Michael Tomasky's Blog, page 3

Senate will vote on Ryan plan | Michael Tomasky

I notice Harry Reid said yesterday that he'll schedule a Senate vote on the Ryan plan soon (no date set):

Reid said that he wanted to see if Republicans in his chamber would be as supportive of the plan as those in the House. But his hope, he added, was that the Ryan budget would ultimately fail (as is likely to happen in a Democratic-controlled Senate).

Well, obviously, it's not going to pass. I don't think a single Democrat will vote for it, not even Ben Nelson and Joe Manchin. Remember, not one Democrat supported it in the House, and those House Blue Dogs are in more dangerous electoral shape that any senator if for no other reason than that incumbent senators tend to be a little bit safer on average than incumbent House members.

The interesting question is which Republicans will vote no. Susan Collins already said she would. Olympia Snowe? You'd think, but she's got this big tea-party challenge coming up in 2012, right? So she's probably going to vote for it. Can't wait to read that press release!

I'd bet Scott Brown will vote against Ryan. He's increasingly becoming a reasonably reasonable guy. Those are your obviosos. Who else?

Tom Coburn? The Oklahoman is awfully conservative, but he proposed ending the tax break for ethanol and voted for the Bowles-Simpson report, which includes tax increases (of a highly theoretical nature I might add), so today, as far as the Norquistians are concerned, Coburn is practically a Kenyan. Plus he's retiring after this term, which is a wildcard element. He just might vote against.

Coburn is one of three Republicans in the "Gang of Six," the bipartisan group that is allegedly finding a bipartisan solution to the problem. The other two Republicans are Mike Crapo of Idaho and Saxby Chambliss of Georgia. I've not heard much from Crapo, but Chambliss has been giving interviews (to NPR, no less!) talking about how serious he is about finding revenues. If the Gang releases a plan and it is at odds with Ryan, one would think it might be kind of difficult for these three to support Ryan.

I don't see any other possible no's, so that's five at most, six if Snowe surprises me, so forty-plus Republicans in the Senate will join 234 in the House in support of the Ryan plan. Liberal bloggers have been to my reading getting a little carried away with the "Republicans scared of Ryan plan" story line, elevating one booing of Ryan in his home district into a bigger event than it really was. I don't see it. Ryan is their money. If not, then what's all this presidential talk about him in the last few days?

Mind you this is the outcome I want - I want Ryan hanging around their necks like cloves of garlic. But I also think they're still pretty bullish on it by and large.

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Birthers and the persistence of racial paranoia | Michael Tomasky

The release of Barack Obama's birth certificate will not pacify the minority that cannot accept an African American president

Let's stipulate at the outset that this whole birth certificate thing is madness, and that the madness comes down to the fact that the president is, for a certain depressingly high percentage of Americans, an Other with a capital O – the kind of person who, to their way of thinking, could not possibly have been legitimately elected the president of any United States they know.

So, there have to be other explanations. Acorn, a voter registration and poor people's rights group, stole the election for him. A cabal of shifty liberal journalists, many of whom merely happen to be Jewish (and – full disclosure – of which your correspondent was a member), allegedly conspired to vault him into our land's highest office. The well-meaning but naïve American people simply could not and would not have made this choice without being duped into it.

In one sense, it's understandable. After Ronald Reagan won, Nora Ephron joked that she didn't see how, as she didn't know a single person who voted for him. So it is with the birthers. They likely know no one who voted for Barack Obama, so all the information they received in 2008 that they trusted – not from the media, but from friends and co-workers – led them to search for explanations fair and foul. Acorn and the journalists helped them feel a little better, but they didn't solve the basic problem: that the man occupied the office.

And so, the birther story. Perfect. Explained everything. A conspiracy of immense proportions, concocted all the way back in 1961, had to be the only explanation for how this black man got to the White House. And if you think race isn't what this is about at its core, ask yourself if there would even be a birther conspiracy if Barack Obama were white and named Bart Oberstar. If you think there would be, you are delusional.

But today, the question is: should Obama have acknowledged the madness?

I think so, and probably earlier. The so-called long-form birth certificate, just a page, could not have taken long to dredge up from its Hawaiian storage coffin. There existed any number of occasions in 2009 and 2010 on which to deal with this. Why not then? I suspect there's no good reason. It's just another example of this White House's slowness of foot on so many political matters.

It is certainly a victory for Donald Trump, the maybe presidential candidate who's been banging on about this. And it's manna from heaven for the birther movement. Far from being satisfied that this ends the matter, the bloggers who depend on this "controversy" for their daily bread will obviously keep at it, finding more and more baroque angles to explore. It is possible, and maybe even probable, that the existence of this certificate will make them – and the Republicans who pander to them – look sillier to a larger percentage of people.

But the problems here are racial paranoia and the bald willingness of politicians to lie in order to stoke it. In at least this one respect, the election of the first African American president, rather than taking us forward, has drawn us back into a cobwebbed and pitiless past, from which there seems no escape.

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Mitch Daniels and Planned Parenthood | Michael Tomasky

You'll recall the Planned Parenthood dust-up in Washington around government-shutdown time. Now it's moved to Indianapolis in a gruesome manifestation.

The state senate there has passed a bill, which the lower chamber is now considering and which seems likely to pass, stripping Planned Parenthood in Indiana of all taxpayer funding. This would affect poor women in various ways, notably with regard to other, non-abortion birth-control related services (probably resulting in more unwanted pregnancies). But since nobody seems to care about that, let's talk about the fiscal ramifications. From today's Washington Post:

But family planning in Indiana is a fiscal as well as a social issue. Half of all births in the state are covered by Medicaid. If Daniels signs the Senate version of the bill, he would likely be giving up $4 million in federal dollars and bringing the state into a costly legal battle.

Because federal law blocks states from choosing which organizations can provide family planning services to Medicaid patients, the measure could cost the state all federal funding for family planning. Planned Parenthood is prepared to sue if the proposal is signed into law. They also estimate that the move would cost the state $68 million in Medicaid expenses for unintended pregnancies by reducing birth control access.

It's not completely clear from reports I've read so far whether the measure would affect cancer screenings and all the other completely unobjectionable and good things Planned Parenthood does. But presumably it would. They're talking about all federal dollars, after all.

Now, for those of you who think Planned Parenthood has every right to exist and do what it wants but should not receive a dime of federal money, I'd like to try to persuade you that that is in fact a pretty radical view if you were to take it consistently across the board.

The federal government funds all kinds of local and regional health-services providers. It provides funds to hospitals (except those that refuse federal funding like many Catholic hospitals), regional health clinics that treat all manner of illnesses and public-health issues, and state and local government facilities. Should the federal government stop funding all of those?

There are migrant healthcare clinics that provide the only access to healthcare for the poorest and most shat-upon people in America, those who pick our lettuces and our fruit. Should the federal government not pay for care for them? If you believe that, you espouse a really radical position: it's been settled law for 40 or 50 years, or more, that this kind of activity is within the legitimate purview of the federal government.

And if you think that's okay but funding for Planned Parenthood is not, well, why? Because of abortion? But no public funds go to pay for abortion. Public funds pay for breast-cancer and cervical-cancer screenings, and for other non-controversial family planning services - for mostly poor women, but for all women who need these services. Should the federal government not support that?

And if it should but not via Planned Parenthood, thenwhy should Planned Parenthood be singled out? According to this survey from the Guttmacher Institute, Planned Parenthood receives just 11% of all federal family-planning dollars that are dispersed to clinics and hospitals across the US. So if Planned Parenthood should be X'd out, does that mean these other places should be too?

And finally, if health-service providers should do without federal money, well, then why not small-business incubators, federal agencies that provide seed money for start-ups, federal underwriters of community development projects and so on? What's the difference in principle between providing health services and providing local development assistance? It's all federal money spent on domestic priorities that were debated and agreed upon through the political process. Why is a local health clinic different from a local senior citizen center built with federal money?

I go into all this because on the surface, it seems like a moderate position to say, "Okay, I have no problem with letting Planned Parenthood go about its business, just without federal money." But healthcare service providers for the poor have been receiving federal money for decades. So that position in fact represents a very radical reversal of standing policy that has been wholly bipartisan, or had been until the GOP went into High Jihad mode these past couple of years.

The Washington Post story puts emphasis on Governor Mitch Daniels' political dilemma. He said a few years ago that he wanted a "truce" on culture wars. Now he is staring down the business end of culture-war issue number one. If he signs the bill, he has embraced an extremely radical premise that will probably widen the gender gap by at least 10 points if he's the GOP presidential nominee. If he vetoes, which any fiscally responsible governor would do, he's probably dead in the water in terms of the GOP presidential primary gauntlet.

So he'll probably sign. But I'm less concerned about his fate than the fate of the women who don't matter anymore in this country, some of whom in the future Indiana won't be getting the usual and customary nutritional help with their actually born babies because the money that used to be there for that has been denied.

No, not denied: the feds are still willing to give it. Refused - by a state government so in thrall to ideology that it must act against that which isn't even happening (federally funded abortion) by preventing women from receiving services that work to lessen the very activity the state claims to hate.

US domestic policyAbortionIndianaMichael Tomasky
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My news | Michael Tomasky

Well, I sort of thought at the beginning of the week that this would take care of itself, because the news was in Politico and Greg Sargent's blog at the Washington Post and I just thought some of you might have noticed it and asked in the comment threads, but no one did, at least that I noticed, and now time is getting short, so I just have to tell you: as of Friday, I'll be leaving the Guardian.

I've accepted a job offer from Newsweek/The Daily Beast. I'll be writing regular columns (about every other issue, I'm told) and occasional features for Newsweek, and regular online pieces for the Beast. I was not looking to leave the Guardian, with which it has been an absolutely privilege to be associated. But this was the kind of offer that only comes along once in life, and I could not say no.

I'll have more to say about the whys and wherefores of all this Friday afternoon, when I will write a proper farewell post. I just didn't want to spring this on you out of nowhere on Friday. In the meantime, we have three days to process, and besides that I have several harangues left in me, and one more good quiz.

Let's try to leave our longer adieus and fare-thee-wells for Friday, eh? Remember: to everything, there is a season. In the meantime, I just read a pretty fascinating article about a situation confronting Mitch Daniels, and I will post on it immediately to keep things chugging along as normal.

United StatesMichael Tomasky
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George H.W. Bush: not Kenyan, but certainly socialist | Michael Tomasky

Ezra Klein has an interesting piece today that is kind of old hat to most of us insidery-types but provides very interesting and useful information and context for those of you who have other things to do in your lives than sit around and think about domestic policy all day. Barack Obama, he writes, is really an early 1990s Republican moderate.

Obama's major initiatives can be traced uncannily to moderate-to-conservative intellectuals of that era. Take it away, Ez:

Take health-care reform. The individual mandate was developed by a group of conservative economists in the early '90s. Mark Pauly, an economist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, was one of them. "We were concerned about the specter of single-payer insurance," he told me recently. The conservative Heritage Foundation soon had an individual-mandate plan of its own, and when President Bill Clinton endorsed an employer mandate in his health-care proposal, both major Republican alternatives centered on an individual mandate. By 1995, more than 20 Senate Republicans — including Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch, Dick Lugar and a few others still in office — had sponsored one individual mandate bill or another.

The story on cap and trade — which conservatives now like to call "cap and tax" — is much the same. Back then, the concern was sulfur dioxide, the culprit behind acid rain. President George H.W. Bush wanted a solution that relied on the market rather than on government regulation. So in the Clean Air Act of 1990, he proposed a plan that would cap sulfur-dioxide emissions but let the market decide how to allocate the permits. That was "more compatible with economic growth than using only the command and control approaches of the past," he said. The plan passed easily, with "aye" votes from Sen. Mitch McConnell and then-Rep. Newt Gingrich, among others. In fact, as recently as 2007, Gingrich said that "if you have mandatory carbon caps combined with a trading system, much like we did with sulfur . . . it's something I would strongly support."

Indeed, one of the many Democratic errors of the recent past is that Bush Sr's EPA administrator, Bill Reilly (no O', thank you very much), offered congressional Dems a deal in which a lot of money was going to go into fighting global warming (in 1991!). Dems turned him down.

Anyway there's more like this. You know how the healthcare reform plan phases in a tax on so-called "Cadillac" plans offered by employers? That was part of John Mccain's health-reform plan, and it came originally, I am pretty certain, from the Heritage Foundation, which liked it in part because unions were against it (I lean toward the Heritage view on this one, for what it's worth, because I want the US off employer-sponsored healthcare altogether).

So how to interpret this? The way Klein and Tomasky see it, this is a case of the Democrats moving to the right bit by bit to try to attract Republican votes and bipartisan support. But then eventually, as the Democratic Party adopts an idea, it becomes a Democratic idea and not a Republican one, and then your more extreme Republicans (which is to say 80 or 90% of them) decide that it's Satan's own handiwork because it's a Democratic idea. So it must be opposed for that reason and that reason alone. Obama being the antichrist and all that only makes things that much worse. The Republican Party is so much more extreme than it was...forget 20 years ago. Three years ago. More from Ezra:

John McCain included a cap-and-trade plan in his 2008 platform. The same goes for an individual mandate, which Grassley endorsed in June 2009 — mere months before he began calling the policy "unconstitutional."

Unhinged, people. And I read something like this poll, from USA Today, and I just want to move to the Yukon Territory and teach composition:

Americans are evenly divided between the deficit plan proposed by President Obama and the one drafted by House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, and those surveyed put more trust in Republicans than Democrats to handle the federal budget and the economy.

The Obama plan, remembers, privileges cuts over revenues by three to one. The Ryan plan is the most radical and immoral document that has been taken seriously that we've seen since, I don't even know, the Southern Manifesto. And the American people are evenly divided? The Democrats should be ashamed of themselves.

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Tomasky Talk: The great GOP reality TV show game - video | Michael Tomasky

Michael Tomasky looks ahead to more budget battles over the federal debt ceiling and the Ryan plan – and ponders how the Republicans might select a presidential nominee

Michael Tomasky

Civil war not over | Michael Tomasky

Via Yglesias, I see the kind of thing that makes great fodder for this blog. From a new survey by Public Policy Polling:

The Civil War may have come to a close almost 150 years ago but Republicans in three Southern states still aren't sure its outcome was a good thing. Less than half of GOP voters in Georgia, North Carolina, and Mississippi are glad that the North won the Civil War:

-In Georgia 47% of Republicans are content with the Union victory, while 31% wish the South had won. Democrats (58/17) and independents (54/19) are both strongly supportive of the North, making the overall numbers 53/23.

-In North Carolina GOP voters are almost evenly divided on the outcome of the war with 35% glad for the North's victory, 33% ruing the South's loss, and 32% taking neither side. Democrats (55/15) and independents (57/14) have similar numbers to Georgia but due to the greater ambivalence of Republicans about the northern victory, overall less than half of Tar Heel voters (48%) are glad the Union won to 21% who wish the Confederacy had.

-In Mississippi no group of the electorate seems all that enthused about the North having won. Republicans, by a 38/21 margin, outright wish the South had won. Democrats (39/22) and independents (49/15) side with the North but compared to those voter groups in North Carolina and Georgia they're pretty ambivalent. Overall just 34% of voters in the state are glad the Union prevailed to 27% who wish the rebels had been victorious.

I just don't know what to say about all this. Some other findings in the poll (full crosstabs can be seen here) are that Mississippi Republicans, by 41-39%, think interracial marriage should be illegal; and that the state's John McCain voters from 2008 have a higher opinion of the NAACP than of the KKK, but only by 20-14%, with 66% "not sure." Soft on terrorism, I'd say.

Well, all this tells us something about the milieu from which Haley Barbour emanates and makes me sadder still that he did not run for president, because who knows what would have come out of the woodwork.

US politicsMississippiState of GeorgiaNorth CarolinaMichael Tomasky
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The Gitmo documents and the Brooklyn Bridge | Michael Tomasky

The day two revelations re the new WikiLeaks tranche seem interesting on your side of the pond, what with this supposed MI6 angle. On our side, today's NYT article is kind of on a journalistic fishing expedition, to my reading, to wring more drama out of this.

The frightening headline: "In Dossier, Portrait of Push for Post-9/11 Attacks." Conjures a series of horrific images in the mind. But if you really read the piece, you don't get the sense that these suspects came especially close to doing any more damage. For example:

Mr. Paracha's assessment is among more than 700 classified documents that fill in new details of Al Qaeda's efforts to make 9/11 just the first in a series of attacks to cripple the United States, intentions thwarted as the Central Intelligence Agency captured Mr. Mohammed and other leaders of the terrorist network.

The plots reportedly discussed by Mr. Mohammed and various operatives, none of them acted upon, included plans for a new wave of aircraft attacks on the West Coast, filling an apartment with leaked natural gas and detonating it, blowing up gas stations and even cutting the cables holding up the Brooklyn Bridge.

All right, the CIA bagged the guy. I tip my hat to the CIA for getting him. It's their job, but I'm sure it was a high-pressure situation, and unlike a lot of liberals I think the CIA does an immense amount of good and valuable work, in contrast to the obvious and notorious black marks, so as a citizen, I am grateful for what they did here.

But read that next graf slowly. "Discussed"...."never acted upon."

The Brooklyn Bridge incident is one we know about. It happened in 2003, and our own Guardian reported on it at the time as follows:

According to his affidavit, [Iyman] Faris attended a series of meetings with senior al-Qaida figures between 2000 and 2002 in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

He researched the bridge on the internet and travelled to New York late last year to examine it, concluding that the plot to sever the cables was unlikely to succeed because of the structure and heavy security.

Faris, 34, sent a message to al-Qaida leaders saying: "The weather is too hot."

Okay. The guy takes one trip to New York to case the joint, and apparently he pretty much immediately decides, the hell with this. Is that really a plot? By that standard I have "plotted" many times in my life, for example, to walk out on a check in a restaurant, because I admit that I have looked around and thought about it (back in my younger days).

I take terrorism very seriously. But I take real threats of terrorism very seriously. I have been convinced this last - my goodness, it's nearly a decade now? - that we as a culture in America have far more often made the opposite error: quaking at the thought of every half-baked notion, elevating it to the level of "plot," living in a state of willed fear. My long-time readers know that I've written this many times. We must be vigilant, yes. With equal conviction, we must not be obsessed with fear and mortality.

It remains something of a mystery to me why there haven't been more attacks on US soil. Not that I want it to happen, obviously. But take blowing up a gas station, which is on the above list. It seems to me that three guys could "plot" for about 10 minutes and take out a gas station. So why haven't they done it?

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Haley's comet fizzles | Michael Tomasky

Well, here's a disappointment for us all, from the office of Governor Haley Barbour:

I will not be a candidate for president next year. This has been a difficult, personal decision, and I am very grateful to my family for their total support of my going forward, had that been what I decided.

"Hundreds of people have encouraged me to run and offered both to give and raise money for a presidential campaign. Many volunteers have organized events in support of my pursuing the race. Some have dedicated virtually full time to setting up preliminary organizations in critical, early states and to helping plan what has been several months of intensive activity.

"I greatly appreciate each and every one of them and all their outstanding efforts. If I have disappointed any of them in this decision, I sincerely regret it.

"A candidate for president today is embracing a ten-year commitment to an all-consuming effort, to the virtual exclusion of all else. His (or her) supporters expect and deserve no less than absolute fire in the belly from their candidate. I cannot offer that with certainty, and total certainty is required.

Barbour had shown every sign of running. He went to the key states. He hired staff. He talked about Big Issues. He said he was going to give a big Race Speech to "put the issue behind him" once and for all. He even went to Israel. That's when I really started to believe.

But I guess Mrs. Barbour did not. Remember this, from earlier this month?:

The wife of Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, a possible contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, said in an interview that a bid for the presidency by her husband "horrifies me."

Speaking to the ABC television affiliate in Biloxi, Mississippi, Marsha Barbour admitted that the task of a presidential run would be "overwhelming" and is something she may not be quite ready for.

"It's been a lot to be first lady of the state of Mississippi and this would be 50 times bigger," she said in the interview aired on Friday by WLOX. "It's a huge sacrifice for a family to make."

Listen, Marsha, I'm with you. So I see her hand in this in a big way. She sounds like a sensible woman. But does this mean Barbour is henpecked? Or maybe there were other issues. Couldn't raise the money? One wag on Twitter, cleverer than I, speculated that the problem was he'd raised most of his money in Confederate dollars, which aren't matchable.

Still, count me disappointed. Just by being on stage with the others, Barbour would have been the flesh and blood ur-Republican whose mere presence would have traveled about as well outside the South as sweet corn, as Liebling once famously put it. So the GOP primary might be more imbued with the Great Lakes accent (Pawlenty and Bachmann) than the soft Dixie lilt? Strange times.

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Gas prices and speculation | Michael Tomasky

Gas prices continue to dominate in the Us and cast a serious pall over the administration. Last Thursday, Obama announced an inter-agency task force to investigate speculation. On television yesterday, freshman Democratic Senator Ralph Blumenthal pressed for empaneling a federal grand jury:

Blumenthal, Connecticut's former attorney general, said on CBS' "Face the Nation" that federal officials need to play hardball.

"I commend and applaud the president for focusing on this issue but I think there really needs to be an investigation involving, for example, subpoenas and compulsory process which I used as attorney general in similar investigations. There needs to be very possibly a grand jury to uncover the potential wrongdoing," said Blumenthal, who was elected to the Senate last year.

"The Justice Department should take the lead, seize this moment and send a message, a very strong deterrent message that this country will not tolerate the kind of illegal speculation and trading and hedge fund activity that may be driving prices up," he added.

To which Republicans have their ready-made answer. Hit F8 and out comes:

But House Speaker John Boehner's (R-Ohio) office on Friday called the Democratic focus on potential market abuses a distraction from the need to expand U.S. oil-and-gas drilling (although this would not affect prices in the short-term).

I think that parenthetical is the handiwork of the reporter, that is, Boehner probably didn't say it. If he did, good for him, but that's not the m.o. The m.o. is to chant "drill baby drill" even though that might lower gas prices in about four or five years.

On the issue of speculation, I have been reading some things, and it seems clear that the unrest in the Middle East has led to more speculation, which does help hike prices. Here's some info from a Senator Al Franken press release, touting legislation he's trying to advance:

The senators are pushing for tougher regulation because new data shows oil trades by speculators have jumped 35 percent since the latest round of civil unrest began in late January in North Africa and then the Middle East. During that same period, U.S. gas prices have soared by almost 40 percent.

And here's a little more information for you:

Speculators can currently buy $100 worth of oil futures with only $6 down, while investors in stocks put down 50%. The Commission has the authority to call for higher margin requirements from exchanges where oil futures and various other commodities are traded.

"New margin requirements could take effect as soon as July, but the CFTC must begin the rulemaking process now," the lawmakers wrote.

"The commission" is the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees this. The House GOP wanted to cut its budget by around $90 million, or basically cut it in half. But under the deal that averted the government shutdown, it actually got a 20% increase, to $203 million.

Meanwhile, says Think Progress, citing the Wall Street Journal, Exxon's profits are expected to rise this year by 50%. Republicans are going to war on gas prices: drill drill drill. The Democrats have a populist response, and the benefit of talking about something (Franken's idea) that could have impact immediately. Will they seize on it? Don't answer that question.

Obama administrationUS domestic policyMichael Tomasky
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