echo chamber. So I’m adding Tigerhawk to my bookmarks and I’ll drop in now and then to see how things look from the other side. Catching up a little: Tigerhawk’s take on the financial crisis is pretty interesting. It’s reassuring to know that a (self-described) conservative CFO from a medical device company tells the story pretty much the same way I do. And his questions for health care reformers are pretty good, if somewhat affected by the whole medical-device-company thing.

Short Notes

If you needed any more proof that pundits don’t belong to a meritocracy, Vanity Fair summarizes the most outrageous predictions of Thomas Friedman.

The Onion reports that American blacks are being “creeped out” by all the positive responses they’re getting from white strangers now that Barack Obama is president: smiles, pats on the back, offers to fist-bump or high-five. “To be honest, you people are kind of terrifying when you’re happy,” says one. And another adds: “I know you mean well and all, but seriously, knock it off. You’re giving my children nightmares.”

Another Onion scoop: A school-board member in Arkham, MA wants the curriculum to reflect a really old-time religion, preparing students for the apocalyptic return of the Elder Gods.

This one isn’t from the Onion, it just sounds that way. Republican Congressman John Campbell:

we’re living through the scenario that happened in Atlas Shrugged, The achievers, the people who create all the things that benefit rest of us, are going on strike. I’m seeing, at a small level, a kind of protest from the people who create jobs, the people who create wealth, who are pulling back from their ambitions because they see how they’ll be punished for them.”

Speaking as somebody who was a huge Ayn Rand fan in my misguided youth, this is deeply weird. Picture it: Somewhere there’s a guy who has the next Google or Microsoft in his head, but when he sees the capital gains tax going up to 20% he thinks: “Why bother? I’d only get to keep 80% of those billions. I’m not going to take that kind of punishment.” How likely is that?

Tigerhawk provides an interesting datum: On March 3, Atlas Shrugged was up to #38 on Amazon’s sales list. I just checked, and it’s still at #54. Not bad for a book published in 1957.

California’s Proposition 8 saga continues. The ballot initiative to make same-sex marriage illegal again (and give involuntary divorces to thousands of same-sex couples) passed in November. Now the state’s Supreme Court is hearing a case challenging Prop 8’s legitimacy.

The issue here sounds technical: Is Prop 8 a constitutional “amendment” (as it claims to be) or a “revision”? Amendments are narrow and can be passed by majority vote, while revisions are more sweeping and require either 2/3rds of the legislature or a constitutional convention. It’s an important distinction, because California’s amend-the-constitution-by-majority-vote provision is insane without some strict limitations. Otherwise, a simple majority could proclaim Schwartzenegger dictator-for-life.

Congress may become a branch of government again: It looks like Karl Rove and Harriet Myers are finally going to have to testify about the US atttorneys scandal.

Al Rodgers on DailyKos collects a few Daily Show clips that prove a point: Jon Stewart is more on top of the financial crisis than the so-called “serious” reporters are. My favorite moment comes during his conversation with NYT financial reporter Joe Nocera (about the 4:25 mark in the third clip), when Jon nails CNBC’s fawning interviews with the very people who turned out to be at the center of the disaster.

It’d be like the Weather Channel interviewing Hurricane Katrina and saying “You know, there’s a report that you have high winds and flooding.” And Katrina’s like, “No, no, no — I’m sunny.” And they’re like “All right” and they walk away.

This clip from Tim Geithner’s testimony to the Senate is disturbing, because he doesn’t answer Senator Cantwell’s question about the AIG bailout. In essence AIG is a conduit: It insured bad debts for other financial institutions, so as the debtors default, the federal bailout money is flowing through AIG to those other institutions. Cantwell is trying to get Geithner to say who the insured institutions are and how much they’re getting, but he provides no specifics.

The worrisome thing is that Geithner seems to be taking the same attitude towards Congress and the bailouts as Donald Rumsfeld took towards Congress and Iraq: Your job is to keep writing the checks. We’ll decide what you need to know about where the money is going.

It started out as one of the more bizarre stories that the Republicans made up about the stimulus bill: Harry Reid was setting aside $8 billion to build a mag-lev train from Disneyland to Las Vegas. Now the story is getting even better, as stories unconstrained by reality often do. In the new version, the train goes from Disneyland to a particular Nevada brothel, which in the real world is nowhere near Las Vegas. And Fox News is reporting it all as fact.

The New Yorker’s Atul Gawande has an interesting take on the health care system: We should build on what we have. I was skeptical, but then he retells the history of how other countries got their health care systems.

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