Evening Reading: Freaks and Rants Edition

That was quick:


Aravosis AmBlog Headline: BREAKING: UPS stops advertising on O'Reilly after he had ThinkProgress blogger stalked, and talked about assassinating MSNBC employees


TPM Headline:How Al Franken's Absence Hampers The Obama Agenda


Josh Marshall: A Slo-Mo Cover Up?

We're trying to pull together the many moving parts of the AIG story. And here's some more on one issue that seems particularly important. Yesterday we mentioned that the chief risk officer at AIG, strange as it may seem, still has his job. But now we find that like AIG's in-house auditors and its outside accountancy, the risk assessing team itself was not given full access to the book of AIG Financial Products.

The next step will be to get some read on just when it was that AIGFP Chief Joe Cassano started shutting everyone out. And what didn't he want them to see?

atrios sees Freaks

As I wrote before, I think Obama has a mix of press working for him and against him. On the one hand you have the deferential access journalism, and on the other hand you have the daily freak show which almost always works against Democrats as it's often directed by America's Assignment Editor, Matt Drudge.

Occasionally the freak show is so stupid that one begins to doubt if these journalists are sentient.

• Media Matters: Gibbs ridicules media's teleprompter obsession
  

  Washington Post reporter Lois Romano interviews White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs:

  MS. ROMANO: The teleprompter changed last night.

  MR. GIBBS: Mm-hmm.

  MS. ROMANO: What was that about that? It's a big jumbotron now.

  MR. GIBBS: You know can I tell you this?

  MS. ROMANO: Yes.

  MR. GIBBS: I am absolutely amazed that anybody in America cares about who the President picks at a news conference or the mechanism by which he reads his prepared remarks. You know, I guess America is a wonderful country.

  MS. ROMANO: You're saying this is all Washington Beltway stuff?

  MR. GIBBS: I don't even know if it's that. I don't think I should implicate the many people that live in Washington.

  MR. GIBBS: No, I you know, I don't think the President let me just say this: My historical research has demonstrated that the President is not the first to use prepared remarks nor the first to use a teleprompter.

• DougJ adds:

  From a chat with Chris Cillizza today:

  In the first few months of the Obama Administration conservatives—spurred on by Matt Drudge—have mocked the president for using a teleprompter at nearly every public speech.

  [....]

  But, look how much time we have spent discussing the prompter in this chat. And, there’s no question that Drudge has been the prime driver of that story.

  I’m not criticizing Cillizza here. To the contrary, he deserves credit for admitting where the story comes from. But why the hell is Romano pushing what she must also know is a Drudge meme?

One should never excerpt genius. Follow the link for another edition of what digby said.

Ambinder: A Push for Prison Reform

Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) will launch an effort to reform the nation's prison system today at noon, his staff says, introducing a bill--the National Criminal Justice Act of 2009--that would create a bipartisan commission no reform. The commission would undertake an 18-month review of the U.S. prison system, offering recommendations at the end.

Prison reform is a difficult thing to achieve, politically. Nearly every politician wants to be perceived as "tough on crime," and suggesting that too many Americans are being incarcerated can seem to run against that. (Webb has, in fact, pointed out that the U.S. has attained the highest incarceration rate in the world.) Add tough discussions of prison conditions, inmate crime, and abuse, and it's not an easy task for a politician to undertake.

Webb has succeeded in pushing major legislation through Congress before, as his 21st Century GI Bill passed last year. And it's hard for anyone to accuse the former Navy secretary of not being "tough" enough. Reported support from Democratic leaders, President Obama, and interest from Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Arlen Specter could help him in this latest endeavor.

• Yglesias: Senator Jim Webb Calls for Prison Reform

  Jim Webb’s talked about prison reform before, and now is prepared to take action on the issue with a new bill. The introductory document notes that “with 5% of the world’s population, our country now houses 25% of the world’s reported prisoners” and “four times as many mentally ill people are in prisons than in mental health hospitals.” This fact, in particular, seems unlikely to be an effective or humane way of dealing with the issue. The legislation’s specific mandate is for not much more than the creation of a national commission on the issue. But I think that’s a good idea. The politics of trying to turn this around are treacherous, but my impression is that there’s actually a lot of common ground that people who’ve analyzed this issue seriously find themselves reaching.

  A few favorite points on the issue:

  – Obviously, mentally ill people should be getting treatment for their mental illness; it’s quite possible that with treatment many of these people would be no danger to anyone.

  – An effective parole system could keep criminals who are also drug addicts off drugs, and thus sharply reduce their proclivity to commit crimes, without the financial or human costs involved in keeping them incarcerated over the long term.

  – At the margin, it’s better to fight crime by having police officers patrolling the streets than by expanding the number of people in prison.

  – Insofar as drug use is criminalized, it’s still possible to target actual law enforcement in the first instance at people involved in violent criminal enterprises.

  – Overcrowded prisons are unsafe, which encourages people to join gangs which, since the prisoners get out eventually, makes the crime problem worse.

  – Sentence lengths should be better-calibrated to reflect actual research on preventing crime rather than pure moralistic outrage. Keeping a person who’s likely to commit violent crimes in prison is an effective crime-control tactic, but we need to focus on people who are actually likely to commit violent crimes. Many people in prison have already aged out of the period at which violent crime is likely.

  There seems to be some interest on the Hill in this bill so hopefully something will happen.

atrios sees Clowns: I'm sure some of them are very nice and very smart, but I generally feel more than a little bit embarrassed for them when I see senators talk, on CSPAN or elsewhere. The lack of awareness that their odd little rhetorical stylings and absurd self-regard make them look like buffoons to just about everyone is frightening.

Daily Kos' BarbinMD: Democratic Leader Tells Democrats To Shut Up

Wow.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Friday that liberal groups targeting moderate Democrats with ads should back off, saying pressure from the left wing of his party won't be helpful to enacting legislation.

"I think it's very unwise and not helpful," Reid said Friday morning. "These groups should leave them alone. It’s not helpful to me. It’s not helpful to the Democratic Caucus.”

Reid, who said he hadn’t seen or heard the ads, added that "most of [the groups] run very few ads — they only to do it to get a little press on it."

Also not helpful? The Democratic Leader going to a newspaper to complain about Democrats exercising a benefit of living in a democracy."

• Steve Benen adds:

  Now, in fairness, I haven't seen a complete transcript of Reid's remarks, so maybe he added some details and context to this. But given the report, I still have no idea why Reid would find progressive pressure to be "very unwise and not helpful."

  Take the budget fight, for example. The White House presented Congress with a progressive and ambitious plan. Reid likes the plan, as do MoveOn and Americans United for Change. Some members of Reid's caucus want to water down the budget and make it worse, so MoveOn and Americans United for Change are encouraging them not to.

  What's unhelpful about that?

  Reid added, "Legislation is the art of compromise. Consensus-building." Fair enough. But legislating is also about responding to public pressure. Democratic lawmakers are already facing plenty of pressure -- some from within the caucus itself -- to move away from the popular and progressive agenda proposed by the administration. MoveOn and Americans United for Change are helping to add some balance to the equation.

  Reid should be sending them "thank you" notes.

DNC Web Ad: "Pot. Kettle. Black."

publius: Hilarious, But Dishonest Too

Like hilzoy, I found the GOP budget bubbles adorably cute. I was hoping to see more underpants gnomes though. That's honestly the only real critique I have of this fine product -- the underpants gnomishness is left implicit. (If any graphically-inclined readers want to take a stab at "gnoming" the bubbles, I'd be happy to post your handiwork).

On a more substantive note, I do think it's fairly revealing that the only specific policy proposal in the entire budget with numbers is a massive tax cut for the rich. The "plan" proposes establishing two marginal tax rates -- 25% for those who make more than $100,000; 10% for everyone else. As I'm sure you know, that's a huge benefit for those who are doing pretty well. Clearly, this is not a party whose sole mission in life is to redistribute income up the ladder.

It's also worth noting that, hilarity aside, it's full of misleading and downright false assertions. A few of the biggies that I saw was the continuing attempt to pin the market meltdown on the Community Reinvestment Act (of 1977), and Fannie and Freddie. This article provides probably the best summary I found on why these are simply demonstrably false claims. (More - here, here, and here).

And there are other goodies too -- like this one (p.5):

Who are the recipients of such largesse? International organizations and foreign aid recipients, including millions for reconstruction in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. Labor union bosses participating in a new “green jobs” program. The National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Americorps, Title X Family Planning, and a host of spending programs that will do nothing to help our economy recover. And even community organizers, such as ACORN, performing “neighborhood stabilization.”

Hamas and NPR -- both are recipients of Obama's largesse.

Amato: Joe the Plumber gets another gig

By John Amato Friday Mar 27, 2009 9:00am

This is not a joke. Americans for Prosperity, an anti-Employee Free Choice Act group, is hiring Joe the Plumber to speak at rallies against the average working class in America.

Joe the Plumber is hitting the campaign trail again! He’s been pressed into service to do a series of events throughout Pennsylvania rallying opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act, the organizer of the events confirms.

Mr. Plumber will speak at rallies against the measure in Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, and Philadelphia on March 30th and 31st, according to a spokesperson for the anti-EFCA group Americans for Prosperity.

“The public loves Joe the Plumber,” the spokesperson, Mary Ellen Burke, claimed to me. “They see him as a role model.”

Asked whether Joe the Plumber had any particular knowledge or expertise about EFCA that might explain the decision to enlist him, Burke said that he was being enlisted to provide a “grassroots perspective” and “the working perspective” on the measure.

Pressed on whether Joe the Plumber has any particular claim to being a spokesperson on the issue, Burke replied that “he represents the American worker.” Burke couldn’t immediately say whether Joe the Plumber was being paid for his appearances.

Wonder if he'll tell the anti-EFCA crowds they make him horny, too. Sounds like a sure recipe for success.

The public doesn't love Joe the Plumber, insane conservatives do. This only makes things look so much worse for Republicans in this country. How weak and foolish Susan Collins or Olympia Snowe must feel seeing that Joe the Plumber is being billed as a celebrity in the GOP. It's so pathetic.

I guarantee you that after his run dies -- well, OK, it may never die, because they are a leaderless party, and he's about as qualified as any of them -- but when it does and if a union job opens up for him, he'll take it in a second.

Benen: THE RNC POLLS ITS SUPPORTERS....

The Republican National Committee emailed a survey to its supporters this morning. The questions are broken up into two categories: "Domestic and Social Issues" and "Homeland Security and Defense Issues."

Of course, the wording a survey uses can have some influence on the results. Consider how the RNC worded some of their more notable questions. (thanks to readers GB and CR for the tip)

* A recent national poll reported that nearly 25% of Americans want the government to pass more socialism. Do you agree or disagree?

* Which do you believe creates more jobs for the American economy: Government Programs and Spending or The American Free Enterprise System?

* Should Republicans unite to block new federal government bureaucracy and red tape that will crush future economic growth?

* Should we do everything we can to block Democrats who are trying to shut down conservative talk radio with the so-called "fairness doctrine"?

* Should we resist Barack Obama's proposal to spend billions of federal taxpayer dollars to pay "volunteers" who perform his chosen tasks?

* Should bureaucrats in Washington, DC be in charge of making your health care choices instead of you and your doctor?

* Do you think U.S. troops should have to serve under United Nations' commanders?

These are actual questions from the survey, not paraphrases intended to make the RNC appear silly.

Chances are, the RNC just sends out a survey like this to encourage supporters to send in a donation, and maybe to help bolster the mailing list. I suspect the party doesn't even bother to tally the data.

But I'm trying to imagine the loyal Republican activist who got an email this morning from Michael Steele, and proceeded to sit down and answer all of the many questions in this obviously-bogus "survey." Scary thought.

Post Script: Before getting into these specific issue areas, the survey asks respondents, "What are the weaknesses of the Republican Party?" There are five choices: "Bad Messaging," "Poor Response to Democrats, "Republicans who don't vote like Republicans," "Standing Up for Principles," and "Need to Lead in Congress."

Respondents are encouraged to check all that apply, but there isn't a field for "other."

Ezra Klein: THE ANTITRUST SOLUTION.

Paul Krugman's column today begins with a shot at Larry Summers but quickly turns into one of Krugman's best. In it, he gracefully tracks the recent growth of the financial sector, tracing its transformation from "a staid, even boring business" that accounted for less than four percent of GDP in the 1960s to a monstrously lucrative and risky industry that was more than eight percent of the GDP of the world's largest economy. How you understand the regulatory implications of that growth, Krugman says, is crucial to how you understand Geithner's plan:

Much discussion of the toxic-asset plan has focused on the details and the arithmetic, and rightly so. Beyond that, however, what’s striking is the vision expressed both in the content of the financial plan and in statements by administration officials. In essence, the administration seems to believe that once investors calm down, securitization — and the business of finance — can resume where it left off a year or two ago.

To be fair, officials are calling for more regulation. Indeed, on Thursday Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, laid out plans for enhanced regulation that would have been considered radical not long ago.

But the underlying vision remains that of a financial system more or less the same as it was two years ago, albeit somewhat tamed by new rules.

That's exactly right. I've been thinking about this in more radical terms. To be more specific, I've been thinking about this in terms of antitrust law.

In its simplest terms, antitrust law addresses the dangers of size. In general, the danger it addresses is anticompetitive behavior, which usually takes the form of monopoly power, but can also take the form of collusion. In both cases, the effect is fairly simple: An economic threat to a functioning market.

The "too big to fail" problem, which is a problem unique to the massive financial sector that has emerged in modern times, is also, fundamentally, a problem of size. A firm grows too large and the simple fact of its size poses a threat to the continued health and survival of the market. The dangerous mechanism here is not, to be sure, anticompetitive behavior so much as dangerous levels of interconnection. In that way, it's harder to speak of it in the moral terms that undergird antitrust law. But it is no less dangerous, and no less intrinsic to size.

Which is all to say that I fall with Krugman on this: The financial sector should be smaller and regulated more tightly to curb the incentives that encourage wild risk. And more to the point, the individual actors should be smaller. There is no solution to the "too big to fail" problem save for breaking up firms that cant be allowed to fail, or preventing them from reaching that size in the first place.

• Josh agrees they are Part of the Problem: We're listening to the bank CEO press conference after their meeting with the president at the White House. And among other comments Jim Rohr, chairman and chief executive of Pittsburgh's PNC Financial Services Group, has just noted that the financial services industry is the "biggest industry we have in the United States." I take it that some of that metric may be tied to just how one defines and delimits what constitutes an 'industry'. But this points up a basic structural problem. The point of the financial services 'industry' is to efficiently allocate capital throughout the economy or to put it a bit more cheekily to actual 'industries'. Now, that's a critical function. But when it becomes the biggest 'industry', and in many ways clearly the most powerful, that's a problem.