Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Tuesday Lunch: civic order Edition

The NYT's new conservative columnist, Ross Douthat, embarrassed himself with A Hole in the Center. The Comments were not kind. Hint: to die for.

DAVID BROOKS:
Democrats have been able to establish themselves as the safe and orderly party. President Obama has made responsibility his core theme and has emerged as a calm, reassuring presence (even as he runs up the debt and intervenes rashly in sector after sector).

If the Republicans are going to rebound, they will have to re-establish themselves as the party of civic order. First, they will have to stylistically decontaminate their brand. That means they will have to find a leader who is calm, prudent, reassuring and reasonable.

Then they will have to explain that there are two theories of civic order. There is the liberal theory, in which teams of experts draw up plans to engineer order wherever problems arise. And there is the more conservative vision in which government sets certain rules, but mostly empowers the complex web of institutions in which the market is embedded.

Both of these visions are now contained within the Democratic Party. The Republicans know they need to change but seem almost imprisoned by old themes that no longer resonate. The answer is to be found in devotion to community and order, and in the bonds that built the nation.
Pizza politics May 4: A pizza parlor in Arlington, Va. was host to a GOP event, featuring former governors Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney, and current Sen. Eric Cantor, R-VA. Is this the best way to make the Republican Party seem cool again?

Chris in Paris: 9/11-style commission for financial crisis?
Warts and all, I'll take it. Yes, it won't be perfect and I'm sure there will be moments that are infuriating much like during the 9/11 commission but it's still better than letting Congress doddle and do nothing. There is so much blame to go around on this meltdown and neither party are immune from playing their own role. Exposing even a small bit of this will be valuable. We're all going to have major frustrations but at least we won't be subjected to the President sitting on the lap of the VP during testimony. Surely it can't get that pathetic...can it? The Huffington Post:
The House of Representatives came to agreement on Monday afternoon on the establishment of a 9/11-styled commission that would be independent of Congress and granted the power of subpoena to investigate the origins of the financial crisis.

Aides on the Hill said that the House will likely vote on the measure Wednesday, adding that the chances of passage were high. The office of the bill's cosponsor, Congressman Darrell Issa, said the legislation would be similar to that recently passed by the Senate.


Tax shelter crackdown May 4: President Obama today vows to crack down on companies who avoid paying some taxes by stashed their money in offshore accounts. How can this help the economy? Rachel Maddow is joined by Senior White House economist Austan Goolsbee.

DougJ: What’s the end game here?

One thing I haven’t read much about is how the Specter switch impacts the Franken-Coleman thing:

“This makes it pretty darn important,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, of the race following Specter’s switch. “I expect they will pursue the appeals until they are exhausted, whenever that may be. … I would assume if they were unsuccessful in the Minnesota Supreme Court, there may very well be an appeal to the United States Supreme Court.”

Democrats, meanwhile, are planning a full-scale public pressure campaign to force Coleman to concede should the court affirm a three-judge panel’s ruling that Al Franken is the winner. Democrats have already begun using the race’s elevated importance to raise money, and they’re mounting a fresh campaign to pressure Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a Republican, to sign an election certificate once the state Supreme Court rules.

“Pawlenty’s signature is very, very important,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic chairman of the Rules and Administration Committee, which oversees election disputes. “We expect it to happen after the Supreme Court of Minnesota rules. …. If he refuses to sign, we’ll have to cross that bridge when we come to it.”

I will not be at all surprised if Scalia-Kennedy-Roberts-Thomas-Kennedy-Alito find a way to reverse the results and seat Coleman. I just hope that Franken has the dignity to deal with this in a bipartisan way.

Think Progress: Al Jazeera report: U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan have Pashto Bibles, told to ‘hunt people for Jesus.’

A report by Al Jazeera English shows soldiers in Afghanistan passing around Bibles in Pashto and Dari, the languages of Afghanistan, presumably to be distributed. The chaplain leading the discussion acknowledges that “proselytizing” is against military rules, but one soldier says, “you can give gifts“:

But in another piece of footage taken by Hughes, the chaplains appear to have found a way around the regulation known as General Order Number One.

“Do we know what it means to proselytise?” Captain Emmit Furner, a military chaplain, says to the gathering.

“It is General Order Number One,” an unidentified soldier replies.

But [Sergeant Jon] Watt says “you can’t proselytise but you can give gifts“.

A military spokeswoman said the Bibles “were never distributed as far as we know.” The Al Jazeera report also shows Lt. Col. Gary Hensley, the chief of the US military chaplains in Afghanistan, telling a congregation of U.S. servicemembers that their job as Christian is to “hunt people for Jesus.” “That’s what we do, that’s our business,” he said. Watch it:



Sully They Tortured With Good Will

Condi Rice tries to walk back her statement that if Bush authorized something, it was not illegal. She says instead - in a cosy conversation with Leon Wieseltier - that the president ordered that interrogation go to the limits of the legal. My own sense, from a few off-the-record conversations as well, is that president Bush simply said: do what you have to do, but make sure it's legal. Cheney ran with that. Bush meant it as cover. He needed legal cover to torture in a systematic way. And, because this was the Bush administration, they did what the great leader asked. Even though it was, in fact, impossible. And was impossible. And so America became a torturing country. And Rice sat by and let it happen. And now wants to be in polite society.

I do not believe in being polite to war criminals. I believe in prosecuting them.

Telling torture's tale Countdown May 4: The New Yorker's Jane Mayer discusses the infighting among Bush administration officials about what to admit about torture.


Justice for Sessions? May 4: Now that Sen. Arlen Specter is moving to the Democrats' side, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-AL, is the likely choice to replace Specter as the ranking Republican in the Senate Judiciary Committee. How will that affect President Obama's choice to be the next Supreme Court justice? Rachel Maddow is joined by washingtonmonthly.com's Steve Benen.

Yglesias: Killing Health Reform With Kindness

Ezra Klein observes that Arlen Specter says he’s for the Wyden-Bennett approach to health care reform but also says he’s against eliminating the tax exemption for employer provided health care. Inconveniently, eliminating said deduction is part of the Wyden-Bennett plan. That’s how you pay for it.

My great fear is that this is how health care reform is going to die. A handful of very conservative members of congress may position themselves as “against” reform. But many people on the center and the right are going to say that they’re all for reform. They’re just going to be against particular things such that reform is impossible. When Barack Obama proposed reducing tax deductions for wealthy taxpayers, that idea died a swift and sudden death on the Hill. And you also don’t see Senators who are eager to start taxing health benefits. Nor do I see Senators who are eager to pay for health reform with steep cuts in defense spending or a new VAT or by raising income tax rates to above their Clinton-era levels. But I’m having trouble thinking of any other possible sources of revenue.

In other words, with all that stuff off the table, health reform dies.

Insofar as I’ve heard this discussed at all, it’s sort of been in the form of concern-trolling where people say progressives shouldn’t be expending so much energy on defending the idea of a public plan. But we should be clear on who the real villains are here—Senators in the center who killed the Obama administration’s revenue concept without either putting a new revenue concept on the table or admitting that their actions are imperiling health reform. Thus far, people have been very eager to build “momentum” for reform by trumpeting all the different people and groups who say they’re for reform. But you need to watch out for a scenario in which reform’s false friends kill it with kindness. If there’s a battle between white hats and black hats we can fight the battle and perhaps win. But if we let too many black hats inside the tent, then reform’s false friends can kill universal health care with kindness. In other words, as far as I’m concerned anyone who’s “for” health reform but “against” all the ways of paying for it is against reform. Someone who’s really for reform—like me—is for paying for reform through any reasonable measures.

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