Michael Tomasky's Blog, page 18
February 28, 2011
Tomasky Talk: The Wisconsin union battle, the federal budget and the travails of Lou Sarah - video
Tomasky Talk: Michael Tomasky reviews last week's US political stories – from Governor Scott Walker's bill to a mysterious Facebook account involving she who may not be named
Michael Tomasky
February 26, 2011
Obligatory Oscar post (but one with a good "oh, man, those 70s" link) | Michael Tomasky
I didn't see very many of these movies this year. For the second half of the year, I've mostly been watching Margot Perfects Her Smile. It's an independent and low-budget affair, and some have charged that the plot is rather desultory. But it's shot through with pathos, wit and charm, and it has certainly melted this critic's cold cold heart.
So I don't have any Big Opinions on the Oscars. Most of the ones I saw, I liked but didn't love: King's Speech, Winter's Bone, etc. I never made it to True Grit. I fell asleep at home one night on The Social Network, but I assure you that had more to do with me than it.
But I figure you all have opinions, and I like reading your opinions, especially on non-political matters when those of you normally detest each other end up finding that you share some fundamental aesthetic sensibility, so I offer this post up mainly to allow for you folks to go to town on the comment thread. I look forward to reading.
To the extent that I have a rooting interest, I'd like to see either Javier Bardem or James Franco win best actor (haven't seen either movie), although I know that would be one of the biggest upsets in Oscar history. Bardem is great, and I'd kind of blown away that Franco is now at Yale getting a PhD in English. A PhD! That's serious. He'd probably do well on the Tomasky quizzes. You have to respect that.
Well, whatever happens Sunday, I'm ragingly confident that we won't see anything like this, from 1973. Click through. It's only two minutes. Those were some crazy days, man.
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February 25, 2011
Tomasky blog's greatest American of the week | Michael Tomasky
That would be Paula Aboud, a Democratic member of the Arizona state senate from Tucson, which sits within the county of Pima, which you'll need to know as you read this:
State senators voted Thursday to let lawmakers nullify federal laws -- but not before refusing to give Pima County permission to secede to avoid all the embarrassment.
The measure, given preliminary approval on a voice vote, would set up a committee empowered to review all past and future federal actions to determine whether they are constitutional. That panel's recommendations of unconstitutionality would go to the full Legislature.
It would take only a simple majority of lawmakers to declare the action null and void. And if that happens, "this state and its citizens shall not recognize or be obligated to live under the statute, mandate or executive order.''...
...Sen. Paula Aboud, D-Tucson, chose not to try to block SB 1433 which has strong Republican support, including that of Senate President Russell Pearce. Instead, she sought to amend it to say that the moment this law takes effect, the Pima County Board of Supervisors "may act to have the county secede from the jurisdiction of this state.''
Aboud said Pima County residents really do want to remain part of Arizona.
"But we don't want to be part of this state that continues to embarrass Arizona,'' she said. "The point is, our business community is hurting because of the reactions brought upon by this body.''
You can have a gander at Paula right here. Senator, we salute you.
I trust Arizona is proud to have beaten South Carolina to the punch here. If everything goes according to schedule, the next civil war will start in 2043. Buy your canned goods.
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Gentle George | Michael Tomasky
George Harrison would have turned 68 today, so I offer you a later (possibly from the 1991 Japan gigs?) rendition of "Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)," a lovely tune with a typically Harrisonesque complex chord progression that he managed to make flow like soothing bathwater (F, Fdim, Gm, C, Am, C, Eflat, Bflat, for those of you who are interested; you put the capo on the third fret, though, and you actually play D, Ddim, Em, A...etc...you take it from there).
It's difficult to say one feels badly for a member of one of the most celebrated musical acts in the history of the human race whose net worth was more than the GDP of some countries. He had a grand life. Yet he had a difficult time in some ways too. Extremely solitary by nature, he never wanted to be quite that famous. And that stabbing: imagine what a horror that had to be, just for making music that made so many people happy. And of course he died far too early. So happy birthday. Dhani, if you somehow trip across this, that was some wonderful dad you had.
Best Harrison songs?
1. While My Guitar Gently Weeps
2. Here Comes the Sun
3. Taxman (yes, reactionary, who cares, great song)
4. Don't Bother Me (waaaay underrated)
5. It's All Too Much (what?! yes!)
6. What Is Life?
7. Apple Scruffs
8. Give Me Love
9. Old Brown Shoe
10. Think for Yourself
Discuss.
No quiz today as I am preoccupied with certain matters, but there just might be (might be, he said) not one but two quizzes next week! Details later.
UPDATE: The redoubtable and sturdy mark13 is of course correct below. Something is way up there. No. 3, maybe even 2. You know the Sinatra story? He once called Lennon and McCartney the greatest songwriters of the last 20 years or whatever (this was the mid-70s, maybe). The greatest "Lennon-McCartney song" he named...Something.
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Did Roger Ailes tell Judith Regan to lie? | Michael Tomasky
Lively allegation in this morning's New York Times worth noting: a document unearthed in a lawsuit stemming from the 2007 spat between Judith Regan and Fox News alleges that Roger Ailes urged Regan to lie to federal investigators about the nature of her relationship with disgraced former NYPD chief Bernie Kerik in order to protect the reputation of Rudy Giuliani, then running for president.
Supposedly, according to the article, Regan has this on tape.
The delightful thing here is that apparently this has been made public accidentally. From the Times piece:
The new documents emerged as part of a lawsuit filed in 2008 in which Ms. Regan's former lawyers in the News Corporation case accused her of firing them on the eve of the settlement to avoid paying them a 25 percent contingency fee. The parties in that case signed an agreement to keep the records confidential, but it does not appear that an order sealing them was ever sent to the clerk at State Supreme Court in Manhattan, and the records were placed in the public case file.
To refresh you on the background. Regan was working for Fox News and had an imprint (she's really from the publishing world) under HarperCollins, owned by News Corp. She was having an affair with Kerik. Kerik came under investigation (he subsequently pled guilty to various fraud, conspiracy and perjury charges and is now in prison). The Kerik scandal was breaking in 2007, during the early days of the 2008 campaign, when Giuliani was still a contender.
In 1989, Ailes was the consultant for Giuliani's first (losing) campaign for mayor. In the 1990s, when he finally was mayor, Guiliani, intervened for Fox News when it was trying to get a foothold in the NYC market. As mayor, he also officiated at Ailes' wedding.
Giuliani also pushed Kerik on George W. Bush as nominee to head homeland security operations. Kerik was nominated and withdrew after the scandal flared up.
The feds came a-knocking, investigating Kerik. Obviously, they approached Regan. The Times article doesn't say exactly what Ailes allegedly told Regan to lie about. Possibly something specific. Possibly just a general warning to her, his employee at the time, not to say anything to them that would damage Rudy. The Times describes it as Ailes wanting "to protect Mr. Giuliani and conceal the affair."
Here's one more interesting tidbit from this story. The "Mr. Redniss" below is a lawyer who'd worked for Regan:
Then News Corporation said Ms. Regan had been fired because she made an anti-Semitic remark to a Jewish HarperCollins lawyer, Mark H. Jackson, in describing the internal campaign to fire her as a "Jewish cabal."
In her 2007 suit, Ms. Regan said the book controversies had been trumped up and the anti-Semitic remark invented to discredit her, should she ever speak out about Mr. Kerik in ways that would harm Mr. Giuliani's image. The new court documents expand upon that charge and link it to Mr. Ailes. Mr. Redniss wrote in an affidavit that Ms. Regan told him that Mr. Ailes sought to brand her as promiscuous and crazy...
...As part of the settlement in January 2008, News Corporation publicly retracted the allegation that Ms. Regan had made an anti-Semitic remark to Mr. Jackson.
So let's review the allegations here:
1. Ailes, the head of a news network, may have instructed an employee to lie to federal investigators in order to help a particular presidential candidate.
2. Ailes and News Corp. fired that employee, alleging (in the most Jewish city in the United States) that she'd made an anti-Semitic comment.
3. After the dust had settled, that allegation against her was withdrawn.
Now this is how I like to start my Fridays.
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February 24, 2011
What can the US do about Libya? | Michael Tomasky
It took a little too long, but Barack Obama finally spoke about Libya yesterday. Now, what should the US do?
The temptation is to demand intervention to stop the violence. But at what exact point are we within our rights to do so? By what mechanism? And what's the potential blowback?
Fareed Zakaria had an interesting column in the Wash Post today, not about Libya per se, but about what's happening in the region, and he (once a champion of GWB's democracy promotion) had good things to say about the Obama administration's somewhat aloof approach to events so far:
Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama deserve some credit for what has happened. Bush put the problem of the Middle East's politics at the center of American foreign policy. His articulation of a "freedom agenda" for the Middle East was a powerful and essential shift in American foreign policy (as I wrote at the time). But because so many of Bush's policies were unpopular in the region, and seen by many Arabs as "anti-Arab," it became easy to discredit democracy as an imperial plot. In 2005, Hosni Mubarak effectively silenced a vigorous pro-democracy movement by linking it to Bush.
Obama has had a quieter approach, supporting freedom but insisting that the United States did not intend to impose it on anyone. As unsatisfying as this might have been as public rhetoric, it has had the effect of allowing the Arab revolts of 2011 to be wholly owned by Arabs. This is no small matter, because the success of these protests hinges on whether they will be seen as organic, indigenous, national movements.
That seems a reasonable point, and with respect to Libya it raised to me the obvious question: if the US goes in there and leads a charge against Gaddafy's suppression, that's bound to lead to the US installing a new regime, and if that happens, there goes the whole "they've done this themselves" narrative. Libya would be well rid of Gaddafy, but demagogues across the region, it seems to me, could use such a US action as "proof" that Amedikka just wants to dominate the region for its oil.
So that's not really a terribly appealing option. There's a lot of talk of a UN-enforced no-fly zone so Gaddafy couldn't use his air force against his people. At UN Dispatch, Mark Leon Goldberg calls this a half-measure, but he mostly agrees with me on the danger of a US-led intervention:
A No Fly Zone is a humanitarian half measure. It would let the international community say that it is doing something, but there is very little a No Fly Zone can actually do to stop ongoing slaughter. Using Lynch's comparisons to slaughters of the 1990s, people need to ask themselves: would a no-fly zone have stopped the Machete wielding Interhamwe from perpetrating the Rwandan genocide? Definitely not. In Bosnia, there was an effective NATO enforced no fly zone over in 1995 when Srebrenica occurred. During the 1999 Kosovo air campaign, as NATO was bombing Serbia, Serb forces accelerated their ethnic cleansing in Kosovo...
...While a U.S/NATO backed military intervention might be effective at halting the ongoing violence, it may also undermine some of the longer-term goals of a nascent democracy movement in Libya. After all, the United States/NATO would be intervening on behalf of one side of a civil war (that's true, even if the level of intervention is only to enforce a No Fly Zone). Given the level of mistrust of the United States, such overt support for the anti-Qaddafi side may backfire — not to mention the fact that people generally don't like to be bombed by foreigners.
Seems that about the best thing that can be done right now is a toughly worded UN security council resolution. Apparently Obama is talking, or already talked, to David Cameron and Nicholas Sarkozy today.
Could there come a time for intervention? I guess there could. When would that be, people? And, as the old joke goes, you and whose army? Because our American one is pretty tapped out.
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The oldest profession and the second-oldest | Michael Tomasky
It's interesting to see in Nevada that the Republican is the pro-prostitution one. From TPM:
Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) defended Nevada's legal prostitution industry on Wednesday -- putting him at odds with Sen. Harry Reid's (D-NV)call this week to end the brothel business.
"You know, that's a county by county issue and I think and it should be left to the counties," Ensign told local station KTNV.com after a town hall meeting.
On Tuesday, Reid delivered a speech to the Nevada legislature in which he declared "the time has come for us to outlaw prostitution." Many state lawmakers defended the current brothel system after and it's unclear whether Reid's position has enough support to move forward. Governor Brian Sandoval (R) has said the issue should be left to the counties as well.
I'm familiar with conservative "devolution" arguments, but isn't this getting ridiculous? Forget states' rights. Now it's time for counties' rights.
When I was younger, I assumed that prostitution was legal because of Las Vegas, but this is apparently not the case. I guess it dates all the way back to the days of silver miners and things like that. In Clark County, where Las Vegas sits, the practice is illegal. Legal brothels exist only way out in rural areas, evidently. Of course, illegal prostitution is rampant in Vegas. I've only been there once, and then for only two days, but it wasn't exactly hard strolling through the lobby or casino and figuring out which womenfolk might well be looking for a way to pass some time, shall we say.
The Reid-Ensign split here would appear to reflect the reality that legal prostitution in Nevada is not seen as a family values kind of issue but as an exploitation of women kind of issue. Since the latter concerns is mostly the province of liberals and feminists, outlawing prostitution is therefore a liberal issue, while conservatives are happy to advance the counties' rights line. Do I have this right, KevinNevada?
Predictably enough, I'm agin' it. It seems appalling in our time that women should work under these conditions. According to this extensive Wikipedia entry, which bases much of its content on past Guardian articles, the women are considered "independent contractors" and thus are not entitled to healthcare benefits or pension plans. So now I have the solution: if it must be kept legal, let the women join the public-employees local! Maybe Harry Reid should just have proposed that.
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Scott Walker and that phone call | Michael Tomasky
You've read by know about that phone call from "David Koch" (pronounced Coke) to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. The full transcript is here and is worth a read. Apparently Walker is just getting hammered in Wisconsin on this.
More interesting to me than the transcript itself is Ian Murphy's description at his web site, The Beast, of how he, pretending to be Koch, managed to get Walker on the phone. It's worth reproducing at some length:
"He's just hard-lined—will not talk, will not communicate, will not return phone calls."
-Wisconsin state Sen. Tim Carpenter (D) on Gov. Walker (source)Carpenter's quote made me wonder: who could get through to Gov. Walker? Well, what do we know about Walker and his proposed union-busting, no-bid budget? The obvious candidate was David Koch.
I first called at 11:30 am CST, and eventually got through to a young, male receptionist who, upon hearing the magic name Koch, immediately transferred me to Executive Assistant Governor Dorothy Moore.
"We've met before, Dorothy," I nudged. "I really need to talk to Scott—Governor Walker." She said that, yes, she thought she had met Koch, and that the name was "familiar." But she insisted that Walker was detained in a meeting and couldn't get away. She asked about the nature of my call. I balked, "I just needed to speak with the Governor. He knows what this is about," I said. She told me to call back at noon, and she'd have a better idea of when he would be free.
I called at noon and was quickly transferred to Moore, who then transferred me to Walker's Chief of Staff Keith Gilkes. He was "expecting my call."
"David!" he said with an audible smile.
I politely said hello, not knowing how friendly Gilkes and Koch may be. He was eager to help. "I was really hoping to talk directly to Scott," I said. He said that could be arranged and that I should just leave my number. I explained to Gilkes, "My goddamn maid, Maria, put my phone in the washer. I'd have her deported, but she works for next to nothing." Gilkes found this amusing. "I'm calling from the VOID—with the VOID, or whatever it's called. You know, the Snype!"
"Gotcha," Gilkes said. "Let me check the schedule here…OK, there's an opening at 2 o'clock Central Standard Time. Just call this same number and we'll put you through."
Could it really be that easy? Yes.
I guess this isn't shocking, the idea that a major muckety-muck can get a governor on the phone in a matter of 2.5 hours. All the same, it tells you how things really work.
I would never call someone up pretending to be someone else, and I have mixed feelings about it. That said, Murphy was skillful in that he didn't try to entrap Walker or lead him to say possibly illegal things, the way James O'Keefe did with Acorn. He just kept handing Walker length of rope. But Walker was careful - he didn't really say anything catastrophically (to him) incriminating.
What's the impact of it? First, Walker looks bad because he's been sitting there refusing to take calls from most Democrats. Second, I sense that it buys the AWOL Democratic state senators a few more days. It probably drives Walker's numbers down a bit. All this is good to see.
But it's worth remembering: he has the votes to pass his bill. Unless a couple of moderate Republicans desert him, it's only a matter of time. Am I misreading?
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Obama, gay marriage, the constitution and the Crackerjack prize | Michael Tomasky
This one is a little bit deep in the legal weeds, but I think this provides fascinating background into Obama and the Justice Department's decision announced yesterday about the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act.
You'll recall from yesterday's post that Eric Holder announced that the DOMA law's Section 3, holding that marriage is only between a man and a woman, is unconstitutional. Holder's letter went on to say that the administration would enforce the law when it had to, but if and when the question of that provision's constitutionality came up in a court of law, it would not defend same.
I began wondering, is there precedent for this? And it turns out there is. There isn't very much precedent, but there's precedent, and the precedent that exists is really interesting, which is why I thought I'd share it with you.
It's all summed up in this post by Marty Lederman from a legal blog written in 2005. Lederman was then at Georgetown law. He's now a deputy assistant attorney general.
Lederman writes that back in 1990, the acting solicitor general of the US (the president's and executive branch's lawyer) urged President G.H.W. Bush to declare unconstitutional a provision of a big telecommunications law. The provision in question held that companies with a certain percentage of minority employees and board members would be given preferences in the awarding of broadcast licenses. These are what we call in the US minority set-asides, and conservatives have fought them for a long time.
Why was Lederman writing about it 15 years later? Because the acting SG in question was John Roberts, then up for chief justice of the US Supreme Court.
The really interesting wrinkle in this case was that Bush 41 himself had signed the law! What's more, he (a Republican president) had appointed three members to the Federal Communications Commission who supported minority set-asides (those were different times, as Lou Reed sang, eh?).
But Roberts persuaded the administration to latch on to a case that might end with the set-asides being declared unconstitutional. It did so, but Roberts lost at the Supreme Court, 5-4.
Lederman concludes:
I should make clear that I although I do not agree with the substantive equal protection argument that John Roberts made in Metro Broadcasting, I do not think it was plainly inappropriate for the Acting SG to file a brief attacking the statutes, assuming the President had concluded that they were unconstitutional and that it was in the best interests of the United States that the Court apply strict scrutiny to federal affirmative action plans. [italics his]
I'm a non-lawyer, but this makes sense to me. This is part of the Crackerjack prize that comes with winning elections. You're the president - you get to decide, up to a point, what's in the best interests of the United States. That obviously doesn't mean you get to wake up one day and decide the First Amendment isn't in the best interests of the United States. But it does mean that your lawyers, the country's lawyers (in the DoJ), can make reasonable findings on matters that aren't truly settled, which gay marriage obviously is not.
And yes, this means that President Pawlenty's DoJ in 2015 or 2019 could find that the individual mandate (assuming for the sake of argument that it lasts that long) is unconstitutional. Again, it's part of the Crackerjack prize. It's part of why the two sides fight so hard over who gets to be president.
All that said, I am aware that this is a sort of side-door way for Obama to come out in support of gay marriage. But apparently the department's hand was forced by two lawsuits coming up on which it had to deliver opinions by March 11. From today's NYT story:
For technical reasons, it would have been far more difficult — both legally and politically — for the administration to keep arguing that the marriage law is constitutional in these new lawsuits. To assert that gay people do not qualify for extra legal protection against official discrimination, legal specialists say, the Justice Department would most likely have had to conclude that they have not been historically stigmatized and can change their orientation.
Can you imagine a Democratic president's lawyers arguing that?
Finally, conservatives will inveigh against what Obama has done here in this fashion, also from today's Times piece:
"It is a transparent attempt to shirk the department's duty to defend the laws passed by Congress," Representative Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. "This is the real politicization of the Justice Department — when the personal views of the president override the government's duty to defend the law of the land."
Just remember when you hear that over the coming days and weeks that it was a Republican administration that laid the groundwork for this. And that the solicitor general who instigated it was not just any conservative, but a revered member of the flock, Mr. Umpire himself, the man who says that judges are just supposed to call balls and strikes.
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February 23, 2011
So this is the Tea Party's endgame. No government | Michael Tomasky
In 1995 Clinton and Gingrich were always going to deal. But these economic fundamentalists don't want compromise
When Tea Party candidates were elected in a raft of seats across the United States in the midterm elections last November, we wondered what the fallout would be. Now we're finding out.
At the state level, most notably in Wisconsin but in other states too, conservative governors are using the financial crisis – created by Wall Street bankers and the deregulation-mad politicians who serve them – to give the bankers even more power, in effect, by trying to crush the strongest countervailing force against them in our political system – unions.
The public employee union members have generous pension arrangements, and they generally contribute far less to their healthcare benefit plans than most private sector employees have to. But this latest development is a sad sign of the power imbalance in American politics that has accrued over the last 30 years – during which time overall union membership has gone from about 25% of the workforce to barely 11%, and the richest 1% have seen their pre-tax incomes nearly quadruple while median earners have stayed flat.
Were the Democrats cleverer and braver, citizens would broadly know these facts. But most Americans have no idea of the massive class war – stealing from the bottom and the middle and giving to the very top – that has been waged over the last three decades. Instead, they appear to know, or "know", that Barack Obama has governed from the hard left, that unions are piggy, and that an uprising of Tea Party patriots has been all that stands between the good old US of A and a kind of Muslim-Marxism state. In such an atmosphere, the right can move with impunity.
Or can it? We'll soon see. In Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker may have overplayed his hand. One sees signs that regular Americans don't buy all the conservative spin. A poll out this week in USA Today finds that Americans support the collective bargaining rights of public employee unions by nearly two to one (61% to 33%). In addition, Walker is evidently lying through his teeth. It has become an important Walker (and overall conservative) claim that he campaigned on exactly what he's doing now, so what's the big shock? But Politifact, a respected and nonpartisan monitor, combed the record and found that he never said a word on the campaign trail about curtailing bargaining rights.
So maybe Walker is pushing it. Here in Washington, the same might be true. It appears increasingly likely that we are heading for a shutdown of the federal government come 4 March, when the current temporary spending bill that is keeping the agencies of the government funded runs out. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives – with 83 new Republican members, most of them extremely conservative – passed a budget cutting $60bn from domestic spending: a meat cleaver.
In the Democratic-controlled Senate, leader Harry Reid this week proposed another temporary spending bill that would keep government functioning for another month at current levels. That's how these things are done traditionally. But the new breed of Republicans isn't very wrapped up in tradition, so the party is portraying Reid's "current levels" as a head-in-the-sand cluelessness about the fiscal realities.
Reid and other Senate Democrats say they won't budge. House speaker John Boehner says that if the Senate sticks to this current-level nonsense, he will shut down the government. And even if the Senate does cave in, Obama vows that he'll veto the Republicans' budget. So a shutdown appears more likely by the day, in which all nonessential government workers and services would simply pause.
In 1995, the last time this happened, 800,000 federal workers stayed at home without pay. Many agencies of the government stopped work – though that's just gravy for the Republicans (they loathe agencies that protect the environment and enforce business regulations, for instance).
But more than that, it's a huge media event. In 1995 when the government actually did cease functioning for two brief periods in November and December, the media played it as a personal battle royale between President Clinton and Newt Gingrich, the Senate leader. It was a tough match. Clinton was ahead on points when the watershed event happened. Gingrich complained to reporters that he shut down the government because, on a trip on Air Force One, Clinton had made him sit at the back. "Newt's tantrum" then drove the story.
Now we're in a new revolution, and some things are different – for one, Boehner does not seem to have quite such a combustible ego as Gingrich. Among Senate Democrats, I sense an overly sanguine "well, we beat 'em last time" attitude. It is true that most Americans quite like most of the specific operations of the federal government and don't want to see them stopped, even temporarily. But it is manifestly clear that last November Americans (the ones who showed up to vote, anyway) said they wanted spending cuts.
The biggest difference of all, though, is in the nature of the Republicans' legislative caucus. In 95, Republican legislators gave Gingrich a long leash to negotiate for them. That won't be the case now. Many are so extreme they're barely Republicans, and they don't care about finding a compromise. They are economic fundamentalists.
As the liberal commentator Jonathan Chait observed last year, America is in a new culture war, but "this culture war is not over social issues – it is over economic ones". As Chait says, this is absurd: an emotionally charged moral issue like abortion may not lend itself to compromise, but an argument over numbers and funding levels is inherently about splitting the difference, which Democrats and Republicans have done for decades. That's called governing.
Or used to be. Governor Walker has spurned a very reasonable compromise in Wisconsin under which the unions would accept virtually all his financial demands. The Tea Party congress in Washington seems to revel in the idea of walking the government off a cliff. One can only hope that they walk their party off the cliff with it; then the Democrats finally might be emboldened to start reversing the great 30-year theft.
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