Politics

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Sal, Dianne and Chuck

Salvatore DeMasi is the third Massachusetts Speaker of the House in a row to end up a felon.  Charles Flaherty didn’t pay his taxes and Thomas Finneran lied to a grand jury.  Charlie and Tom took pleas and didn’t go to jail.  Tom lost his law license.  Sal went to trial, was found guilty and still thinks he is innocent.  Even my 93 year old mother who followed the trial avidly knew he was guilty.

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I think it is inevitable that DiMasi is going to jail.  He was just greedy.  As Speaker he hung around with men who were a lot wealthier than he was and he needed to keep up. 

Scott Leigh wrote yesterday in the Boston Globe

Outside the courthouse, Beacon Hill’s newest felon seemed in denial about what had just happened. Either that or his mental teleprompter had mistakenly loaded the “I’ve just been vindicated’’ speech rather than remarks better toned for a guilty verdict.

DiMasi thanked his family for standing by him “through this terrible ordeal,’’ then added: “All of the people in my community that every day supported me, encouraged me, and knew that I was not guilty of this crime, I thank them . . . I told all of you when I was indicted that I never made any decision unless it was based on what I thought was in the best interest of the citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts [and] my constituents.’’

The jury, of course, felt otherwise, and with good reason. No less credible a source than Steven Topazio, DiMasi’s former law associate, had testified about the way he had funneled $65,000 in Cognos money to DiMasi. And how, when the Globe — through the tenacious reporting of Andrea Estes — started to unravel the scheme, DiMasi had suggested that he fudge or lose the relevant part of his check register.

…

Asked in her post-trial press conference why she thought DiMasi had committed the crime, US Attorney Carmen Ortiz cited greed and high living. “People live beyond their means,’’ she said. “People get into financial trouble and unfortunately think that the resolution or how to solve that problem is by committing a crime that can put money in their pockets.’’

DiMasi did do a lot of good things.  We owe gay marriage and health care in part to him.  But that still does not mean he can break the law.

Chuck Turner, my neighbor and City Councilor, and Dianne Wilkerson, my State Senator and one time political ally are both currently serving time.  Both are African American.  No one would ever accuse Chuck of living a lavish lifestyle, but he still took illegal money.  Dianne’s Achilles Heel all along was finances:  personal and campaign.  Somehow her inability to find someone who could manage the money ended with the videotape of her stuffing money in her bra.  Neither of them actually did anything for their money, but at the very least they violated campaign finance laws.  I was worried at the beginning of the prosecution that DiMasi would some how escape.

This time, as Adrian Walker wrote, justice is colorblind.

Sal DiMasi had barely been convicted when a friend called to relate what she, like a sizable portion of the city’s population, feels about the verdict: relief.

“I was worried that he wouldn’t get convicted,’’ she said. “The black community would have gone crazy, after what happened to Chuck and Dianne.’’

That would be Chuck Turner and Dianne Wilkerson, the two Roxbury pols serving time for accepting bribes in exchange for helping a federal informant get a liquor license. They are in prison, and appropriately so.

…

Part of the backdrop of the DiMasi affair had been a sense that white politicians skate or at least face less harsh punishment. The wrist slaps handed out to former speakers Charlie Flaherty and Tom Finneran were often cited to me as evidence that justice is not necessarily blind.

It didn’t help matters that DiMasi was treated with kid gloves when he was arraigned, driven away from the federal courthouse in a fancy sports car. Wilkerson’s house was ransacked by federal agents, supposedly looking for the money she had taken, and Turner was led away from his City Hall office in disgrace on the morning he was arrested.

My point is not that Turner and Wilkerson were somehow mistreated. They weren’t. But the notion that justice has been evenly applied is good news for everybody.

In sheer financial terms, DiMasi’s crimes were in a different league from the other two. Wilkerson got $23,500, Turner accepted $1,000. DiMasi took close to $60,000 in cash and had access to hundreds of thousands more that was funneled to his close associates. Though he will not be sentenced until September, his sentence is very likely to exceed those of the other former elected officials.

“There was no way these nickel-and-dime crooks were going down, but DiMasi wasn’t,’’ said the Rev. Eugene F. Rivers III of the Ella J. Baker House. “You have to give DiMasi credit: He knew how to really steal.’’

…

People on Beacon Hill like to talk about “ethics reform,’’ a cause that is clearly a work in progress. Not only does government need to be transparent and free of taint, but lapses must be treated equitably, too. Frankly, that hasn’t always been the case.

So maybe this is a watershed moment for clean government, in a way that DiMasi’s jury probably never contemplated. Justice prevailed. The cynics have been routed. The verdict is in, and it says that corrupt white politicians go to jail, too.

Maybe Adrian Walker is right, but I don’t have a lot of hope that this will change things. We are now watching the current speaker, Robert Deleo, negotiating for slot machines at race tracks.  He just happens to have one in his district.

We don’t need new laws or regulations.  We don’t need ethics reform.  We need politicians that understand the current laws and follow them.  My job is covered by the same laws.  The other day, a homeowner who had been assisted by several co-workers brought in a couple of loaves of home-baked bread.  After he was thanked and he left, we started asked if the value might be over the limit as a gift.  We knew it wasn’t, but we were still thinking about it.  Our elected officials need to think about these things also.

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Massachusetts Mitt, Jobs Creator?

Just so there is no mistake here:  I didn’t like Mitt Romney when he was Governor of Massachusetts.  First,  he got the Republican nomination by elbowing out a perfectly good candidate, Acting Governor Jane Swift.  Second, he spent most of his time here not being Governor, but running for President.  Third, getting universal health care was a great achievement showing the country that it can be done, but Mitt wants to forget it ever happened.  Kinda like throwing out your only child with the bath water.  But now Mitt is running again as a jobs creator because only Republicans can create jobs.

Last night Rachel Maddow reminded us of a little fact about Mitt Romney’s job creation:  He didn’t create very many. 

What Romney leaves out of his stump speech, however, is just how bad his state’s job creation statistics were during his four years as governor. Different job creation studies rank Massachusetts in the bottom four states during Romney’s administration. A study by the independent think tank MassINC ranked the state 49th in job creation from 2001-2007, ahead of only Michigan. And according to the U.S. Department of Labor, Massachusetts ranked 47th, ahead of only Michigan, Ohio, and Louisiana. Michigan and Ohio, both located in the Rust Belt, faced heavy job losses due to the flight of manufacturing jobs from the Midwest. Louisiana, meanwhile, lost hundreds of thousands of jobs in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

During Romney’s period as governor, Massachusetts’ job growth was just 0.9 percent, well behind other high-wage, high-skill economies in New York (2.7), California (4.7), and North Carolina (7.6). The national average, meanwhile, was better than 5 percent.

So who does Mitt blame for this poor performance?  The Democrats in the legislature.

Romney blames the poor job numbers on Democrats in the Massachusetts state legislature. But since its economy faltered in 2008 and 2009, Massachusetts has rebounded in the job creation ranks, emerging from the recession with some of the nation’s strongest job numbers. Under current Gov. Deval Patrick (D) — and a legislature still controlled by Democrats — the state experienced 4.2 percent job growth in the first quarter of 2011, better than twice the national average and good enough to rank in the top 10 nationally. That followed a year of solid growth in 2010, when Massachusetts was among the nation’s leaders in job growth.

Mitt, you might have to find something else to run on.

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More Budget Talk: The Deficit

After I posted yesterday, I started thinking about the deficit that the Republican’s are always yammering on about.  I found this chart.

 

 

This analysis is from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities based on information from the Congressional Budget Office.

 So even if we don’t stop spending the the Wars, if we end the Bush tax cuts, we could fund all kinds of new stimulus programs (like COPS and education programs) that could help prevent more layoffs in the public sector,  fix medicare and social security and still begin to pay off the debt.  We might even extend umemployment benefits and fund programs to help unemployed homeowners save their property from foreclosure. 

The question for 2012 is how to convince people that the Ryan budget, endorsed by all the Republican candidates and most Republican members of Congress, will actually increase the projected defict by maintaining the tax cuts.

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2012 Budget Talk

There are three budget proposals on the table that have been made public:  The President’s, Paul Ryan’s, and the Progressive Caucus.  So far all the talk is on Ryan’s cutting of Medicare.  It has defined the Republican politics.  Newt Gingrich found that out.  As I understand the President’s proposal it uses the 2008 budget as a baseline – a baseline we are already below. But no one is talking much about the Progressive budget.

The Progressive and Ryan budgets are good symbols of the world views currently held by many on the two sides.  The Democrats being democrats are not as monolithic and many will object to the severe defense cuts in the Progressive budget, but it seems to me that these proposals can be the end points that let everyone meet in the middle.

The National Priorities Project compares the two proposals.

  Congressional Progressive Caucus People’s Budget Rep. Ryan’s The Path to Prosperity
     
Underlying Philosophy Strengthens role of government in reducing income inequality and providing social safety net. Reduces deficit through combination of increased revenues and reductions in spending Relies on private sector to spur economic growth and employment using a trickle down approach. Reduces deficit solely through spending cuts
     
Revenues Shifts tax burden towards higher income earners and corporations Decreases taxes for wealthy and corporations
Individual Taxes Allows for the expiration of Bush era tax cuts Maintains the Bush era tax cuts
  Reverts highest individual tax brackets to 36% and 39.6% from 33% and 35% Cuts the top individual tax rate to 25% from 35%
  Enacts new tax brackets for high income earners (45%-49% for $1 million – $1 billion range Consolidates the current six tax brackets
  Taxes capital gains and dividends as ordinary income Eliminates $800 billion in tax increases imposed by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
  Limits tax benefit of itemized deductions to 28%  
  Enacts progressive estate tax in which larger estates pay higher tax rates  
Corporate Taxes Imposes financial transaction tax on derivatives and speculative financial products Reduces corporate tax rate to 25% from 35%
  Repeals tax deductions and preferences for oil, natural gas and coal producers Eliminates loopholes and deductions that allow some corporations to pay no tax
  Taxes US corporate foreign income as it is earned instead of as dividend  
  Imposes tax equal to 0.15% of covered liabilities for banks with more than $50 billion in assets  
     
Investment Emphasizes public investment as engine for job creation and economic growth Believes that public investment crowds out private investment
  Rebuilds infrastructure – highways, railways, National Infrastructure Bank  
  Funds highway construction through increase in Gasoline Tax of 25 cents  
     
Health Care and Social Safety Net Maintains government role in providing vital public services and programs Limits government provision of social programs
  Maintains Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors Privatizes Medicare starting in 2022 for new beneficiaries
  Establishes public health care option in health care exchanges starting in 2014 Repeals Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
  Negotiates drug prices with pharmaceutical companies Raises age of Medicare eligibility to 67 from 65
  Increases Social Security benefits based on higher employee contributions Converts Medicaid into block grants to the states
  Raises Social Security contribution limits, including employer contributions for high earners Converts SNAP (food stamps) into block grant to the states. Requires recipients to work or get job training
    Reduces Pell grants to 2008 levels
    Imposes time limits and work requirements for recipients of federal housing assistance (Section 8)
     
Defense Makes significant cuts in annual defense spending and ends the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in FY2012 Largely exempts the military from spending cuts
Funding for Security Generates $2.3 trillion in savings compared to the CBO baseline over the FY2012-2021 period Provides real growth for “security” in each year through 2021, totaling $214 billion in new spending
Annual Pentagon Spending Reduces DoD baseline budget by $692.2 billion over 10 years compared to CBO, or $816.7 billion compared to the Obama Pentagon spending plan Reduces DoD waste by $178 billion. Reinvests $100 billion of this into key combat capabilities and uses $78 billion to reduce the deficit
Overseas Contingency Operations (Iraq & Afghanistan) Provides $161.4 billion for “Overseas Contingency Operations” (OCO) in FY2012 and withdraws U.S. forces from Iraq and Afghanistan. Provides no funding for OCO starting in FY2013, saving $1.6 trillion between 2013-2021 compared to the CBO baseline Continues Iraq and Afghanistan wars and provides $117.8 billion in FY2012. Anticipates over $1 trillion in savings from reduced costs of the “Global War on Terror” over the next decade by using the Pentagon’s $50 billion annual “placeholder” for OCO costs
     
Government Maintains size and role of government Reduces size and scope of government
  Provides percentage increases for discretionary programs Reduces size of government to 20% of GDP by 2015 and 15% of GDP by 2050
    Reduces non-security discretionary spending to pre-2008 levels
    Reduces public sector employment by 10% through attrition by 2014
    Institutes government pay freeze through 2015
    Increases federal employee contributions to retirement
    Privatizes Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
    Decreases regulation of the energy industry
    Establishes a binding cap on total spending as a percentage of the economy
    Requires any increase in debt levels to be accompanied by spending reductions

I couldn’t find a chart that adds the President’s budget proposal, but here is a short summary.

Key Budget Facts

  • The Budget includes more than $1 trillion in deficit reduction – two-thirds of it from cuts — and puts the nation on a path toward fiscal sustainability so that by the middle of the decade, the government will be paying for what it spends and debt will no longer be increasing as a share of the economy.
  • The President meets his pledge to cut the deficit he inherited in half by the end of his first term.
  • Five-year non-security discretionary spending freeze will reduce the deficit by over $400 billion over the next decade and bring this spending to the lowest level since President Eisenhower sat in the Oval Office.
  • 10-year Deficit Reduction:  $1.1 trillion, excluding war savings and not extending 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for high-income earners. Two-thirds are from spending cuts.
  • 2011 Projected Deficit: $1.645 trillion, 10.9 percent of GDP; 2012 Projected Deficit: $1.101 trillion, 7.0 percent of GDP; 2015 Projected Deficit: $607 billion, 3.2 percent of GDP; 2017 Projected Deficit: $627 billion, 3.0 percent of GDP

The budget itself is composed of proposals made by federal agencies under guidelines from the White House budget folks, but it seems to be a timid version of the Progressive Budget.

The choices are pretty clear.  And the news this week – increased unemployment and no job creation – has everyone saying it is bad news for the President.  But with the layoffs of public employees is it surprising that unemployment is rising?  Wasn’t keeping the Bush tax cuts supposed to create jobs?  Where exactly are all these jobs?  The Republicans are all about not raising taxes on anyone and cutting the size of government and government benefits.  They don’t care about the widening gap between rich and poor but seem to be perfectly happy to accept tax payer paid benefits.   Like Congressman Woodall. (R- GA) who thinks we should all be self reliant except for him.

The bottom line:  We have two visions of American and the one that wins will determine our future.

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Many Questions

I have not done a good job of keeping my new year resolution to post at least once a week, but life is busy and exhausting – which is all an excuse.  So as spring fades to summer here in New England I am trying to revive by resolution.

So here are the questions I’ve been saving up.  I will likely write about some of them in time.

Will the Democrats lose control of the Senate because the Republicans have made it dysfunctional?  I mean how can they not confirm a Nobel Prize winning economist?

How in the world can Anthony Weiner think that no one thought he was lying all along?  And his credibility is shot not because of what he did, but because he lied about it.

Anthony Weiner leaves his New York press conference on Monday. | AP Photo

How can historians really defend Sarah Palin’s story of Paul Revere?  OK, we weren’t American’s back then, we were British and we were trying to protect our cache of arms, but Paul Revere rang no bells and he and the other riders told people the regulars were coming.  This had nothing to do with gun control or the 2nd amendment which hadn’t even been written.

When will people wake up and realize that Barack Obama has an extraordinary first two years as President?

Along the same lines:  Will the Democrats blow their Medicare advantage?  And will people realize that we can’t keep cutting stuff without raising taxes on those making over $300,000 or even $500,000 a year.  We extended those tax cuts once and I don’t see the private sector creating lots and lots of new jobs.

How can people believe that laying off all those public employees does not impact the rise in unemployment?

Will the Red Sox find consistency on the upcoming road trip playing the AL East contenders and at a minimum stay in contention?

Sox updates from Yankee Stadium

Can the Mavericks beat the Heat?  And how about Nadal?

I’ve broken the ice now and there will be more posts to come.

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Martin Luther King, Jr., Barack Obama and the State of the Union

At the 41st Annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Breakfast in Boston, Melissa Harris-Perry asked us to remember the picture of King with President Lyndon Johnson and to superimpose President Obama on one of the men.  After a brief pause to let us think about it, she said that if we had made King Obama we had picked the wrong person, that Obama was President just as Johnson had been. 

President Lyndon B. Johnson and Rev. Dr. Marti...

Image via Wikipedia

While, as Harris-Perry pointed out there are a number of parallels that can be drawn between King and Obama.   “Both men are brilliant orators, both had a unique ability to capture the American political imagination … and both endured harsh criticism.”  And I will add, both are Nobel Peace Prize winners.

Using King’s book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community, she pointed out

It was a period of backlash,” she said. “We were being told it was all moving too fast.

It is easy to behave as if Martin King was beloved in a bipartisan manner across races and communities — but that is not the reality of Dr. King..

But the primary difference is the King was an activist seeking change from the outside while Obama is the President who has to govern the country as a whole while still trying to move us toward a more progressive society and trying stay above the chaos.

Meanwhile we have the shootings in Arizona, Michelle Bachman giving a Tea Party response to the State of the Union Address (in addition to the Republican resonse), and new Tea Party Republicans pushing the more moderate Republicans in Congress into taking up legislation that I feel certain that Speaker Boehner does not view as in the parties best interest.  We can only hope that the chaos remains in the Republican Party and that incidents like Arizona do not spread.  Maybe the Republicans will lose the Tea Party Republicans to a third party.  Wouldn’t that be interesting?

Nate Silver posted a response to the recent polls the other day on Fivethirtyeight,

With the Democrats still in control of the Senate and Barack Obama in the White House, there is little that the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives can do before 2013 to enact legislation. The health care overhaul will not be repealed, and social welfare programs will not be cut — at least, not unless Mr. Obama wants them to be, or until a Republican occupies the White House.

What the Republicans can do now, though, is use their leverage over the budget process. On spending matters, Congress is compelled to act every year merely to maintain the status quo. Sooner or later — perhaps over raising the federal debt ceiling, perhaps over authorizing funds to put Mr. Obama’s health care overhaul into effect — there is likely to be a showdown between the House Republican leaders and the president.

The most recent precedent is a favorable one for Mr. Obama: the 1995 government shutdown. The public largely blamed Republicans for the mess rather than Bill Clinton, whose standing rose as a result; he went on to win re-election the following year.

He goes on the point out the parallels in the polls while remaining cautious about 2012.

Mr. Obama’s approval rating has risen a few points in recent weeks, and is now at roughly 50 percent in the average poll. Mr. Clinton’s approval rating was at 54 percent in November 1995, just before the shutdown began, according to both Gallup and Washington Post surveys.

A Pew poll conducted in October 1995, meanwhile, found that 36 percent of respondents approved of the job that Republican leaders in Congress were doing. The figure right now is the same, according to an AP-GfK poll, or a bit lower at 30 percent, according to Quinnipiac; both surveys were released last week.

Surveys conducted before the 1995 shutdown found that the public largely viewed Mr. Clinton as capable of compromise, but not the Republicans. Similarly, in this week’s NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 55 percent said they expected the Republicans to be too inflexible in negotiations with President Obama, but only 26 percent said they expected that of Mr. Obama.

We have to remember, however, that President Obama is not Bill Clinton.  While we may have chacterized President Clinton as “the first Black President”, he was still a white man.  His alleged crimes were sexual, not racial.  We have to remember that a segment of the country will never accept Barack Obama as president because of his skin color.

President Obama’s recent moves have been toward the center, toward business, with the hope of creating enough jobs to win re-election.  I understand why he is not pushing more of a social agenda right now.  I think he did that, and did it well during the recent lame duck session.  He needs to put himself and the Democratic Party in a position to keep the Senate and the Presidency and to take back the House.  We need to remember, as Melissa Harris-Perry reminded us that the man in the picture is the President and not the activist.

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Being Liberal or not being Glenn Beck

Being a bit behind in my reading (as always), I picked up The Nation from November 22 a few days ago to read Patricia Williams’ column, Veritas-iness and the American Way.  This started a train of thought about education, reading, why so many followers of popular conservatives are uneducated and how much of a threat this is to the American experiment. It also got me thinking about why being liberal became a bad thing.  Somewhere in recent history “liberals” became “progressives”.

According to my 11th Edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, the first definition of liberal is related to education, “of, relating to, or based on the liberal arts”.  The archaic meaning if “of or befitting a man of free birth”.  More current meanings include “marked by generosity” and “broad-minded esp: not bound by authoritarianism, orthodoxy, or traditional forms.”  The entry goes on to explain “Liberal suggests openhandedness in the giver and largeness in the thing or amount given…”  From these meanings the political philosophy of liberalism was born.  Liberalism being defined as “a political philosophy based on a belief in progress, the essential goodness of the human race and the autonomy of the individual and standing for the protection of political and civil liberties.”  On the other hand, a conservative is defined as “tending to disposed to maintain existing views, conditions, or institutions.”  Conservatism is “a disposition in politics to preserve what is established.”

Conservative and liberal.  These are two tensions that should complement each other.  But liberal has become synonymous for the over education elite who want to move away from the traditions of our Founders and the True Meaning of the Constitution. (my caps)  Is this because somehow our education system has failed?

Patricia Williams points out

Sadly, American education has suffered a miserable decline since those days.[when she went to public schools] According to the Programme for International Student Assessment, we are fifteenth in reading literacy, twenty-first in science literacy and twenty-fifth in math literacy. This slide was largely accomplished by a calculated disinvestment in public education that began with the anti-tax movement of the late 1970s. California, where that movement began with a series of ballot initiatives, had one of the best school systems in the world. It now ranks almost dead last here, just above Mississippi.

There’s a curious tension in politics between the popular hunger for better schooling and widespread resentment of those who actually find it. Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin have built a movement around the felt dispossession of those who don’t read newspapers, whose spelling is nonstandard and who cite Shakespeare to “refudiate” book-learning. Beck, who sniffs that public schools should be abolished altogether, exploits this ambivalence brilliantly by establishing his online Beck University, whose basic courses are Faith 101, 102 and 103; Hope 101, 102 and 103; and Charity 101, 102 and 103. Yet Beck U. also has a coat of arms with a numbingly lofty motto: Tyrannis Seditio, Obsequium Deo.

Here is one of Beck’s diagrams copied from AlterNet.

Being one of the over-educated liberals, I find the diagram incoherent and the connections based on a lack of understanding.  Does Glenn Beck understand that George Soros who is the heart of the “obam a pocalypse” help finance movements to overthrow oppressive governments in Eastern Europe? Or that he grew up in Nazi occupied Hungary? So yes, he has a connection to Hitler, but not the kind Beck wants to imply.  And Ivan Jones? 

Williams describes the crowd at the Steward-Colbert rally this way

…While Stewart and Colbert expressly appealed to “the busy majority” of reasonable, middle-of-the-road, somewhat-stressed-but-not-given-to-hysterics people, the signs among the masses were deeply inflected by class consciousness and the national educational divide. Some were relatively subtle: Which Way to Whole Foods? and Anyone for Scrabble Later? Others more overtly referenced Beck’s Rally to Restore Honor: Every Word on This Sign Is Spelled Correctly; I &heart; Evidence-Based Policies; and my favorite: If You Don’t Believe in Government Perhaps You Shouldn’t Run for It.

This was a crowd that listens to NPR (Kiss Me, Nina Totenberg!). It was racially and ethnically diverse ( Fox Told Me I Am a Terrorist). Their humor was sophisticated ( I Clutch My Purse When I See Juan Williams Coming). It was a throng of New York Times readers who eat bagels and peruse the Book Review. They marched with Kindles in hand, and their Patagonia backpacks contained novels by Anna Quindlen and essay collections like David Rakoff’s Don’t Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never-Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil and Other First World Problems.

If this sounds like a litany of class markers, we need to remember that class and education are not necessary correlates. This was a population of very diverse Americans who equate political sanity with studiousness and curiosity. It was a gathering of people fluent in subtlety and satire, tolerance and tact; who saw similarity in differences and differences among the similar; who appreciated metaphors, analogical thinking and the discipline of data. This is the opposite of fundamentalism. And it ought to be the very essence of American identity, for we can have no broad civic culture without it. Unfortunately these critical capacities are also the hallmarks of a good liberal arts education, which is increasingly unavailable to any but the very well-off. (The State University of New York, Albany, just announced that it may eliminate its Latin, French, Italian, Russian and theater degree programs.)

Why bother with the nuances of analytical thought? Consider this—recently State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley tweeted: “Happy birthday President #Ahmadinejad. Celebrate by sending Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer home” and “Your 54th year was full of lost opportunities. Hope in your 55th year you will open #Iran to a different relationship with the world.” Sarah Palin tweeted back: “Happy B’day Ahmadinejad wish sent by US Govt. Mind boggling foreign policy: kowtow & coddle enemies; snub allies. Obama Doctrine is nonsense.” This is not merely a lack of irony; it is a form of illiteracy, the kind of flat, childish reading that grasps the basic meaning of each word but not what they mean together.

Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are frightening in their ignorance and I worry that the ignorance is spreading faster than we can stop it.  The problem in the United States today is not the divide between liberalism and conservative:  that tension has existed since the founding of the country.  The problem is the divide between those who can read and comprehend and those who can’t.  I am not talking here about the quality of the inner city elementary school, although that too is an issue, I am talking about people who are supposed to be educated and still can’t really read and when they do don’t understand what it is they read.  True conservatives should be just as worried about them as liberals like me.

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Congresswoman Giffords, violence, rhetoric and other thoughts

Happy 2011!  I had made a resolution to post at least once a week this year and am already behind.  I have had a difficult fall with lots of energy sapping family and work issues.  It also didn’t help that for someone like me, the political news was depressing.  There were a number of bright spots including the Massachusetts election, the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t tell, and ratification of START.  But overall it was pretty bleak.

But watching the first week of the new House was most entertaining.  At least it was until Saturday.

Bob and I were driving back from western Mass after a day of packing up my mother’s old apartment and when we got to Worcester, I turned on the NPR station to see if there were any news.  That was how we heard about Congresswoman Giffords, Judge Roll and the others who were shot and wounded.  I think that the assassination or attempted assassination of any political figure regardless of party or political philosophy is horrendous.  But this shooting is the culmination of the violence advocated by the radical right of the Republican party and the Tea Party Movement.

The first official to put the blame squarely where it belongs was Clarence W. Dupnik, the Pima County sheriff.  Sheriff Dupnik was blunt.  He was quoted in the Washington Post

There’s reason to believe that this individual may have a mental issue. And I think people who are unbalanced are especially susceptible to vitriol,” he said during his televised remarks. “People tend to pooh-pooh this business about all the vitriol we hear inflaming the American public by people who make a living off of doing that. That may be free speech, but it’s not without consequences.

He went on to say

It’s not unusual for all public officials to get threats constantly, myself included,” Sheriff Dupnik said. “That’s the sad thing about what’s going on in America: pretty soon we’re not going to be able to find reasonable, decent people willing to subject themselves to serve in public office.

So let’s look at some actual facts since the Republicans and the Tea Party appear to be painting themselves as victims of the liberal media and claim no responsibility of what happened.

First it is a fact that Sarah Palin posted a map with cross-hairs over the Congressional Districts of 20 Democratic Congresspersons including Giffiords.  She remarked on the fact last year.

Ms. Giffords was also among a group of Democratic House candidates featured on the Web site of Sarah Palin’s political action committee with cross hairs over their districts, a fact that disturbed Ms. Giffords at the time.

“We’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list,” Ms. Giffords said last March. “But the thing is the way that she has it depicted has the cross hairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they’ve got to realize there’s consequences to that.”

The image is no longer on the Web site, and Ms. Palin posted a statement saying “my sincere condolences are offered to the family of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and the other victims of today’s tragic shooting in Arizona. On behalf of Todd and my family, we all pray for the victims and their families, and for peace and justice.” (Late Saturday, the map was still on Ms. Palin’s Facebook page.)

Second, her office in Tuscon was vandalized after her vote in favor of Health Care Reform.  And both she and Judge Roll received threats. 

Third, her opponent in last November’s Congressional race held an event.  This information is from the blog, Firedoglake.

Kelly’s website has apparently scrubbed the event , but here is the account from the Arizona Daily Star:

Jesse Kelly, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to be bothered in the least by the Sarah Palin controversy earlier this year, when she released a list of targeted races in crosshairs, urging followers to “reload” and “aim” for Democrats. Critics said she was inciting violence.

He seems to be embracing his fellow tea partier’s idea. Kelly’s campaign event website has a stern-looking photo of the former Marine in military garb holding his weapon. It includes the headline: “Get on Target for Victory in November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly.”

The event costs $50

I’m sure I will have much more to say on all of this as time goes on but I want to end with this from Paul Krugman’s column today.

It’s important to be clear here about the nature of our sickness. It’s not a general lack of “civility,” the favorite term of pundits who want to wish away fundamental policy disagreements. Politeness may be a virtue, but there’s a big difference between bad manners and calls, explicit or implicit, for violence; insults aren’t the same as incitement.

The point is that there’s room in a democracy for people who ridicule and denounce those who disagree with them; there isn’t any place for eliminationist rhetoric, for suggestions that those on the other side of a debate must be removed from that debate by whatever means necessary.

And it’s the saturation of our political discourse — and especially our airwaves — with eliminationist rhetoric that lies behind the rising tide of violence.

Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It’s hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be “armed and dangerous” without being ostracized; but Representative Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the G.O.P.

And there’s a huge contrast in the media. Listen to Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann, and you’ll hear a lot of caustic remarks and mockery aimed at Republicans. But you won’t hear jokes about shooting government officials or beheading a journalist at The Washington Post. Listen to Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly, and you will.

Of course, the likes of Mr. Beck and Mr. O’Reilly are responding to popular demand. Citizens of other democracies may marvel at the American psyche, at the way efforts by mildly liberal presidents to expand health coverage are met with cries of tyranny and talk of armed resistance. Still, that’s what happens whenever a Democrat occupies the White House, and there’s a market for anyone willing to stoke that anger.

But even if hate is what many want to hear, that doesn’t excuse those who pander to that desire. They should be shunned by all decent people.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t been happening: the purveyors of hate have been treated with respect, even deference, by the G.O.P. establishment. As David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter, has put it, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we’re discovering we work for Fox.”

And this sums it all up.

Dan Wasserman

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Why the Democrats didn’t have a chance

The Democrats never had a chance at overcoming the non- facts repeated over and over by the Republican-Tea Party coalition.  Tom the Dancing Bug explains.

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If you don’t see Ruben Bolling regularly, check him out.  There is a new one every week.

I find it interesting that, like the infamous Joe the Plumber, Americans worry about what happens to the rich because they may be rich themselves someday.  It is an ingrained part of our national psyche.  Perhaps the President compromise on the tax cuts should be raising the middle class cut from $250,000 to $400,000 or thereabouts.  And we need to work on the tax code if people are making that much as a business and still filling on their personal tax returns.  We probably need some kind of small corporation category for filing added to the tax code. 

The discussion in the Lame Duck Congress should be interesting since the Republican Tea Party did run on reducing the deficit and keeping the tax cuts for those making over the $250,000.  I want to see their math as it seems keeping the cuts for the very top earners adds to the deficit without helping to pay it down.  This will be high on the agenda when Congress returns to session On November 15.  It should be fun.

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About November 2nd

Actually the election was better than I thought it would be.  Here in Massachusetts the Democrats swept the Constitutional offices and proved that there was no enthusiasm gap – or if there was one it was on the Republican side.  The Democrats proved that old fashioned shoe leather is still the way to get out the vote.  The turnout was very good for a mid-term election in my precinct where Charlie Baker got all of 19 votes out of 433 voters.  Equally significant the two most important propositions got voted down.  We kept affordable housing laws on the books and didn’t reduce the sales tax.  But remember we also voted for George McGovern.

I have mixed emotions about the scene nationally.  On one hand, it probably means nothing will get done legislatively until after the 2012 Presidential election is over.  We can only hope that Congress musters the votes for a continuing resolution on the budget.  On the hand, it will be very entertaining to watch the Republicans try to deal with dissent in their party as the election of Rand Paul and others means the end to the lockstep voting of Republicans in Congress.  And given what is happening in recent European elections, particularly the Conservative take-over in England (and while we are talking, can someone please explain to me why the Liberal Dems there are in a coalition with them?) we shouldn’t be surprised that the Republican-Tea Party coalition won.  But how bad is it really?

There was a 60 vote swing in the House.  But remember that before the election the Democrats held 255 seats.  After the election the Republicans hold 239.  Even if all 8 still undecided races break Republican, they will hold 247 seats.  So yes, there was a huge swing, the biggest since, I believe since the Truman mid-terms, but even so, the new Republican majority is not as large as the Democratic one before the election.  And I was very sorry to see my old friend, Rick Boucher, lose in Virginia as part of the wave.  

The pre-election talk was a 9 seat pick-up in the Senate for the Republicans.  Pundits on both sides were saying that the Republicans would have had the 10 seats to take over if not for Christine O’Donnell getting the Delaware nomination.  But the gain is only 6 with Alaska still undecided.  The Democrats still hold 53 seats in the Senate.  Maybe Harry Reid can figure out a way to change the Senate rules to a majority instead of 60 votes.

Joshua Holland has a great piece posted on AlterNet titled “It’s Not the End of the World — 7 Things Progressives Need to Keep in Mind about Last Night’s GOP ‘Wave”.

Here are a few of those 7 things.

2. The electorate is hopping mad, but they still dislike Republicans. A month before an election that has swept some rather extreme GOPers into Congress, an Associated Press-GfK Poll found that “60 percent disapprove of the job congressional Democrats are doing — yet 68 percent frown on how Republicans are performing.”

A New York Times/CBS News poll last week found that while a majority of Americans voted GOP yesterday, the electorate “continues to have a more favorable opinion of the Democratic Party than of the Republican Party, with 46 percent favoring Democrats and 41 favoring Republicans.”

This will be the third consecutive year in which the party out of power wins. That’s not a measure of the country’s ideological leanings, it’s a sign that people are hurting and are mad as hell about it (in case one needed such a sign).

3. Blue Dogs took the brunt of it. The loss of Wisconsin’s liberal lion, Russ Feingold, is a blow to the progressive movement. Alan Grayson’s defeat in Florida hurts. Other good lawmakers were booted out of office last night as well. But in many cases, what we saw were conservatives with Ds next to their names replaced with conservatives with Rs.

That’s to be expected after two big Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008. They won in a lot of conservative districts, but as many observers noted at the time, many of those Dems winning in marginally “red” districts were the bluest of dogs, who have not exactly helped advance a progressive agenda.

In his new book, Ari Berman argues that a smaller, more ideologically coherent Democratic party would in fact be good for progressives. Whether or not one agrees, it’s hard to see a bunch of the most corporate-friendly Dems losing their seats as a tragedy for American progressivism.

5.  A wave of low-information voters says more about our media and education system than our politics. In late July, a much discussed poll revealed that only 42 percent of Republican primary voters were confident President Obama was born in the United States. Compare that to 77 percent of the electorate at large.

It’s important to remember that many Tea Partiers are voting in an alternative universe where the decidedly centrist Dems are stealthily pushing the nation toward socialism, trying to enact Sharia law, taking over broad swaths of the economy, setting up “death panels” to decide if grandma lives or dies and plotting to join the United States with Canada and Mexico.

Given those beliefs, it’s really no surprise they’re so animated to “take their country back.” But all of that is a testament to the power of the Right’s mighty Wurlitzer, and says little about the state of our political beliefs.

So right now, I’m going to sit back and watch the Republican Party try to reign in Michele Bachmann and Rand Paul and the expectations of the people who voted for them that the world will now run their way while I hope that the President and the Democrats stick to their principles and don’t compromise them away.  We don’t need them to become the equivalent of the English Liberal Dems.