A 47 year old homely matron shows up on Britain's Got Talent ... Seriously, I'm still choked up.
QOTD, Ezra Klein: Nobody wants to give money to Wal-Mart. But many people would like to give money to Wal-Mart in exchange for a large jar of pickles. Similarly, no one wants to give money to the federal government. But it's possible that many people would prefer to give $5,000 to the government rather than $7,000 to a private health insurer. Instead, we talk about rolling back the Bush tax cuts and changing the itemized deduction and the importance of never raising taxes on 95 percent of Americans. It comes off as taxation for taxation's sake, and politicians are reduced to targeting the rich because they're simply aren't that many of them.
atrios: And Speaking Of Bringing On The Crazy I get, if don't agree with, reasons why reporters might not feel compelled to inform you that one major political party is, in fact, stark raving mad. But the degree to which the press treats Glenn Beck with kid gloves is pretty infuriating, especially given how "crazy" liberals like Michael Moore and dirty fucking hippie bloggers have been treated. It's almost as if there's a bit of an asymmetry here. Nah, couldn't be...
Kurtz: Beware the Google Responding to the flap over President Obama's visit, Arizona State U. prez says the school doesn't award honorary degrees to elected officials still in office -- except they did in 2002.
Think Progress: Obama: Stimulus transportation projects ‘under budget,’ ‘ahead of schedule.’
Today, President Obama and Vice President Biden will appear at the Transportation Department along with Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood to celebrate the 2,000th transportation project funded by the stimulus package. “Just 41 days ago we announced funding for the first transportation project,” Obama said, according to his prepared remarks. “I am proud to utter the two rarest phrases in the English language — projects are being approved ahead of schedule, and they are coming in under budget.” Administration officials say that billions in road and bridge money is going “farther” and being used “faster” than expected.Benen: CLARENCE THOMAS SEES TOO MANY RIGHTS...
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas doesn't say much. According the NYT's Adam Liptak, he hasn't even asked a question from the bench in over three years.But he answered some questions the other night in a D.C. ballroom from winners of a high school essay contest. Thomas noted, among other things, that he thinks Americans have too many rights.
The evening was devoted to the Bill of Rights, but Justice Thomas did not embrace the document, and he proposed a couple of alternatives.
'Today there is much focus on our rights," Justice Thomas said. "Indeed, I think there is a proliferation of rights."
"I am often surprised by the virtual nobility that seems to be accorded those with grievances," he said. "Shouldn't there at least be equal time for our Bill of Obligations and our Bill of Responsibilities?"
It's not at all encouraging when one of the nine members of the Supreme Court complains publicly about a "proliferation of rights." I hesitate to even wonder which protections Americans currently enjoy that Thomas would like to see taken away.
In fairness, I should note that I didn't hear the full context. According to the NYT piece, Thomas went on to complain that "many" Americans have to come to believe "they're owed air conditioning, cars, telephones, televisions." He forgot to tell us to stay off his lawn.
All kidding aside, when Thomas said there's been "a proliferation of rights," was he talking about a perceived "right" to modern amenities and conveniences? If so, I'm afraid the high court justice doesn't know what a "right" is. After all, when was the last time you heard someone above the age of 14 claim the "right" to have 10,000 BTUs and a 50-inch flatscreen, as opposed to say the "right" to vote or to a fair trial?
At an event devoted to the Bill of Rights, one would like to think a sitting Supreme Court justice wouldn't throw around rhetoric like this.
As for Thomas' call for "our Bill of Obligations and our Bill of Responsibilities," Adam Serwer added, "Funny, I don't remember there being a 'Bill of Obligations' or a 'Bill of Responsibilities' in the Constitution of the United States of America. But since Thomas is an originalist who interprets the Constitution the way the founders intended, I suppose it must be in there somewhere."
- atrios adds on this unseemly Proliferation Of Rights: In the context of constitutional law I really have no idea what the hell Clarence Thomas is talking about. Does he even know what the constitution is for?
Christy Hardin-Smith: One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others
Which one of these things is not like the others?selise at FDL: Elizabeth Warren: ‘I don’t have a badge and a gun. The power of this panel is derived entirely from the voice of the American people’The Illinois governor’s budget proposal would scale back home visits to ill-equipped first-time mothers, who are given advice over 18 months that experts say is repaid many times over in reduced child abuse and better school preparation.
“We spend $1.2 billion a year on child welfare,” said Diana M. Rauner, director of the Ounce of Prevention Fund in Chicago, which channels government money to private agencies. “You’d think we’d spend a lot of money to keep people out of that system.”
Ohio’s proposed budget “will dramatically decrease our ability to investigate reports of abuse and neglect,"...
The $787 billion stimulus act and major spending proposals have ratcheted up the lobbying frenzy further this year, even as President Obama and public-interest groups press for sharper restrictions on the practice.
The paper by three Kansas professors examined the impact of a one-time tax break approved by Congress in 2004 that allowed multinational corporations to "repatriate" profits earned overseas, effectively reducing their tax rate on the money from 35 percent to 5.25 percent. More than 800 companies took advantage of the legislation, saving an estimated $100 billion in the process, according to the study....
...The now-beleaguered financial industry also benefited from the provision, including Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch, all of which have since received tens of billions of dollars in federal bailout money.
The researchers calculated an average rate of return of 22,000 percent for those companies that helped lobby for the tax break.
After learning that a camp that connects siblings in foster care would be hit hard by state budget cuts, Tyler Harlow decided to take his bike out for a ride.
This week, the 23-year-old camp counselor will begin what he hopes to be a 55-day journey, logging more than 3,000 miles from Boston to San Francisco to raise $20,000...
Faced with a $3 billion budget deficit, legislators are making cuts that we will all pay for dearly. It runs the gamut, from kids whose education gets shortchanged, to adults struggling with mental-health problems, to thousands of neglected and abused children.
The next time Newt Gingrich opens his yap and whines about the need for more top tier tax cuts, think about example #2 and whose pockets he wants to line...and who gets the shaft.
And why.
Do poor, abused children have the money to lobby Congress for humongo benefits, favors and breaks? Nope.
Why is it that the rest of us foot the bills for this perpetual shortsighted anti-good-government mismanagement and all of its craptastic aftereffects, while corporations get to "repatriate" their profit margins offshore?
Why is it okay to transfer wealth to entities who then shift it to offshore accounts for a legal tax maneuver or to manipulate the corporate bottom line, but odious to even mention any social contract duty to poor, abused and neglected children -- something which actually saves public money down the road instead of pouring it down a creative accounting rathole? Someone explain that one to me, please.
The Boston Globe has posted an interview with Elizabeth Warren (chair of TARP Congressional Oversight Panel).
In the interview she describes what the TARP plan is supposed to accomplish, "Treasury has given us multiple contradictory explanations for what it's trying to accomplish," the difficulty in getting any information from Treasury, "I've spent four weeks now looking for someone who can give me the details of the stress test so that we can do an independent evaluation of whether the stress test is any good" and lots more.
The interview is short and ends with this question:
For anyone wanting to know more about Warren, I highly recommend her 2007 interview with Harry Kreisler, The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class: Higher Risks, Lower Rewards, and a Shrinking Safety Net.Q: Is there anything else that you would want people to understand?
A: I don't have a badge and a gun. The power of this panel is derived entirely from the voice of the American people. If they stay out of the policy debates, then Treasury can spend at will and reshape the American economy with no one in the room but insiders. If they are involved, the policies will look different.
It's the design of the rules going forward that will tell us or that will determine whether we are moving to a cyclical economy with high wealth, high risk, and crashes every 10 to 15 years. Or whether we will emerge, as we did following the new regulatory reforms in the Great Depression, with a more stable economic system that benefits people across the economic spectrum. It's an amazing moment in history.
Ezra Klein on THE PROBLEM WITH TAXING THE RICH.
David Leonhardt had a very nice piece in the Times Magazine this weekend on the relative timidity of Obama's tax agenda. In particular, I liked this bit correcting the historical record on those confiscatory marginal rates.Yglesias: Broad Support for Zero Nukes Goal[Obama's] agenda is a bold one in many ways. Yet his tax code would still look more kindly on wealth than Nixon’s, Kennedy’s, Eisenhower’s or that of any other president from F.D.R. to Carter. And only part of the reason for this is widely understood.
It’s well known that tax rates on top incomes used to be far higher than they are today. The top marginal rate hovered around 90 percent in the 1940s, ’50s and early ’60s. Reagan ultimately reduced it to 28 percent, and it is now 35 percent. Obama would raise it to 39.6 percent, where it was under Bill Clinton.
What’s much less known is that those old confiscatory rates were not as sweeping as they sound. They applied to only the richest of the rich, because yesterday’s tax code, unlike today’s, had separate marginal tax rates for the truly wealthy and the merely affluent. For a married couple in 1960, for example, the 38 percent tax bracket started at $20,000, which is about $145,000 in today’s terms. The top bracket of 91 percent began at $400,000, which is the equivalent of nearly $3 million now. Some of the old brackets are truly stunning: in 1935, Franklin D. Roosevelt raised the top rate to 79 percent, from 63 percent, and raised the income level that qualified for that rate to $5 million (about $75 million today) from $1 million. As the economist Bruce Bartlett has noted, that 79 percent rate apparently applied to only one person in the entire country, John D. Rockefeller.
Today, by contrast, the very well off and the superwealthy are lumped together. The top bracket last year started at $357,700. Any income above that — whether it was the 400,000th dollar earned by a surgeon or the 40 millionth earned by a Wall Street titan — was taxed the same, at 35 percent. This change is especially striking, because there is so much more income at the top of the distribution now than there was in the past. Today a tax rate for the very top earners would apply to a far larger portion of the nation’s income than it would have years ago.
All that said, the concept of taxation has become completely unmoored from the social services and societal priorities it purchases. Taxes are spoken of almost as a "wealth penalty" of sorts: Politicians promise that the middle class and the upper middle class will be untouched. Taxes are a bad thing. The middle class doesn't deserve this bad thing. The rich, however, sort of do deserve it. They're rich.That's fine so far as it goes, but it only goes so far. You could easily imagine a somewhat more regressive tax structure that leads to a more progressive country. That's the case in Europe where more regressive taxes fund a much more progressive welfare state. The middle class pays more in health care taxes but gets much more in services.
That "gets" part is crucial. And it gestures towards the problem with our debate over taxation: It's all about what we pay and never about what we get. Nobody wants to give money to Wal-Mart. But many people would like to give money to Wal-Mart in exchange for a large jar of pickles. Similarly, no one wants to give money to the federal government. But it's possible that many people would prefer to give $5,000 to the government rather than $7,000 to a private health insurer. Instead, we talk about rolling back the Bush tax cuts and changing the itemized deduction and the importance of never raising taxes on 95 percent of Americans. It comes off as taxation for taxation's sake, and politicians are reduced to targeting the rich because they're simply aren't that many of them.
If you’re interested in some good analysis of the importance of Barack Obama’s Prague speech framing his non-proliferation goals in terms of a long-term effort to entirely rid the world of nuclear weapons, I would recommend this from Steve Coll in The New Yorker, this editorial from The Economist, this piece by Peter Scoblic in The New Republic. You can also see brief statements from figures ranging from Chuck Hagel and Lawrence Eagelburger to Mary Robinson and Desmond Tutu courtesy of the excellent group Global Zero.
Alternatively, you could listen to New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz who snifs that “nuclear weapons have served the world well” which will, of course, continue to be true right up until the day that we have a substantial nuclear exchange.
tristero: Pesticide Makers To Michelle Obama: Please Grow Tasteless, Chemically-Soaked Food
Looks like pesticide makers have been spraying themselves silly with their own products: Their brains have rotted. Go ahead, read the letter The Mid America CropLife Association (MACA) sent to Michelle Obama. It would be funny if it weren't for the simple fact that it's not in the slightest bit funny, given the unbelievably unhealthy way we Americans typically grow, distribute, and consume our food:As you go about planning and planting the White House garden, we respectfully encourage you to recognize the role conventional agriculture plays in the U.S in feeding the ever-increasing population, contributing to the U.S. economy and providing a safe and economical food supply.For some reason or another, the letter fails to mention the latest recall of pistachios or a recent report that food safety is no longer improving:Roughly 76 million people in the United States suffer foodborne illnesses each year, 300,000 are hospitalized, and 5,000 die, according to C.D.C. estimates. Children younger than 4 are sickened by food more than those in any other age group, but adults over age 50 suffer more hospitalizations and death as a result of food-related infections."It should be mentioned that most of the food safety issues are the result of growing food industrially, as monocultures, not simple organic gardens like the one at the White House. And pesticides used in the vast quantities in which they are used to maintain these artificial monocultures contribute in numerous ways to undermining the quality of our food. See The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan, for example.
Never mind. They were so proud of their letter that they forwarded it to their supporters with a cover letter that asked:Did you hear the news? The White House is planning to have an "organic" garden on the grounds to provide fresh fruits and vegetables for the Obama's and their guests. While a garden is a great idea, the thought of it being organic made Janet Braun, CropLife Ambassador Coordinator and I shudder.You can sign a petition to oppose these creeps here. I strongly suggest you do.
Daily Kos' BarbinMD Some-Say "Journalism"
There's nothing like a little rightwing editorializing from the so-called liberal media.
From the Associated Press:
Still, it goes some way toward dispelling the notion that a liberal Democrat with a known distaste for war — Obama campaigned on his consistent opposition to the Iraq invasion — doesn't have the chops to call on U.S. military power.
... and the Washington Post:
Nonetheless, it may help to quell criticism leveled at Obama that he came to office as a Democratic antiwar candidate who could prove unwilling or unable to harness military might when necessary.
Before regurgitating talking points, perhaps the AP and Washington Post could have done "the google," and found Obama's 2002 speech on the Iraq War:
I don't oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war ... That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.
... and from candidate Obama:
We're confronting an urgent crisis in Afghanistan, and we have to act ... I would send two to three additional brigades to Afghanistan.
So, whose notion and whose criticism was the AP and Washington Post citing? Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh? Seriously, could anymore garbage be packed into two short sentences?
As Spencer Ackerman at The Washington Independent pointed out:
And that’s a meme that just ... doesn’t exist beyond some of the more fevered conservative imaginations. And not even that many fevered conservative imaginations!
Apparently we can add the AP and Washington Post to the ranks of the fevered.
Think Progress: Astroturf campaign uses fake letters from senior citizens to push for Medicare Advantage.
The Eagle-Tribune reports that a lobbying group hired by America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade group for insurance companies, is waging a pro-Medicare Advantage astroturf campaign. The Dewey Sqaure Group, a consulting group founded by Democratic operatives, sent letters to the editor purportedly written by seniors urging support of the costly private Medicare plans, which the Obama administration plans to eliminate. However, some of these seniors had never written any such letters; a few didn’t even know what Medicare Advantage was:
A letter supposedly from Ana Abascal of Lawrence said she “wanted to express how important my Medicare Advantage health plan is to me and other fixed-income seniors in my community.”
But when contacted by The Eagle-Tribune, Abascal was shocked and concerned to learn someone was using her name on a letter to the editor. She did not know what the Medicare Advantage plan was.
The Eagle-Tribune writes that the “tip off” to the fake campaign came when a man who turned out to be a Dewey intern called the paper to check if a letter from Gloria Gosselin had been published, falsely claiming to be Gosselin’s grandson. (HT: Romenesko)
Yglesias: The Uncaring Public
Everyone’s already said what needs to be said about the most Broderific aspects of David Broder’s latest column but I wanted to take a stab at another angle it contains:
It is the reaction of those swing voters — or the politicians’ anticipation of their shifting opinion — that drives the outcome of the big policy debates. You’ve had an example of this already with Obama’s cap-and-trade proposal for protecting the environment from carbon discharges.
Swing voters aside, there’s just very little reason at all to believe that public opinion has much of anything to do with the cap and trade debate. I got a briefing recently based on a pretty in-depth look at public opinion on climate energy issues and one clear finding is that the overwhelming majority of people have no idea what the phrase “cap and trade” refers to. And they certainly don’t have opinions about questions like auctioning permits or giving them away. People don’t pay that much attention to politics, and tend not to form detailed opinions about policy questions.
If anything, causation is likely to go the other way. If Barack Obama starts talking in high-profile situations about how it would be great if we had some “cap and trade” then people will start forming opinions about the policy based on their opinions about Obama. After all, Obama is something almost everyone has opinions about. People also have opinions about their local elected officials. If Mary Landrieux (D-LA) and David Vitter (R-LA) were to both start telling constituents and local media that there’s an idea called “cap and trade” and it’s bad for Louisiana and likely to kill jobs, then many Louisianans will conclude that this bipartisan consensus probably reflects some larger truth about the Louisiana economy.
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