feminist blogs

(Crossposted between Alas and TADA.)

From The Washington Independent:

Recognizing that Democrats would be reluctant to record “yes” votes for a budget that would augment the deficit, the House leadership opted to deem as passed a “budget enforcement resolution” instead, just before the July 4 recess. While the distinction between an enforcement resolution and a full budget is largely technical, there is one crucial difference: Under the enforcement resolution, Democrats can no longer use a parliamentary tactic known as budget reconciliation next year — a process Democrats had hoped might allow them to pass key pieces of legislation, such as a jobs bill, with 51 votes in the Senate, as opposed to the usual 60 needed to overcome a filibuster.

Under the arcane rules of the Senate, budget reconciliation can only be used if it was written into the budget rules passed the previous year. With no full budget, there can be no reconciliation. As a consequence, Democrats lose a valuable tool for passing budget-related items on a majority-rules vote.

Over at The Corner, conservative Daniel Foster is justifiably elated:

If in November the Republicans come very close to taking the House and cut into the Democrats’ majority in the Senate (I consider this the most likely outcome), they will nevertheless end up in de facto control of both bodies.

Without reconciliation, Senate Democrats won’t have any procedural check on the filibuster (save a “nuclear option”),¹ and grabbing the usual-suspect New England Republicans will no longer be enough to get to 60. On the other side of the Capitol, even if the Democrats hang-on to a bare majority, there is still going to be a non-trivial number of conservative House Democrats who side with the GOP on tough spending and social issues. (As Kevin Williamson just put it to me, “conservative Democrats rule the world.”)

This situation would be disastrous for Democrats, whose narrow majorities would give them all of the responsibility and none of the power.

He’s absolutely right. One of the more frustrating things about the current political situation is that Republicans have been having a huge impact on policy through their use of the filibuster — both as a means of influencing particular policy outcomes, and also as a way of generally obstructing government. But because our system gives one party the majority but not the power to govern, Republicans haven’t had to take any responsibility for their acts.

This situation will grow even worse next year. The slim hope of overcoming filibusters will be gone; gone also will be the chance to pass legislation through reconciliation.

In fact, it might be better if the Republicans win control of the House by a slim majority in the 2010 elections. It probably would have only a minor effect on what legislation is passed — and anything really horrifyingly right-wing would be unlikely to get past the Senate and past Obama’s veto — but it would at least put Republicans in a formal position of partial responsibility for our useless Congress.

The logic of the cowardly Democrats is frustrating in two ways. First of all, as Matthew Yglesias writes, it simply doesn’t make sense:

Shame on everyone involved for thinking that a single vote will be swung by this goofy procedural nonsense. The apparent belief of backbench House members that the American people understand or care about these procedural gimmicks is bizarre. It was bizarre during the “deem and pass” controversy of January and it’s bizarre today.²

Secondly, the trade-off the Democrats are making — an at best marginal increase in their odds of re-election, in exchange for guaranteeing no significant legislative accomplishments in the 112th Congress — is a simply not worth it. In exchange for slightly better odds of continued employment for a handful of the most contemptible, overpaid mediocrities in the country, Democrats have given up on doing anything to help millions of far more deserving and needy unemployed Americans.

The needs of unemployed millions should outrank the needs of a few cowardly Democrats.

I can understand why Democrats in the House might see their re-elections as much more important than actually passing any worthwhile legislation next year. But they shouldn’t. The purpose of voting for Democrat Representatives is so that they will pass worthwhile legislation, and the House Democrats have given up on that purpose.

So why should we vote for them again?

1. I’d be thrilled if Senate Democrats began their next session by eliminating the filibuster entirely. But I’d be shocked if that actually happened.
2. Yglesias also correctly criticizes Obama’s role in this fiasco: “But the White House needs to take a share of the blame here. For a while now they’ve engaged in a fair amount of “austerity theater” as a political strategy without really considering the systematic consequences of that which include the fact that many House members who’d be happy to support the Obama agenda don’t want to position themselves to the left of the most high-profile and well-regarded progressive leader in the country. Consequently, austerity theater spreads to the House and we don’t have a budget. Which means that in the 112 Congress there will be no legislative agenda.”

I never knew that the way to get rich in America was to become a waiter. I mean, sure,  I suspected; waiters are always driving those sweet ‘99 Hyundais, rolling with fat stacks of Washingtons, and spending holidays at their vacation homes in their regular homes. But still, it’s nice of Minnesota Rep. Tom Emmer, R-Delano, to come along to alert the rest of us to the dread scourge of waiters earning a living wage.

For those who live outside my home state, Emmer, the presumptive GOP nominee for governor, has suggested that Minnesota should join those states that allow businesses to pay their servers $2.13 an hour if said servers make tips. Right now, Minnesota restaurants have to pay servers $5.25 if they’re a small employer, or $6.15 an hour if they’re a big one.

Now, you may note that $6.15 an hour isn’t that much. And you may realize that if you’re a typical Perkins server on a slow night, you may only be bringing in another three or four dollars per hour in additional tips. Indeed, if you live here on planet Earth, you’re probably not surprised to find out that, far from being the richest of the rich, the median server earns $9.36 an hour — about $19,000 a year. Of course, Emmer claims that waiters actually average $15.43 an hour, which is a bit better — $31,000 a year.

But Emmer is proposing a wage cut for waiters and bartenders equivalent to $8361.60 a year. Even using Emmer’s inflated statistics, that’s cutting a $31,000 a year salary to $22,638.40 — a 37 percentLike a pay cut for people barely making a living wage. Using real statistics, the pay cut is even steeper — cutting wages 79 percent, from $19,000 a year to $10,638.40.

Why Emmer would want to cut someone’s wages by 79 percent — to literally drop servers below the poverty line — is simple. Servers aren’t rich. Restaurateurs aren’t all rich either, of course. But they’re a lot more likely to be rich than their employees. And Emmer cares very much about making the rich richer. If he has to do so by making the poor poorer, well, that’s a feature, not a bug.

Tom Emmer doesn’t mind snatching away basic protections from the working poor — from people working hard, five days a week, doing what they’re supposed to do. Indeed, he revels in it. Like far too many of his fellow Republicans, Tom Emmer doesn’t care if you work hard. He only cares if you make a lot of money. If you don’t — no matter how hard you work — screw you.

Outtacontext has created a series of WW2-style propaganda posters calling for less partisan division. Here’s a typical example:

First of all, let me say, these posters are gorgeous. Outtacontext, you rock. As a poster designer.

But I find the politics expressed by the posters to be… frankly annoying.

Not all disagreements are shallow partisanship. Some disagreements are based on substance. But “substance” — which is what I’d really like everyone’s politics to be focused on — is entirely ignored by the “stop the partisan bickering!” folks.

If a policy position is right, then it’s also right to advocate for it passionately — even if that turns out, in practice, to create “disunity.” Unity is not the most important value in the world.

One of Outtacontext’s posters calls on us to “vote moderate” in 2010. But is the “moderate” position always correct? Historically, we can see many cases in which splitting the difference between two major sides would have produced fairly horrible and unjust policy. For instance, when the question was if women should be allowed to vote, a “moderate” position might have been to grant women limited voting rights (the right to vote in local but not Federal elections, for example). A position can split the difference and still be horribly wrong.

I’d suggest that, next time Outtacontext is looking for inspiration for posters, he should read Martin Luther King Jr’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which — among other things — covers the difference between being moderate and being right.

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another mans freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro the wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating that absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.

Of course, there’s a lot about partianship as it’s practiced that I have criticized and will criticize. But on the whole, I agree with Nancy Rosemblum: “What we need is not independence or bipartisanship or post-partisanship but better partisanship.”

Al Gore has done a lot of good during his long career in public service. His work on global warming, for example, has been exemplary. His work as Clinton’s vice president to streamline government and make it run more efficiently was outstanding. And it’s hard to argue that America would not have been better off with President Gore than President Bush Jr.

And so it’s tempting, when allegations are raised that Gore sexually assaulted a masseuse in 2006, to dismiss them. To argue that they’re clearly politically motivated. To assume the best, not the worst, of a politician who one has agreed with over the years.

This is a temptation that must be resisted.

I do not know whether Gore committed sexual assault in a Portland, Oregon hotel room three years ago. Indeed, only two people do: Gore himself, and the complainant. But as Hanna Rosin notes, the woman’s very detailed statement rings true. And Emily Bazelon cites the complainant’s own words explaining why she didn’t immediately seek out the authorities:

I did not immediately call the police as I deeply fear being made into a public spectacle and my work reputation being destroyed. I was not sure what to tell them and was concerned my story would not be believed since there was no DNA evidence from a completed act for rape. I did not even know what to call what happened to me. I did not know if the police would even want to take a report on this.

That seems completely rational; how would you react if you were the victim of a difficult-to-prove criminal case against Dick Cheney, or Dan Quayle, or Fritz Mondale? Probably by realizing that a rich former vice president would have enough power not just to avoid prosecution, but to make your life a living nightmare.

This does not mean Gore is guilty, either legally or morally. It is possible that this has been fabricated, that Gore is the completely innocent victim of someone with a vivid imagination. It’s possible.

But having read the complaint, I have to say that my gut tells me that it’s more likely Gore is guilty of sexual assault than not guilty. He may not be convicted. Indeed, he likely won’t be charged. But my gut tells me that Al Gore did something illegal and immoral in a Portland hotel room in 2006, and that is something that should not be taken lightly, and should not be minimized.

Humans are rarely all evil or all good. Al Gore’s actions in Portland in 2006 don’t eliminate the good he’s done on global warming. But the good he’s done on global warming doesn’t eliminate his actions in Portland in 2006. I will never look at Al Gore the same way again. And if his actions lead to civil or criminal penalties against him, he has nobody to blame but himself.

If there was one thing we knew about Rand Paul, it was that he wanted to bring America back to its glory days, when businesses could call the police to evict those meddlesome Negroes from their lunch counters. If we knew another thing, it was that he was Ron Paul’s kid. And if we knew a third thing, it was that he was a board-certified ophthalmologist.

Well, one of those things turns out to be not exactly true. Sadly, it’s not the lunch counter one. And he looks way too much like his dad to have his paternity in doubt. So let’s look behind door number three, shall we?

Rand Paul, who touts his career as a Kentucky eye doctor as part of his outsider credentials in his campaign for U.S. Senate, isn’t certified by his profession’s leading group.

He tried Monday to bat away questions about it by calling it an attack on his livelihood, saying the scrutiny stems from his challenge of a powerful medical group over a certification policy he thought was unfair.

The libertarian-leaning Republican helped create a rival certification group more than a decade ago. He said the group has since recertified several hundred ophthalmologists, despite not being recognized the American Board of Medical Specialties – the governing group for two dozen medical specialty boards.

Hey, to be fair to Rand Paul, I can understand why he did this. I mean, who hasn’t gone out and formed their own ophthalmology licensing board? I know I have. In fact, if you want to be a board-certified ophthalmologist just like Rand Paul, just print out the certificate below, and write your name on it somewhere. Voila! Instant certification!

Okay, sure, Jeff’s Pretty Good Ophthalmology Board isn’t, like, recognized by anyone. But that’s only because we’re sticking it to the man, with his “rules” and “regulations” and “dues.”

Seriously, this does fit with Paul’s worldview — if you’re a Randian superman, you can do whatever you damn well please, and silly things like licensing shouldn’t matter. Hey, if the eye doctor blinds enough people, the magic of the market will ensure that rich people don’t go to him, thus ensuring that the doctor will only be able to make a meager living treating the poor.

Now, Rand Paul might be a great surgeon. Even in libertarian world, some people who set up shop as doctors would turn out to be good at it. But here in the real world, you have to question a surgeon who has certified himself, with assistance from his wife and father-in-law. Moreover, you have to wonder about someone who would flout his industry’s basic rules. Because thankfully, we live in a real world, where doctors have to get real certification from real boards. And that gives those of us going into surgery at least a basic reassurance that the doctor who’s treating us has reached a basic level of competence.

The fact that Paul was willing to go it alone shows a startling arrogance, and a disregard for his patients. But then again, that arrogance is part and parcel of Paul’s persona. He’s a man born on third base who thought he hit a triple, and who sneers at the rules that put him where he is. A man who should be nowhere near the levers of power.

Let me begin by saying that although Democrats deserve to lose, Republicans certainly don’t deserve to win.

1) The economy is in terrible shape. Unemployment is dismal. Long-term unemployment in particular is dramatically worse than it’s ever been.

The long-term unemployment situation continued to deteriorate in May, as an additional 47,000 unemployed workers crossed the six-months-unemployed threshold. There are now 6.8 million workers who have been unemployed for longer than six months, which is unsurprising given that there are now well over five unemployed workers per job opening. The median, or typical, unemployment spell was 23.2 weeks (5.4 months), and nearly half (46.0%) of all unemployed workers had been unemployed for over six months, both record highs.

Click through and scroll down to look at the graph, which is one of the more scary-ass trend lines I’ve ever seen.

2) We know how to fix the economy; what’s needed is a truly gigantic, short-term injection of stimulus from the government, to get the economy moving and people working. Unfortunately, there has not been any net fiscal stimulus.

The proper measure for fiscal stimulus is not spending by the federal government; it is spending by all levels of governmeTnt. And when you look at the contributions to US GDP growth (Table 1.1.2 at the BEA site), total government spending has been a drag on growth over the past two quarters. The increases at the federal level have not been enough to compensate for the spending cuts at the local and state levels.

3) The long-term damage caused by high levels of unemployment will be a drag on the US economy (and on Americans individually) for many years to come, maybe decades.

Taken as a whole, the results suggest that the labor market consequences of graduating from college in a bad economy are large, negative, and persistent. [...] There is a growing body of evidence on the deleterious effects of long-term unemployment on individual well-being, including lowered earnings, which can persist for many years after re-employment, as well as increased mortality, poorer health outcomes, greater probability of depression and other mental health issues, and marital instability.

4) Many Americans seem to believe that we can address the long-term deficit problem, or we can address unemployment, but we can’t address both. That’s not true.

If we spend an extra $1 trillion over the next three years in unemployment-reducing stimulative fiscal policies, we raise–at current interest rates–real government debt service in 2030 by $7 billion a year. [...] Whatever we do (defined as spending up to an extra $1 trillion) in the short run (defined as the next three years or so) is rounding error in the context of our long-run fiscal stability problems. [...]

Think of it this way: our natural gas pipes are corroding, and there is a good chance that tomorrow ten years from now we will have a gas leak and if we do not fix it the house will explode. And Henry Blodget is using that danger to argue that we shouldn’t turn on the heat tonight even though it is snowing outside…

In fact, unaddressed long-term unemployment makes it harder to deal with the deficit.

In the US, there are two political parties that matter. Republicans are obviously hopeless on this issue; the average Republican Senator is considerably more likely to pound iron nails into Superman’s skull using only a hammer made of cotton balls, than to support a really good fiscal stimulus bill.

What’s horrible is that the Democrats have been only marginally better. I don’t think the Democrats are saints — far from it — but I would have imagined, once, that self-interest would motivate the Democrats in Congress and in the White House to do everything they possibly can to bring unemployment numbers down, because that is the single factor that will make the most difference in the next election. But instead, Democrats have continually settled for quarter-measures and half-measures.

I think the Democrats will pay for their tepid response to unemployment in November — and they’ll deserve to lose. A majority party that doesn’t treat our current levels of unemployment as an urgent crisis does not deserve to retain power. Unfortunately, the Democrats losing equals Republicans winning, and they don’t deserve to win, either.

Boy, the GOP seems to have picked a real winner in Nevada:

At first, [Nevada State Sen. Sharon] Angle appeared to be a conservative beamed to us straight from 1932. She’s come out against the repeal of Prohibition (which she later retracted). She’s against Social Security and Medicare. If you pressed her, you’d probably get her to grouse that things have gone downhill since the 19th Amendment, or that movies lost their spark once they introduced sound.

But sadly, my theory that Angle simply came to us after accidentally stepping in to a time machine in 1932 has been disproved. It turns out that Angle also staunchly opposed fluoridation, because she’s at least strongly influenced by the Bircher conspiracy theory about how fluoridation is a communist experiment in mind control. This conspiracy theory dates back to the ’50s and ’60s, when the government mandated fluoridation. It appears that Angle is less a time traveler and more a grab-bag of a century’s worth of right-wing conspiracy theories and screwy ideas.

Fluoride. That’s a conspiracy that hasn’t been around since the halcyon days of the sixties. People were opposed to fluoride in water because the gummit was putting chemicals into our bodies, and this would…uh…something.

This was obvious, because government is the enemy, damn it! Surely the government wasn’t interested in lowering the incidence of tooth decay — if they had been, then mission accomplished — but instead the evil forces of the government were focused on…well, it didn’t matter what, because it had to be nefarious.

Between Angle wanting to bring us back to the dental care of the 1930s, and Rand Paul happy to resegregate what few Walgreen’s lunch counters remain, the Tea Party folks are sure busy building a bridge to the 20th century. Which is why, for all the angst about our country’s direction, I expect the fall to be better for the Democrats than the dire predictions suggest. After all, it’s one thing to vote against Harry Reid. It’s quite another to vote for someone who thinks we should repeal Medicare.

Your pathetic, quixotic campaign was good for a little Schadenfreude. But when you start plagiarizing Paul Wellstone, it stops being funny and starts being enraging.

Earth to Mickey: Paul Wellstone stood on the side of unions, gays, immigrants, and teachers. Everything you stand against. If there is proof that there is no God, it is that Paul Wellstone is dead, and you’re still wandering around as if you have something worthwhile to say. Go back to your goats, and leave us alone.

I think the take by Joan Walsh here is pretty much on the money for Super Tuesday XVIII: The Sleestak Experience. While it’s tough to draw conclusions from primary elections about who will win general elections, it’s not tough to see that this night went pretty well for Democrats, especially in the only intersquad matchup, the special election in Pennsylvania 12th, where Democrat Mark Critz beat Republican Tim Burns by a solid 53-45 margin, in a seat that was supposed to be at best a toss-up for the Dems.

As for the other results, they’re not necessarily bad news for Democrats, though they aren’t necessarily good news for incumbents. Arlen Specter losing in Pennsylvania makes a lot of sense — let’s face it, the guy jumped to the Democrats for pure political expediency, assuming that he couldn’t beat Pat Toomey in a primary. No matter your party or political inclination, it’s hard not to see a sort of karmic justice in his defeat by Rep. Joe Sestak, D-Penn. Specter really put himself above the people of Pennsylvania, full stop, and both the Democrats and Republicans have every right to be glad he’s gone.

In Kentucky, Son of Google Ron Paul won the Republican primary. Jane Hamsher’s cheerleading tweets aside, Paul has run as a pretty doctrinaire conservative. Yes, he’s pro-pot and anti-Iraq War, but the latter’s pretty common among Republicans now (after all, it’s Obama’s War), and the former’s a nice little libertarian fig leaf. On the larger question of where Paul sides on the people vs. the powerful, he’s come out as opposed to the Americans with Disabilities Act. His rationale — business should be able to do whatever it damn well pleases because the markets know all and see all — is classic boilerplate Randian woo. No wonder the teabaggers love him. Meanwhile, he’s so libertarian on social issues that James Dobson endorsed him.

Paul could well win in Kentucky, of course. But he’s probably a less safe bet than the stereotypically Republican-monikered Trey Grayson. And the Democrats gave the nod — barely — to Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway, who has been running strongest of possible statewide candidates on the left.

Meanwhile, in Arkansas, incumbent Democrat Blanche Lincoln narrowly scraped by Lt. Gov. Bill Halter in the primary, but both made the run-off in June, as Halter held her under 50 percent. This is sort of a win-win for Democrats, as Lincoln pre-primary was dead in the water in the general. If she hangs on, she can run as the candidate the liberals love to hate, which, let’s face it, probably will resonate in Arkansas. And if she loses…well, Halter’s not some upstart nobody. And he’s probably got a better chance in the general than Lincoln had last year.

In general, primary night showed that while there is a bit of an anti-incumbent and anti-establishment wave right now, that wave isn’t necessarily breaking as hard against the Democrats as we’ve been led to believe. If 2010 is a wave year for the Republicans, they’re going to need to take all the R+1 open seats available. They failed to tonight. That bodes ill for a Republican takeover of Congress. It’s still possible, of course. But the odds are slightly higher against it tonight than they were 24 hours ago.

Someone who works for the Senate Democrats, and is in charge of writing title captions for their Youtube videos, desperately needs to improve their game.

So here’s the story:

Senators Menendez, Lautenberg and Nelson today asked unanimous consent on their Big Oil Bailout Prevention Liability Act of 2010, a bill that would raise the liability caps for oil companies from $75 million to $10 billion to help ensure that they pay the full costs of economic and environmental disasters caused by their negligence. Sen. Murkowski, however, objected, essentially blocking passage of this important piece of legislation. Inexplicably, Republicans are protecting negligent oil companies like BP and blocking our efforts to prevent a BP bailout,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. “Through their obstruction, Republicans are leaving taxpayers on the hook to pay for BPs negligence.”

And here’s how someone who works for the Senate Democrats captioned the video: “Republicans Block Big Oil Bailout Bill.”

Yeesh!

To add some more content-like content to this post, I’ll quote Ezra, addressing Murkowski’s argument:

Yesterday, Sen. Lisa Murkowski rose to deny unanimous consent to Democrats trying to pass a bill increasing the cap on damages for oil spills from $75 million to $10 billion. Murkowski saw a problem: “It would be impossible or perhaps close to impossible for any energy company that is smaller than the super majors, smaller than the national oil companies, to operate in the OCS. Ten billion dollars in strict liability would preclude their ability to obtain financing, to obtain the bonds or insurance for any exploration.”

To put it slightly more clearly, if oil producers are on hook for up to $10 billion of the cost of a spill, smaller oil producers won’t be able to afford the insurance necessary to do offshore drilling. Murkowski might be right about that. But why should the federal government be in the business of helping oil companies take risks that they don’t find economically viable? As David Roberts put it, “Murkowski wants small, independent oil companies to be able to privatize the profits of offshore drilling but offload the financial risks to the public.”