Carly Fiorina Is the New Dick Cheney

From the fallout of the “debate” last night, I take it Republicans are impressed with Carly Fiorina’s performance. Never mind that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

Digby:

… much of what Fiorina says is either untrue or incoherent, which her polished style of rapid-fire answers containing long lists of memorized specifics obscures. She is a master at what we used to call “dazzling them with BS.” She claims to have a well thought out plan for everything from dealing with the Ayatollah (only after conferring with her “good friend” Bibi Netanyahu) — by calling him up and demanding that he allows Americans to inspect his nuclear facilities anytime we choose or we’ll start “moving his money around the financial system” — to enlarging the sixth fleet and putting missile defense into Poland. The first bit of magical thinking is so common among the Republican candidates that it’s not worth commenting upon except to say that the presidency would be a part time job if it was that easy. As for her military “prescriptions,” let’s just say they are vacuous nonsense. Here’s what she said she would do about Russia

“What I would do, immediately, is begin rebuilding the Sixth Fleet, I would begin rebuilding the missile defense program in Poland, I would conduct regular, aggressive military exercises in the Baltic states. I’d probably send a few thousand more troops into Germany. Vladimir Putin would get the message. By the way, the reason it is so critically important that every one of us know General Suleimani’s name is because Russia is in Syria right now, because the head of the Quds force traveled to Russia and talked Vladimir Putin into aligning themselves with Iran and Syria to prop up Bashar al- Assad.”

That sounds very impressive, except, as Ezra Klein pointed out, the nuclear armed Sixth Fleet is gigantic already, the U.S. is already conducting military exercises in the Baltics and we already have 40,000 troops in Germany. Oh, and Vladimir Putin, General Suleimani and Bashar al-Assad will have been dead for decades, if not centuries, by the time a missile shield is installed in Poland.

But she lies with total conviction and authority. Charles Pierce:

She was steely-eyed in her prevarication. She was relentless in her determination to launch pure crapola into the stratosphere. She smiled rarely. She glowered effectively. The woman stares daggers better than anyone I’ve ever seen. And, on many occasions, she lied her ass off with a formidable brand of armored certitude. If you eliminate “telling the truth” from the assessment, Carly Fiorina was every bit the winner she is universally acclaimed to be this morning.

It’s the Dick Cheney thing — exude enough gravitas, and people will take you seriously even if you are spouting nonsense.

The most egregious lie was about Planned Parenthood, which was so bizarre I don’t even want to repeat it. Just see Sarah Kliff. See also Carly Fiorina won the GOP debate, but fact checkers will have a field day.

As for her alleged skill as a businesswoman: Not only did she run Hewlett-Packard into the ground; she’s apparently responsible for the demise of Lucent. See Carly Fiorina’s troubling telecom past.

GOP Feels the Bern

Apparently over the weekend certain Powers That Be decided that Bernie Sanders needed to be taken down. Sanders has benefited from being mostly ignored by the GOP, which has focused its guns on Hillary Clinton. But in the past couple of days several rightie spokesmouths have spread disinformation on Bernie, and soon the MSM will follow suit (see Steve M).

The Wall Street Journal ran a screaming headline saying Price Tag of Bernie Sanders’s Proposals: $18 Trillion: Democratic presidential candidate’s agenda would greatly expand government. The wingnut war cry “Tax and Spend!” is ringing in my ears already.

The ever-sensible Paul Waldman debunks this by pointing out that he’s proposing things we are already paying for. Sanders wants to change how we are paying for them.  “We shouldn’t treat his proposals as though they’re going to cost us $18 trillion on top of what we’re already paying,” Waldman says. Further,

And there’s another problem with that scary $18 trillion figure, which is what the Journal says is the 10-year cost of Sanders’ ideas: fully $15 trillion of it comes not from an analysis of anything Sanders has proposed, but from the fact that Sanders has said he’d like to see a single-payer health insurance system, and there’s a single-payer plan in Congress that has been estimated to cost $15 trillion. Sanders hasn’t actually released any health care plan, so we have no idea what his might cost.

But this takes me to a long-standing gripe of mine. Whenever anyone talks about government subsidized health care, people get hysterical because they see their taxes going through the roof. What they don’t consider is that just about any taxpayer-supported national health care system would result in more money staying in their pockets, even if they are paying more in taxes. That’s because they wouldn’t be shelling out their own money to pay for medical care and health insurance. And a national not-for-profit system could save us all a ton of money through economies of scale.

The system we have now is wasteful, bloated and inefficient. We’re spending tons more money than people in other countries and getting less care for it.

See also “U.S. Healthcare Ranked Dead Last Compared to 10 Other Countries.”

Young folks complain about paying for Medicare, but they don’t consider that without Medicare they’d be stuck paying off their parents’ medical debts, which often will run into six figures.

And then there’s college. We’re choking off our future as a nation, IMO, by allowing a college education to be so prohibitively expensive. Sanders wants to make it free, which I support, but even making it reasonable will do. Let’s at least go back to the time in which people could put themselves through college with a part-time job. Which was as recently as 1979, according to this article, which is worth reading. (I would have guessed more like 1969, but I haven’t crunched numbers.)

People who don’t have children to put through college, or who aren’t interested in college, might balk at helping others pay for it. But it’s good for the country in the long run to encourage people to get as much education as they are capable of learning. A nation of under-educated yahoos will not remain economically competitive forever.

Back to health care. Waldman:

So let’s say that Bernie Sanders became president and passed a single-payer health care system of some sort. And let’s say that it did indeed cost $15 trillion over 10 years. Would that be $15 trillion in new money we’d be spending? No, it would be money that we’re already spending on health care, but now it would go through government. If I told you I could cut your health insurance premiums by $1,000 and increase your taxes by $1,000, you wouldn’t have lost $1,000. You’d be in the same place you are now.

By the logic of the scary $18 trillion number, you could take a candidate who has proposed nothing on health care, and say, “So-and-so proposes spending $42 trillion on health care!” It would be accurate, but not particularly informative.

And, again, with economies of scale, and reducing the profit-taking, we really ought to be able to get more medical bang for the buck than we have been these past many years. The ACA helped, but it was just a tweak compared to what’s really needed.

There’s something else to keep in mind: every single-payer system in the world, and there are many of them of varying flavors, is cheaper than the American health care system. Every single one. So whatever you might say about Sanders’ advocacy for a single-payer system, you can’t say it represents some kind of profligate, free-spending idea that would cost us all terrible amounts of money.

Put another way, most of the time when people talk about health care reform they are just talking about moving the bills around. You can pay for it through taxes, or through insurance, or out of your own pocket, but you’re still paying for it. The cost doesn’t go away unless you tackle the systemic reasons why there’s so much cost. The ACA partly does that; no Republican proposal ever does.

Meanwhile, Jeb! is promising more voodoo economics. Krugman:

The Jeb! tax plan confirms, if anyone had doubts, that the takeover of the Republican Party by charlatans and cranks is complete. This is what the supposedly thoughtful, wonkish candidate of the establishment can come up with? And notice that the ludicrous claim that most of the revenue effects of huge tax cuts would be offset by higher growth comes from economists who, like Jeb!, are very much establishment figures – but who evidently find that the partisan requirement that they support voodoo outweighs any fear of damage to their professional reputations.

See also the view from nowhere in the Washington Post: Jeb Bush’s new tax plan could cost $3.4 trillion over next decade.

Stuff to Read

More articles on charter schools and what a rip-off they are.

Jeb’s charter school calamity: How the former Florida governor forged an industry of chaos and corruption

Take that, charter schools: Why a Washington court decision will force accountability to a movement that needs it badly

The more I learn about this stuff, the more I’m persuaded charter schools are a five-alarm scam.

Also: Read about how Republicans are doing everything they can to eliminate verifiable facts and data from policy decisions.

Also: The more I read about Jeremy Corbyn, the better I like him.

Another 9/11

A New York Times headline asks, “Will we always remember 9/11?” The article is about the health care and compensation programs for responders and other survivors, which Congress appears willing to let lapse again.

But the question caused me to reflect on memory, and that we’re not all remembering the same day. We’d like to think that our memories are objective recordings of actual events, but they are not. I think memories are narratives we have crafted from our subjective impressions, and I suspect we all “remember” some things that never happened, or that happened very differently from what we remember.

So it was that as the Bush Administration tried to use 9/11 to hustle us into war in Iraq, the pro-war argument was “have you forgotten?” But the people asking that question were the ones who had forgotten, or who had too little experience of 9/11 to actually remember it. The war was never popular in New York City, possibly because people there really did remember.

This is one place where myths come from, I believe. “Memories” of real events become infused with meaning, and from the depths of our subconscious Jungian archetypes are summoned to act out that meaning. Eventually the details of the real event become completely lost, and only the archetypes and the reconstructed narrative remain. Modernity and recording technology frustrate this process but don’t stop it. Trutherism might be an example of post-modern myth making; unfortunately, the poor besotted truthers don’t recognize that’s what they’re doing.

At this point we all do remember that a Big Thing happened on September 11, 2001, but our recollections of that event have all become utterly personalized and subjective, so we really aren’t remembering the same thing.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Y’all predicted this

The Oath Keepers, the anti-government “Patriot” group that mounted an armed standoff with the Bureau of Land Management at the Bundy Ranch, stationed armed guards outside of military recruitment centers after the Chattanooga shooting, and unsettled Ferguson protestors when they showed up carrying assault rifles, is now offering anti-gay Kentucky clerk Kim Davis a “security detail” to protect her from further arrest if she continues to defy the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling.

Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes announced yesterday that he had reached out to Davis’ lawyers at Liberty Counsel to offer the protection of his group, which he says is already forming a presence in Rowan County, Kentucky, where Davis was recently released from jail after prohibiting her office from issuing marriage licenses. Rhodes said in a statement that his position has nothing to do with gay marriage, but rather his conviction that Davis had been illegally detained by the federal judge who held her in contempt for violating multiple court orders. …

… Rhodes said that the Rowan County sheriff should have blocked U.S. Marshals from detaining Davis, but since neither the sheriff nor the state’s governor will do their “job” and “intercede” on behalf of Davis, the Oath Keepers will have to do it instead. “As far as we’re concerned, this is not over,” he said, “and this judge needs to be put on notice that his behavior is not going to be accepted and we’ll be there to stop it and intercede ourselves if we have to. If the sheriff, who should be interceding, is not going to do his job and the governor is not going to do the governor’s job of interceding, then we’ll do it.”

Would nonsense like this be tolerated in any other allegedly functioning nation in the world? Steve M writes,
A shootout between these self-important bastards and the authorities might be the what finally makes clear to America that conservatism has gone stark raving mad, but there won’t be any bloodshed — at worst, these guys will show up armed and the authorities will back down, sensibly seeking to keep the peace. The crazies will get a win, it’ll be a one-day story at best, and we’ll just shrug and forget all about it as a nation, because nobody died.

In all seriousness, do we get to use the term “domestic terrorist” and actually have it mean something if armed goobers like this are going to butt heads with U.S. Marshals after Davis inevitably violates her court order?

Bonus question:  Do these guys show up at the Rowan County Clerk’s Office to “protect” Davis from same-sex couples wanting to get married?

Double bonus question: if you’re publicly announcing your intent to “interfere” with county sheriffs and U.S. Marshals, why are you not having a nice conversation with law enforcement in a little room with no windows?

Because as long as they are politically useful to the Right, they’ll be protected.

Meanwhile, the Nooz says that Mike Huckabee thinks Dred Scott is still the “law of the land.”

Huckabee appeared on conservative radio host Michael Medved’s show to defend Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis, who went to jail for contempt of court after refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses. The former governor compared the Supreme Court’s recent decision to legalize same sex marriage to the Dred Scott decision, which upheld slavery.

“Michael, the Dred Scott decision of 1857 still remains to this day the law of the land which says that black people aren’t fully human,” he told the radio host. “Does anybody still follow the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision?”

Huckabee needs a long rest and lots of drugs, methinks.

A Setback for the School Reform Grifters

For one reason or another the U.S. public school system has been under constant attack since Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and the American people have been well primed to believe that public schools are cesspools of ignorance and depravity. Except for the schools their own kids go to, of course. It’s all those other schools that are rotten.

The first taxpayer-supported charter schools were set up after Brown so that taxpayer dollars could follow white children into what amounted to private all-white academies. But what started out as a reaction to desegregation soon turned into Opportunity! in the form of the charter school scam.

As conservatives continued to gripe about those awful public schools, charter schools were marketed as a way to empower parents to make better public schools. And on paper, it sounds like a grand idea. However, it’s also turned into a way to siphon taxpayer dollars into a for-profit education industry. Even officially non-profit charter schools turn to for-profit companies to manage them sometimes. See “Education for Profit: The Darker Side of Charter Schools.”

And what’s happening out in Real World Land is that many of these charters have become less accountable to parents and the communities than traditional public schools used to be. The charter school activists saw Hurricane Katrina as an opportunity to force New Orleans to accept a mostly charter school system. And today residents complain the New Orleans system is more like colonialism than reform. With no elected school board, schools are answerable only to the state chartering bureaucracy, not to communities and parents.

Having an elected school board created ways for the public to participate. When Katrina hit, I was serving on the search committee for a new superintendent. For years I served on the disciplinary review committee. It was much different from the dictatorial charter school environment.

The charters purport to give parents and teachers greater power, right? But you have little real voice. In the charter school world they say, “We don’t even want a PTA in our school, but we’ll survey our parents about satisfaction.” Well, goddamn it, we’re not consumers!

Now the grifters have hit a glitch. Last week, the Washington state Supreme Court decided that privately operated charter schools do not qualify as public institutions and do not qualify to receive tax support.

In the lead opinion, Chief Justice Barbara Madsen said the case wasn’t about the merits of charter schools, simply whether they were eligible for public funds. Citing state Supreme Court precedent from 1909, she said they are not eligible because they are not under the control of local voters. Washington charters are run by private nonprofit organizations that appoint their own boards. Most, including Tacoma’s charters, are also under the oversight of the appointed Washington State Charter School Commission.

(On Diane Ravitch’s invaluable blog, Peter Greene has a simple solution for the charter-school panjandrums – submit to the authority of an elected local school board. Yeah, that’ll happen.)

Because it happened on Friday of a holiday weekend in which Donald Trump is still running for president, this was a huge story that got buried in the news cycle, but it remains a signifying decision in the fight against the school “reformers.” This latest attempt was the result of the fourth statewide referendum on charter schools. This latest one squeaked through in 2012 because the pro-charter side brought in all the pros from Dover – Gates, the inexcusable Jeff Bezos, Ms. Rhee and her consort, Kevin Johnson. There is now great scrambling among the masters of the universe because public accountability and democratic institutions can be so damned…inconvenient. (Not that they’re done. There are higher courts.) Public education should be conducted in public schools. Period. Good on the Washington Supremes for reinforcing this simple truth.

Regarding quality of education, if you google for information you can find articles extolling the virtues of charter schools, and others complaining they’re teaching kids that cave men rode dinosaurs. (Forbes magazine loves them, which ought to make us suspicious right there.) The rules and regulations governing charters as well as how performances are measured vary from state to state, so it’s hard to make any general claims. But there are news stories telling us that in some states and school systems — Ohio, Chicago, and Arizona, for example — the charter schools are lagging behind public schools. See also Separating fact from fiction in 21 claims about charter schools.

Weirdly, both supporters and detractors of charter schools pull data from the same study to support their positions, so here is the study. It takes a while to load, and I haven’t had time to look at it in detail, but it appears to say that charter school performance can be better than public schools in some ways but are worse in others.

House Republicans Are, Um, Confused

As I understand it: House GOP leadership had scheduled a procedural vote today to begin debate on the Iran deal. The whackjob fringe scuttled the vote.

Members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus are demanding that the Obama administration send side deals between Iran and international nuclear inspectors to Congress as part of the Iran deal now under consideration. Opponents of the deal have argued that the clock on congressional consideration of the deal has not even begun until these side deals are submitted.

Under legislation approved earlier this year, Congress has 60 days to review the deal before the White House can begin lifting sanctions on Tehran, as required under the nuclear deal.

Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) has offered a resolution that would prevent a vote on the Iran deal until all of the documents of the international agreement — including the deals between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) are provided to Congress for review.

The 60 days are up on September 17. Also, there are enough Democrats committed to supporting the deal (42) that they could stop the delaying measure from being voted on in the Senate.

Ted Cruz is in on this:

Cruz explained:

“Those side deals have not been submitted to Congress. Under the terms of Corker-Cardin, the review period has not started, and does not start until the entire deal is submitted to Congress and the president cannot lift these sanctions until the review period expires.”

I’m not sure if they think they ought to get a say in whatever deals Iran makes with the IAEA, or what.  It’s pretty certain that after September 17, the President’s hands are untied and the deal will be made.

On the plus side, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-WTF?) has vowed to quit Congress if the Iran deal goes through. Don’t let the door hit your butt on the way out, Louie.

Kim Davis: Feature or Bug?

Kim Davis has been released from jail with the admonition that she not interfere with her clerks’ issuing of marriage licenses, including licenses to same-sex couples. However, her lawyers are saying she’s going to block the issuing of licenses as before. So we may not be done with her yet.

I agree with Steve M that there probably are forces within the Republican Party that want Ms. Davis and her homophobic dog whistles to go away. A Rasmussen poll shows that two-thirds of the public think Davis should get over it and issue the licenses. Fox News is not supporting her, it seems. She’s sucking up attention that they’d probably like to re-direct to Hillary Clinton’s emails, and gay-baiting is no longer a winner for Republicans in general elections.

Some  conservative commenters are sympathetic to her, of course, but the talking point that developed over the weekend is that all this Sturm und Drang would go away if the state of Kentucky would change their marriage license regulations so that the licenses would not have to be issued in Davis’s name (apparently the clerks have been issuing licenses without Davis’s name on them, and there is some question about whether that is legal). And yes, that would be a solution, but a federal judge can’t do that, and neither can Davis, unilaterally. So until the Kentucky legislature gets off its ass and offers that remedy, I don’t see that as an out to our current impasse.