Premise Loft

Tea Party: A Koch Industry

2012-01-11T15:15:00.000-08:00

Let’s call aspade a spade. Let’s call the Tea Party the Koch Party. The Koch Party is thetail that is wagging the GOP’s lead dog, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).

Thebillionaire brothers Charles and David Koch bankrolledTea Party groups from their beginning in addition to funding FreedomWorks,Americans for Prosperity, and Citizens for a Sound Economy. The Kochs have beenreferredto as “the financial engine of the Tea Party.” Their agenda opposes theextension of unemployment benefits, opposes a federal deficit, and calls for afreeze on federal regulations regarding oil, mining, and financialconcerns.

As the NewYorker reported, “In Washington, [David] Koch is best known as part ofa family that has repeatedly funded stealth attacks on the federal governmentand on the Obama Administration in particular.”

Just beforeChristmas Boehner’s song was that the Keystone XL pipeline was the keystone ofthe payroll tax cut bill. “We will make changes,” Speaker Boehnersaid. “I will guarantee you the Keystone pipeline will be in the bill whenit goes back to the Senate.” Increasing Canadian oil imports benefits KochIndustries, which is responsible for close to a quarter of the oil sands crudethat is imported into the United States. Pipeline approval would be a windfallfor Koch, with its deep involvement in the Canadian petroleum industry.

The Senategave the Speaker the song he wanted to sing, a payroll tax extension with thePipeline project rider. It then adjourned and left Washington. But the KochParty House members rebelled and the Speakers’ tune changed to another piece ofbrinkmanship, for which the 112^th Congress has become renowned. Atstake this time were 2 million Americans losing their long-term unemploymentbenefits and 160 million workers seeing their taxes rise by 2-percentagepoints.

FormerSpeaker NancyPelosi (D-CA) slammed the GOP. “The public has to be concerned and wonderingwhy on Earth are we not getting a payroll tax cut when everybody says they'refor it?" The answer to her question is the Koch Party, led by MajorityLeader Eric Cantor (R-VA), who opposedthe Senate bill and urged his caucus to reject it.

Job creation isjust the lip service that Speaker Boehner gave to the Keystone XL pipelineproject. Blocking the middle class tax cut could cost between 400,000 and 1million American jobs. Jobs are not on the Koch Party agenda. Its Tea Partysurrogates do not understand who creates jobs or how a tax increase wouldimpact consumer spending. Koch Industries is big business concerned aboutregulations and corporate tax loop-holes.

Big businessdoes not create jobs: it eliminates jobs. Small business creates jobs,but it can only create jobs when consumer spending goes up.

Well-fundedRepublicans do not grasp the concept that taking $40 a month away from theaverage US households is hardly a way to increase consumer spending. Thenon-partisan NationalFederation of Independent Business says, “It is going to take a rebound inconsumer spending, particularly in the service sector to make a significantdent in the number of unemployed. The manufacturing sector is doing very well,but it does not create many jobs.”

The KochParty has had a strategy for the 2012 election. In order to thwart the re-electionof President Barack Obama, it has exercised considerable effort to keepunemployment high and to restrain economic growth. The effect has been for theHouse of Representatives to abdicate its legislative responsibilities to theSenate and to fomenta split between the two chambers.

However, theKoch Party strategy is flawed. Its usual Rupert Murdoch ally, the WallStreet Journal, critiqued, “After a year of the tea party House, Mr.Obama and Senate Democrats have had to make no major policy concessions beyondextending the Bush tax rates for two years. Mr. Obama is in a strongerre-election position today than he was a year ago.”

TheRepublican Party has not necessarily sold out to big business such as KochIndustries. The GOP has been traditionally regarded as the party of business.But it is difficult and expensive to be elected to congress, let alone to thepresidency. So MittRomney, who has been courting a Koch endorsement, took no sides on thepayroll tax standoff. Nor has the Koch Party endorsed his candidacy. They donot trust him.

Koch money fundedand organized its surrogate Tea Party wing of the GOP. However, the Koch Partyhas yet to produce anything other than obstruction of the legislative process,record low congressional approval ratings, and a downgrade of the US creditrating. The Koch Party assertion that such an achievement record is what voterssent them to do in 2010 is dubious. The Speaker and his party are going to takea hit. A big hit.

Gingrich: The Honest Liar

2011-12-27T15:45:00.000-08:00

HermanCain quit. That he has suspended his campaign means that he can still raisemoney. How presidential. I feel for Cain's followers, especially the ones whodonated their money and their time to his populist posturing. However, I do notfeel anything but contempt for their candidate. Narcissists never apologize foranything, like dishonesty. It is not the alleged sexless extramarital business,which he denies; it is his dishonesty that has further disqualified him.

Strategicambiguity aside, Newt Gingrich will do the same thing as Cain – raise money onthe pretense of a further presidential campaign. At least, Newt is an honestliar. He admits it. But, lying is still dishonest.

RepresentativeBarney Frank (D-MA) said that Newt Gingrich is dishonest. Frank called Gingrich“fundamentallyintellectually dishonest” about the former House Speaker’s consultingcontract with Freddie Mac. Frank used the word “ludicrous” during a recentMSNBC interview onthe topic. Then again, there have been words between these former colleagues. Gingrichsaid the Representatives Frank and Chris Dodd “should be jailed” for theiroversight of the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in one of the GOP debates. So,Frank qualified “dishonest.”

In fact, as Bloombergreported, Gingrich made between $1.6 million and $1.8 million in consultingfees from two contracts with mortgage company Freddie Mac. Gingrich said thathe provided only “strategic advice” over an eight year period. The Gingrich assertionhas been since that such advice is not lobbying. Obfuscation notwithstanding,it is paid political influence wielding. We are supposed to forget about that justas we were supposed to forget about the multiple Herman Cain sexual harassmentcase settlements. Bygones are supposed to be bygones. The truth is irrelevant.

For examples,ten years ago when he ran for president, Gingrich said, “I helped balance thebudget for four straight years. We didit by cutting taxes and bringing the unemployment rate below 4%." He saidthat on “Meetthe Press.” It was not true then and it has not become true now. President Clinton's1993 taxincrease on the wealthy lead to a booming economy, after it passed withouta single Republican vote. That Mr. Gingrich is known for saying misleading andcontradictory things, however, does not cover such dishonesty.

Consider theMonica Lewinsky affair. The former Speaker of the House engaged in anextramarital affair at the same time he was going after President Clinton forone. Gingrich admitted it in a 2009 broadcast interview, “There are times thatI have fallen short of my own standards.” Moreover, he argued that he shouldnot be viewed as ahypocrite for pursuing the impeachment of Clinton over infidelity. Perhaps,more accurately, he meant his “double standards.”

The HouseEthics Committee went after Gingrich on numerous ethics charges. They foundProfessor Gingrich wrongly used tax-exempt funds to teach a college course. TheHouse reprimanded him for his using tax-exempt funds to promote Republicancauses and then lying about it to ethics investigators. Gingrich paid a$300,000 fine in 1997. The next year, facing with a revolt within his party, heresigned the speakership and quit the House of Representatives.

Cain cavedbecause of his dishonesty. Gingrich has admitted to and paid for his. So thequestion is, do voters prefer a known liar to a discovered liar? With the Cain cancelation,eyes will focus on the comeback of Newt Gingrich. He has truly been there anddone that. Under the circumstances, however, I have to question the veracity ofa Gingrich candidacy. Dishonesty is still dishonesty, even if one is honestabout it.

Articlefirst published as Gingrich: The Honest Liar on Blogcritics.

Wishful Thinking

2011-12-21T10:52:00.000-08:00

The NewtGingrich candidacy for President is a cynical practical joke. He is not aserious presidential candidate. He is a recognizable figure promoting himselffor personal gain, tosell his books and indulge in some fantasy about a future Republican presidentialadministration, just not anytime soon. His only viability is to make MittRomney seem a more reasonable and safer candidate. Gingrich is the spice in anotherwise bland stew. The only expectation of him is for self-destructionwithin the next eleven months. It is not for him to become the President of theUnited States in 2012 and it never has been. It is for him to make more money.

But theGingrich candidacy has shed light on other things about the post-Bush weaknessesof the Republican Party. There is no credible expectation for the GOP to winthe national election against the incumbent Democratic president than there waswhen the Republican standard bearer was Senator John McCain. Media attentionalways follows shiny objects that move quickly in and out of headlines be itHerman Cain, Newt Gingrich or Michele Bachmann. Fame seekers are just fameseekers. There is no substance to them. Attracting attention does not count.

The 112^thCongress has done so much to discredit the Republican Party that Gallupreports, “About three-quarters of registered voters (76%) say most membersof Congress do not deserve re-election, the highest such percentage Gallup hasmeasured in its 19-year history of asking this question.” How that GOP majorityexpects to run on its record of obstruction and be returned for another term asthe majority party is wishful thinking. There is no record of accomplishment.There is only a documented record of opposition to a single person, PresidentBarack Obama.

The countryis not “Chokingon Obamacare.” The country has not had time to taste, eat, or digest itbecause most of its 10 provisions will not go into effect until after 2014. Justbecause conservatives recite those three words does not make the comment so.

The 111^thCongress passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). Thatthe PPACA is remarkably similar to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health carelegislation has been hashed and rehashed so much so that it has become aliability to Romney, especially in the “flip-flop” category.

I do not singleout columnist George Will as an ardent wishful thinker, either. Theconservative pundits have their own problems with which Will is not alone. Theytend to nod with favor towards Gingrich as a man of great intellect and of bigideas. To borrow a Richard Nixonquote, "That's just plain poppycock." It isn’t true. Gingrich maycome across as smart compared with Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and MicheleBachmann. Compared with people of true intellect, however, Gingrich is apretender.

What arethose big GOP ideas for government? They seem limited. Repealing a law that hasnot been completely implemented, abolishing abortion, repealingthe Great Society, and replacing President Obama are less than noble ideas.

The wealthyprofessor and the wealthy businessman are tribunes of a cause that is limitedfor a nation in the midst of a turn-around. The only reason for a Gingrichcandidacy is a Romney candidacy. The only reason for a Romney candidacy is thatthe GOP has to run someone. Romney winning is wishful thinking.

Articleoriginally published as “SoMuch Wishful Thinking” on Blogcritics.

Buying Bad Ideas

2011-12-08T14:48:00.000-08:00

There are a lot of expressions for bad ideas, like shooting one’s self in the foot. A bad idea is simply one that does not work. The problem is that from time to time, both as ourselves and as a people, we do not recognize a bad idea when we encounter it. The danger comes when for whatever reason -- ignorance, stubbornness or hubris – we stick with a bad idea to our detriment. Unfortunately, bad ideas tend to compound themselves. We have been suffering from that effect.

Consider the candidacy of the former governor of Alaska for Vice President. At the outset it is with some reluctance that I acknowledge a grudging gratitude to Sarah Palin. Until she appeared on television as if a human bridge to nowhere, nothing compelled me to engage in a political debate that I considered both cyclical and one-sided. The cyclical part was the fact that the country was due to change political leadership after an eight year Republican run, which is something that the country does. The one-sided part was the fact that the Democratic Party had emerged from a climactic contest between two compelling and competent Senate candidates, one of whom destined to become a historic first as President of the United States.

An oblivious Palin seemed to take herself seriously, saying stupid things and celebrating such stupidity. It offended me. I minded and began saying so. I minded that Palin did not speak any American language I would expect to hear from a competent executive. It was not alright, folksy or cute. But I underestimated the “moose-hunting rube,” as columnist Charles Krauthammer referred to her in the National Review.

Palin reminded me of one of the most vapid students in my high school graduating class who was the vice president of student body and vice president of at least a half-a-dozen high school clubs. The girl had a mid-double-digit IQ and passable looks. She would have been rather doltish except that she knew how to glom. She would stick to and campaign for the more popular students, thereby elevating her status in the high school social pool. She was a person who was never troubled by an original thought, just like Sarah Palin. The difference is that the high school girl understood the limitations that make bliss of ignorance. Palin did not.

Palin wowed conservatives like the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol and Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, who told the New York Observer that Palin was “a mix between Annie Oakley and Joan of Arc.” Soon after, Palin brought self-aggrandizement to a new level as she energized the baseness of the Republican base – people who use racial epithets in private when they explain that they just don’t like blacks. She appealed to people of limited educational backgrounds as she championed anti-intellectualism with a wink and a nod. She became a darling of Fox News, the moral equivalent of a grocery store tabloid for people who do not read and who feel threatened by people who do.

People at Republican rallies began to shell out big bucks to hear her cheerlead and Palin noticed.

The Republican Party’s self-inflicted loss in 2008 is due as much to its selection of Sarah Palin for Vice President as the country’s guts being full of the Bush Presidency. A 2008 New York Times editorial said of her choice for VP, “It was either an act of incredible cynicism or appallingly bad judgment.” It was a bad idea. But having proved to be such a draw, the crowd pleasing Palin glommed on to the burgeoning Tea Party – another bad idea – and became an influential force.

With Palin on the payroll, Fox News aggressively promoted negativity and hostility, specifically towards the newly elected president. The Tea Party appeared to resuscitate the out-of-power GOP in the mid-term elections. Republicans believed it was important to take control of congress’ lower chamber more so than Democrats and they did, kind of. Reciting an edited version of the US Constitution, the GOP majority of the 112^th Congress had no idea that it had been infected by such a polarizing group. Its anti-government/anti-tax/anti-Obama negativity proved to sell to an electorate suffering from a deep, GOP induced repression.

However, the new Speaker of the House soon discovered that he only controlled a majority of the new Republican plurality. The Tea Party faction held it hostage. Compromise was futile. Government shutdowns and default threats became normal operating procedures.

As a result this bad idea, Gallup reported in September, “Majorities of Democrats (65%) and Republicans (92%) are dissatisfied with the nation's governance.” At present, “Congressional job approval remains at 13% in November, identical to October and tying the all-time Gallup low on this measure. The 2011 average is on track to be the lowest annual rating of Congress in Gallup's history.” What an accomplishment that is.

We are being bullied by the rhetoric of Tea Party acolytes in the Republican Party into thinking that the United States is not a prosperous country, despite evidence to the contrary. We are being coerced into thinking that taxation is too high, even though it is at its lowest point in 60 years. We are being fed a line that our economic policy needs to be austere and rife with cuts. Such contentious conjectures are bad ideas.

There are better ones. For example, here is what President Lyndon Johnson said in his January 28, 1965 message to Congress.

"The task of economic policy is to create a prosperous America. The unfinished task of prosperous Americans is to build a Great Society. Our accomplishments have been many; these tasks remain unfinished:

- to achieve full employment without inflation;

- to restore external equilibrium and defend the dollar;

- to enhance the efficiency and flexibility of our private and public economies;

- to widen the benefits of prosperity;

- to improve the quality of American life."

Palin and her gibberish have been replaced by other people every bit as unqualified for high public office as she who similarly say stupid things. Negativity and attack ads directed at the incumbent president remains the top Republican theme. Fox News is a beneficiary of the advertising revenue but the country is not. I am not convinced that the electorate will buy into more such negativity as a winning proposition as it did in 2010. It isn’t a winner. In its celebrated ignorance, it asks us to buy some more of a bad idea.

Originally published as Buying Bad Ideas on Blogcritics.

The Something Missing

2011-11-27T19:17:00.000-08:00

You have doubtless had the experience that something is missing and you don’t know what that something is. You would know instantly if you came across the missing something and I am not referring to Governor Rick Perry’s much discussed television lapse, although I could. Because it was the surplus of televised debates that had been on my mind and something about them was missing. Then it occurred to me out of the thin television air. It was as if someone had snuck up behind me and popped a paper bag full of air. Ohio’s Republican Governor John Kasich used the words “public servant” -- the missing concept revealed.

"My view is when people speak like this in a campaign referendum," Mr. Kasich said, “you have to listen if you're a public servant.” Ohio overwhelmingly rejected a law that restricted the collective-bargaining power of some 350-thousand government workers. Now, that law that Kasich championed will never take effect.

But it is the idea of public service that has been missing in the Republican debates because it is all about them and not about us.

In the last decade US television audiences began their affair with so-called reality TV shows. Suspending the notion that such shows have production requisites -- like cameras, lights, audio, make-up, direction, catering, transportation and lots of folks behind the scenes – reality is just an abstraction. The sponsored GOP debates are also such an abstraction in addition to being a relatively cheap shoot. They are to professional politics what wrestling is to professional sports.

It’s like watching a reality version of Gilligan’s Island as an elimination game show. Just look at the cast. Seven contestants are or have been elected public officials and one has never held an elected public office. Three candidates are from the House of Representatives and one is from the Senate. Two are former governors and one is a sitting governor. There is a white woman, a black man, two white seniors and four middle-aged white men. Republicans call this diversity.

100% divided by 8 equals 12.5%. Polls only make the television event dubious.

Here is what is apparent. Gallup shows that Huntsman, Santorum and Paul do not register among likely Republican voters. What that means is that the money is not there. Gallup also reports that Romney, who has been running for president for five years, is the most likely to make it to the finals of the contest to win the Republican nomination. He is dull. So is the contest. There is no debating. Except for Perry’s lapse, debate moderator John Harwood said on PBS Washington Week, the television show would have only been about people reciting lines. The Perry gaffe made it interesting.

Only interesting.

The Tea Party stains Bachmann and Cain: Bachmann, who thinks US default on its debt is good and Cain, who thinks sexual harassment is an acceptable management style. Age dims Paul and Gingrich: the Libertarian and the former Speaker could be a formidable tag-team for one presidential term, as US comic relief in a troubled world. Texas dung sticks to Perry’s pointed-toe boots, by his admission, and it stinks.

By the way, Romney and Perry may have the campaign money, but their support of US military intervention in Iran lacks money. They have not said how they would have the US pay for yet another war. Neither did George W. Bush, the former Republican president, who paid for two wars by deficit spending.

So, what about public service? There isn’t any. Romney knows what it is but won’t admit it. Huntsman and Santorum know what it is but lack the money to demonstrate it. Bachmann and Cain do not comprehend what it is. Paul and Gingrich are just there for the show. And none of them mention public service – that something missing in their television show.

The Republican Brand: An Empty Hat

2011-11-22T11:42:00.000-08:00

The GOP became the removed-from-power party when Barack Obama won the 2008 election. The Republican Party ran a Senate veteran with a relatively novice politician to follow its flawed Presidential incumbency. They lost the election. The GOP squandered time for the necessity of rebuilding in favor of expedience. By the midterm elections it embraced a faction called the Tea Party. In so doing, the GOP became fractious, forgetting that it took six years for candidate Richard Nixon to successfully reinvent the Nixon brand: Nixon’s the One. Nixon had a plan. The Republican debates demonstrate no such plans from its cast of candidates and puts the brand in jeapordy.

To its credit the Republican National Committee replaced Michael Steele at its helm. However, the RNC retained the same elite hypocrisy as the John Boehner House speakership demonstrates. Being the party of business became the party owned by business. The recent debt ceiling crisis and deficit debate debacle that Speaker Boehner allowed makes matter worse. It difficult to argue that such GOP stewardship has been looking after the best interest of its stock holders, Republican and Independent voters. Some observers allege that the disparities in the Republican Party stem from ideological differences. However, those allegations are phony.

One might think that it must be hard to be both phony and shallow. Failure to distance the Republican brand from its Tea Party faction as well as from self-appointed spokespeople like Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin has corralled the GOP into a political pen. Bigots have come to roost. The Republican debates may have demonstrated reach and audience, but the star candidates lack substance. They are becoming highly paid political celebrities who are famous for being famous. Unfortunately, that is all there is to them. They don’t stand for anything; they stand against things, President Obama foremost among all. They don’t represent anyone other than themselves. A television audience is a poor substitute for a constituency.

The concept of “take the country back” deserves derision, not applause. It is an expression of rube rhetoric that may sound good but does not mean anything. Does it mean taking the country back to another time in history, like before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- an idea floated by Rand Paul? Does it mean taking the country away from a person or from a group? I ask because neither the President nor the Congress is a foreign occupier of our government. Even so, the Tea Party faction likes the “take back” slogan fragment because it is an identifier, like a verbal secret handshake.

Although they won’t admit it, the Tea Party folks are pissed off because they lost the most important election of our time in 2008. They have hated the loss now for three years. They will continue to hate it for another five years if the secret handshakers in Congress continue to make the O in GOP stand for obstruction.

There is a limit to just how much empty-hat policy the country will tolerate. Griping about everything the president does or doesn’t do is no substitute for policies on issues such as civil rights, ending the wars, and immigration reform. Karl Rove’s acolytes drove Hispanics and Blacks from the GOP to appeal to the white Christian right. That was their master plan, their conservative agenda. Gallup reports, “The Republican Party in 2011 remains demographically and ideologically similar to the way it looked in 2008. The only change is that “Republicans are now slightly less likely than they were in 2008 to be male and to be highly religious.”

The Tea Party rejuvenated the GOP sufficiently in the midterm elections to keep it out of any meaningful rehabilitation. Had it undergone rehab, the Republican Party would have admitted it is powerless over the greed that subsidizes it and that subsequently tarnished America’s reputation and finances. It would have made amends to everyone it hurt, like the American people. Seeking some forgiveness is no longer an option. Repudiation is in order, such as bringing criminal charges against Bush, Cheney and Rove -- indicting them with high crimes and misdemeanors.

Instead, the GOP has served up a meaningless series of television debates among candidates who are incompetent for the presidency. The debates offered lots of talking points but no policy, just empty-hat ritual and rube rhetoric. The debates showed that the party lacks the courage for the conciliation required to rebuild the Republican constituency. It will require those attributes for the Republican brand to become inclusionary, to end obstructionism and to become a smart, loyal opposition.

The “O” in GOP stands for “Old.” The elephant logo dates from 1874. It looks like something one would expect to find hanging on the wall at Applebee’s. I can venerate the GOP for what it once was in my father’s lifetime. “I like Ike” was then. Today, the GOP brand is like old-time religion -- significant to a former time, just not to this time. The once venerable Republican Party has become more about political celebrities, who vie for money by denigrating the incumbent president than it is about conservative policies articulated by credible candidates. Deep down inside, it is shallow.

End Sweeping the Voting Rights Act

2011-11-14T11:39:00.000-08:00

The good news about the Voter ID law debate is what it demonstrates: the modern GOP’s antipathy to civil rights. The concerted state level effort to end-sweep the constitution is a cynical attempt to limit the electoral process in the knowledge that it will not be litigated until after the damage is done. The GOP knows that the lower the voter turnout in 2012, the better prospect their party has in the national election. However, despite financing, hypocritical rhetoric and a dependence on public ignorance, these new state Voter ID laws violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

“Millions of Americans are denied the right to vote because of their color. This law will ensure them the right to vote. The wrong is one which no American in his heart can justify. The right is one which no American true to our principles can deny.” President Lyndon Johnson made those remarks before Congress on August 6, 1965, when he signed the Voting Rights Act into law.

Extended in 1970, 1975, 1982, and 2006, the VRA codifies and effectuates the 15th Amendment's permanent guarantee that no person shall be denied the right to vote on account of race or color. During the Reagan Administration, Congress amended Section 2 of the law. It prohibits any voting practice or procedure that has a discriminatory result and states that proof of intentional discrimination is not required. The provision focuses instead on whether the electoral processes are equally accessible to minority voters. New Voter ID laws are not.

The GOP falsely claims that widespread voter fraud exists. Once upon a time it did.

Electoral fraud by ballot box stuffing, throwing out non-Democratic votes, or counting them for the Democrats even when cast for the opposition, was the norm in the Southern states before legal means of voter disenfranchisement became entrenched. Republicans, who have passed almost all of the new election laws, say they are necessary to prevent voter fraud. The rhetoric is flawed.antee that no person shall be denied the right to vote on account of race or color. During the Reagan Administration, Congress amended Section 2 of the law. It prohibits any voting practice or procedure that has a discriminatory result and states that proof of intentional discrimination is not required.

In a Wall Street Journal column Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach wrote, "You can't cash a check, board a plane, or even buy full-strength Sudafed over the counter without ID.” Kobach is the co-author of Arizona's SB 1070 illegal immigration law and former Counsel to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft. “That's why it's not unreasonable to require one in order to protect our most important privilege of citizenship."

Nice try, but voting is not a privilege. Voting is constitutional right. There is no Bill of Privileges.

Rolling Stone reports that 38 states have introduced legislation designed to impede voters at every step of the electoral process. Alabama and Kansas require new voters to provide proof of citizenship before registering. Registration drives for new voters by groups like the League of Women Voters in Texas and Florida are now restricted. Maine’s Election Day voter registration, which had been on the books since 1973, has been repealed. Moreover, early voting periods have been shortened in Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia.

These new laws could make it significantly harder for more than five million eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012, according to the New York University School of Law. At a time when the United States continues to turn out less than two thirds of its eligible citizens in presidential elections and less than half in midterm elections, the states that have already cut back on voting rights will provide 171 electoral votes in 2012 -- 63% of the 270 needed to win the presidency.

Most cynically, an internal memo circulated by executive assistant of the Wisconsin Department of Transportation Steve Krieser, instructs employees: "While you should certainly help customers who come in asking for a free [Voter] ID to check the appropriate box, you should refrain from offering the free version to customers who do not ask for it." Obtaining a state-issued photo ID for the purpose of voting is actually free of charge. But if voters don't specifically ask for the free ID, they'll get charged $28.

Can you say “Poll Tax?”

"There is cost no matter what, whether they give these IDs out for free or not," said the executive director of One Wisconsin Now, Scot Ross. "There is a cost that you would not normally have to bear in order to be an eligible voter."

Even if an ID is free, getting the documents to obtain it can be expensive and difficult. For example, a U.S. passport costs as much as $145. Naturalization papers can run up to $200. A birth certificate in Texas costs $22. People born out of state who lack transportation, work multiple jobs, have disabilities, or are home-bound or poor cannot access or afford this paperwork.

It took the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to prohibit the poll tax in state elections. The Supreme Court independently declared poll taxes an unconstitutional violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections. Congress applied a nationwide prohibition against the denial or abridgment of the right to vote based on literacy tests. However, the modern GOP seeks to end-sweep the VRA in specific and Constitution in general.

President Johnson said, “The denial of the right to vote is still a deadly wrong.” That denial is the effect of new Voter ID laws. As LBJ admonished Congress in 1965, "There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem.”

Article first published as End Sweeping the Voting Rights Act on Blogcritics.

Class Warfare: Boo--Hiss

2011-10-06T14:42:00.000-07:00

Well, “Boo-Hiss,” say the Republicans. “It’s class warfare!” They object to the president, of course. That is just doing their Republican job. It is politics, after all, and they have to object to the incumbent Democrat chief executive and all things Obama. But the GOP would prefer that we have no perspective, as evidenced in the “class warfare” mantra and that oft repeated and tired bit about a “resounding defeat in 2010” referring to the mid-term election. That “referendum on the Obama presidency” elected a fractured Republican majority that now has approval ratings that are approaching single digits. Boo-Hiss.

Class warfare, huh? Let’s talk about that. The richest 10 % of Americans control two-thirds of the nation’s wealth. Between 1979 and 2007, the income gap between the richest 1% of Americans and the poorest 40% more than tripled. Statistically speaking, 88% of the increase in real national income went to corporate profits as the US economy grew in 2009 and 2010. Recently released census data shows that real incomes of average Americans declined by 2.3% in 2010. If it is class warfare, the rich are the only ones doing the fighting.

The 112^th Congress has yet to address the fact that almost one in 10 Americans is unemployed and 15% live at or below the poverty level. It cannot even get the government funded for more than a few weeks at a time. But I have written a lot about the Republican majority inventing problems it wants to solve and I want to stick with class warfare. The real problem, as opposed to a make believe one, is that the president is not in capitulation mode, anymore. In fact, Obama is taking the argument to the Republicans with the American Jobs Act and calling them out in the process. He has gone on offense. Boo-Hiss, again.

"We're going to see if congressional Republicans will put country before party," Obama told the crowd of union members in Detroit. "The time for Washington games is over. The time for action is now. No more manufactured crises. No more games. Now is not the time for the people you sent to Washington to worry about their jobs; now is the time for them to worry about your jobs." That’s got to sting as only the truth can.

At a Denver campaign stop on September 20^th, the president told a crowd that Republicans in Washington have "a habit of becoming curiously deaf to the voice of the people. They have a hard time hearing what the ordinary people of the country are saying. But they have no trouble at all hearing what Wall Street is saying. They are able to catch the slightest whisper from big business and the special interests." That president was Harry S. Truman and the year was 1948. “What I am really telling you is not that the Republicans are coming, but they are here. They have been in Washington for the last 2 years in the form of the notorious Republican ‘do-nothing’80th Congress.”

Truman represented the middle class and took it to his Republican opposition who gave him a load of Boo-Hiss. “Big business is against any aid to the farmers, and the Republican leaders in Congress are the errand boys of big business and special privilege,” Truman told his Winona, Minnesota audience on October 14, 1948. He explained the term he had coined, a handle if you will, that the 112^th Congress is trying to avoid being called – “do-nothing.” Truman said, “That is why the Republican 80th ‘do-nothing’ Congress--I mean do nothing for the people, they did something for the special interests all right . . .”

Republican sympathizers like to point to President Obama’s decline in the polls, as if they are proud of their low polling numbers. It is a point that the administration notes as well. Republicans pointed to Truman’s polling more 60 years ago, too. In fact, here is the Gallup comparison of presidential approval in September: 1951 Truman -- Approve 32%, Disapprove 54%; 2011 Obama -- Approve 41%, Disapprove 51%.

“By 1948, Truman began to employ a more relaxed, folksy, and sometimes fiery speaking technique,” according to the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. “He combined both style and substance in launching effective attacks against the Republicans.” He took his argument to the people by train. On Truman's "whistle-stops”, he attacked the Republican Congress, warned that a Republicans White House would repeal the New Deal, and reminded voters that the Democrats had saved the country from the depression.

"If you give the Republicans complete control of this government, you might just as well turn it over to the special interests and we'll start on a boom and bust cycle and try to go through just what we did in the twenties. And end up with a crash which in the long run will do nobody any good but the Communists," he said. Truman won the 1948 election against all odds.

The Republican class warfare charge is also dated in our relatively recent political history. A Republican opposition originally accused President Franklin D. Roosevelt of turning class against class. Although FDR came from elite wealth, he championed the middle class in his opposition to such wealthy elite. “Government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob,” Roosevelt said. “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me and I welcome their hatred.” Evidently, so does Obama.

“If asking a millionaire to pay the same tax rate as a plumber or a teacher makes me a class warrior, a warrior for the middle class, I will accept that; I’ll wear that as a badge of honor,” President Obama said in a speech promoting his jobs bill recently in Denver. “Because the only class warfare I’ve seen is the battle that’s been waged against the middle class in this country for a decade now.” So President Obama’s new strategy is similar to Truman’s – be aggressive, push new ideas, and call out those who oppose him. They do not like him anyway.

Is it working for Obama? Just listen to the Boo-Hiss. The right’s most ardent Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer protests that Obama’s new tack is “anti-millionaire populism” from a “self-proclaimed class warrior.” Speaker John Boehner tweets, “Pitting one group of Americans against another is not leadership.” Yes, the Speaker of the House tweets.

Meanwhile, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney says, “Members of Congress will have a lot of explaining to do when they go home at the end of the year if they’ve done nothing, nothing, to address the urgent need to help our economy and create jobs. ... Their constituents are demanding it.”

American Enterprise Institute political scholar Norm Ornstein says, "Republicans came in believing the radical, conservative ideology is what voters were aiming for -- and more confrontation." However, President Obama’s inability to quickly solve the nation’s economic situation has only reinforced the right’s ideological advantage, according to others. Even though poll after poll shows that the public wants less confrontation, toned-down rhetoric and a spirit of bipartisanship, it has not worked for Obama.

The president has been recast. Like Truman before him, Obama has decided that populism only works when it is taken out of Washington and out of a studio. He has changed his tone and is again on the public speaking circuit. That the fractious right has taken up class warfare as an issue demonstrates that Republicans have become defensive. Boo-Hiss.

# # #

Article first published as Class Warfare: Boo--Hiss on Blogcritics.

The Tea Party Shutdown Movie

2011-09-26T14:27:00.000-07:00

Since January 5, 2011, for John Boehner (R-OH), his position as Speaker of the House has been just a title in words not in deed. The words are those of the 1789 US Constitution. The Speaker presides over the proceedings of the House and is the highest position in the House leadership. However, the deed is that Boehner does not demonstrate leadership of the majority party. The Tea Party wing that enabled the GOP to achieve its majority status has also rendered it factious. Once again it has compromised Boehner’s speakership by its handling of a Continuing Resolution to fund the government. Once again, oblivious to public opinion, House action threatens us with a government shutdown.

Tea Party Republicans defied their leaders and brought down a bill to keep the government running after September 30 because it did not meet their demands to make deeper spending cuts. In the past, disaster relief rushed out of Congress with strong backing from both parties. Not this time. Instead, the House Republicans made it the focus of a political issue: offsetting the cost of funding the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) with cuts elsewhere.

The bill failed. Boehner and his operatives cobbled together support for a slightly different but essentially similar bill. They brought some recalcitrant freshmen on board in video and photo opportunities with the old pros to recite sound bites, and then narrowly passed a stopgap bill two days later.

“We are now watching the Tea Party shutdown movie for the third time this year,” said Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) of the House not passing the CR. “The ending isn’t surprising,” Durbin said on MSNBC. “It isn’t even interesting anymore. They can’t get together the basic Republican votes on the House side to even pass the continuing resolution they agreed to just a few weeks ago, let alone some disaster aid for a country that’s been hard-hit by a lot of disasters.”

A Continuing Resolution is a temporary measure designed to buy time for negotiations to continue when the fiscal year ends. In the past, as with raising the debt ceiling, passing a stopgap was routine business. It becomes necessary when the House and Senate fail to agree on appropriations bills to fund government for a whole fiscal year, as is the case. Tea Party Republicans said they believed their party should push for deeper cuts at every turn. 50 of them signed a letter to Boehner calling for those deeper budget cuts and when those demands were not met, 48 of them voted against their own party’s bill.

So did Democrats, but for different reasons. Former Speaker of the House and now House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told reporters that Democrats believed disaster funds were for emergencies and no offset spending cuts would be acceptable to her members. Asked whether there might be any offset that House Democrats would back, Pelosi said, “I think I answered that question: there has never been an offset for disaster assistance.”

Boehner and other House leaders had to rewrite the measure to appease Democrats and to appeal to the Tea Party wing of their own party. Democrats saw the amount of disaster assistance as inadequate and objected to the Republicans’ insistence on offsetting some of the cost with cuts elsewhere. They remained nearly united against the measure. So, Boehner cracked the proverbial whip with his members and the revised bill passed by seven votes to go to the Senate in time for the House to go on recess.

"The House bill is not an honest effort at compromise," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV). "It fails to provide the relief that our fellow Americans need as they struggle to rebuild their lives in the wake of floods, wildfires and hurricanes, and it will be rejected by the Senate." Saying that he had hoped House Republicans would move toward the middle Reid said, "Instead, they moved even further toward the Tea Party." The Senate voted 59 to 36 to table the House bill, which effectively killed it.

The funding for the federal government got wrapped up into the debate about FEMA funding and they became tied together. Speaker Boehner had assumed and hoped that the stopgap bill to keep government operating until November 18 would be a routine matter, as such resolutions usually are. Instead, the matter blew up and illustrated that his control of the House majority only exists on paper.

The government’s funding will run out Friday evening, September 30, if something is not passed by then. Of course both Democrats and Republicans have repeatedly said that they do not want a government shutdown and they do not want to have FEMA run out of funds. However, just how they are going to achieve that is anything but clear.

So House Republicans decided to blame the Senate and its Majority Leader Harry Reid for the impasse. Led by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), they contend that the Senate is responsible for blocking desperately needed disaster dollars from flowing to FEMA.

“Harry Reid is now talking about perhaps bringing up a clean CR without disaster relief funding,” Cantor said, and that the House acted to provide the disaster relief. “If that happens, FEMA will run out of money, and it will be on Harry Reid’s shoulders because he won’t act,” Cantor said.

For the record, in October 2004, Cantor voted against an amendment to an emergency supplemental bill for disaster aid that would have "fully offset" the cost of that supplemental with "a proportional reduction of FY05 discretionary funding" elsewhere. The 2004 emergency supplemental was proposed after five hurricanes hit the United States, including Tropical Storm Gaston, which did damage to Cantor's home district of Richmond.

Meanwhile, Speaker Boehner shrugged off the defeat as the price of trying to get legislation through the democratic process. "I have no fear in allowing the House to work its will," he said. "Does it make my life a little more difficult? Yes it does." Boehner added, "There is no threat of a government shutdown. Let's just get this out there."

Are there philosophical differences within the Republican Party, as has been suggested in our media, particularly in the House of Representatives? If there are, that would require intelligence and thought such that would lend it to making compromises in the best interests of House member constituencies. As the polls suggest, however, that does not appear to be the case. Instead, the differences are not philosophical but ideological. That relies on slogans and sound bites, scripts that are rehearsed and recited that require neither thought nor care. Unfortunately, such last minute play acting is making the audience weary of disagreement and threats.

The threat of a government shutdown proved to be just a threat back in April. Likewise, the threat of government default proved to be just a threat in August, but with collateral credit rating fallout. With this threat of a government shutdown, it should be of little wonder that Gallup’s Congressional Approval poll finds 15% of Americans approve of Congress and 82% do not. It is also clear that despite his efforts, the current Speaker of the House is only the leader of the majority of the majority which has compromised his leadership. Boehner maybe acting as a leader, but he is just part of the audience.

# # #

Article originally published as The Tea Party Shutdown Movie on Blogcritics

Hating Obama and Raising Money

2011-09-19T13:53:00.000-07:00

There are two messages being sent to us by the House of Representatives. "Hate Obama. Vote Republican." The other message is, "Save the Rich. GOP Now." But, the question the American people want answered is, "How are you going to guide the country?" Pending focus groups, we’ll have to wait for an answer. Meanwhile, House Republicans showed the country that they do not think that trust is an issue. They did two things last week to prove that. First, they voted for the country to default, which would increase the deficit they oppose. Second, they voted to help send jobs overseas, which they excoriate. They also seek reelection at the time when their approval rating is less than 13% and expect the country to reward such delusional behavior.

That will work if the country is delusional, too.

On September 13 the House passed a resolution of disapproval of the debt ceiling deal that they passed in August. They had also granted themselves the right to pass a resolution saying they disapproved of it. They passed such a resolution. I did not make that up. Never mind that the Senate has already rejected their attempt to put the country into default and that House Republicans do not have enough votes to overcome a presidential veto. They passed it anyway.

HJR 77 says, “Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That Congress disapproves of the President’s exercise of authority to increase the debt limit, as exercised pursuant to the certification under section 3101A(a) of title 31, United States Code.”

To put this in context, the Republican House also passed the "Protecting Jobs From Government Interference Act" just two days later. According to the GOP, HR 2587 essentially prevents the National Labor Relations Board from doing its job, which is what “government interference" means to them. They do not say that, naturally, but that is what the bill does. The other thing it does is to pander to the corporations that fund the Republican Party.

“This bill dismantles key functions of the National Labor Relations Board and guts more than 70 years of established labor law in our country,” said Congressman Pete Stark (D-CA) in opposition. “If this legislation becomes law, it would eliminate nearly all worker protections when companies illegally fire workers and close or move plants in retaliation for union activities.”

Remember the GOP “Pledge to America?” It promised a “government more transparent in its actions” and “honest in its dealings.” They lied or forgot about it.

Today’s consumer confidence rating is the fourth lowest since 1952, according to GOP pollster Bill McInturff. “The collapse of confidence in government has substantially eroded already weak consumer confidence.” The debt ceiling negotiation profoundly reshaped our view of the economy and the federal government that has yet to be realized in full measure. “It has led to a scary erosion in confidence . . . at a time when this steep drop in confidence can be least afforded.”

When the GOP’s McInturff says, “We are entering a new phase of the American political dialogue that has been irrevocably shifted in a way that will prove difficult to predict,” he is not kidding. Why would he? By its actions however, the GOP does not seem to care about such cause and effect. It seems to think that default is an option. It seems to care more about the party itself and raising money than it cares about the best interests of American people and real governance.

Hating Obama is a posture, not a policy. The resuscitation of Republican party that brought enough new members to the 112^th Congress to create a majority succeeded by rallying contempt for the new Democratic administration, personified by the president. HJR 77 and HR 2587 are more posturing. Neither bill advances a course of action to address chronic U.S. unemployment or to improve our anemic economy. Neither bill demonstrates smart opposition. Instead they lend credence to the cynical observation that the GOP agenda is to maintain the recession in order to win a national election.

Hating Obama and raising enough money to mount a successful campaign may not be as mutually sustainable as the GOP seems to believe.

# # #

Article first published as Hating Obama and Raising Money on Blogcritics.

Presidential Approval: So What?

2011-09-10T11:42:00.000-07:00

Presidential popularity begs a lot of questions. The most important question at election time is what candidate gets the most Electoral College votes, making the popular vote only interesting. Presidential approval begins with inauguration day and can be less than 50% to start, as with the administrations of Kennedy, Carter and “W” Bush. Between 1961 and 2001, voters changed their opinions widely about the eight presidents who occupied the White House. They disapproved of all of the presidents and demonstrated that economics drives public opinion more than current events.

Gallup has been tracking presidential job approval since Harry Truman took office in 1945. The Gallup Presidential Job Approval Center shows President Obama with an all-time high of 69%, when he took office in January 2009, and a to-date low of 40% recorded at the end of July. He is about two-months shy of being in office 1000 days and his average approval is 50%. Regardless of how one interprets the data, one thing abundantly clear: an awful lot of people disapprove of a President most of the time. Who is in office does not really matter.

Imagine becoming President with barely half of the vote by any measure. In 1960 Democrat Senator John Kennedy became president by defeating Vice President Richard Nixon with a 0.1% margin of the popular vote, 49.7% to 49.6%. Since JFK’s overall approval is 70.1%, he is assumed to have been well approved by Americans. That was not the case at the time. People who did not like him personally despised him. In the South for example, I remember seeing Ku Klux Klan bonfires burning to celebrate his assassination because Kennedy was a Catholic and a pro-civil rights president.

JFK also sent the first US troops to a country few people had ever heard of – Vietnam. During his 1036 days in office, JFK’s budgets ran deficits to finance his New Frontier programs. His approval ratings scored a high of 83% and a low of 56%. They had been trending down when he was murdered.

JFK’s Vice President Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency and then won the 1964 election in a landslide, defeating Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. LBJ also won the popular vote by a margin of 61.1% to 38.5 %. Johnson’s overall 55.1% approval rating ranged from a high of 79% to a low of 35%. He used his popularity when he had it, too. His Administration submitted 87 bills to the 89^th Congress and LBJ signed 84 of them into law.

''This country,'' LBJ said, ''is rich enough to do anything it has the guts to do and the vision to do and the will to do.'' His Great Society is still with us ''in Medicare and Medicaid, in the air we breathe and the water we drink, in the rivers and lakes we swim in; in the colleges our students attend; in the medical miracles from the National Institutes of Health; in mass transportation and equal opportunity,'' as former Johnson advisor Joseph A. Califano has stated. LBJ also expanded costly US involvement in the Vietnam War. With his approval ratings in decline, Johnson did not run for reelection.

As a private citizen, former Republican Vice President Richard Nixon won his second campaign for president in 1968 defeating two other candidates: LBJ’s Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Alabama Governor George Wallace, who ran as an Independent. Wallace captured 13.5% of the popular vote, leaving a 0.7% margin between Nixon and Humphrey, 43.4% to 42.7%. Although Nixon won reelection in a 1972 landslide victory and 60.7% of the popular vote, he resigned the presidency under the threat of impeachment and saw his approval numbers fall from a high of 67% to a low of 24%. Nixon had an overall term and a half approval rating of 49%.

Nixon inherited a weak economy from the Johnson administration but delivered a balanced budget in 1969. However, inflation, rising energy costs and high unemployment troubled Nixon’s administration. Despite wage and price controls and other measures that did not work, Nixon’s budget plans included using large deficits to marginally improve the economy. Although Nixon called upon “the great silent majority” for support, continued expansion of the Vietnam War, including bombing Cambodia, and the costs of war in addition to the Watergate scandal further degraded his approval numbers.

After Nixon’s resignation, Vice President Gerald Ford assumed the presidency and served its remaining 845 days only to lose his subsequent election bid in 1976. During his time in the White House, Ford gave Nixon a presidential pardon and concluded US involvement in the Vietnam War. His overall approval rating scored 47.2% for the time of American discouragement with politics that followed the highly publicized Watergate hearings that contributed to Ford’s becoming president. Ford’s approval ranged from a high of 71% to a low of 37%. Despite the Ford “Whip Inflation Now" program, 7% inflation and growing unemployment continued to weaken the economy that had slipped into recession and further eroded his approval numbers.

The next presidential race was so close, many voters stayed up until the early morning hours to see Georgia’s Democrat Governor Jimmy Carter win the 1976 election. A US Naval Academy graduate and peanut farmer, Carter won the election with a less than a 2% popular vote margin, 50.1% to 48%. Elected by just half of the voters like Jack Kennedy, Jimmy Carter only earned an overall approval rating of 45.5% that ranged from a high of 75% to a low of 28%. The federal government was in deficit every year of the Carter presidency. Slow recovery from the ’73-‘75 recession, fuel shortages, double-digit inflation and 9% unemployment plagued the Carter administration which lasted one term only. The American hostage situation in Iran exacerbated disapproval of Carter.

The country turned to a former Hollywood actor and spokesperson in the 1980 election of California Republican Governor Ronald Reagan, who won with 50.7% of the popular vote to Carter’s 41% and Independent Congressman John Anderson’s 6.6% protest vote. Reagan got his landslide reelection four years later, defeating former Vice President Walter Mondale by 58.8% to 40.6%. While Reagan’s overall approval rating is 52.8%, it ranged from a high of 68% to a low of 38%.

Reagan survived an assassination attempt and took credit for the end of Communism with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although he railed against the debt ceiling, it raised 17 times during his eight-year administration. His supply side “Reaganomics,” which his critics called “voodoo

economics,” created more new debt than the combined deficits of all previous presidents. While Reagan said he was committed to reducing government spending, it rose by $321 billion during his presidency, to more than a trillion dollars. He also raised taxes seven times. Only his age and the 22^nd Amendment prevented Reagan from running for a third term.

Instead, with a revenue improved economy, the enormous popularity of Ronald Reagan and relative world peace, Vice President George H. W. Bush won the presidency by defeating Massachusetts Democrat Governor Michael Dukakis by a popular vote margin of 53.4% to 45.7%. Best known for his famous pledge, "Read my lips: no new taxes," a recession began. Rising deficits, a declining economy plus a growth in mandatory spending began to further increase the federal deficit. Bush’s approval ratings ranged from a high of 89% to a low of 29%.

By 1990 the deficit had grown to three times its size in 1980. The federal government shut down for three days and the Democratic majority in Congress eventually forced Bush to raise tax revenues. But events of the Gulf War pushed economic issues out of the news and Bush ended up with an overall approval rating of 60.9% for his term in office, second only to Kennedy.

After three Republican presidential terms and the economy again in recession, two candidates ran against President Bush in the 1992 election: Arkansas Democrat Governor Bill Clinton and Independent businessman Ross Perot. Bush's 89% approval ratings following the Persian Gulf War made him look like a certain winner, but the economy trumped his approval ratings at the ballot box. Clinton prevailed with 43% of the popular vote to Bush’s 37.5% and Perot’s 18.9%. Ross Perot capitalized on the economic woe in his 1992 campaign and ran again in 1996. He siphoned an 8.4% popular vote as incumbent President Clinton defeated Kansas Republican Senator Bob Dole 49.2% to 40.7%.

The Congressional Budget Office reported a budget surplus between the years 1998 and 2000, the longest economic expansion period in US history. Only the second president to be impeached by the House, the Senate failed to muster the Constitutional two-thirds majority requirement to convict and remove an officeholder. Despite the impeachment and another government shutdown, Clinton left office with the highest end-of-office approval rating of any US president since World War II at 60.6%. His highest approval rating scored 73% and his lowest recorded 37%.

Economy tends to trump political events no matter how much of a splash those events create. Kennedy’s high rating occurred because he died in office before his first term ended. Reagan’s approval rating of 52.8% falls behind the 55.1% approval rating of LBJ and Bill Clinton, who tie for 3^rd place. George H.W. Bush comes in second to JFK at 60.9%. Those are the numbers.

Here are some more. Take a look at the disapproval ratings for the eight presidents and keep them in mind the next time approval ratings is brought up as some kind of data being foisted as something significant.

John Kennedy: 56

Lyndon Johnson: 35

Richard Nixon: 26

Gerald Ford: 37

Jimmy Carter: 29

Ronald Reagan: 37

George H.W. Bush: 38

Bill Clinton: 37

The public changes its mind with regularity and presidents are just not that popular. Why anyone would want such a job is another question.

Article first published as Presidential Approval: So What? on Blogcritics.

I Should Live So Long

2011-08-26T12:10:00.000-07:00

I found this Thursday afternoon and thought you might be interested. It's a screen shot. Click on it.

"Sign up to get a free Obama 2074 bumper sticker before they're gone." By 2074 they should be.

Eric Cantor's Rhetorical Deniability

2011-08-25T15:35:00.000-07:00

An important part of being a politician is to keep your name before the public in the press. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) did a lot of that recently in the debt ceiling hostage taking by the Tea Party wing of the GOP as its articulate spokesperson and rising star. While congress is on vacation, to keep his name in the press, Cantor has signed off on an opinion piece in the Washington Post, “Removing the obstacles to economic growth.” He says there are two: “The first is the federal government’s debt crisis” and “The second is the jobs crisis.” He should know since his majority is responsible for creating the first one and for doing nothing about the second one. Cantor blames President Obama for each.

The so-called “debt crisis” is a product of the previous Republican administration that decided to wage two wars and to finance them with deficit increases instead of tax increases. “In fact, you need a war to really get a big deficit,” Christopher Chantrill says on usgovernmentspending.com. “The peak deficits came during World War I (16% of GDP in 1919) and World War II (24% in 1945),” he says. Moreover, “The deficits of the Great Depression only came to about five percent of GDP, and the big $1.4 trillion deficit for FY 2009 amounted to 13% of GDP.”

The real problem with extreme government debt would be the interest burden it would create. If interest payments reached 12% of GDP, that could cause a government default. The US is far from reaching that point. However, it was using the debt ceiling to extort political concessions that made a routine financial process look like the crisis it became. Cantor kept his name in the press then by walking out of negotiations with Vice President Biden.

In his Washington Post opinion Cantor writes, “Republicans passed a budget this spring, written by Rep. Paul Ryan, that would address our challenges head-on by putting in place common-sense reforms to manage our debt over the short and long term.”

That is not what the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office's analysis says. The CBO found “that by the end of the 10-year budget window, public debt will actually be higher than it would be if the GOP just did nothing.” In addition to requiring additional raises in the debt ceiling, the CBO also acknowledged “that seniors, disabled and elderly people would be hit with much higher out-of-pocket health care costs.”

Who needs facts when rhetoric will do?

“President Obama is wrong to think that the answer is to increase spending or raise taxes when so many millions of Americans are out of work.” Cantor’s interpretation of what the president thinks is not what the president says. In a televised address on July 25, 2011, President Obama petitioned for a "balanced" approach that includes spending cuts as well as revenue increases from tax increases for wealthier Americans. In that speech Obama also debunked the Cantor/GOP rhetoric about the debt ceiling allowing the congress to spend more money.

As to jobs, Congress has offered only one piece of legislation that has the word “jobs” in its title, but that is all. It is HR 1745, the ‘‘JOBS Act of 2011.” Cantor does not mention it in his op-ed piece, probably because it does not have anything to do with jobs. What it does is to allow states the option of using federal unemployment-benefit dollars to repay federal loans to help balance their budgets or provide tax breaks to businesses.

According to Cantor, however, “the Obama administration’s anti-business, hyper-regulatory, pro-tax agenda has fueled economic uncertainty and sent the message from the administration that ‘we want to make it harder to create jobs.’” HR 1745 takes money away from the long-term unemployed. Where is the job creation in that?

While Representative Cantor keeps his name before the public, with such rhetorically inflamed publicity as his Washington Post piece, he deserves consideration as one of Congress’s rising stars.

The Treasury Department used $267 million of taxpayer funds to buy preferred stock in a private banking company that employed his wife, Diana Cantor. As part of a Treasury Department program to boost "healthy banks" with extra capital, New York Private Bank and Trust (NYPBT) received its bailout money in January 2009. NYPBT is the holding company for Emigrant Bank, a savings bank with 35 branches in and around New York City. She ran the Virginia branch of the wealth-management division of Virginia Private Bank & Trust, a subsidiary.

To be fair, Cantor's deputy chief of staff Rob Collins said the congressman didn't know the bank was seeking bailout money and never interceded on the bank's behalf with government regulators. Additionally, a spokesman for the bank said Diana Cantor had nothing to do with the operation of NYPBT and was "never aware that the parent bank was seeking or received [bailout] funding."

Last year the Wall Street Journal reported, “Eric Cantor, the Republican Whip in the House of Representatives, bought up to $15,000 in shares of ProShares Trust Ultrashort 20+ Year Treasury ETF last December, according to his 2009 financial disclosure statement. The exchange-traded fund takes a short position in long-dated government bonds. In effect, it is a bet against U.S. government bonds—and perhaps on inflation in the future.”

The Huffington Post picked up the story when it obtained information that said Cantor "stands to profit from U.S. treasury default, which thereby raises the appearance of a conflict of interest," and that he "may be sabotaging [debt ceiling] negotiations for his own personal gain."

Again, to be fair, Cantor spokesman Brad Dayspring said, "The insinuation is so outrageous that it shows a fundamental lack of understanding about how the markets work, how the U.S. economy works." Dayspring added, "Any member of Congress who would seriously identify themselves with this would reveal a complete inability to understand the United States economy and basic investing."

Maybe, but such ignorance does not stop people from acting, especially for personal gain.

Rhetoric and deniability are common in politics and in court. The Department of Justice is investigating the US credit downgrades by rating agencies Standard & Poor and Moody. The downgrade is a direct outcome of the debt ceiling crisis which congressional Tea Party members and House Majority Leader Cantor championed. The credit downgrade also spooked the markets. Cantor’s piece may keep him in the public eye, but it obfuscates the fact that the crisis and the downgrade cannot be laid at the president’s feet. They can be laid at Mr. Cantor’s.

Article first published as Eric Cantor’s Rhetorical Deniability on Blogcritics.

The Tea Party and RICO

2011-08-11T19:32:00.000-07:00

Having fulfilled their purpose of dumping the vulnerable US economy back into the toilet of recession, the Tea Party wing of the GOP has a final job: to flush it using the president as a commode handle. However, in bragging about it as some kind of ideological triumph, they admit ownership of creating a lucrative opportunity for profiteers to engage in short-selling the United States. As Republican sympathizers and media pundits attempt to divert public attention almost apologetically for this blatant racketeering, the Republican Tea Party members have breached their Congressional oath of office knowing that they cannot be impeached nor be recalled. But they are not above the law. It is called RICO.

“We're going to make sure Barack Obama is a one-term president!” Michele Bachmann (R-MN) proudly exclaimed in Iowa. Next to an actual default, which she sought to enable by voting against raising the debt ceiling four times, the founder of the Tea Party Caucus and declared presidential candidate tells her audience that Standard & Poor's lowering America's bond rating from AAA to AA+ is a triumph. "What we saw last week is the markets agreed with me," Bachmann proclaimed. "It [US bond rating] was lowered for the first time in American history!"

Put another way, the way to defeat the incumbent president is by manipulating the market and then blaming the administration.

Earlier this year, the new Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) told the 87 freshmen who had given the GOP control of the House, “I’m asking you to look at a potential increase in the debt limit as a leverage moment when the White House and President Obama will have to deal with us.” Having recently received money and support, they listened as their leader told them, “Either we stick together and demonstrate that we’re a team that will fight for and stand by our principles, or we will lose that leverage.” As CNN reported, the message from Cantor to House Republicans was "to stop grumbling and whining and to come together as conservatives and rally behind the speaker and call the president's bluff."

They stuck together and refused to compromise on ending tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy. Put another way, the way to gain power is through extortion.

That may all look and sound merely political, but it is not. The behavior has less to do with proclamations about ideology and principal than it does about money. In this regard there is an argument that has not yet been made. That argument is that allegedly these Tea Party Representatives in Congress have deliberately conspired to devalue the US credit for political and/or personal benefit. Whether it has to do with preparation for an election or not, allegedly they have knowingly or otherwise been party to committing the following actions punishable under the RICO Act: securities fraud, obstruction of justice and extortion.

Originally written to go after the Mafia in 1970, Congress passed the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act [Title 18, United States Code, Sections 1961-1968]. However, RICO is almost never applied to the Mafia today. RICO is applied to individuals and businesses. In addition to criminal claims, Section 1964(c) of the RICO Act allows civil claims to be brought by any person injured by reason of a RICO violation. Tea Party members of Congress are not immune.

Their behavior looks like that of racketeers. As such they could be seen as an ongoing criminal organization subject to the federal law (RICO) that provides for extended criminal penalties and a civil cause of action that focuses specifically on racketeering and allows for the leaders of a syndicate, such as the Tea Party appears to be, to be tried for the alleged crimes which they ordered and assisted. Violations of the RICO laws can be alleged in civil lawsuit cases. It is important to bear in mind that a RICO-related charge focuses on patterns of behavior as opposed to criminal acts. Additionally, a civil RICO action can be filed in state or federal court. Both the federal and civil components allow for the recovery of triple the amount of actual and compensatory damages.

Look at the provision for private parties to sue. For example, stock holders whose stocks lost value can be considered as a "person damaged in his business or property." They can sue one or more "racketeers", Tea Party members. As plaintiffs, the stock holders, including people with 401(k)s must prove the existence of an "enterprise", that they are victims of the racketeers. What needs to be shown is that the defendants conducted or participated in the affairs of the enterprise "through" the pattern of racketeering activity.

The crimes punishable under the RICO Act alleged here are securities fraud, obstruction of justice and extortion.

Tea Party members committed securities fraud in several ways. They made and publicized misstatements on the financial report of United States and the US debt as elected public officials. That resulted in driving down stock prices. As a stock manipulation scheme, that allowed for insider trading. Those fraudulent schemes that have been perpetrated in the securities and commodities markets can ultimately have a devastating impact on the viability and operation of those markets at home and abroad, which is what Tea Party Representative Bachmann bragged about in Iowa.

Tea Party members have obstructed justice by interfering with the work of other government officials, such as the Secretary of the Treasury and members of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Obstruction can include crimes committed by elected officials. In this regard, they were aware that their actions could manipulate markets for the purpose of financial gain of others or themselves. It was obstruction of justice that the House used to impeach President Clinton and brought about President Nixon’s resignation from office.

Tea Party members, as elected government officials, have practiced extortion under color of authority. That includes false pretenses, like Cantor’s charge to stick together and “demonstrate that we’re a team that will fight for and stand by our principles.” Their extortion has included promises and representations as well as the deprivation of the right of citizens to the honest services of their elected officials. While extortion is more commonly practiced by and associated with organized crime groups, it is defined as a criminal offence which occurs when a person unlawfully obtains money, property or services from a person(s), entity, or institution, through coercion.

There is no excuse for the Tea Party members of Congress deliberate effort to drive down the credit worthiness of the United States, let alone to do as elected public officials. There is no defense for participating in actions by which people can make money on the resultant market manipulation which is unfolding. That their pattern of behavior has hurt both investors and consumers in the false claim of principal is calumny. Seeking the political defeat of the president by purposely trashing the US economy is criminal.

The administration may feel its hands tied and not unleash the Justice Department to prosecute the alleged criminal activity, but that does not prevent the private sector from bringing these seeming racketeers to justice severally and jointly. The harm that has been perpetrated by the Tea Party cannot be justified. Both criminal and civil litigation under RICO can at least marginalize the Tea Party’s willful and destructive influence in Congress and defeat its members.

They are not above the law.

# # #

Article first published as The Tea Party and RICO on Technorati.

History and Consequences

2011-08-10T11:44:00.000-07:00

With all of the information that is available, the public remains confused. It may have to do with the sources of their information, but the latest polling data says that 47% of Americans say their greater concern is that raising the debt limit would lead to higher government spending and make the national debt bigger, while 42% say their greater concern is that not raising the limit would force the government into default and hurt the economy. Additionally, 74% of Republicans and GOP leaning independents who agree with the tea party faction of the party say their bigger concern is that raising the debt limit would result in more spending, compared to 58% of those who do not agree with the faction.

According to the Congressional Research Service, the debt ceiling has been raised 74 times, since March 1962, and 10 of those times have occurred since 2001. Theoretically, the debt ceiling limit is supposed to help Congress control spending. In practice, the debt limit has been ineffective in controlling spending and deficits because politicians and reality remain as strangers to one another. History shows that it has been that way for quite a while.

The fact is that the debt ceiling doesn’t regulate anything, believe it or not. The Budget Control Act of 1974 created a process that requires Congress to vote on aggregate levels of spending, revenue and deficits every year. That makes the debt limit redundant.

Five years after the 1974 Budget Act passage, a combination of a failure to increase the debt limit in time and a breakdown of Treasury’s machines for printing checks caused a two-week technical default and a short term failure for the government to meet its obligations. That raised interest rates by six-tenths of a percentage point. Over time that percentage hike translated into billions of dollars in increased interest payments on the nation's debt, which became a cost passed on to taxpayers.

In other words, default increases the debt service which increases the deficit.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) questioned the meaning of a legal debt limit, according to Time Magazine on January 20, 1941. The President “hinted that there should be no legal limit.” In its coverage of the FDR’s Budget for the fiscal year 1941-42, Time noted, “Last July's Democratic platform made no mention of that fiscal dodo, that old museum piece: a balanced budget. Franklin Roosevelt held to precedent—he didn't mention it, either.” The Newark News remarked, “Like the budgets of Mr. Average Citizen, it was full of unjustifiable errors of judgment, of expenses borne out of habit, of big installments still being paid on past mistakes.”

FDR signed the first Social Security Act into law in 1935. Thirty years later, that part of FDR’s “New Deal” became part of the President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) “Great Society” and established Medicare when LBJ signed the Social Security Act of 1965 into law.

Only half of American's 65 and older had any health insurance at the time. The bill LBJ signed also created Medicaid, the public health insurance program that today covers over 60 million people, including one in three children, eight million people with disabilities and nearly six million low-income seniors. Each state administers its own Medicaid program. Republicans have scorned the entitlement programs of the Great Society ever since, now more so than ever.

Here is how we pay for those programs. Social Security and Medicare entitlements are paid for by the FICA [Federal Insurance Contributions Act] tax. The rate is 7.65% of our pre-deduction [gross] earnings. 6.2% goes for OASDI [Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance]. 1.45% goes for Medicare. The Social Security system pays for old-age, survivors, and disability. Hospital insurance is funded by Medicare. Income tax funds the government. It is called revenue and is a separate and different issue. Republican rhetoric obfuscates that point.

While the public may be somewhat divided about the debt ceiling, they are not so confused when it comes to entitlements. “The public decisively supports maintaining the status quo,” according to the Pew Research Center. “Six-in-ten (60%) say it is more important to keep Social Security and Medicare benefits as they are; only about half as many (32%) say it is more important to take steps to reduce the budget deficit.”

LBJ argued that helping the poor was in the best interest of business by providing stability to society. GOP disdain for Johnson’s Great Society and its War on Poverty continue. Republicans demand sharp cuts to Medicare and Social Security. Programs for the poor and the aging are the “reckless spending” recitations of Republican rhetoric that compound the deficit conundrum that confronts House Speaker John Boehner.

At a recent press conference Boehner said, “I agree with the president we cannot allow our nation to default on our debt.” He added, “But to prevent a default, a bill must pass the Congress.” For that to happen, “the bill must include spending cuts in excess of the increase in the debt ceiling.” He faced a similar challenge in April with the government shut-down threat. He also faces factional opposition within the Republican House majority and its fame-seekers, like Representatives Cantor and Ryan.

"I don't think the majority of Congress is so stupid as to visit an actual default on the United States," said David Kelly, chief market strategist at JPMorgan Asset Management. "Their constituents would never forgive them for playing fast and loose with the credit-worthiness that it took 230 years to build up." Meanwhile, Standard and Poor's told Reuters last week it would “waste no time cutting the top-notch U.S. credit rating” if Treasury missed a $30 billion debt payment on August 4.

The consequence of default would crank up borrowing costs for consumers and businesses, and flush the vulnerable US economy back into the toilet of recession.

The Speaker of the House is responsible for ensuring that the House passes legislation supported by the majority party, in this case the majority of the majority. Mr. Boehner was a teenager when LBJ ushered in the Great Society in 1965. [President Obama was 4.] Majority leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) was a 2-year-old. GOP Budget author Paul Ryan (R-WI) wasn't even born. . It is their short-sighted ignorance of history and consequences, coupled with the ideological intransigence of the freshman tea party faction, which threatens Boehner’s speakership, the Republican Party and the United States.

# # #

Article first published as History and Consequences on Blogcritics.

The Deadline Gambit

2011-07-20T15:35:00.000-07:00

Vice President Joe Biden's debt ceiling talks stopped when the opposition party representatives, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) and Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-AZ), walked out in a dispute over the idea of raising taxes. Cantor left first. Somehow he told his colleagues what he was going to do but did not tell the Speaker of the House, if we are to believe that. Kyl couldn’t do much else but recite the GOP “job killing” mantra and participate in the display. It is much easier to strike a pose than to negotiate a deal, anyway.

Before his walkout on Thursday morning, Cantor told The Wall Street Journal, “As it stands, the Democrats continue to insist that any deal must include tax increases.” Cantor said in a statement, “Regardless of the progress that has been made, the tax issue must be resolved before discussions can continue.” The tax increase idea means the elimination of Bush era tax breaks to which the Republicans are married. It does not mean tax increases for individual US taxpayers, but that is just GOP semantics.

During the Biden debt ceiling talks, Democrats argued that Republicans should at least join them in eliminating corporate tax breaks for chief executives with private jets. Republicans also rejected consideration of eliminating even temporary tax breaks, such as those for NASCAR tracks and Puerto Rican rum. As a result, a new Washington Post-Pew Research Center poll found that more people say they would blame Republicans in Congress than President Obama if the debt-ceiling talks broke down.

Politicians deal in factoids, not facts. They live and breathe strategic ambiguities so that blocs of voters like the tea party can panic and over react. For example, “It's time to force our elected officials to stop spending cold turkey, and we can start by making sure they do not raise the debt ceiling,” announces Representative Michele Bachmann’s website. Never mind the fact it cannot be done.

Even one of her more staunch supporters William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, says such an idea is not only silly but irresponsible. “I've seen no plausible plan that would enable us to go "cold turkey" (to use her term) fast enough or dramatically enough that we could reduce the deficit to zero in a few months--which is what would be required if Congress were not to authorize an increase in the debt ceiling.”

Here is a quick review of some of the facts being ignored. For one thing, the government officially hit the federal debt limit on Monday, May 16. That forced the Treasury Department to make moves to avoid a default, like reducing government investments in two federal employee pension funds. For another thing, it is the Treasury Department that set an August 2 deadline to raise the country’s $14.3 trillion debt limit before the country risks defaulting on its debt obligations. For yet another thing still, although they don't admit it, every time Congress votes for a spending hike or a tax cut, lawmakers are agreeing to raise the debt ceiling whether they say so or not.

"Congress has already passed and the president has already signed legislation that increases spending or decreases revenues. Those decisions have already been made," said Susan Irving, director for Federal Budget issues at the Government Accountability Office. So arguing over the debt ceiling is like arguing over whether to pay the bills the country has already incurred. This is the United States. Its obligations will be paid. That is why they are called obligations.

The US Treasury Department says, “Since 1960, Congress has acted 78 separate times to permanently raise, temporarily extend, or revise the definition of the debt limit – 49 times under Republican presidents and 29 times under Democratic presidents. In the coming weeks, Congress must act to increase the debt limit. Congressional leaders in both parties have recognized that this is necessary.”

Just for the record, “Between 1980 and 1990, the debt more than tripled,” the Treasury reports. “The debt shrank briefly after the end of the Cold War, but by the end of FY2008, the gross national debt had reached $10.3 trillion, about 10 times its 1980 level.”

Remember the Ryan Budget passed by the Republican House majority? The Congressional Budget Office and House Budget Committee estimates that “the spending included in the House Republican Budget Resolution would necessitate a nearly $2 trillion increase in the debt limit by the end of FY2012. Moreover, it would require trillions of dollars in additional debt limit increases beyond that amount for the next several decades.” But these are only government estimates, not facts.

As to the Cantor walkout the morning after his boss met with the president, it would be underestimating the Speaker to believe he did not know what his Number 1 was going to do. It would be more characteristic of Boehner to believe that he said, “Eric, you can go, now.” It’s a chess move where you sacrifice a Rook to a Queen.

"In the Bush years the Republicans said that tax cuts will produce jobs. They didn't. They produced a deficit," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said. "Leader Cantor can't handle the truth when it comes to these tax subsidies for big oil, for corporations sending jobs overseas, for giving tax breaks to the wealthiest people in our country while they're asking seniors to pay more for less, as they abolish Medicare," Pelosi said.

Congress and the Treasury seem to have a problem with the concept of a deadline. Showmanship seems to be paramount for the GOP. But it is the absence of any sense of urgency that gives the deadline gambit away. The Biden talks may be “in abeyance” after the Republicans pulled out, but Boehner's office says he's leaving town for an 11-day House recess, swaggering all the way to the golf course.

Article first published as The Deadline Gambit on Blogcritics.

Repealing the Great Society

2011-07-13T07:39:00.000-07:00

Republicans propose changes in Medicare and Social Security. The claim is that federal spending is “out of control.” Members of Congress repeat that claim often, hoping that by repetition their claim will become true. GOP members publicly advocate that the federal budget must be cut to their terms or else the United States can default on its obligations. The party opposes the “Great Society” as it did the “New Deal.” It just doesn't know that.

President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) signed the Social Security Act of 1965 into law. It established Medicare. Johnson enrolled former President Harry Truman as the first Medicare beneficiary at the bill-signing ceremony and presented him with the first Medicare card. Truman’s boss, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), signed the first Social Security Act into law in 1935. Thirty years later, that part of FDR’s New Deal had become part of LBJ’s Great Society.

Republicans have opposed Social Security for more than 65-years-old. They also oppose facts. For instance, Social Security and Medicare entitlements are already paid for through an involuntary tax called FICA, collected at a rate of 7.65% of gross [before deduction] earnings. 6.2% goes for Social Security called OASDI [Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance]. 1.45% goes for Medicare. The federal system of old age, survivors, disability and hospital insurance is paid by the FICA tax. The Social Security system then funds the first three, while hospital insurance is funded by Medicare.

Those are the facts. Here are more. For the last 20 years Congressional Republicans have tried to limit Medicare spending on doctors’ services. However, the proposed limits have always proved to be so unrealistic, like their current demands, that each time new limits have been proposed, Congress has had to intervene to increase them. Republicans inaccurately call it uncontrolled spending when they lose.

Only half of American's 65 and older had any health insurance at the time LBJ signed the bill that created Medicare. Medicaid, established by Title XIX of the Social Security Act of 1965, is administered by the states. The public health insurance program covers over 60 million people, including one in three children, eight million people with disabilities and nearly six million low-income seniors. Each state administers its own Medicaid program. In addition to Medicare, LBJ’s “Great Society” legislation included laws to uphold Civil Rights, to create Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, and to establish a host other social legislation programs to improve the American way of life. It seems as if Republicans are determined to repeal the Great Society.

Thirty-five million Americans lived below the poverty level in 1965. In a nation with such abundance, LBJ argued that helping the poor was in the best interest of business by providing stability to society. Republican disdain for Johnson’s War on Poverty continues. Originally headed by the late R. Sargent Shriver, the first Director of the Peace Corps, its legislation created Medicaid in addition to environmental protection, aid to education, Head Start, and the Job Corps. Republicans appear to label any program that helps poor people as “reckless spending.”

President Johnson also handled spending differently than the way Republicans and President Obama are considering. Instead of deficit spending to finance the Vietnam War, LBJ pushed Congress to enact a surtax. The imposition of a surtax added another 10% to one's ordinary federal income tax liability. LBJ left office in 1969 with a balanced budget plus a small surplus. It took 30-years for the United States to see another balanced budget.

Bear in mind that there is no Constitutional requirement for a balanced budget. The United States federal government has pretty much always been in debt since its inception. Article I, Section 8, Clause 2 of the Constitution grants to the United States Congress the power “To borrow money on the credit of the United States.” As you may also know from recent accounts, Section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment states, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

Republicans are questioning it.

Their latest debt ceiling demands include an oldie-goldie cover renamed the Cut, Cap and Balance Pledge. It is a classic hit that comes up from time to time -- to oppose raising the borrowing limit unless it is accompanied by spending cuts and caps, and to pass a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution. So far the Pledge has been signed by just 12 senators (6 of them freshmen Republicans) and 28 House members (17 of them Republican rookies). Republicans seem to like the idea of amending the Constitution despite the fact that the founders made that so difficult to accomplish it has only happened seventeen times. As I say, it’s a GOP blast from the past like the Fair Tax.

During the Carter administration, Republicans proposed the Balanced Budget Amendment as a fiscal cure-all. It didn’t cost them anything politically since they were out of power, controlling neither house of Congress nor the Presidency. They knew it would not be enacted. Between April 29, 1975 and January 29, 1980, 34 petitions for a Balanced Budget Amendment have been submitted to Congress from 30 different state legislatures. Even though deficit spending soared during the Reagan administration, a program agreed to by Congressional leaders and the administration that entailed two dollars of spending cuts for every dollar of tax increases failed miserably. Deficits mounted further. But Congress had no intention of passing the Balanced Budget Amendment.

The Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act of 1985 acted as political cover to raise the debt limit. It called for automatic cuts in discretionary spending when certain deficit-reduction targets were not met. Aimed at cutting the budget deficit, the largest in history at the time, the House passed the bill 271-154, the Senate by 61-31, and President Ronald Reagan signed the bill on December 12, 1985. However, when it began to affect popular programs, Congress amended it to postpone its effects until later years. The Act was partially overturned in the courts and eventually repealed in its entirety.

Republicans should know that default is not an option. A failure to increase the debt limit by the deadline coupled with a breakdown of Treasury’s machines for printing checks caused a two-week default in 1979. That was enough to raise interest rates by six-tenths of a percentage point for years afterward and increased the Reagan era deficit even more. Yet, the GOP threatens default as a negotiating tactic.

As to tax revenue increases, Ronald Reagan requested the largest peacetime tax increase in American history in 1982. Bill Clinton also asked for a large tax boost for deficit reduction again in 1993. Strong economic growth followed each time, even though conservative economists predicted economic disaster.

Congressional Republicans seem to be thinking about something other than fiscal responsibility, business, or the social fabric of the country. Advocacy of its position to negotiate the budget with default puts its representatives in the position of breaching their oath of office which could subject them to recall if not impeachment. The GOP position seeks to repeal the Great Society. They are doing a good job of that, so far.

Article first published as Repealing the Great Society on Technorati.

GOP Leaders Breach Oath of Office

2011-07-10T17:22:00.000-07:00

The GOP rhetoric is pernicious. It advocates the financial destruction of the United States. It is ignorant and stupid because it is based solely on emotional appeal as the dominant factor of GOP/teaparty cheerleading. It reminds me of the Miller Light ads “Tastes Great/Less Filling,” except those ads were not dangerous. What the Republicans are advocating is.

House Representatives Eric Cantor and Michele Bachmann suffer delusions of grandeur brought on by having to believe their own pernicious nonsense. Cantor seems to believe that he will succeed John Boehner as Speaker of the House. Bachmann seems to believe that she will succeed Barack Obama as President of the United States. They advocate that the United States should default on its worldwide obligations. That alone should be sufficient to disqualify them from achieving higher office. In fact it should qualify them for recall if not impeachment.

The financial destruction of the nation that these Republicans seek is beyond what any terrorist could hope to achieve.

It is a very serious statement. I do not make it lightly, either. The consequence of not raising the debt ceiling is default on obligations the US has in the world market. Look at Bachmann's website. Never mind the fact that such a plan cannot be done. Even her most ardent of supporters Bill Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, says it’s “irresponsible.” He is being understandably kind and wrong. It’s not irresponsible, it’s negligent and dangerous.

Keep in mind that she has also claimed that the Founding Fathers “worked tirelessly” to end slavery, but facts don’t interest her. That conjecture is stupidity. Politicizing a function of government to make a headline is something the GOP/teaparty regularly does with flagrant disregard for consequences. It is not alright. It is bad for business and bad for the country. If that is a "negotiating tactic," it is a treacherous one.

What is worse is that the Republican Party leadership is enabling such treachery. Its recent Budget Resolution is an example because to go into effect requires raising the debt ceiling. By the way, the rest of the world is watching and so are world markets. They could not care less about Medicare. They care about the United States making good on its obligations. But the GOP does not care about anything except trashing the economy so they can blame it on the administration.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner says that if the ceiling isn’t raised by Aug. 2, the government could begin defaulting on some of its obligations, triggering a financial crisis.

Republicans floated the idea of rewriting the 14th Amendment last year when they were waving the flag over Arizona’s immigration lies. Top Republicans Senator Lindsey Graham (SC), Senator Jon Kyl (AZ), and Senator Mitch McConnell (KY) advocated eliminating the “birthright clause” and demonstrated their antithesis to the Amendment. Senator Graham argued that the 14th Amendment no longer serves the purpose it was designed to address. Senate Minority Whip Kyl supported hearings on repealing the 14th Amendment. Senator McConnell said Congress should “reconsider the Fourteenth Amendment.”

But there isn’t anything to interpret in Section 4: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law . . . shall not be questioned.” These Republicans took an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution whether they like it or not. To prevail in their hypocrisy imperils the country and should be sufficient grounds for their impeachment and removal from office for breaching their oath of office.

Article first published as GOP Leaders Breach Oath of Office on Technorati.

Congress’s Scorecard: 17% and Falling

2011-06-30T15:04:00.000-07:00

In 1974, President Richard Nixon resigned, Muhammad Ali knocked out George Foreman in 8 rounds, a Hungarian architecture professor invented the Rubik's Cube, and the first Universal Product Code (UPC) was scanned. 1974 is also the year that Gallup first asked Americans whether they approved or disapproved of the job Congress was doing. It has been asking that question in one form or another ever since. After the 2010 midterms when the lower chamber changed hands, Congress watching has almost become a sporting event with numbers like scores. The House is where the action is. The score this month: 17% and falling.

After scientifically analyzing thirty years’ worth of collected public opinion data, what Gallup found was that Congress never averaged above a 42% job approval rating for any calendar year prior to 1999 nor averaged below a 42% afterwards. But that started to change after 2004. Gallup noted of congress’s job approval rating, “. . . that record is being tested this year as the public grows more negative toward the direction of the country in general and President George W. Bush in particular with a sluggish economy and an ongoing war in Iraq.”

Gallup began its annual updating of congressional approval in the 1991-1992 term of the 102nd Congress. “Approval of subsequent Congresses has varied mostly from the low 20s to the mid-40s, although it reached 55% for the 107th Congress' 2001-2002 term.” It should be noted that following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Congress scored a record 84% job approval rating in October 2001.

The sport of congress watching advanced as more polls began to assess public opinion and apply ratings of their own, kind of like inverse handicapping. The CBS poll began asking the congress approval question in 1977. In May of 2005 CBS reported, “Today a majority of Americans, 55 percent, disapprove of the way Congress is doing its job.” CBS continued, “Approval ratings for Congress have historically been low, rarely moving above the 50 percent mark since this poll began asking the question,” and concurred with Gallup. “However, recent Congressional ratings are at some of their lowest points since the mid-nineties,” the network said.

This month the decline in the approval ratings of Congress has set record lows. A Rasmussen survey reports, “. . . the approval rating of Congress has slipped into single digits. It now stands at just 9 percent, tying an all-time low.” The survey also says, “Just 16 percent of survey respondents say Congress has passed legislation in the past year that will improve life in America significantly,” contributing to the second month of its 9% rating.

According to pollster Scott Rasmussen, who started his survey in 2003, “If we ever found a Little League team behaving as poorly as the Republicans and Democrats or the congressman and senators, we'd probably disband the team and go home.” Of course he also has a book to promote, In Search of Self-Governance. But the findings of the survey that bears his name are consistent with Gallup’s, if not a bit more pessimistic.

The Rasmussen survey also says, “Eighty percent of respondents say members of Congress care more about advancing their own careers than helping their constituents.” That would make it the House of Self-Representatives, like Bachmann and Paul who haven’t posted scores yet.

Ratings aside for the moment, service in the lower chamber of congress, self and otherwise, has been the big league beginning for the careers of 19 presidents and 33 major presidential nominees. According to the Office of the Clerk of the House of Representatives, “Only Henry Clay (1824), James A. Garfield (1880), and John Anderson (1980) ran for President in the general election as sitting House Members.” Garfield became president. More familiar House members were Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Bush the elder, and contenders McGovern, Anderson, Dole, Gore and McCain. The most famous president to come from the House is Abraham Lincoln, Whig of Illinois.

Back in Gallup trends, Congress had a 19% rating in June 1979 and an 18% approval rating in March 1992. “All of the historical low ratings have come during sluggish economic times in the United States,” Gallup reported. Such a dim view of Congress by Americans has led to significant turnovers after the 2006, 2008, and 2010 elections. Gallup concludes, “Unless conditions in the United States improve and Americans become more charitable in their ratings of Congress, the 2012 elections may result in another shake-up in Congress' membership.”

To use the vernacular, it must suck to go to work every day in an organization that most of your fellow Americans thoroughly dislike. So far the 112^th Congress has achieved new nadirs in its approval ratings that may not have tanked yet. If the scorecards are accurate, the present Republican House majority and its speaker John Boehner could end its series with a loss in 2012 and be replaced by a Democrat majority and the return of Nancy Pelosi as speaker. Compared to Congress' 17% approval numbers, which is the same as it was following the last election, the President’s 43% approval numbers look great.

Article first published as Congress's Scorecard: 17% and Falling on Blogcritics.

Fair Tax: One More Time

2011-06-14T13:31:00.000-07:00

Almost as a footnote in current events, Senior Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) announced that he is joining a new push for an old GOP favorite, the Fair Tax. Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) introduced Senate bill S.13 with the support of fellow Senators Burr (R-NC), Coburn (R-OK), Cornyn (R-TX), DeMint (R-SC), Isakson (R-GA) and Moran (R-KS). According to Lugar, 60 members in the House are also on board with the Fair Tax and have a bill of their own, HR.25, titled “Repeal of the Income Tax, Payroll Taxes, And Estate and Gift Taxes.” Representatives Dan Burton (R-IN), Marlin Stutzman (R-IN) and Mike Pence (R-IN) have cast their endorsements of the legislation. The bill has been referred to the House Ways and Means Committee.

The U.S. budget controversy continues to be about austerity and so-called spending cuts, which is a misnomer and an aside. Discussion of revenue opposes any tax increases as election time approaches. With the deficit apparently more important than unemployment, so much so that Republicans have dumped their previous job creation promises to voters, maybe the time has come to reconsider the Fair Tax. So let’s do that.

The S.13 Senate Fair Tax bill would impose a national sales tax on “the use or consumption in the United States of taxable property or services.” It sets the sales tax rate at 23% in 2013, but the Fair Tax rate is actually 30% when calculated the way state and local sales taxes are. S.13 defunds the Internal Revenue Service after 2015, but it creates two new bureaus: an Excise Tax Bureau and a Sales Tax Bureau. Finally, if the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution is not repealed within seven years of its enactment, the Fair Tax terminates. The bill has been referred to the Senate’s Committee on Finance.

10 years ago when revenues were as high as 20.6% of gross domestic product (GDP), the Fair Tax might have meant a huge tax cut for most Americans. Today, with revenues as low as 14.9% of GDP, it would create a huge tax increase. The GOP likes good old ideas, facts notwithstanding. Such Republican ideas like term limits, the flag-burning amendment and the balanced-budget amendment got plenty of media and public attention, but they lost traction and failed to be legislated. Still, announced presidential candidate Herman Cain has made the Fair Tax idea part of his campaign platform, just as Richard Lugar did sixteen years ago. Perhaps Cain should talk to Steve Forbes, the last unelected presidential candidate to champion the Flat Tax cause, twice. However, that is another story.

10 years ago in January, 2001, the Congressional Budget Office forecast surpluses totaling $5.6 trillion by 2011. Balanced for the first time in decades, at that time, the U.S. budget has since plunged from surplus to debt. A third of that $12.7 trillion plunge can be accounted for by three policies for which no one in office claims responsibility: the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq funding and the 2009 Obama stimulus bill. Expressed a percentage of the economy, except for a period after WWII, those three policies contribute to the national debt being larger than at any time in U.S. history.

So while everyone is blaming everyone else for a crisis in which they are complicit, politicians like to drag out the tax code and beat it like a populist’s piñata. It worked for President Obama.

"We've got a tax code that's making things worse,” candidate Obama said, October 22, 2007. “This isn't an accident. Special interests in Washington have carved out a trillion dollars worth of corporate tax loopholes at a time when income inequality is larger than any time since before the Great Depression." But candidate Obama was talking about a fair tax system, not the Fair Tax bills being put forth in Congress.

Its central idea is that the Fair Tax would eliminate complexity in the tax code. The idea is long on rhetoric, like what you earn is what you keep; like no more withholding taxes; like no more income tax. However, it is short on reality. For example, taxpayers would still pay the FICA Social Security tax, which is already a bigger burden than income tax for most people. Somebody would have to enforce the new tax law, so the plan would not eliminate the IRS altogether. The Fair Tax would not help the poor, who pay no income taxes under current tax code.

That is all before special interests hire lobbyists to propose exemptions. Tax attorneys, tax accountants and tax preparation companies be damned. Not.

The very idea of a federal income tax is barely a hundred years old. President William Howard Taft (R-OH) floated the idea in 1909. Oddly enough a greedy coalition of Republicans and Democrats of the day turned Taft’s idea into the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. At the time, no one really thought that the states would ratify the amendment. But a majority of states did ratify it in 1913 and people have been griping about income tax ever since.

The 16th Amendment created income tax as method of raising revenue and it created a federal bureaucracy called the Internal Revenue Service to collect it. Its ratification trumped an 1895 Supreme Court decision, Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co., holding a similar congressional attempt to uniformly tax incomes to be unconstitutional.

“And so the question is, is there a way of achieving simplification, but still having some element of progressivity and some element of fairness in the tax system?” President Obama asked a conference in Buffalo last year. “That’s part of what makes it complicated.”

So is repealing the 16^th Amendment which both of the Fair Tax bills require. It takes Constitutional amendment to repeal a Constitutional amendment and that has to be ratified by the states. So far it has only happened once. In 1934 the 21^st Amendment repealed the 18^th Amendment that created Prohibition in 1919. Civics lesson aside, the Fair Tax bill that Senator Lugar endorses has a Republican appeal that the tea party fringe will surely enjoy. But as interesting as the idea is, it is only interesting.

# # #

Originally published on Blogcritics June 6, 2011

Where Are the Jobs?

2011-06-04T10:42:00.000-07:00

The 112^th Congress has passed 25 roll call votes. This is the result of its taking care of the people’s business: 7 bills have become public law, 9 bills are destined for veto and the balance faces Senate opposition. Speaking of the Democratic controlled Senate, 4 of those veto destined bills have been referred to the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs and the balance are probably destined to failure. So, where are the jobs?

Let’s start with the legislation that has become public law. Bills on defense, Republicans never say “No” to the Department of Defense. There are lots of jobs in the armed services, but that’s not new. Roads will continue to be built and small business gets to save a lot of paper. There are continuing appropriations because bills must still be paid until a some kind of budget is enacted. But there are no new jobs in any of that.

The extension of the Patriot Act is contentious because it comes up for vote again. Key parts of the Patriot Act are set to expire on May 27^th. The Senate promised a real debate on this Bush Administration brain-child, but clearly that isn’t going to happen. The ACLU opposes its abridgement of the 4th Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures, along with requiring any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause. But they guy listening to your phone calls could have told you that.

The Banking Committee is looking at bills aimed at existing legislation and none is likely to pass. There is a Refinance bill to eliminate the Federal Housing Administration’s recently implemented short refinancing program. The White House has threatened to veto the measure should it pass the Senate. The Treasury’s Emergency Mortgage Relief Program, aimed at helping 3 to 4 million people by modifying at-risk mortgage loans, is a target. The HAMP Act [Home Affordable Modification Program], part of the TARP [Troubled Asset Relief Program] created by the Bush administration is a target and the administration has already said it will veto that bill. So far, however, there are no jobs offered in any of that business.

The new Republican House got lots of TV camera time by doing what it said it was going to do -- to attack and repeal the Affordable Health Care Act, which they call by the epithet “ObamaCare”. They passed the Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act and Repealing the Prevention and Public Health Fund, the latter which seeks to defund the new Health Care law. Both of those were campaign promises to people who don’t like Obama by people whose platform is not to like Obama. They promised jobs to everyone, just not in these bills.

Remember the BP oil disaster in the Gulf last year? The new Republican House hopes you don’t. Their Restarting American Offshore Leasing Now Act would require the administration to move forward with lease sales along the Atlantic Coast and in the Gulf of Mexico that it has delayed or canceled. Coincidentally, the Atlantic drilling is off the coast of Virginia, of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s home. The administration has said it will veto the bill.

And speaking about the environment, the Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011 would bar the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases for the purpose of combating climate change. How that saves taxpayers money while it chokes them must be a gift to somebody. If you guessed an Obama veto is likely, you guessed right. As for the defunding of National Public Radio, when Rush Limbaugh is free, Who Needs NPR?

What else has the House done for us, the people, so far? It passed some more “Repeal Funding” bills, aimed at defunding provisions of the Affordable Health Care Act that probably will not make it through the Senate. I have previously written about H.R.3 [No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act] and Net Neutrality [Disapproving the rule submitted by the Federal Communications Commission with respect to regulating the Internet and broadband industry practices]. Both of those face major Senate opposition.

They passed a Scholarship bill that has to do with Washington, D.C. schools. Congress is responsible for the district. There is an FAA bill “to streamline programs, create efficiencies, reduce waste, and improve aviation safety and capacity,” and we all need safer skies. There is the Government Shutdown Prevention Act, but that is probably unconstitutional. The budget bill that passed the House last month is in the Senate Budget Committee. It is all about cuts that will put more people out of work.

The one thing that the Republican House has done that gets plenty of attention is to create controversy on the deficit and debt ceiling debates. Both are exceptional exercises in brinksmanship, not effective fiscal policy, and confirmed to investors that congress is clueless about financial markets. The financial crisis itself is a product of the Republican administration that started two wars and decided to finance them with deficits instead of taxes. Republicans are responsible for a problem that cuts cannot cure. Creating jobs would at least increase federal revenue though withholding taxes, but that is a promise they have not kept. They also expect to be reelected.

Article first published as Where Are the Jobs? on Technorati.

H.R. 3: An End Sweep of Rights

2011-05-13T10:44:00.000-07:00

While so much attention has been paid to the death of Osama Bib Laden, yet another Republican House majority attack on civil liberties has moved forward under a new guise. Introduced in the House back in January and renamed H.R.3 to symbolize its importance, the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act” made its way through committees to the House floor on Wednesday. Not surprisingly, it passed. Essentially, the bill codifies what has already been practice, which is to bar federal employees, members of the military and those who receive federal assistance from using taxpayer money to pay for abortions, with few exceptions.

It is also an end sweep of the 14^th Amendment and Roe v Wade and re-regulates women’s reproductive rights in the process.

A top priority of top Republican leaders, co-sponsors John Boehner and Eric Cantor specifically, under the language of H.R. 3, rape becomes "forcible rape." Presumably that modifier distinguishes it from other kinds of sexual assault that are typically recognized as rape, such as statutory rape and attacks that occur because of drugs or verbal threats.

"We want to live up to our commitment to make sure that there is no government funding of abortion," said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. "And the provisions . . . have some connect with a government's support and funding of abortion." The bill effectively eliminates tax incentives on employer-provided health care benefits if those benefits cover abortion as a medical procedure. Cantor’s contention is that those incentives essentially constitute federal spending on abortion.

Sponsored by Republican Representatives Chris Smith of New Jersey and House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, the legislation also enacts strict procedural requirements for private insurance companies that cover abortions and deny tax credits to small businesses that purchase health insurance plans offering abortion coverage. Eighty-seven percent of private insurance plans currently include such coverage.

However, it is not the use of federal money that is at stake. It is a Congressional attempt to legislate around the Roe decision. The American Civil Liberties Union has cautioned against H.R. 3 “making access to abortion services harder to obtain for low-income women.” The ACLU says, “No woman plans to have an abortion, but that is the point of health insurance.” It further says, “That’s why the majority of plans currently include coverage for abortion care. Politicians should not be working to take away coverage that already exists for most women.”

Speaking of which, of the 227 co-sponsors of the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, count the number of women on the list. But the overwhelming majority of co-sponsors are men, for whom abortion is only a concept.

In the Roe decision Justice Blackmun wrote, “We, therefore, conclude that the right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision, but that this right is not unqualified, and must be considered against important state interests in regulation.” H.R. 3 goes after the regulation and not the right of privacy. Republican legislators and candidates, like Donald Trump, may be confused about the right of privacy. Men in Congress will never have to consider having an abortion, but they can regulate women’s reproductive rights, as they always have.

Article first published as H.R. 3: An End Sweep of Rights on Blogcritics.

Peace and Prosperity: Nothing Personal

2011-05-02T11:18:00.000-07:00

People are not going to like what any president does. Many people are not going to like the person, as is the case with Barack Obama and to a greater extent than to George W. Bush. Conservatives revere the Bush presidency, especially its tax cuts and its waging wars. They despise Obama for trying to undo both of those situations as if it’s personal. They seem to hate peace and prosperity.

I stumbled across an elephant in the living room – the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. As a candidate for the presidency, Senator Obama spoke in Iowa about the great beast, “The best way to protect our security and to pressure Iraq’s leaders to resolve their civil war is to immediately begin to remove our combat troops,” Mr. Obama said. “Not in six months or one year — now.” That was almost four years ago.

It is regrettable that President Obama has not yet prevailed in bringing peace, if for no other reason than the sheer financial cost of the wars. Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports that between Fiscal Year 2001 and Fiscal Year 2011, the Iraq War has cost $802 billion and the Afghanistan War has cost $455.4 billion. (CRS page 14: Table 3, Estimated War Funding By Operation, Agency and Fiscal Year) The CRS report is an interesting read for congressional wonks and for political writers.

Here is a different look at that amount of money. It is a ticker produced by the National Priorities Project. The NPP is a research organization that analyzes and clarifies federal data so that people can understand and influence how their tax dollars are spent. The Project has focused on the impact of federal spending at the national, state, congressional district and local levels since 1983. By any measure, the wars cost the US an astounding amount of money.

The problem is that the money has got to come from somewhere, taxes or deficits. Historically, wars financed heavily by higher taxes end quickly, such as the Korean War and the first Gulf War. Wars financed largely by deficits, such as the war in Vietnam and the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, tend to drag on indefinitely.

Congress and Presidents Johnson and Nixon asked for sacrifices from all citizens. In 1968, Congress imposed a 10% surtax to pay for the Vietnam War. There was also a draft. Conscription can be viewed as a kind of tax that was largely paid by the poor and middle class. However, without naming names, young men from wealthy families largely escaped the effects of the draft through college deferments.

The GOP controlled Congress from 2001 to 2006 and President Bush never asked for sacrifices from anyone, except those in our nation's military and their families. According to Forbes columnist Bruce Bartlett, a former Treasury Department economist in the Bush administration, “American people's support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has always been paper thin. Asking them to sacrifice through higher taxes, domestic spending cuts or reinstatement of the draft would surely have led to massive protests akin to those during the Vietnam era or to political defeat in 2004.” So the Bush administration chose deficits to finance the wars.

What’s more, in the middle of that period -- February 4, 2003, to be exact -- White House budget chief Mitch Daniels conceded that the budget would remain in deficit for the next decade. According to Slate, “a Feb. 3 White House fact sheet lays down the Bush line: The budget would be in double digit deficit if had there never been a tax cut in 2001.” Republicans blame run-away spending, now.

The elephant in the living room is the deficit financing of two wars. End the wars and we apply a tourniquet to the deficit spending that requires raising the debt ceiling. Since March 1962, that ceiling has been raised 74 times and ten of those times have occurred since 2001. If President Obama is to be despised for anything, it must be for attempting peace and prosperity. It’s nothing personal.

Article first published as Peace and Prosperity: Nothing Personal on Blogcritics.

Another Fake Debate: Raising the Debt Ceiling

2011-04-28T08:52:00.000-07:00

Time Magazine used the word “zoom” with respect to the “public debt” in a 1941 article and said, “The President questioned the meaning of a legal debt limit, hinted that there should be no legal limit.” There were only newspapers, magazines, movie theatre newsreels and radio to report that the 1940 Democratic platform “made no mention of that fiscal dodo, that old museum piece: a balanced budget. Franklin Roosevelt held to precedent—he didn't mention it, either.”

Bear in mind that the idea of a federal budget was relatively new. Up until 1921, the president did not have much of anything to do with hashing out budget, other approving or disapproving it as the head of his political party. The Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 created the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) as part of the Legislative Branch. Its job was to audit federal books and prevent fraud. In the Executive Branch, the 1921 legislation created the Bureau of Budget to coordinate budget submissions by various departments and agencies.

Former Treasury Department economist Bruce Bartlett wrote in Forbes, “Deficits primarily resulted from wars, and strenuous efforts were always made to pay them off as soon as possible afterward. On those occasions when the Treasury needed to sell bonds, each individual bond issue had to be specifically authorized by Congress.”

The federal budget is actually on automatic pilot, anyway. The reality is that neither Congress nor the presidents have anything so say about it. “If you take all the earmarks, unnecessary weapons systems, waste, fraud and abuse and everything else you can think of that deserves to be cut, it still adds up to drops in the ocean compared to Social Security and Medicare,” Bartlett says. “As long as those programs are off limits the president's budget will continue to decline as a matter of political and economic importance.”

As to the meaning of the debt ceiling that President Roosevelt questioned, since March 1962 the debt ceiling has been raised 74 times. According to the Congressional Research Service, 10 of those times have occurred since 2001. Theoretically, the debt ceiling limit is supposed to help Congress control spending. However, in reality, the debt limit is ineffective in controlling spending and deficits. Politicians and reality continue to be strangers to one another.

Here is where the appearance of a showdown gets legs. “Administration officials say even GOP firebrands won’t risk a national default and an international financial meltdown,” according to Politico. “There is a growing sense among all parties that President Barack Obama won’t be able to extend the credit limit without making significant new concessions to congressional Republicans.”

Democrats have leverage, however. “There are obviously divisions in the GOP among the leaders and the people pursuing their dumb notions of linking [cuts] to the debt vote,” said Representative Barney Frank (D-MA). Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) has repeatedly said the limit needs to be raised. Representative Eric Cantor (R-VA), Boehner’s number 2 in the House, is keeping with his alliance with tea party conservatives and taking taken a tougher line. But that’s all it is – a line.

Conservative strategists are warning that the GOP should not push the debt ceiling debate too close to the breaking point. According to the Huffington Post, “If there is a vote on raising the debt ceiling and it fails, there will be a significant market reaction,” said Tony Fratto, a former Treasury and White House official in the Bush administration. “Investors already believe that Congress doesn’t understand the financial markets. A failure to raise the debt ceiling will confirm this to them."

The country is already sour on congress. Gallup reports, “Congress' approval is at 17%, essentially unchanged from last month's 18%, and identical to where it was just after last November's midterm congressional elections. The current rating is just four percentage points above the all-time low of 13% from December.”

Gallup also reports that neither the budget nor unemployment is Americans' top overall concern. “That distinction belongs to the economy, by a significant margin over any other issue. The economy has placed first or second on the list each month since February 2008.” Even so their polling shows that “Independents and Republicans are both twice as likely as Democrats to say the budget is the most important problem. In turn, Republicans are less likely than Democrats and independents to view unemployment as the top problem.”

Pew Research March survey found that 34% of Americans said the economic issue they found most worrisome was “the job situation,” followed by rising prices (28%) and then the budget deficit (24%). The survey also said, “The number citing the deficit as their top economy worry had increased from 19% in December. Concern over rising prices increased even more dramatically -- from 15% in December to 28% in March.”

Pew Research also found that with respect to Obama’s handling of the federal budget deficit, 33% approved and 59% disapproved. However, when asked whether the GOP or President Obama has the better approach on the deficit, “most Americans (52%) say there is not much difference between the two sides -- and Republicans have lost ground on this measure, among their own base, since November.”

Not surprisingly the New York Times/CBS poll finds pretty much the same results. Of Barack Obama’s handling the federal budget deficit, 33% approve and 59% disapprove. Of the way the Republicans in Congress are handling the federal budget deficit, 27% approve and 63% disapprove. As to the way Congress is handling its job, 16% approve and 75% disapprove. Congress beats the president in disapproval.

H.L. Menken said, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” The recent House Republican habit of creating fake debates and backing losing legislation would seem to confirm Menken’s observation. However, its Barney Frank who calls the raising the deficit ceiling debate best. “In the end, the Republicans are not going to be able to withstand the pressure from the business community, the guys who finance their campaigns. … In the end, they have to do this.” Posturing about the debt ceiling is another fake debate.

Article first published as Another Fake Debate: Raising the Debt Ceiling on Technorati.

Net Neutrality: Medium or Message

2011-04-19T09:57:00.000-07:00

While everyone’s attention was focused on the potential for a government shutdown, House Republicans passed a bill to repeal federal rules barring Internet service providers from blocking or setting different prices for some uses of their networks. According to the Associated Press, in voting to repeal rules on “network neutrality” set down by the Federal Communications Commission, Republicans claimed that the FCC lacked the authority to impose such rules.

“The FCC power grab would allow it to regulate any interstate communication service on barely more than a whim and without any additional input from Congress,” said Rep. Greg Walden (R, OR), a sponsor of the legislation. The vote along party lines to pass the bill, H.J. Res. 37, was 240-179. This is the same House that voted 228-192 on a bill to defund National Public Radio last month. It is yet another bill unlikely to pass in the Senate and doomed to a presidential veto if it should.

The concept of “net neutrality", according to the New York Times, holds that companies providing Internet service should treat all sources of data equally. The debate centers on whether those companies can give preferential treatment to content providers who pay for faster transmission, or to their own content, “in effect creating a two-tier Web, and about whether they can block or impede content representing controversial points of view.”

Before the House took up a joint resolution condemning the new Internet access rules, Verizon and MetroPCS brought a lawsuit to court that challenged the FCC’s pending rules to keep Internet service providers from blocking access to certain Web sites or applications. The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia circuit rejected the suit as “premature.” Although considered by some as a first-round victory for the F.C.C. and its chairman, Julius Genachowski, the real battle over the commission’s attempt to regulate broadband providers has only just begun.

In a recent meeting with Wall Street Journal reporters and editors, Genachowski said, “I don’t see any circumstances where we’d take steps to regulate the Internet itself.” He added, “I’ve been clear repeatedly that we’re not going to regulate the Internet.” In trying to craft new rules that would require phone and cable companies to treat all legal Internet traffic that flows over their lines equally, the FCC had proposed a draft of “net neutrality” rules last fall. “The communications line piece is something that we have historic responsibility for [in] promoting competition and promoting innovation. So that is the distinction,” Genachowski said.

Internet service providers, of course, say there’s no need for the government to step in, as do other opponents of the FCC.

Freedom Works called the FCC rules “job-killing regulations [that] would involve significant new controls on the Internet that would have significant implications for investing in innovation and broadband deployment.” In urging passage of HJR 37, it posted, “The FCC should respect this fact—and the careful separation of power laid out in the US Constitution—and not make such sweeping law where the legislature has not.” Naturally, anything that conservative organizations and Republicans don’t like, out comes the Constitution.

Another organization, Americans for Prosperity went as far to charge that “Chairman Genachowski, a long-time executive at Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp, one of the leading corporate beneficiaries of net neutrality, is currently attempting FCC’s second foray into Internet regulations.” The fact is that no FCC commissioner may have a financial interest in any FCC-related business.

Consumers Union opposed the legislation. “Internet providers should not limit your choices to their preferred sites,” said Parul P. Desai, the organizations policy counsel. “Key stakeholders – from consumers, to small business, to civil rights groups and religious organizations – have overwhelmingly voiced support for Open Internet rules as well as the FCC’s authority to implement and enforce them.” Unfortunately, they did not refer to the Constitution in their opposition.

Democratic policymakers called free and open communications “a vital part of American democracy.” At the Free Press’s National Conference for Media Reform, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) said she was pleased by Democratic opposition to the GOP-backed resolution, which cleared the House under the cover of the looming shutdown. “No one should be guarding the gate on the Internet,” Pelosi said. She added that the resolution isn’t likely to gain support in the Senate. “I don’t think this bill is going anyplace.”

As I pointed out in Blogcritics two years ago, there is a difference between a regulation and a law. As an independent regulatory agency, the FCC has the power to impose regulations at any time without action by either the executive or legislative branches. The new regulations, which the FCC calls its Open Internet Order, are the rules that House Republicans attacked.

Once again House Republicans have backed a losing proposition as they did with their attempt to defund National Public Radio. The GOP opposition to Net Neutrality regulations favors corporations over consumers. At least we know where they are coming from. This time it is not about the message. This time it is about the medium and the corporations that own it. It is another win for losing.

Article first published as Net Neutrality: Message or Medium on Technorati.

House Crier: Faking a Shutdown

2011-04-08T08:41:00.000-07:00

Hypocrisy is a pretense of having a virtuous character and principles that one does not really possess. Bare that in mind while I offer an observation that the threat of a government shutdown is just a threat. It is a bully’s threat that is about as credible as the tears of Speaker Boehner. The speaker’s tears demonstrate one of two things, that the shut-down threat is a fake or that the man is emotionally unbalanced. In either case, the threat will last until the very last minute, when it will be averted. Deals have already been cut.

Here is a quick example of this hypocrisy. Republicans especially are all about National Defense. They would sooner burn autographed pictures of Ronald Reagan than touch the Defense Budget, as they have demonstrated. However, as ABC News reports, if the government shuts down, US military personnel won’t get paid.

The Speaker is responsible for ensuring that the House passes legislation supported by the majority party, in this case the majority of the majority. Boehner’s freshmen are challenging his ability to do so. Representative Paul D. Ryan (R, WI), recently of Budget Committee fame, had very telling words about the tea party contingent who have propelled the threat of shutdown forward. “The new people did not come here for a political career,” he said. “They came here for a cause.”

Their “cause” is a risky government shutdown that they seem to think is alright. That opinion found voice in a former member of the House Budget Committee, Thad McCotter (R, MI), who says he thinks the “majority of the public would agree” that a partial shutdown of the federal government wouldn’t be that bad in their lives, according to ABC.

For Boehner the worse outcome is a split conference that pits the Republican establishment against the tea party contingency. Of course senior members of the Republican caucus like Mike Pence and Michele Bachmann, who seek to raise their profiles by establishing themselves as rebel leaders, make out but all future Republican progress would be undermined.

Republicans seem to intend to cut benefits and programs for the nation’s retirees and neediest citizens while protecting corporate America and the wealthiest people from paying their share of taxes. The ACLU opposes enacting their FY11 spending bill because it contains amendments that would eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood to legislation that would impose an “abortion tax” on small businesses who want to provide abortion coverage in their employees health plans.

The government did shut down in 1995 and 1996 under Newt Gingrich’s speakership. Two years later, voters sent 20 Republican members packing and the speaker took the blame. The hypocrisy of the tea party ideological “cause” begs the question that if the Republicans cannot govern themselves, how they are supposed to govern the country?

# # #

originally published on Blogcritics, April 6, 2011 as House Crier: Faking a Shutdown

# # #

A couple of notes, April 8, morning of the shutdown threat:

“It’s not realistic to shut down the government on a debate dealing with abortion,” Senator Harry Reid (D, NV) said. “It’s not fair to the American people. We haven’t solved the issue in 40 years. We’re not going to solve it in the next 38 hours. We should not be distracted by ideology. This is a bill that funds the government.” (see ACLU above)

Gallup reports "The American public has clearly and consistently expressed a desire for elected officials in Washington to pass a new fiscal year budget without bringing government operations to a halt."

The New York Times reports that it is “the policy riders that are the real holdup to a deal.” To Republicans it’s all about abortion, environmental protection and health care. The hold up has nothing to do with jobs or the economy. Negotiators at the White House say “the issue of the spending cuts barely even came up. All the talk was about the abortion demands and the other issues.”

The shutdown is a made for TV event. Neither the White House nor the Republican leadership will let it happen and, contrary to Dave’s right intentions, there is already a continuing resolution in the breach ready for the moment of truth.

Aaron Sorkin has written a better teleplay, but it was performed by real actors.

Tommy

NPR and AFRTS Won't Be Chopped

2011-03-25T09:00:00.000-07:00

On Blogcritics, where my NPR piece appeared, someone commented, “No other broadcast entity is supported by the government (except its propaganda outlets like V of A and Radio Marti . . . ” I had to reply.

Actually there is. AFRTS, Armed Forces Radio and Television Service, is part of the Department of Defense.

As a graduate of the Defense Information School, which trains all AFRTS personnel, let me assure you that AFRTS is in no danger of being defunded. It broadcasts Rush Limbaugh as part of its “stateside radio and television programming, "a touch of home,” to U.S. service men and women, DoD civilians, and their families serving outside the continental United States.” Those are places like Afghanistan and Iraq, among others.

Don’t forget that House Republicans held an emergency session on HR 1076 waiving O'Keefe’s misleading editing, distorted quotes, and untruth and promoted his tape as gospel. The emergency was on. They won.

The bill has no chance in the Senate. The president has a pen full of veto ink. NPR will continue to receive federal funding, as will the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, those “frivolous” institutions recently trashed by the Arch Republican Sarah Palin.

By the way, AFRTS is available in Sweden and Israel.

Someone commented that they were “concerned that AFRTS has become an Establishment propaganda tool which is financed by the taxpayer” and asks about it’s scheduling. Again, I had to reply.

First and foremost let me point out that the service is for Armed Forces and Department of Defense personnel serving the United States overseas, not in the continental US. For scheduling, you should look to AFN, American Forces Network, which is a part of the Department of Defense (DoD).

Second, one could argue that AFRTS is an establishment propaganda tool, that establishment being the federal military/industrial establishment, once again the DoD. One could also argue that the context in which the word “propaganda” is used must be considered. The context usually depends on what side one is on.

Third, with regard to scrutiny and budget trimming, that goes directly to the DoD Budget itself, which is Holy to Republicans. They would just as soon burn an autographed picture of Ronald Reagan than to touch the so called Defense budget. But that is what would have to happen before any cutting of the pittance paid for media.

In 1947 the DoD, the acronym for United States Department of Defense, is what became of the Department of War, which was founded in 1789. It has the largest budget of any US Department headed by a single secretary. Its budget is more than 4.5 % of Assumed Nominal GDP and accounts for more than 21% of the US Federal Budget. One wonders if it would be so much if it was still called the Department of War.

Name changes and propaganda give us the US Navy as a "Global Force for Good". Good aiming, see CNN. While I am at it, the job of the US Army and US Marine Corps is not peace keeping. Their job is to seek out an enemy and to destroy it.

Take it from a former US Army propagandist [Awards winning Military Journalist]. But, I digress.

Hidden Tape Emergency

2011-03-21T15:56:00.000-07:00

House Republicans held an emergency session on HR 1076, the NPR funding cut. What was the emergency?

A hidden camera captured NPR executive Ron Shiller saying that NPR would be better off without federal funding. But that’s not all. Shiller also ripped into the tea party movement as a bunch of “gun toting racists,” adding “and not just Islamaphobic, but really xenophobic.”

Republicans have had NPR on their agenda for years and a phenomenal and bogus tape by James O'Keefe became their next big deal. O'Keefe claims to be acting in the tradition of undercover investigative muckrakers. But the GOP’s new majority seized O'Keefe’s misleading editing, distorted quotes, and untruth and promoted it as gospel. The emergency was on.

Here is an interview with O'Keefe.

As I wrote on Blogcritics, when you can listen to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity for free, who needs NPR? It reaches 33 million listeners through its member stations, with its 36 bureaus and offices around the world, and local coverage produced by more than 270 independent NPR member public radio stations across the country. Republicans hate that. In the House of Representatives they voted their conscience, and this tells us everything we need to know.

It’s not about the money. It is all about the content. The GOP doesn’t like NPR content because they are focusing on a small percentage of it that they disagree with. I am sure Rush Limbaugh agrees with me.

The left politics or right politics argument that is being bandied about is referred to as the False Dichotomy Fallacy, which excludes anything in the middle. The majority of NPR programming is neither left nor right. NPR stations broadcast programs ranging from A Prairie Home Companion and The Thistle & Shamrock to Car Talk and Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me. The news programs Fresh Air and All Things Considered must drive the GOP nuts.

There is nothing like a tempest in a tea party pot, which is what the new House majority seems to be all about. Their emergency meeting on NPR funding is just one of many items on a growing list to stuff that they know is doomed to successful failure. There are health care bills they know they can't pass, abortion bills they know they can't pass, climate bills they know they can't pass, and budget bills they know they can't pass.

The voters that elected them must really be impressed with the amount of time, money and energy their House GOP representatives have spent on defending the Defense of Marriage Act, recklessly accusing Muslim Americans of disloyalty, and pushing culture-war bills related to vouchers, English as the 'official' language, and 'In God We Trust.'

NPR's funding would have been an issue whether or not O'Keefe made that tape. Senator Saxby Chambliss agrees about that, but also says, “You know, an awful lot of conservatives listen to NPR. It provides a very valuable service.” The Georgia Republican also thinks that “total elimination of funding is probably not the wisest thing to do.” He is being politically kind.

Other than NPR stations, radio is owned by the right. Television is owned by the sponsors. That’s why journalism and television have become as oil and water. Television journalism has become an oxymoron. The reason is that television is show business.

“Mack, guys like you [journalists] are like icing on the cake. We don’t really need you,” the Sales Manager of WJCL TV, Savannah, said to me after I got pulled off of a story I was working. “If it doesn't sell beer or cars, it doesn’t go on the air.”

As to news presenters, they are their own little institutions. They are actors playing the rolls of journalists. They are talking hairdos. The scripts they read are becoming more and more shallow, almost vapid. Their script writers are too lazy to use Google.

Incidentally, if you think that one broadcast or cable news organization is any better than another, please think again. Aside from NPR and PBS, all other “self-respecting news organizations” ask themselves two basic questions. Does it sell beer? Does it sell cars?

O’Keefe’s productions sell both.

Marching in Madison

2011-02-21T18:51:00.000-08:00

What did the Republicans expect other than an outdoor media event in Madison?

“I hope I’m inspiration just as much as others are an inspiration to me,” Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker said last week. He just did not say what he inspires. State Democrats walked out of the legislature, preventing a quorum and thus a vote and people came out to demonstrate, of which Madison has a long tradition.

Walker, “Wisconsin’s new union-busting governor”, as Paul Krugman called him, announced plans to cut the bargaining rights and benefits of public workers. The measures in question would prohibit unions from bargaining over issues other than wages. They would stop unions from having dues deducted from state paychecks and require them to hold annual elections to stay in existence.

It should be noted that Wisconsin’s pension fund is better off than most pension funds in the US. The state does not suffer the large shortfalls that other states face and it has a 7.5 percent unemployment rate, well below the national average.

“Workers’ rights — including the fundamental right to organize and bargain for better pay, benefits and working conditions — are under attack in states from Maine to Ohio, from Wisconsin to Florida,” said Gerald McEntee, president of the main union of Wisconsin state employees.

“It’s like Cairo has moved to Madison,” First District Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI) said. Never mind that the Wisconsin protesters, unlike those in Egypt, have jobs, homes, families, plenty of food on their plate, police protection, and are engaging in completely risk-free protests.

Besides, even Rush Limbaugh, Rick Santorum, and Glenn Beck denounced the uprising in Egypt and insisted that President Obama should have helped Mubarak put it down.

Like many Republicans in states like Wisconsin, Walker came to power last November by defeating union-backed Democrats. Now those newly elected Republicans are attacking union wages and union power, as they face budget gaps in those states that were largely created in the first place by Republicans prior to 2008.

The Mid-East comparison trivializes the protest in Madison. That is what a media event is: a shiny bit that attracts attention and rhetoric but no substantive discussion. It is the false analogy that a protest is a protest is a protest to which I object. The whole purpose of a protest is to call attention, foment debate and call for amendment, and it should affect the discussion that emerges when Wisconsin Democrats return.

Governor Scott Walker is one heck of an inspiration, all right, especially for those who are interested only in power and not in consequences. He certainly is not interested in making any concessions or negotiating with anyone. He most certainly is not interested in bargaining with state workers. He wants to terminate their ability to bargain. That appears to be his Republican brand of politics.

Begging the rhetorical question of whether Wisconsin is the Tunisia of collective bargaining rights has a lot of coincidental appeal, but it is off point. The point is what President Obama called “an assault on unions” which is all about politics, especially in center-left Madison, where it is cold.

However, the spring will come, the freeze will thaw and the protests will be what used to be called a Kodak moment. Follow it on Twitter and Facebook.

Patriot Action: Suspending the 4th Amendment

2011-02-15T14:26:00.000-08:00

After the Republican House procedurally failed at their first attempt to have the Patriot Act extended, they succeeded and passed it with little debate. The bill now goes to the Senate and begs a very important question. Where is the oversight on this issue? The answer is, there isn’t any oversight. There is fear mongering, like the claim that our country is facing unprecedented threats both at home and abroad. What threats? Where at home? Where abroad?

The Patriot Act is the post-9/11 law created during the Bush/Cheney administration that violates the 4th Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. Its authorization is so broad that the government does not even have to specify the suspect’s name to get a warrant. It authorizes the following:

1. Examination of library and bookstore records of suspects, along with hard drives, tax documents and gun records, without being required to show probable cause

2. Roving wiretaps on a terror suspect without the government specifying the suspect’s name to get a warrant

3. Surveillance of so-called “lone wolf” suspects, permits secret intelligence surveillance of non-US persons who are not affiliated with a foreign organization. Although it has never been used, the Congress seeks to renew it without debate.

Additionally, National Security Letters (NSLs) permit the government to obtain the communication, financial and credit records of anyone deemed relevant to a terrorism investigation even if that person is not suspected of unlawful behavior.

The ACLU also offers a detailed look at how congress and the public “have yet to receive real information about how these [Patriot Act] powerful tools are being used to collect information on Americans.” The ACLU makes it easy for you to contact your Senator. Reasonable suspicion or probable cause before undertaking an investigation that infringes upon a person's privacy is suspended under the Patriot Act, which needs to expire.

The House vote came in and by a margin of 65, approved the Patriot Act extension. As the NY Times reported, “it is likely that the Senate will approve the House’s bill — putting off a larger debate over the provisions until later in the year.”

Or so we hope.

In the Senate, a bill proposed by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) would extend the provisions for three more years without new safeguards. Another bill by Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) would make the provisions I mentioned permanent. Although Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) offers a bill that would add several safeguards, it also extends the expiring provisions in the Patriot Act through 2013.

Some have argued that it is like the tree falling in the woods with no one around and asking if it makes a sound. The tree’s falling creates a disturbance whether anyone is around to hear it or not. Moreover, the use of such a postulation demonstrates a lack of understanding of the issue, if not ignorance.

If you pardon the reference, the issue is clear cut. First, The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,” which the Patriot Act allows, especially whether or not a person knows it. Second, “no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized,” which the Patriot Act authorizes.

Of course many English colonists, perhaps even a majority, asked the same question, “Why get worked up over things that only theoretically threaten liberty?” No one asked you to concern yourself about the “right of the people” or civil liberties at all. The Constitution takes care of that, whether or not you know it.

While many writers are concerned with pontificating about Egypt, a subject vastly beyond their understanding, concern about their own liberties go ignored. To keep our eye on the ball, compromising our constitution affects us more than current events abroad in Africa. Egypt now has no constitution. Its military accomplished that. It is our Bill of Rights that is threatened here at home by our Congress that demands our concern.

The reason for concern is as the American Civil Liberties Union motto states, “Because Freedom Can’t Protect Itself.”

Landmark or Landmine: Roe v Wade

2011-02-03T14:37:00.000-08:00

“I am committed to protecting this constitutional right,” President Obama said in a statement. “I also remain committed to policies, initiatives, and programs that help prevent unintended pregnancies, support pregnant women and mothers, encourage healthy relationships, and promote adoption.” Mr. Obama said the 1973 Supreme Court ruling “affirms a fundamental principle: that government should not intrude on private family matters.”

We’ll see how that commitment works.

The phrase that it “ain’t what you say, it’s the way that you say it” comes to mind whenever I consider landmark Supreme Court decisions, none more so than that of Roe v Wade. Whenever the 38-year-old case comes up, the next words to follow are “that legalized abortion.” Those three words express an often repeated opinion of what the Court ruled when it struck down Texas criminal abortion statutes as “…vague and over broadly infringing the plaintiffs' Ninth and Fourteenth Amendment rights.”

What the ruling says is different than such a “that legalized abortion” modifier. It would be more accurate to say of Roe that “the unborn have never been recognized in the law.” In fact, it is exactly what Justice Harry Blackmun wrote. Roe is not about abortion.

Roe is about the right to privacy which, while not specifically articulated in the Bill of Rights, comes from a previous landmark decision, Griswold v Connecticut. In that 1965 case, the Court identified a constitutionally protected right to privacy, which the Court reasoned prohibited states from denying birth control to married couples. In that case the Court ruled that the Constitution protected a right to privacy by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

As the Roe decision declares, “State criminal abortion laws, like those involved here, that except from criminality only a life-saving procedure on the mother's behalf without regard to the stage of her pregnancy and other interests involved violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which protects against state action the right to privacy, including a woman's qualified right to terminate her pregnancy.”

It is not a carte blanche for the termination of pregnancy, however, as Justice Blackmun wrote. “We, therefore, conclude that the right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision, but that this right is not unqualified, and must be considered against important state interests in regulation.”

The controversial nature of public opinion relating to abortion and to the Roe decision is polarized. The opposing sides try to be careful with their use of language, as in what they call themselves: Abortionists or Pro-Choice on one side and Anti-Abortionists or Pro-Life on the other. Both sides are highly politicized and their confrontations have a history of violence.

The prevailing view of the Pro-Choice side is characterized by organizations such as the National Abortion Federation. As a “professional association of abortion providers in North America,” the NAF says, “We believe that women should be trusted to make private medical decisions in consultation with their health care providers. NAF currently offers quality training and services to abortion providers and unbiased information and referral services to women.”

The more activist Pro-Life side is characterized by organizations such as the Pro-Life Action League, which organizes and participates in marches, such as the recent one in San Francisco. The League says, “We confront the abortionists and abortion promoters wherever they are. We picket and demonstrate outside abortion facilities, pro-abortion events, the offices of abortion organizations like NOW and Planned Parenthood and even abortionists' houses. We infiltrate their meetings and groups.”

Each side of the abortion issue has a different position on when life begins, at conception or later. It is an argument that has its roots in the 19^th Century. But the Roe v Wade decision side steps that debate, leaving it outside of the rule of law.

“Texas urges that, apart from the Fourteenth Amendment, life begins at conception and is present throughout pregnancy, and that, therefore, the State has a compelling interest in protecting that life from and after conception. We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.”

If the debate is outside of the rule of law, it is not outside of the legislation of laws. The American Civil Liberties Union cautions that Congress is trying attempting to legislate around the Roe decision, “making access to abortion services harder to obtain for low-income women.” The ACLU says, “No woman plans to have an abortion, but that is the point of health insurance.” It contends, “That’s why the majority of plans currently include coverage for abortion care. Politicians should not be working to take away coverage that already exists for most women.”

While that may or may not be, the question becomes how legislators will respond to their constituencies and to public opinion. The group Priests for Life president, Father Frank Pavone, asserts that even after 38 years the public still does not understand what the ruling in Roe means. “Perhaps it is more accurate to say our nation is beginning to awaken to the fact that Roe’s policy – imposed by a Court rather than voted on by the people’s representatives -- has never represented what the majority of Americans think about abortion.” Perhaps.

So, what is that thinking? Let us turn to Gallup where you too can look at the data. Two years after the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling “gave sweeping constitutional protection to abortion”, Gallup asked Americans to say whether they believe abortion should be "legal under any circumstances," "legal only under certain circumstances," or "illegal in all circumstances."

The survey results said, “In the most recent period, from 2005 to 2009, the majority of all age groups favored the middle "legal only under certain circumstances" position.” Gallup further observed that even though the topic of abortion is a contentious social issue, “in recent years, the generational distinctions have blurred.” Gallup asked about abortion, not about the right to privacy.

Given the mood swing of the country that put a new Republican majority in Congress with its avowed anti-abortion agenda, the President’s right to privacy commitment is either to a Constitutional landmark or to a political landmine.

# # #

Originally published on Blogcritics, January 25, 2011

Assassination and the 2nd Amendment

2011-01-23T11:39:00.000-08:00

In March, 1968, I turned 18 barely a month after the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. Within 3 days I reported to my draft board and registered, otherwise a deputy Sheriff would have come to my high school to escort me to the bus station and a free trip to Ft. Benning, Georgia, but I digress. At my recently desegregated high school, I enjoyed my deferment. The only times I remember thinking about such violence was after watching the nightly news.

By 1968, with no Internet, laptops or cell phones, television had become the dominant news medium, following from the live televised assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald five years earlier. Night after night at supper time, anchors Bob Young (ABC), Walter Cronkite (CBS) and the team of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley (NBC) reported the carnage of the Vietnam War and the outrage surrounding the Civil Rights movement. Sound on film replayed the gunfire and the violence.

I had seen Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on television. Of him I heard mostly vile things, since I lived in the rural South where the idea of “separate but equal” still held and the term “African-American” was unknown. I recall thinking at the time that he and other leaders of the civil rights movement were sure putting themselves in harm’s way by their exposure like targets, especially Dr. King who was all over television leading marches and being interviewed.

April 4, 1968, James Earl Ray shouldered a Remington.30-06-caliber rifle with a Redfield 2x7 scope and pulled the trigger.

My hero and presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy broke the news of Dr. King’s assassination to a crowd in Indianapolis. Kennedy spoke of King's dedication to "love and to justice between fellow human beings," adding that "he died in the cause of that effort." Rioting broke out in Memphis and 4,000 guardsmen were called out. Other cities burned, but Indianapolis did not. "I had a member of my family killed,” Kennedy said, “but he was killed by a white man."

June 5th, 1968, Sirhan Sirhan pulled out a .22 caliber revolver and fired eight shots.

I do not remember hearing calls for any kind of gun control, though, until after the failed Reagan assassination attempt, March 1981, when John Hinckley fired a .22 caliber Röhm RG-14 revolver six times and wounded both the President and his Press Secretary James Brady. It made the nightly news after it appeared within minutes on CNN. Subsequently, after a seven-year battle, President Clinton signed into law the Brady Bill, which requires a five-day waiting period and background checks on handgun purchases.

If you love data, and who doesn’t, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence has a graphic on its home page that updates how many people are shot in America so far this year and so far today. As I originally posted this article with Blogcritics, the numbers reported 5000 people shot to date, 175 today.

In the aftermath of the Giffords’ shooting, you may or may not know that Arizona has virtually no restrictions on guns and recently became the third state to allow people to carry concealed weapons in public places without a permit. The state also recently allowed concealed weapon carriers to take their guns into bars and just last year became the third state to make it legal for adults to carry a concealed weapon without getting training and a background check.

Arizona House Speaker Kirk Adams is one of 61 Republicans making up two-thirds of the 90-member Legislature. According to AP, Adams said last year's bill to legalize carrying concealed weapons without a permit wasn't a mistake. "Arizona remains a place that is respectful and adamant about our Second Amendment rights, and I think the people of Arizona support that," Adams said. The state ranks 5th in the nation in gun deaths, behind Wyoming, Louisiana, Alaska and the District of Columbia.

What a contrast exists between 5^th ranked Arizona and 1st ranked Washington, D.C. on so many levels. But I want to stick with gun possession and get to the 2^nd Amendment. The District of Columbia banned the possession of handguns, making it a crime to carry an unregistered firearm and the registration of handguns illegal. Ultimately, the D.C. handgun ban went to the Supreme Court in District Of Columbia v. Heller, which overturned the ban.

Justice Antonin Scalia is the longest-serving justice on the Supreme Court and wrote the Court’s opinion in Heller. “Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.” He continued, “Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment, nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”

Judge Scalia further wrote, “Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride of our Nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security, and where gun violence is a serious problem. That is perhaps debatable, but what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this Court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct.”

Let me point out that the founders wrote the 2^nd Amendment to protect citizens from Congress, not from home invaders. The whole idea dates back to the 17^th century when the Catholic Stuart Kings, Charles II and James II, sought to protect themselves from overthrow by disarming insurgent Protestant militias. By the time of the founding, an English subjects’ right to have arms was understood to be an individual right protecting against both public and private violence.

By the way, how many shootings happen in home defense? I cannot find the data. But, again, I digress. As Justice Scalia wrote in Heller, “…we do not read the Second Amendment to protect the right of citizens to carry arms for any sort of confrontation, just as we do not read the First Amendment to protect the right of citizens to speak for any purpose.”

Assassins shot and killed both Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F.Kennedy in 1968. An assassination attempt on Representative Gabriel Giffords killed Judge John Roll and 5 other people in 2011. Laws and public policy cannot prevent assassinations. Public figures, such as John Lennon, will always be vulnerable. The only things that have changed in this regard, since I was in high school, are how quickly we find out about such tragedies, how many more shooting deaths occur each year, and how public opinion on the 2^nd Amendment has become politicized.

Article originally published as Assassination and the 2^nd Amendment on Blogcritics.

A Tragic Update

2011-01-11T15:45:00.000-08:00

After Sarah Palin posted the rifle scope cross hair target map on her Facebook page, she entered the frontier of sedition using Twitter. “Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD!” The recent Tucson, AZ, shooting atrocity confirms Palin’s seditious speech. Palin deserves derision for such speech and for not pulling down her “Target map” until one of her targets was publically shot in the head.

Palin’s speech is protected under the 1st Amendment. The murderer’s right to bear arms is protected under 2nd Amendment. The terrorist himself did not reload and in retreat was apprehended. However he can count on the 5th Amendment’s guarantee of “due process of law” – ironic since he killed a judge.

After Palin’s followers are instructed on what to say (on Facebook and Twitter), they will assert that no connection to her seditious speech can be made other than for its tragic coincidence. They will say that she is in no way responsible for such a terrorist act as the Tucson public murders, especially since the gunman does not appear to be one of her “peace-seeking Muslims.”

In fact, the SarahPac went to work immediately to crank out its public relations mop job. It insisted, among other things, that the cross hairs on the target map came from the US Geological Survey.

Soon enough Ms. Palin herself will be fed lines to repeat to incriminate the liberal lame stream media, you watch. The public relations kids working for the media millionaires have been busy little people keeping the public eye sore. You can bet that the Arizona PR people are plenty busy, too.

Misery loves company and, unfortunately, tragedies build audience share.

Ratings will go up as those rich bloviators of hate -- Palin and her contemporaries Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh -- become beneficiaries of the Tucson tragedy. Thoughtful people who find them distasteful will just dial them out. Their followers, however, will wrap themselves in the flag and the 1st Amendment and try to blame the liberals for the Tucson murders, since such is the way of that trio’s audience.

Elected officials such as President Obama, Speaker Boehner, and others have shown considerable statesmanship for the circumstances. Senator Robert Kennedy showed remarkable statesmanship in the aftermath of Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968. Back then, hatred and hateful speech were quite common, but their mediums of expression were more up-close and personal. RFK was later murdered.

The Speaker has a job to do, part of which is the waste of time the new Republican majority is involved in with passing a bill to repeal a law along strict party lines. The bill, when passed, will go to the Senate and, should it pass the Democratic majority there, will go to the President who signed the law in the first place. It will take a two-thirds majority in the House and in the Senate to override his veto.

Statesmanship is admirable. It just doesn't last long. As to the continual AP assertions that Ms. Palin is a presidential contender, let us hope that idea is put to rest in respect for those who lost their rights to life, liberty, and happiness.

140 Characters, Huh

2011-01-07T14:38:00.000-08:00

The point of this exercise is to see just what a 140 character limit looks like. That sentence has only 80 characters. This makes it to 140. [27 words]

It confirms my observation that Twitter is ideal for teaching people how to write good cut lines. Present active voice helps to pull it off. [25 words]

It is almost like saying that one has 29 words or less, so long as the words are short, to make a point. Using bigger words buggers it up. [29 words]

Just like everything else in journalism, the re-write is where it is at. There is nothing that cannot be improved, especially the new Tweet. [25 words]

Personally, I have trouble thinking that Tweeting is important to anyone without a broadband gadget and an extra $30 bucks a month to spend. [24 words]

Then again I probably said the same sort of thing when I was forced to use a word processor instead of an electronic typewriter by my boss. [27 words]

“Damn it Jim, I’m a writer, not some digital space scribbler!” Bones McCoy barked. “Besides that, the character count includes quote marks.” [22 words]

And the good doctor would have been correct, even if he used the word quote instead of quotation; but I am digressing from my original point. [26 words]

At some point the discussion about danger has already been discussed by others. Things like texting while hiking or driving get people killed. [23 words]

Perhaps a discussion about just plain flat being rude is in order; although to date I have not read anything about Tweeting while copulating. [24 words]

For those waiting for me to bring up Sarah Palin in the Tweeting context, wait no more. I just did, by shrinking political discourse process. [25 words]

Can you imagine how much money it would cost to get the Klondike Twitterer to endorse a broadband texting gadget? Think of an i-Palin device. [25 words]

It would doubtless have an American language debasing app and another one that makes up words. But I hope that’s all in some distant future. [25 words]

In the long run, writing a letter by hand, using a pen and ink, and developing personal handwriting may actually become in vogue and return. [25 words]

Hopefully I have made my point. The average word count in this exercise was 25 words. And my point, in case you missed it, was get over fads. [28 words]

It’s not like I wrote about the Hoola-Hoop. Think of a fountain pen as a hand held, fluid medium, friction driven, analogue texting devise. [forget the count]

# # #

originally published on Blogcritics as "140 Characters, Huh", December 30, 2010

Piss Poor and Other Expressions

2010-12-19T18:05:00.000-08:00

Ever wonder where the term “piss poor” comes from? Here is your lesson.

Animal skins used to be tanned with urine. So families used to all pee in a pot and then once a day take it and sell it to the tannery. If you had to do this to survive you were "piss poor". But worse than that were the really poor folk who couldn't even afford to buy a pot. They "didn't have a pot to piss in" and were the lowest of the low.

Welcome to the 16^th Century.

Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May, and they still smelled pretty good by June. However, since they were starting to smell, brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor: hence the custom of carrying a bouquet when getting married.

Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children. Last of all came the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it: hence, "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water!"

Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof: hence, "It's raining cats and dogs."

There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could mess up your nice clean bed: hence a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection: hence, canopy beds.

The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt: hence, "dirt poor." The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh [straw] on floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they added more thresh until, when you opened the door, it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entrance-way: hence, a thresh hold.

What Else Was Cooking?

In those old days, people cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while: hence the rhyme -- "Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old."

Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man could, "bring home the bacon." They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and "chew the fat."

Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or the upper crust.

By the way, those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing death by lead poisoning. This happened most often with tomatoes. Thus for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.

Lead cups were used to drink ale or whiskey. The combination would sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They [the dead drunks] were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait to see if they would wake up: hence, the custom of holding a wake.

England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a bone-house, and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night -- the graveyard shift -- to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be saved by the bell or was considered a dead ringer.

There will not be a quiz.

________________________________________________________

This unsolicited piece was edited by Tommy Mack McEldowney without permission from an email that circulated without attribution. Seasons Greetings.

Political Post Hoc and Other Fallacies

2010-10-28T13:49:00.000-07:00

The sedentary post-Obama election electorate has been aroused to a state of apathy. Consider the hasty generalization fallacy that Americans are frustrated and angry with government. Earlier this month Gallup reported, “Americans' frustration with Congress is directed at both sides of the aisle -- with job approval ratings of 33% for the Democrats in Congress and 32% for the Republicans in Congress.” Gallup also admits, “What is not clear, however, is why the ratings are so low.” It is not anger. It is boredom. Rhetorical fallacies make politics dull.

The post hoc fallacy gets its name from the Latin phrase "post hoc, ergo propter hoc." The translation is "after this, therefore because of this." Put another way, because B comes after A, A caused B. Try "President Obama was elected to fix the economy, and then the budget deficit went up. Obama is responsible for increasing the budget deficit."

My personal favorites are the ad hominem and tu quoque fallacies. What a combo. They sound naughty and translate "against the person" and "you, too!" Here is how cool Latin is. “The reason you cannot believe Obama is that we don’t really know who he is (ad hominem) or he is an elitist (tu quoque).

Rhetorical fallacy is not just a tea party Republican gambit. Lynn Forester de Rothschild, a prominent Hillary Clinton supporter and member of the Democratic National Committee said of Obama, “… frankly I don’t like him. I feel like he is an elitist. I feel like he has not given me reason to trust him.” Elitist derides elite as elitist. But I digress.

Back to fallacies in English, Republicans seem particularly fond of the false dichotomy fallacy. In essence they set up a situation and offer only two choices. They eliminate one choice so that only their preferred choice remains, never minding any other choice for consideration. “This country is in terrible shape. Either we defeat the Democrats and take over congress, or we continue to threaten our children’s future. Clearly no one wants to threaten our children’s future, so we must take over congress."

Robert Kennedy said, “One-fifth of the people are against everything all the time.” That could describe the tea party, if I used the RFK quote to base my case that midterm election rhetoric is rife with fallacies. Actually, I just did and I used the appeal to authority fallacy for that feat.

# # #

originally published at Blogcritics.org as "Political Post Hoc and Other Fallacies"

Opinion Polls Don’t Vote

2010-09-14T10:14:00.000-07:00

I have calculated that individual public opinion occupies a space of 334,540,800 cubic inches: 1 mile wide times I mile long times 1 inch deep. Our problem is that the over reporting of polling data is too much with us. The statistical size of the undecided vote suggests that there is no huge shift in public opinion. The much touted anger and rage being recited to us every minute, should we listen, is exaggerated on purpose and exacerbated by advertising based visual media. The reason is the contrary of what is being reported -- the midterm races are not that close. However, if they appear to be close, then the more beer, cars and pills to treat erectile dysfunction can be sold.

Money is flowing into media to go after the undecided vote to be sure. A flood of money will be spent on negative advertizing. But I question just how undecided voters really are. Depending upon which group of pundits one hears or which newspaper opinion page one reads, the rhetoric tends to fall along For-Obama or Against-Obama lines. Yet neither of those arguments convinces anybody of anything.

Washington Post columnist David Broder notes, “The history of midterm elections shows regular gains for the opposition party, and so far all the polls look upbeat for the GOP.” However, the flaw in the polling argument is that of voters not aligned to either political party. They are not undecided. They are nondecided. If they vote, it will probably be across a previous party affiliation they had, grudgingly or not. As a result the survey numbers are rendered ambiguous -- a best guess.

Furthermore, voter turnout is low in midterm elections. FairVote.org says, “Turnout in midterm elections is far lower, peaking at 48.7% in 1966 and falling as low as 39.0% in 1978,1986, and 1998 remaining below 50% in midterm elections.” What that suggests is that so long as the election rules are consistent, “the same electorate can result in 60% turnout in one election and 2% in another depending on what is on the ballot and whether the election has essentially already been decided.”

“It ain’t over until it’s over.” Yogi Berra also said, “Baseball is 90% mental -- the other half is physical." So it goes with polling. The non-closeness of the elections, I contend, accounts for the weakness of the Republican candidates from amateurs such as Rand Paul, Meg Whitman, and Carly Fiorina to political hacks like Jan Brewer and Sharron Angle.

In California for example, the Fiorina senate campaign is reported to be statistically close to that of 3-term incumbent Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer. If elected, Fiorina will have to work with incumbent Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein. If not elected, as a former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, she will still be a former CEO either looking for a new big-corporation gig or living off of her new celebrity, like Sarah Palin who endorsed her. If nothing else, Palin has proved that celebrity pays better than public service.

Once non-incumbents are elected, they become junior members of a governing elite and are obliged go to knife-and-fork school to be trained in their new positions. They have no influence. They do as instructed if they want to return. They are obliged to work for their constituency by making deals, especially with other legislators of their state and of other states.

Because of my Irish heritage, I am anti-incumbent by nature. I am for term limits on congress. However, I cannot support candidates who have never shown any interest or participation in public service. By the way, one never hears the tea party Republican candidates speak about public service. To them the very concept is foreign, probably even socialist.

Theodore Roosevelt said, “A typical vice of American politics is the avoidance of saying anything real on real issues.” The deficit is not a real issue for the mid-term elections, which are state elections. The deficit, part of the economy, is an issue of federal elections. Employment, two wars and immigration are “real issues,” as they were in TR’s time.

With an alarming dearth of policy, the present GOP is content with merely opposing everything and anything that the President does or supports. The argument goes like this: it took the GOP seven years to destroy the US economy and to create the deficit out of a surplus. The Democrats have not fixed it in the first 19 months of the Obama presidency. It is kind of like saying “We screwed it up. Only we can unscrew it.”

The War in Afghanistan has not ended. The War in Iraq is slow going. They are both products of the Bush Administration and each is astronomically costly in terms of the 3-Ms – the men, the material and the money. And somehow it is all Obama’s fault. He should have wrapped those two wars up by last Christmas. He is, after all, the Commander-in-Chief.

Immigration to a land of immigrants is the purview of the Federal government. It was a major Ku Klux Klan issue after WWI, although the Klan had little interest in Latinos except for their tendency to be Catholic -- like being a Communist or a homosexual or, say, a Muslim. Yet, somehow the Obama administration has failed to protect the Arizona border, as its tea party governor has said.

For the record, the court found Arizona Law SB 1070 to be unconstitutional [that pesky 14th Amendment, again]. Arizona legislators passed it four times when Janet Napolitano was governor and each time Napolitano vetoed it. She became the head of Homeland Security and the governorship went to Jan "headless corpses" Brewer who signed it. Unconstitutional is unconstitutional no matter what state or by who’s signature.

We tend to believe things that support our opinions and disbelieve the things that do not. With such human nature in mind, it is easy to understand the popularity of public opinion polls. The data that polls generate is enormous and critical to estimating what a well defined target audience is going to favor or reject. Survey data is the life blood of marketing and fund-raising.

It is important to remember that the public can change its mind on any issue and it does. Consider off-shore drilling. The Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico seems to have changed the opinion of Californians by a 16% swing, from a small majority that favored it to 59% who oppose drilling off the California coast. We know this because it is what the survey said.

No one surveyed me. “Undecided” is not a choice I would make anyway. “Prefer not to say” maybe, but no one asked me. And well they should not have asked me. I do not poll well. Most likely the reason is because I did not go to a mall, or did not answer my phone, or did not click on an online pop-up box. Somehow, I eluded the surveyors. But you can bet I will vote.

# # #

Article first published as "Opinion Polls Don't Vote" on Blogcritics.org.

Marginalizing Dr. King's Dream

2010-08-31T10:51:00.000-07:00

While the GOP and Fox have been trumpeting how bad President Barrack Obama’s approval ratings are, as the midterm elections approach, they either bury or ignore the fact that President Ronald Reagan’s were worse. In understatement Gallup says, the “public's view of the economy remained sour.” It sounds familiar. “The 1982 midterm elections were not good ones for Reagan and for the GOP.” Republicans lost about 25 seats in the House. Neither the GOP nor Fox are confused by facts because the make up their own. So of course they will deny the following indictment that they openly hostile to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and seek to repeal it.

Fox News owner recently gave the Republican Governors Association a million bucks. Two of Fox’ celebrities star in an outdoor Washington event at the Lincoln Memorial. The date is the 47th anniversary of the most famous plea for racial equality in this country since President Abraham Lincoln. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech to the more than 200,000 people who participated in the "March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom." Swathed in the US flag and bunting, the Fox celebrity emcees host an attempt to marginalize the struggle for civil rights for which Dr. King was gunned down and killed.

Sarah “Reload” Palin gets paid to speak at events. She and Glenn “Just Behind Rush” Beck are the event spokespeople – hired guns representing the bullies inside the GOP. Her “Reload” rhetoric is already exposed. She posted a rifle scope-sight cross-hairs graphics on a map to target Democrats up for re-election on her Facebook page. She sent the tweet “Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD!" Likewise she defended radio host Laura “N-word” Schlessinger and told her, "Don't retreat . . . reload!"

Martin Luther King III said of his father, in the Washington Post, “But his dream rejected hateful rhetoric and all forms of bigotry or discrimination, whether directed at race, faith, nationality, sexual orientation or political beliefs.”

Marginalizing Dr. King and the civil rights movement must have a reason, since the GOP is not run by stupid people -- mean-spirited but not stupid. Successful bullies, such as the Ku Klux Klan, are always mean-spirited and rarely stupid, as the Klan is an example. The KKK became infamous for killing people while fellow Klansmen burned Christian crosses, dressed in costumes and recited Biblical scripture all in front of their own children. The Ku Klux Klan championed the 2nd Amendment and hated the 14th Amendment, as does the GOP.

What is the reason? Glenn Beck gave it away when he said, “This is a moment, quite honestly, that I think we reclaim the civil rights movement. It has been so distorted and so turned upside down. It is an abomination." There it is. The civil rights movement is an abomination. When Beck says “reclaim the civil rights movement”, he means “repeal the Civil Rights Act.”

There is one hurdle in the way, however. It is the 14th Amendment -- the basis of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, not to mention the subsequent Voting Rights Act of 1965 and Fair Housing Act of 1968. That is why the GOP is busy trying to rewrite or repeal the 14th Amendment. It’s in their way.

Enter the Republican’s immigration bandwagon, a Fox regular attraction. With a midterm election looming, the out-of-power GOP has aimed its bigotry-mongering directly at Mexican immigrants, somehow segregating them from immigrants of other countries such as Russia or Pakistan. The GOP argument to repeal the 14th Amendment is based on the “citizenship” clause. They seek to segregate a group of people for punitive purposes by singling out Mexican babies as enemies of the country, who deserve to be punished for the crime of being born in the United States.

The GOP immigration bandwagon harkens back to a time when discrimination and segregation were legal. Stirred up by the unsubstantiated plight-claim of Arizona, whose immigration issues are peculiar to all four of Mexico’s border states, such prominent Republicans as Senator Lindsey Graham (SC), Senator Jon Kyl (AZ), and Senator Mitch McConnell (KY) are on board. While far from being tea party types, they share the same contempt for facts.

For example, there have been over ten thousand attempts to amend the United States Constitution, but only 27 attempts have succeeded and one of them repeals another one – Prohibition. The Birthright Citizenship Abolition Amendment proposed on April 13, 2005, failed. So did the Federal Marriage Amendment, proposed on May 21, 2003.

H.R. 1868 -- Birthright Citizenship Act of 2009, “To amend section 301 of the Immigration and Nationality Act to clarify those classes of individuals born in the United States who are nationals and citizens of the United States at birth” languishes in committee. The bill’s text is found in 69 other proposed bills of the 111th Congress, also stuck in committees.

President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A year later LBJ signed the Immigration and Nationality Act. At that time the issue of Cuban immigration riled Republicans. Cubans sought refuge and got it. Mexicans are not mentioned. Mexico has never been a communist country.

None the less, Senator Graham argues that the 14th Amendment no longer serves the purpose it was designed to address and that Congress should reexamine granting citizenship to any child born in the United States. “I'm looking at the laws that exist and see if it makes sense today,” Graham has said. “Birthright citizenship doesn't make so much sense when you understand the world as it is.”

Senate Minority Whip Kyl also supports hearings on repealing the 14th Amendment. "The Fourteenth Amendment [has been] interpreted to provide that if you are born in the United States, you are a citizen no matter what," Kyl has said. What the 14th Amendment says is “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” How else would one interpret?

Senator McConnell says Congress should reconsider the 14th Amendment citizenship guarantee and joined the immigration bandwagon. “Regardless of how you feel about the various aspects of immigration reform,” McConnell said, “I don't think anybody thinks that's something they're comfortable with."

Evidently these Senators have forgotten their high school civics. Before an amendment can take effect, it must be proposed to the states by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress or by a convention called by two-thirds of the states. Then the amendment must be ratified by three-fourths of the states or by three-fourths of conventions. For the record, no convention for proposing amendments has been called by the states and the convention method of ratification been employed only once.

Even as a long shot, which would require super majorities for the GOP in both houses of congress and a Republican administration, there is so much more to gain by repealing the 14th Amendment. It would set the stage for reversal of a treasure trove of Supreme Court decisions. Ones that the GOP has long targeted include: Plyler v. Doe , protecting all children born in the US, Brown v. Board of Education , ending “separate but equal” , and the prize of prizes, Roe v. Wade , extending the right of privacy to abortion.

In Plyler, a “citizenship” case, the Court’s ruling says the statute it found unconstitutional imposed “a lifetime hardship on a discrete class of children not accountable for their disabling status. These children can neither affect their parents' conduct nor their own undocumented status.” Furthermore, “Use of the phrase ‘within its jurisdiction’ confirms the understanding that the Fourteenth Amendment's protection extends to anyone, citizen or stranger, who is subject to the laws of a State, and reaches into every corner of a State's territory.”

In Brown, the landmark “equal protection” case, the court concluded ". . . the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment."

In Roe, the contentious “due process” case, the court held “State criminal abortion laws, like those involved here, . . . violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which protects against state action the right to privacy, including a woman's qualified right to terminate her pregnancy.”

Reversing Roe has been the ultimate objective of anti-abortionists and the GOP since 1973. All previous attempts to reverse the decision have failed because of that pesky 14th Amendment.
Now there is one more case destined to go before the Supreme Court. It is a civil rights case, Perry v. Schwarzenegger overturning the California ban on same-sex marriage.

The U.S. District Court ruling in Perry said that the voter initiated measure to amend the California State constitution was "unconstitutional under both the due process and equal protection clauses [of the 14th Amendment] because it “disadvantages gays and lesbians without any rational justification."

The immigration bandwagon may get many more passengers on board on its way to the midterm elections. After all, a bandwagon is a bandwagon. It sounds best when it is standing still. The GOP/Fox/Beck rally is a major stop. I hope they do.

Still, what the GOP immigration bandwagon has put forth, that the 14th Amendment needs to be reviewed in context of today’s laws and society, is worth consideration. Using that logic, we should equally review their sacred Second Amendment. “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State”, to quote Senator Graham, “doesn't make so much sense when you understand the world as it is.”

The Second Amendment allowed a reload to assassinate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The Fourteenth Amendment protects his dream. It protects us.

# # #

Article first published as "Marginalizing Dr. King's Dream" on Blogcritics.org.

Assault on the Fourteenth

2010-08-08T14:05:00.000-07:00

The founding idea of “Equal Justice Under Law” is literally carved in stone above the entrance to the Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C. The Republican Party wants that idea changed. They want exceptions. They want “Equal Justice Under Law Except For Immigrants From Mexico. “ It’s like saying, “Liberty and Justice for Almost All.”

The Republicans won and Congress enacted the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1868. Times have changed. Republicans have changed, too. Now they want to repeal the Fourteenth Amendment. With a midterm election looming, the out-of-power GOP has found its bandwagon in immigration. Its’ bigotry-mongering is aimed directly at Mexican immigrants, somehow segregating them from immigrants of other countries, like Russia or India.

Since its passage in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment is the basis of all Supreme Court decisions having to do with our Civil Rights. Thus, the Republican assault on the Fourteenth Amendment is an assault on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, not to mention the subsequent Voting Rights Act of 1965 and Fair Housing Act of 1968. Their argument to repeal it singles out Hispanic babies as enemies of the country who deserve to be punished for the crime of being born in the United States.

Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment to counter what was at that time called the "black codes," such as depriving citizenship to children born of former slaves. To make sure that the States could not legislate against it, the Fourteenth Amendment requirement is that “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of the citizens of the United States... [or] deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, [or] deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

The GOP has created an immigration band wagon that harkens back to a time when discrimination and segregation were legal. Ginned by the plight of Arizona and immigration issues peculiar to all four of Mexico’s border states, on board are such prominent Republicans as Senator Lindsey Graham (SC), Senator Jon Kyl (AZ), and Senator Mitch McConnell (KY). Eliminating the so-called “birthright clause” is intentionally aimed at Hispanic children by discriminating against them and not children born of undocumented aliens from countries other than Mexico.

Senator Graham argued that the Fourteenth Amendment no longer serves the purpose it was designed to address and that Congress should reexamine granting citizenship to any child born in the United States. “I'm looking at the laws that exist and see if it makes sense today,” Graham said. “Birthright citizenship doesn't make so much sense when you understand the world as it is.”

Senate Minority Whip Kyl also supports hearings on repealing the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Kyl said that he opposes allowing children of undocumented immigrants to be granted U.S. citizenship and wants Congress to hold hearings on the matter. "The Fourteenth Amendment [has been] interpreted to provide that if you are born in the United States, you are a citizen no matter what," Kyl said. "So the question is, if both parents are here illegally, should there be a reward for their illegal behavior?"

Senator McConnell says Congress should reconsider the Fourteenth Amendment citizenship guarantee and joined the immigration bandwagon. "I think we ought to take a look at it -- hold hearings, listen to the experts on it," McConnell said. "I haven't made a final decision about it, but that's something that we clearly need to look at. Regardless of how you feel about the various aspects of immigration reform, I don't think anybody thinks that's something they're comfortable with."

The Republican immigration bandwagon claims that children of undocumented aliens will overburden a State’s resources cannot be justified and such an argument has already been held by the Supreme Court to be unconstitutional. What this Republican assault on the Fourteenth Amendment does is to attack “citizenship” by renaming it the “birthright clause.” It also attacks “due process” and “equal protection.” Its’ cynical purpose is to set the stage to reverse three Supreme Court decisions that Republicans have never liked that are on its to-do list.

· Citizenship: Plyler v. Doe (1982) protecting all children born in the US
· Equal Protection: Brown v. Board of Education (1954) ending “separate but equal”
· Due Process: Roe v. Wade (1973) extending the right of privacy to abortion

Here is what the Supreme Court held in those cases that you will find in the links above.

Plyler v. Doe

A state statute “which withholds from local school districts any state funds for the education of children who were not ‘legally admitted’ into the United States, and which authorizes local school districts to deny enrollment to such children, violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

The Court’s ruling says, the statute “imposes a lifetime hardship on a discrete class of children not accountable for their disabling status. These children can neither affect their parents' conduct nor their own undocumented status.”

Furthermore, “Use of the phrase ‘within its jurisdiction’ confirms the understanding that the Fourteenth Amendment's protection extends to anyone, citizen or stranger, who is subject to the laws of a State, and reaches into every corner of a State's territory.”

The immigration band wagon may get many more passengers on board on its way to the midterm elections. A band wagon is a band wagon. It sounds best when it is standing still. But it is going to play hell getting by Plyler, which will make the band wagon moving anywhere after the election a no-go from the git-go. Amendment 14 says so.

Brown v. Board of Education

"We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment."

Under the guise of a “birthright” reward, being deprived of protection by reason of segregation is the effect. The GOP program is not about “separate but equal”; it is all about “equal protection.” Here is the prize.

Roe v. Wade

“State criminal abortion laws, like those involved here, that except from criminality only a life-saving procedure on the mother's behalf without regard to the stage of her pregnancy and other interests involved violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which protects against state action the right to privacy, including a woman's qualified right to terminate her pregnancy.”

Reversing Roe has been the ultimate objective of anti-abortionists and the GOP since 1973. All previous attempts to reverse the decision have failed because of that pesky Fourteenth Amendment. Now there is one more case to add to the list of decisions that the GOP would like reversed. It is a civil rights case.

· Civil Rights: Perry v. Schwarzenegger overturning the California ban same-sex marriage

Perry v. Schwarzenegger

The appeals are filed on this latest civil rights case that rests on the Fourteenth Amendment. The case overturns California Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage. U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker ruled the measure was "unconstitutional under both the due process and equal protection clauses" of the Fourteenth Amendment. "Because Proposition 8 disadvantages gays and lesbians without any rational justification," Judge Walker ruled the ban bombs.

Both the Proposition 8 gay marriage ban and the Arizona SB 1070 Immigration law have two things in common. First, they seek to segregate a group of people for punitive purposes. Second: they attack the Fourteenth Amendment, which establishes protection of “citizenship” to children, grants “due process of law” to everyone, and “guarantees equal protection of the laws.” Because of that, both Proposition 8 and SB 1070 have been overturned, each measure being held to be unconstitutional.

Let us accept the offer that the Republican immigration band wagon has put forth, that the Fourteenth Amendment needs to be reviewed in context of today’s laws and society. Using that logic, then let us equally review the Second Amendment in the same context. The acclaimed GOP birthright to guns says, “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State”, to quote Senator Graham, “doesn't make so much sense when you understand the world as it is.”

The Fourteenth Amendment issue is about the Constitution, not some election show. It is about Equal Justice Under Law.