Troubled Bridge Over Ft. Lee Water, Update

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Is it me, or did the Right drop the “U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman is a Democrat” meme rather quickly? I’m not seeing much follow up, although I don’t know what’s being said on Faux News. The Wall Street Journal actually published a positive profile of Fishman.

Did it occur to someone that stirring up a U.S. Attorney scandal on behalf of Chris Christie might be counterproductive? Hmmm.

Meanwhile, it appears Christie may not get away with claiming he had no idea what was going on. See, for example,

Christie Tried to Slow Down Investigation

What Did Christie Know and When Did He Know It?

Bridge Scandal Papers Point to Cover-Up by Chris Christie Allies

Do You Really Want to Talk About U.S. Attorneys, Righties?

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When I went to bed last night, conventional wisdom was that Chris Christie was on the ropes. But now I see the Noise Machine magicians have pulled a distraction out of a hat:

CNN, likely reporting on an email received last night from Reince Priebus:

Paul J. Fishman, the U.S. attorney tasked with looking into New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s bridge controversy, has donated to several Democratic politicians and organizations, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Most notably, Fishman – who was nominated for the post by President Barack Obama in June 2009 – donated to then-Sen. Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign on June 30, 2007. At the time of the contribution, Clinton was battling then-Sen. Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination. Fishman donated $2,300 to Clinton, according to the FEC.

Steve M says,

You know how this will be spun on the right, don’t you? Eric Holder’s Justice Department is now investigating Christie after refusing to investigate blah blah blah blah blah. Now the right has a liberal enemy in this matter. Game on

Because there’s nothing righties love more than painting themselves as the innocent victims of evil liberal oppression. Yesterday, the baggers saw Christie as a RINO. Within a few hours he’ll be Holy Saint Martyr Christopher of Blessed Persecution, or something.

But do indulge me as I take a little trip in the wayback payback machine to an item in the Maha Archives:

Further into the Kirkpatrick & Rutenberg article we find:

In New Jersey, Mr. Rove helped arrange the nomination of a major Bush campaign fund-raiser who had little prosecutorial experience.

That would be Christopher J. Christie.

Mr. Christie has brought public corruption charges against prominent members of both parties, but his most notable investigations have stung two Democrats, former Gov. James E. McGreevey and Senator Robert Menendez. When word of the latter inquiry leaked to the press during the 2006 campaign, Mr. Menendez sought to dismiss it by tying Mr. Christie to Mr. Rove, calling the investigation “straight out of the Bush-Rove playbook.” (Mr. McGreevey resigned after admitting to having an affair with a male aide and the Menendez investigation has not been resolved.)

Christie’s name popped up in another post from 2007, which led me to this NY Times editorial:

The Justice Department has been saying that it is committed to putting Senate-confirmed United States attorneys in every jurisdiction. But the newly released documents make it clear that the department was making an end run around the Senate — for baldly political reasons. Congress should broaden the investigation to determine whether any other prosecutors were forced out for not caving in to political pressure — or kept on because they did.

There was, for example, the decision by United States Attorney Chris Christie of New Jersey to open an investigation of Senator Bob Menendez just before his hotly contested re-election last November. Republicans, who would have held the Senate if Mr. Menendez had lost, used the news for attack ads. Then there was the career United States attorney in Guam who was removed by Mr. Bush in 2002 after he started investigating the superlobbyist Jack Abramoff. The prosecutor was replaced. The investigation was dropped.

Of course, if you point these inconsistencies out to righties they curl up into a fetal position and play the martyr well enough to make Joan of Arc at the stake look like a slacker.

BTW, the investigation into Menendez was closed by the Justice Department in 2011, but not in a way that made Christie look any less like a bully. Menendez had been collecting rent from a nonprofit community activist organization and had also helped the group secure a lot of federal grant money, so there was an appearance of quid pro quo. This was the matter that triggered the subpoena. But the rental arrangement had been pre-approved by the House Ethics Committee, so it’s not clear to me what Menendez was doing that warranted a subpoena, or that couldn’t have waited until (ahem) after the election.

BTW, the U.S. attorney who was originally assigned the Menendez case was Paul Fishman. But the newly appointed Fishman recused himself because Senator Menendez had backed him for the post.

I’m Tired of the BS About Big Government

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This is my response to Karen Tumulty’s bullshit article about the serious “philosophical divide” touched off by the “Great Society.”

“Philosophical divide” my ass. I am well old enough to remember the Johnson Administration. The “Great Society” amounted to extending the New Deal to everyone, regardless of race. White Americans who had been perfectly fine with big government while it was helping them saw the GS as a scheme to take money out of their pockets to benefit black Americans, and they weren’t having it. Their sudden scruples about “big government” were not the reason for their objections, but the excuse.

That’s also true today, as Republicans are always happy to increase the federal debt when it benefits the wealthy and are only fiscal hawks when they have to squeeze some money out of the budget for the “undeserving poor.”

Try to get real next time, Ms. Tumulty.

Do They Think We Have Amnesia?

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Apparently the Republicans are rallying behind the argument that Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty failed, so it’s time to give them a turn at running the government.

Seriously.

WASHINGTON — Senator Marco Rubio says the American dream has become “unattainable.” Senator Mike Lee says reforming government benefits programs should be the country’s “first priority.” And Representative Paul D. Ryan says the government safety net has “failed miserably.”

Fifty years after President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a war on poverty, the message from Republicans in Congress is that the government has foundered in its efforts to address the problem.

“While we have programs in place that help deal with the pain of poverty, they don’t deal with the structural problems,” Mr. Rubio of Florida said in an interview.

And who caused those “structural problems,” toots? Answer me that! Whose economic/governing philosophy has dominated Washington and federal policy since, oh, about 1980 or so (and arguably earlier)?

Mindful of polls that show many Americans see them as detached from or indifferent to the hardships faced by the people most affected by the recession and slow recovery, Republicans have begun to speak publicly on the issue of poverty and to propose their own, more market-based solutions.

In other words, the same crap that got us into this mess.

But at the same time that the party is shifting its focus to poverty, many Republicans are pushing for deep cuts to food assistance programs and unemployment insurance, while 11 million Americans are jobless and poverty rates remain elevated in the wake of the recession.

One way to reduce poverty is to starve the impoverished, I give you that. It worked pretty well in Ireland awhile back.

Un-bee-lee-vah-bull.

But you know the Republican establishment is nervous when they bring in the empathy coaches.

House Republican leaders sent a memo this week to the entire GOP conference with talking points designed to help rank-and-file Republicans show compassion for the unemployed and explain the Republican position on unemployment benefits. In the memo, which was obtained by The Washington Post, House Republicans are urged to be empathetic toward the unemployed and understand how unemployment is a “personal crisis” for individuals and families. The memo also asks Republicans to reiterate that the House will give “proper consideration” to an extension of long-term insurance as long as Democrats are willing to support spending or regulatory reforms.

Of course,

Last year they tried to empathy coach Republican politicians about women, and I can’t see that it helped. But why are they so worried now? Joan Walsh writes,

Maybe because of polls like the one just completed by Hart Research (on behalf of the National Employment Law Project). Surveying likely 2014 midterm voters the pollsters found they overwhelmingly supported extended benefits 55 to 34 percent. Significantly, key Republican groups like seniors and white non-college educated voters were among the most supportive; white women, a swing group that leaned to the GOP in 2012, support maintaining the benefits 53-33 percent.

And by some non-coincidence, many Washington politicians who are most adamantly against extending benefits are from states with the highest number of jobless constituents. Funny how that works, huh?

Unfortunately for them, Paul Ryan spilled the beans last month when he declared he wanted to end jobless benefits so that people would be compelled to go out and find a job. But the average American is at least a few shades brighter than Ryan — hell, there could be varieties of dieffenbachia that are brighter than Ryan — and understand that it’s a bit tricky to go out and get a job when there are no bleeping jobs to get.

Persistently Ignorant

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We go through this every winter. Every snow fall, every cold snap, and the Right hoots derisively that this proves global warming is a hoax.

And then scientists attempt to patiently explain why global warming actually makes cold snaps worse. Cold snaps and global warming go hand-in-hand, even. And, of course, the Right will have none of that.

It’s fascinating that the Right is so certain all those scientists sounding the alarm about global warming are only saying that because they are being paid to say it. I’m not sure who stands to gain from all this largesse. I don’t see the green tech companies having enough cash to pay off 97 plus percent of the world’s climate scientists. The fact that the petrochemical industry really does have a lot of cash and stands to lose much future income if fossil fuels are phased out doesn’t seem to get their attention.

And while I’m there — see “Dark Money” Funds Climate Change Denial Effort in Scientific American.

The denialism on the Right takes two forms. One, you’ve got the usual cretins (I’m convinced one must have a negative IQ to write for Newsbusters) who don’t look at the science at all but instead pick apart comments made by non-scientist news personalities. The other is to point to disagreements among climate scientists as to precisely how global climate change functions.

Apparently, until scientists are 100 percent in agreement about the cause and nature of a particular phenomenon, we can just ignore the science. By that logic, since scientists are still struggling to understand how gravity works, maybe we can persuade the Koch Brothers to step off a cliff.

The Koch Brothers’ Labyrinthe

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Someone at WaPo actually committed an act of journalism; see “Koch-backed political coalition, designed to shield donors, raised $400 million in 2012.”

Matea Gold writes,

The political network spearheaded by conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch has expanded into a far-reaching operation of unrivaled complexity, built around a maze of groups that cloaks its donors, according to an analysis of new tax returns and other documents. …

…A labyrinth of tax-exempt groups and limited-liability companies helps mask the sources of the money, much of which went to voter mobilization and television ads attacking President Obama and congressional Democrats, according to tax filings and campaign finance reports.

The article goes on to describe the Koch’s several astroturf organizations are set up in a way that cloaks the donors, so there is no way to find out where money originates. The article doesn’t say this, but seems to me there could be all kinds of foreign money flooding into our election process through this labyrinth, and we’d never know about it.

For that matter, we don’t know how much of their own money the brothers Koch are pouring into this.

I liked this part:

Tracing the flow of the money is particularly challenging because many of the advocacy groups swapped funds back and forth. The tactic not only provides multiple layers of protection for the original donors but also allows the groups to claim they are spending the money on “social welfare” activities to qualify for 501(c)(4) tax-exempt status.

As sure as the night follows the day, some commenters got on WaPo and chalenged them to print an expose of George Soros and the Unions and what they are contributing. But that wouldn’t be an expose, because that appears to be public knowledge. According to Open Secrets, Soros Fund Management spent $2,775,000 during te 2012 election cycle. By comparison, Sheldon Adelson was snookered for paid out $92,796,625 during the same period. But I couldn’t find information on the Koch brothers’ donations at all. It’s like they don’t exist, or something. Very creepy.

Go for It, Young Folks

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There was a time — thirty years ago, maybe — I would have pooh-poohed some of what Jesse Myerson is proposing in Rolling Stone — “Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For.” Now I just say, go for it, young folks.

Joe Weisenthal of Business Insider and Kathleen Geier at Washington Monthly both explain that Myerson’s ideas aren’t as radical as they might seem at first glance. Geier writes,

All right, settle down, these proposals are hardly as far-out as they may sound at first glance. Number one is a public works program, number two is a universal basic income, the third is a land value tax, the fourth is collectivizing wealth ownership by having the government buy up private sector assets and paying a dividend to all citizens (Alaska has a program similar to this in place), and the fifth is pretty much what it says: i.e., a public bank that doesn’t rip off its customers or rape the country. …

… Myerson’s program may or may not be, in the words of Michael Harrington, “the left wing of the possible” — at least not yet. They are too visionary for that. But that’s not to say that what he envisions does not exist in the world, and could never exist here. The reforms he outlines are your basic social democracy — you know, society as it exists in uncivilized hellholes like Denmark and Sweden — spiced with some classic American populism. It’s not going to happen tomorrow, or next week, or in the next five years. But I think it’s important for progressives to have a long-term plan that is truly aspirational and idealistic — in other words, something other than fending off further cuts and praying the Republicans don’t get re-elected in the next two or four years. Without boldness and imagination, a political movement will fail. It will lose its power to inspire, and it will end up at best barely holding steady, and at worst, seriously losing ground.

In our current political climate these ideas may be non-starters. And to say that the Right is going ballistic over Myerson’s article is an understatement. They’re having a Red Scare meltdown and hurling every infantile insult they can think of in his direction.

But y’know what, wingnuts? We’ve tried it your way. It doesn’t work.

In their minds markets are never free enough and taxes are never low enough, so righties will deny their way has been tried. But every time the country enacts another tax cutting and market-freeing measure, life gets harder and more precarious for most of us. That’s just a plain fact. We’ve been lurching toward Reason Magazine Promised Land lo these more than 30 years, and now we’re close enough to see it. And it doesn’t look so hot.

This is rich: Newt Gingrich sneered at New York Mayor De Blasio’s new administration as “small soy latte liberalism.”

“Those earning between $500,000 and $1 million a year,” the new mayor continued, “…would see their taxes increase by an average of $973 a year. That’s less than three bucks a day — about the cost of a small soy latte at your local Starbucks.”

It was sadly symbolic that Mayor de Blasio was speaking one week before the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s declaration of a “War on Poverty.” …

… Here are the facts: After 50 years and trillions of dollars, bureaucratic government has lost the war on poverty. Each year, we spend $17,000 per person in poverty on means-tested welfare programs alone, as Peter Ferrara points out. That adds up to more than $16 trillion since 1965. Yet today, left-wing leaders like Mayor de Blasio and President Barack Obama still call inequality “the defining issue of our time.” What does this say about their welfare bureaucracies? …

… Poor Americans need a fundamental break from a system which has trapped so many in dependency.

A small reminder that the last President with genuinely progressive domestic policies was Lyndon Johnson. Too bad his Administration crashed and burned in Vietnam, but at least he wanted to expand the New Deal, not cut it. And, yeah, we’re talking 50 years ago. Since then, we’ve had varying degrees of timid, let’s not scare the chickens moderation to full bore, rape the earth uber-Reaganism. Johnson’s War on Poverty was gutted decades ago. The biggest financial disasters of our lifetimes came about because New Deal regulations were cut so that markets could be freer. Every time we let the Right get its way, things get worse. And economic inequality grows. And more people get trapped in a poverty hole with no ladder out.

So, y’know what, righties? Bloviate all you like. You got nothin’ Your ideas are zombies. They don’t work. The more power you have, the more you screw up our country. So kick your heels and cry and scream about Marxism and insult us all you like. We should all have started ignoring you a long time ago, but maybe it’s not too late to start now.

Sailing the Crazy Sea

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From browsing around the Web I see that the political Right and its zombie followers have settled on these Articles of Faith about Obamacare:

1. It’s imploding. Now everyone but the libtards will finally get behind repealing it.

There are two corollaries that accompany this belief. One is that President Obama cleverly intended the ACA to be a disaster so that he could then declare an emergency and enforce a single payer plan. The other is that President Obama is incompetent. You can find people who appear to hold both views simultaneously.

As proof for the “implosion” scenario, the Right is hyping every story it can find about problems in U.S. health care. This includes problems that have been going on for years. The Daily Mail had a “hard-hitting” investigation complete with photos with some faces pixil’ed out saying that people were showing up at hospitals without proof of insurance coverage and being told they would be stuck with the bill if they aren’t insured. Like that never happened before.

There was also a study being talked about earlier this week predicting that visits to emergency rooms would go up, not down. One of the selling points of the ACA was that reduced emergency room visits would save us all money. More implosion!

Think Progress reported that this happened in Massachusetts for a while. People gaining insurance for the first time don’t understand how the health care system works, and they continue to go to emergency rooms because that’s the only health care they know. (Hey, it’s what Mitt told them to do, right?) It takes awhile to educate people how to use the other parts of the health care system.

2. More people have lost coverage from canceled policies than have gained it.

The number I keep seeing on Twitter and in comment threads is either 5 million or 6 million, or sometimes 6 point something million, which is supposed to be the number of policies that have been canceled, causing the people who were covered by those policies to either go without coverage or to be “forced” to take Medicaid — or both — and either way they’re going to start dropping dead any minute for lack of health care. Wingnuts weep and mourn for these alleged 6.something million, but of course the 48 million who were uninsured before January 1 were of no concern to them.

I believe the number of policies that were canceled is thought to be as high as 4.7 million, which rounds up to 5, so that’s where they get the 5 million. I’m not sure where they are getting the 6.something million figure, however, and why so many have seized upon that number when there are worse numbers floating around out there.

For example, in November the Heritage Foundation solemnly predicted that 85 percent of private plans and 65 percent of employee benefit plans would be canceled, and that adds up to a whole lot more than 6.something million. You actually have to read the Heritage report to find those numbers, however, which may be why the wingnuts haven’t found them.

Some guy at Frontpage reported mid-December that for every one person gaining coverage under the ACA, 14 people would lose coverage. This guy went on to say that 7 million people are losing coverage, so maybe he’s rounding up the 6.something. But he doesn’t give sources for his numbers.

The sub-articles of faith that go with this one is that anyone whose policy has been canceled is SOL because (it is assumed) they can’t find an affordable alternative, and being stuck with Medicaid is the same as being uninsured.

And here’s the reality check, with the caveat that there are some hard numbers we won’t have for awhile:

Now, a new report from the minority staff of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce has destroyed the foundation of that particular GOP claim. It projects that only 10,000 people will lose coverage because of the ACA and be unable to regain it — or in other words, 0.2 percent of the oft-cited 5 million cancellations statistic.

I skimmed the report, and it’s not clear to me why the 10,000 were left completely without options, but this is something that needs to be looked at. Nevertheless, this doesn’t look like “implosion” to me.

It’s also the case that Republicans are having a terrible time finding people who have lost insurance coverage whose stories even make sense.

3. Everyone’s insurance costs will be higher.

Wingnuts want to believe this, so it must be true.

4. Most of the people getting new insurance are illegal immigrants.

They don’t come out and say “illegal immigrants and blacks,” but if you read between lines that assumption isn’t hard to find.

Right now I think most people are confused about the ACA because the Administration didn’t do as much as it should have to educate people. And I think that’s going to continue for the first half of the year. Barring any new glitches, by summer I suspect most people will have settled down and realized the ACA is actually OK, if not perfect, but of course the Right will continue to believe in their articles of faith for the rest of their lives.