The Libertarian Dysfunction

Posted: May 10, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Republican presidential politics | Tags: , , , , | 46 Comments

Ron Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest the other night at the Republican Debate in South Carolina.

Every time I have any dealings with libertarians, I always wind up saying something to myself to the effect of what is wrong with this people?  Are they the products of a dysfunctional family with parents who don’t show emotion? Did they have problems bonding or with the attachment process as infants?  Libertarians seem like they were all bred in some kind of petrie dish rather than born of flesh and blood people.  They seem so oddly unaware of human nature and empathy. I’ve recently started wondering if it’s not really a symptom of some kind of autism  because there seems to be so much emphasis on a seemingly detached self-identity and a desire for a reality that seems straight of a bad science fiction novella where the main plot is alienation rather than aliens.

So, this WAPO op-ed by “conservative” Michael Gerson got me thinking about Ron Paul’s truly strange statements in that Republican Presidential-wanna be debate the other day. Gerson was using Ron Paul’s thoughts on legal heroin as the basis of the argument that the Republican Party shouldn’t treat Ron Paul seriously because he’s truly not a serious candidate. Advocating legalized heroin–instead of punishing it as bad boy behavior–evidently gives one a lack of gravitas.  I thought this strange.

I have to admit that Ron Paul says things that just makes me think he was hatched from an orphaned egg left in a cuckoo’s nest.  It frightens me that some one with such serious misunderstandings of economics heads a subcommittee over the nation’s monetary policymaker.  It’s like putting a flat earther in charge of NASA.  Paul was so surrounded by other odd birds at that Republican debate however, that he didn’t stand out more than any one else to me.  However, the legalize heroin comment stood out to many of us  including Michael Gerson.  For me however, it stood out because it’s part of the symptoms of denial of social costs and spillovers that you hear coming from libertarians.  Paul really doesn’t appear to know what it’s like to be around the chaos vortex that is an addict.  He has a really odd take on human nature.  Gerson started out with a pretty good description of that before he fell back on hellfire and brimstone.

Paul was the only candidate at the debate to make news, calling for the repeal of laws against prostitution, cocaine and heroin. The freedom to use drugs, he argued, is equivalent to the freedom of people to “practice their religion and say their prayers.” Liberty must be defended “across the board.” “It is amazing that we want freedom to pick our future in a spiritual way,” he said, “but not when it comes to our personal habits.”

Now, I’m of the personal opinion that other people’s religion and practices, can in fact, trample on other people’s rights.  I will only remind you of the time I went out on Sunday in Nebraska to buy creme de menthe to make grasshopper pie and couldn’t.  Also, you have no idea what it’s like to deal with Christmas hoopla when you’re never in the mood.  However, when you are near people, they do have a habit of getting in your way all the time.  What they do impacts you to varying degrees.  So, I didn’t think Paul could possibly have much experience with addicts because it’s hard to avoid the fallout from the disease even if you’re not all that intimately involved with them.  If you work with them or live near them, their addiction and its costs will be felt.

Or, as Gerson puts it:

This argument is strangely framed: If you tolerate Zoroastrianism, you must be able to buy heroin at the quickie mart. But it is an authentic application of libertarianism, which reduces the whole of political philosophy to a single slogan: Do what you will — pray or inject or turn a trick — as long as no one else gets hurt.

Even by this permissive standard, drug legalization fails. The de facto decriminalization of drugs in some neighborhoods — say, in Washington, D.C. — has encouraged widespread addiction. Children, freed from the care of their addicted parents, have the liberty to play in parks decorated by used needles. Addicts are liberated into lives of prostitution and homelessness. Welcome to Paulsville, where people are free to take soul-destroying substances and debase their bodies to support their “personal habits.”

But Paul had an answer to this criticism. “How many people here would use heroin if it were legal? I bet nobody would,” he said to applause and laughter. Paul was claiming that good people — people like the Republicans in the room — would not abuse their freedom, unlike those others who don’t deserve our sympathy.

The idea that there are actions that don’t impact people on any large scale is a weird one to me.  Gerson talks about Paul’s attitude of  “I don’t need laws against heroin because I won’t use heroin” as a form of arrogance.   What really made me think, however, was this paragraph.  This is where Gerson dove off the deep end.

The conservative alternative to libertarianism is necessarily more complex. It is the teaching of classical political philosophy and the Jewish and Christian traditions that true liberty must be appropriate to human nature. The freedom to enslave oneself with drugs is the freedom of the fish to live on land or the freedom of birds to inhabit the ocean — which is to say, it is not freedom at all. Responsible, self-governing citizens do not grow wild like blackberries. They are cultivated in institutions — families, religious communities and decent, orderly neighborhoods. And government has a limited but important role in reinforcing social norms and expectations — including laws against drugs and against the exploitation of men and women in the sex trade.

This is where he lost me completely. The government doesn’t need to reinforce Judeo-Christian norms and expectations.  To me, that’s not the role of government.   The government should recognize that the behavior of individuals and businesses impact others.  Some times, the impact is quite negative.  It doesn’t need to replace some absentee parent as an angry, punishing daddy.  It needs to be more like a judge, a referee, and a prevention coach. Let me explain that.

No one in Love Canal asked to be sold a home sitting on a lot saturated with toxic chemicals.  People actively withheld information to make those business deals and a group of innocents were hurt mightily; both financially and physically. You can read studies dealing with communities that have gambling facilities to determine the social costs of those things.  You get pawn shops and paycheck advance loan shops. There are tons of predatory businesses that pop up out of no where. Communities also get crime because once gamblers run out of things to hock and ways to borrow, they will steal.  Communities will attract prostitutes with accompanying costly public health problems.  Communities eventually wind up with destitute people.  As a result, many businesses and homeowners leave and the city is left with only problems and no revenues.

Just like I can’t imagine drinking day-in-and-day-out, I can’t imagine playing any other gambling games where I don’t know the rules, the odds, and have a strategy to know when to hold them and fold them.  The deal is that I don’t have the addiction gene.  Problem is, that there are a lot of people that can’t either make good decisions or stop.  They become chaos vortexes.  They drain resources from families that eventually need public help. They emotionally and some times physically abuse people which infers the cost of  the criminal justice system.  Relatives of addicts may or may not be able to recover without public assistance or spreading issues further across society.

These behaviors are not just personally destructive, they have social costs.  We frequently have to pay to clean up these messes after these folks have spun out of control.  I also didn’t need the government enforcing ‘Judeo-Christian’ values for me to recognize destructive behaviors and many of these folks with issues had plenty of it.  That’s no solution either.  Frankly, plentiful and good information on statistics and public health should give most people knowledge to make good decisions about prostitution, substance abuse, and gambling.  Neither Gerson or Ron Paul want these provisions either.  They prefer that be left to chance, happenstance, or some imaginary Father Knows Best.

This is what bothers me about both the libertarian and the conservative narrative described above.  You can’t just say let them self destruct and not witness that the fall out from destruction frequently is spread wide and costs a lot of money to a lot of people.  You can’t just say that if some one sits in a pew and hears some kind of moral spew attached to an angry sky god that they’re going to just get in control of themselves.  There’s a genetic component to substance abuse.   Certainly, a faceless corporation that only exists for the purpose of creating profit but yet, is treated as an individual legally,  is not capable of full considering the costs of its actions on others.  Addicts definitely don’t consider the costs of their actions on any one.   Gerson and Paul’s overly simplistic view of people and reality has to come from some blocked pathway in a brain that doesn’t recognize the interconnectedness of people and their actions.

Maybe that’s why they both have fairly useless views of economics too because, at its essence, economics is about human behavior and choices.

It’s not about becoming a national mommy, or daddy, or nanny or whatever.  It’s about trying to prevent the problems, first off, by providing adequate information to people. Then, it’s about judiciously assessing the fall out and compensating society and others for the cost of the chaos. Then, something should be done to try to stop recurrence.

We keep trying permissiveness and punishment.  What we frequently get is recidivism and more spillover costs.  Somewhere in between the models of permissiveness and punishment is a more pragmatic mindset. Laws, regulations, and government are necessary because humans and their corporate counterparts don’t exist in a vacuum and all of them are not good decisionmakers.  Their actions aren’t always a reflection of either enlightened self-control or fear of retribution by an angry sky god or parent.   Of course, government can’t do everything for us.  But, it should be able to prevent the fall out from the behaviors and actions of others and the spillover costs they entail.  That’s the real purpose of regulations. Libertarians seem to disregard a bevy of actions where there are victim’s of people’s individual decisions.  Conservatives appear to think that enforcing some kind of moral code via punishment  is all that’s necessary.  Frankly, I’d rather we use less straight-jacket ideology and use our knowledge to figure out what best prevents a problem.

Tuesday Reads: U.S.-Pakistan Deal, “Dr. Sex,” Fearful Republicans, Violence against Women, and More

Posted: May 10, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Foreign Affairs, morning reads, Pakistan, Republican politics, U.S. Economy, U.S. Military, U.S. Politics, Violence against women, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 29 Comments

Good Morning!!

The Guardian posted a story last night that seems to put the lie to all the supposed arguing about whether the Obama administration had the right to unilaterally enter Pakistan and raid Osama bin Laden’s residence. The two governments had agreed ten years ago that this would be acceptable in the event bin Laden’s location was found.

The US and Pakistan struck a secret deal almost a decade ago permitting a US operation against Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil similar to last week’s raid that killed the al-Qaida leader, the Guardian has learned.

The deal was struck between the military leader General Pervez Musharraf and President George Bush after Bin Laden escaped US forces in the mountains of Tora Bora in late 2001, according to serving and retired Pakistani and US officials.

Under its terms, Pakistan would allow US forces to conduct a unilateral raid inside Pakistan in search of Bin Laden, his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the al-Qaida No3. Afterwards, both sides agreed, Pakistan would vociferously protest the incursion.

“There was an agreement between Bush and Musharraf that if we knew where Osama was, we were going to come and get him,” said a former senior US official with knowledge of counterterrorism operations. “The Pakistanis would put up a hue and cry, but they wouldn’t stop us.”

So Pakistan kept its word. No wonder they are so insulted by all the accusations that they protected bin Laden. The agreement would protect the Pakistan government from public reaction at home. The only problem is that neither side seems to have thought about what the reaction would be here in the U.S.

Anyway, as I mentioned in a comment a couple of days ago, the Pakistan ISI has retaliated by outing the CIA station chief in Islamabad for the second time . Joseph Cannon has been doing a fantastic job of covering the ins and outs of this story, see here and here.

Back in March, I wrote a post about Professor J. Michael Bailey, AKA “Dr. Sex,” who taught a course in Human Sexuality at Northwestern University. In an optional after-class session, Bailey had a allowed a man to bring a woman to orgasm using a sex toy called “the f*cksaw.” Today Northwestern announced that the human sexuality course will not be offered next year.

Northwestern University will not offer a controversial human sexuality class next academic year after its professor came under fire for allowing a live sex-toy demonstration during an after-class lecture.

About 100 of psychology professor J. Michael Bailey’s students observed a naked woman being penetrated by a motorized sex toy on Feb. 21. The university said in March that it would investigate the incident; officials said Monday that the review continues.

“I learned a week or two ago that they had decided to cancel the course for next year,” psychology department chair Dan McAdams said Monday. “The decision was made higher up than me at the central administration level.”

No other Northwestern psychology professor is qualified to teach the subject, McAdams said. Bailey “will have other teaching assignments in the coming year,” according to a university statement.

I’m not particularly surprised. I wonder what “other teaching assignments” Bailey will be getting–Psychology 101, perhaps? There is bound to be some kind of disciplinary action that we won’t be told about.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) has admitted that the raucous town hall crowds faced by Republicans over his Medicare Destruction Plan have had an effect (although not on him). John Nichols has a great piece about it at The Nation.

But the outcry over his plan to mess with Medicare, heard in Wisconsin communities from Milton to Kenosha, and at spring recess sessions in the districts of Republican freshmen from Pennsylvania to Florida, obviously influenced other Republicans.

Images from Kenosha – a historic factory town in Ryan’s district, where hundreds of people showed up to criticize his scheming to cut benefits for working Americans while giving billionaires and multinational corporations new tax breaks – were featured nationally on broadcast network news shows.

Cable news programs focused intense attention on the story. MSNBC’s Ed Schultz devoted much of a program last week to the outcry. (In addition to a blistering analysis of the congressman’s proposal by the host, this writer provided some on the ground reporting from Kenosha, including details of a brief interview with Ryan, who was typically dismissive of the popular discomfort with his plan.) But other networks — even Fox — at least touched on the congressman’s troubles.

The reporting was noticed in Washington where, last week, GOP leaders began almost immediately to distance themselves from Ryan’s plan to use Medicare funds to enrich the private insurance firms that have donated so generously to his campaigns.

At Salon, Michael Winship has a good article about the many corporations who don’t pay any taxes–yet the Republicans constantly complain that poor people don’t have to pay any on their paltry incomes.

What’s greasing the wheels for these advantages is, hold on to your hats, cash. Over the last decade, according to the New York City public advocate’s report, those same five companies — GE, Exxon-Mobil, Bank of America, Chevron and Boeing — gave more than $43.1 million to political campaigns. During the 2009-2010 election cycle, the five spent a combined $7.86 million in campaign contributions, a 7 percent jump over their 2007-2008 political spending.

“These tax breaks were put in place to promote growth and create jobs, not bankroll the political causes of corporate executives,” Public Advocate Bill de Blasio said. “… No company that can afford to spend millions of dollars to influence our elections should be pleading poverty come tax time.”

And by the way, those campaign cash figures don’t even include all the money those companies funneled into the 2010 campaigns via trade associations and tax-exempt non-profits. Thanks to the Supreme Court Citizens United decision, we don’t know the numbers because, as per the court, the corporate biggies don’t have to tell us. Imagine them sticking out their tongues and wiggling their fingers in their ears and you have a pretty good idea of their official position on this.

Meanwhile, last week Republicans like Utah’s Orrin Hatch, ranking member of the US Senate Finance Committee, grabbed hold of an analysis by Congress’ nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation and wrestled it to the ground. The brief memorandum reported that in the 2009 tax year 51 percent of all American taxpayers had zero tax liability or received a refund. So why, the Republicans asked, are Democrats and others so mean, asking corporations and the rich to pay higher taxes when lots of other people – especially the poor and middle class — don’t pay taxes either.

The great Chris Hedges has a new post up at Truthdig: Your Taxes Fund Anti-Muslim Hatred [PDF]

…perhaps most ominously—as pointed out in “Manufacturing the Muslim Menace,” a report by Political Research Associates—a cadre of right-wing institutions that peddle themselves as counterterrorism specialists and experts on the Muslim world has been indoctrinating thousands of police, intelligence and military personnel in nationwide seminars. These seminars, run by organizations such as Security Solutions International, The Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies, and International Counter-Terrorism Officers Association, embrace gross and distorted stereotypes and propagate wild conspiracy theories. And much of this indoctrination within the law enforcement community is funded under two grant programs for training—the State Homeland Security Program and Urban Areas Security Initiative—which made $1.67 billion available to states in 2010. The seminars preach that Islam is a terrorist religion, that an Islamic “fifth column” or “stealth jihad” is subverting the United States from within, that mainstream American Muslims have ties to terrorist groups, that Muslims use litigation, free speech and other legal means (something the trainers have nicknamed “Lawfare”) to advance the subversive Muslim agenda and that the goal of Muslims in the United States is to replace the Constitution with Islamic or Shariah law.

“You would not expect a Democratic administration to fund right-wing groups,” Thom Cincotta, a civil liberties attorney and the author of the Political Research Associates report, told me, “and yet we continue to have hard-right, Islamophobic speakers and companies being paid taxpayer dollars to promote racist doctrines that undermine U.S. national security policy concerning Islam and the Muslim world. Policy expert after policy expert point out that framing our counterterrorism efforts as a war against Islam is a recipe for building increased resentment among Muslims, as well as a potent recruiting tool for those who would like to carry out violent attacks against us. This kind of demonizing breaks down communication between law enforcement agents and Muslim communities, which have proven to be strong allies in the rare instances of domestic extremism. Not only does it threaten to erode basic civil liberties, it threatens freedom of expression and freedom of worship.”

Also recommended at Truthdig, an article about the “anti-war orgins” of Mother’s Day.

In 1870, Julia Ward Howe responded to the horrors of the Civil War by issuing her “Mother’s Day Proclamation,” calling on women around the world to rise up and oppose war in all its forms.

It would be decades before Americans officially began celebrating Mother’s Day, and much of the original spirit of the proclamation has since been lost.

Some new (and horrifying) information came out today in the case of the bodies that have been found in Long Island. It turns out there may be as many as three murderers on the loose in New York.

“It is clear that the area in and around Gilgo Beach has been used to discard human remains for some period of time,” Spota said at a Hauppauge news conference with investigators Monday. “As distasteful and disturbing as that is, there is no evidence that all of these remains are the work of a single killer.”

Jeeze, I’m glad I don’t live in Oak Beach, LI. The most interesting (and very horrifying) information is that some of the body parts found belong to a woman named Jessica Taylor whose mutilated body was discovered 30 miles away in Manorville, NY, in 2003.

Authorities Monday made one new identification: Jessica Taylor, 20, who went missing in July 2003 and whose torso was found at that time near Manorville.

Spota said her death appears related to another woman, still unidentified, parts of whose body was found off Ocean Parkway in April and in Manorville in 2000.

Why do so many men murder women? Serial murder is relatively rare, but it sure seems to happen pretty often in this country. And men murder their wives and girlfriends every day in the U.S. Will violence against women ever be treated as seriously as it should be? It should be seen as an epidemic that needs to be vigorously addressed through public policy. I don’t know if that will happen in my lifetime.

Change would have to start with teachers and textbooks that value women’s current and historical contributions to our society, along with public education campaigns for adults. I also wonder if the anti-abortion movement doesn’t contribute to the general attitude that women have no right to protect the integrity of their own bodies.

It would also help if law enforcement personnel could be made to understand that rape is a serious crime even if the victim isn’t killed or beaten within an inch of her life. Rape is still rape even if the victim knows the perpetrator. With that in mind, I’m going to end with a story from Boston: Thousands Attend Boston’s “SlutWalk” March. The march was a response to an ignorant remark made by a policeman in Toronto.

In January, a Toronto police officer told a group of university students that women should avoid dressing like “sluts” to avoid being raped. He later apologized. The officer who made the comments, Constable Michael Sanguinetti, was disciplined but remained on duty, said Toronto police spokesman Mark Pugash.

However, advocates in Toronto held a “SlutWalk” to protest the officer’s remarks and to highlight what they saw as problems in blaming sexual assault victims. Since then, SlutWalks, organized mainly through social media, have been held in Dallas, Asheville, N.C., and Ottawa, Ontario. Organizers say the events also were held to bring attention to “slut-shaming,” or shaming women for being sexual, and the treatment of sexual assault victims.

“I had watched the Toronto walk happen from afar,” said Jaclyn Friedman, author of “Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape” and resident of Medford, Mass. “When I heard it was coming to Boston I just emailed the organizers and said, `How can I help?”‘

The Boston march attracted 2,000 people, even though organizers expected only 30.

Chanting “We love sluts!” and holding signs like “Jesus loves sluts,” approximately 2,000 protesters marched Saturday around the Boston Common as the city officially became the latest to join an international series of protests known as “SlutWalks.”

That’s it for me. What are you reading and blogging about today?

Late Night: What do the Brooklyn-based Der Tzitung and the South Dakota legislature have in common?

Posted: May 9, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Hillary Clinton, Women's Rights | Tags: , , | 38 Comments

So what do Der Tzitung and the SD legislature have in common?

Answer: Their fear of women!

Via the UK Daily Mail… Where did Hillary Clinton go? Hasidic newspaper edits Secretary of State out of Situation Room photo:

Brooklyn-based Hasidic newspaper Der Zeitung printed a story this week with a subtly manipulated version of the historic image – all the men in the photograph remain untouched but the two women in the picture have been Photoshopped out.

Photoshopped: The Hasidic newspaper printed an altered version of the Situation Room photograph, with the women edited outPhotoshopped: The Hasidic newspaper printed an altered version of the Situation Room photograph, with the women edited out

[…]

Spot the difference: Hillary Clinton and Audrey Tomason are missing Spot the difference: Hillary Clinton and Audrey Tomason are missing

Original: The historic picture of White House staff in the Situation RoomOriginal: The historic picture of White House staff in the Situation Room

Der Tzitung has since issued a non-apology apology, after Wapo called them out on a technicality (which doesn’t even make all that much sense, since all WH photos are public domain):

Update: Full statement by Der Tzitung.

The White House released a picture showing the President following “live” the events in the apprehension of Osama Bin Laden, last week Sunday. Also present in the Situation Room were various high-ranking government and military officials. Our photo editor realized the significance of this historic moment, and published the picture, but in his haste he did not read the “fine print” that accompanied the picture, forbidding any changes. We should not have published the altered picture, and we have conveyed our regrets and apologies to the White House and to the State Department.

The allegations that religious Jews denigrate women or do not respect women in public office, is a malicious slander and libel. The current Secretary of State, the Honorable Hillary R. Clinton, was a Senator representing New York State with great distinction 8 years. She won overwhelming majorities in the Orthodox Jewish communities in her initial campaign in ’00, and when she was re-elected in ’06, because the religious community appreciated her unique capabilities and compassion to all communities. The Jewish religion does not allow for discrimination based on gender, race, etc.

We respect all government officials. We even have special prayers for the welfare of our Government and the government leaders, and there is no mention of gender in such prayers.

All Government employees are sworn into office, promising adherence to the Constitution, and our Constitution attests to our greatness as a nation that is a light beacon to the entire world. The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees freedom of religion. (See below.) That has precedence even to our cherished freedom of the press! In accord with our religious beliefs, we do not publish photos of women, which in no way relegates them to a lower status. Publishing a newspaper is a big responsibility, and our policies are guided by a Rabbinical Board. Because of laws of modesty, we are not allowed to publish pictures of women, and we regret if this gives an impression of disparaging to women, which is certainly never our intention. We apologize if this was seen as offensive.

We are proud Americans of the Jewish faith, and there is no conflict in that, and we will with the help of the Almighty continue as law-abiding citizens, in this great country of our’s, until the ultimate redemption.

NEWS REPORT

The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

This isn’t about the impression given or so-called intentions.

Going out of one’s way to photoshop two women out of a historic photo of the WH Situation room IS disparaging to women. Not publishing photos of women because of modesty laws IS disparaging to women.

And, now for the South Dakota tie-in…

Via Amanda Marcotte/RH Reality Check… South Dakota Banning Abortion Without Banning Abortion?:

How did South Dakota do it? The new law requires women seeking abortion to speak to the doctor, then wait 72 hours, then get counseled at an anti-choice propaganda station called a “crisis pregnancy center,” only after which would she be allowed to obtain an abortion. This law received quite a bit of attention for overt misogyny inherent in the implication that women are too stupid to be aware of what they’re asking for when they seek abortion, or that women are so ignorant and incurious that they can’t be expected to have considered anti-choice arguments unless forced. But it’s looking like this law may do more than that, and may actually make abortion impossible to get in South Dakota.

This works in two ways. Right away, it was clear that the 72-hour waiting period was an attempt to force the sole abortion provider in the state, a Planned Parenthood in Sioux Falls, to drop the service. The doctor that performs abortions flies in to provide the service, and this requirement is obviously intended to push out any doctor who doesn’t work full time at the clinic by making the travel requirements onerous.

The “counseling” requirement seemed more condescending than truly burdensome at first, though it is true that many women seeking abortion really don’t have the flexible schedule to work in a few hours to be hectored by anti-choicers before obtaining their abortion, which pushes this requirement from being irritating and sexist to being truly an obstacle. But recent news indicates that something more devious is likely going on. As Robin Marty reported last week, not a single crisis pregnancy center has agreed to counsel patients seeking abortion so that those patients can fill their requirements to get their abortions. Not even the centers that lobbied to get the requirement pushed through. Without centers willing to say they saw the patients seeking abortion, patients could be caught in a red tape nightmare that makes getting abortions impossible.

It’s always possible that this is a paperwork oversight, but experience tells us that anti-choicers don’t play by the normal ethical rules of fair play (which comes with the territory when you’re organized around the immoral desire to force unwilling women to bear children), so we have to consider the alternative, that this was the plan all along. At the end of the day, the “counseling” requirement is using bureaucratic nonsense to create a situation where women who want abortions have to get consent from people who think that every woman should be forced to have a many children as possible, whether she likes it or not. Of course they’re going to refuse to give that consent. Through a paperwork shuffle, the state of South Dakota has given the power to control abortion access to anti-choicers, and their choice—surprise, surprise—is a ban.

Once again, the real news reads like the fake news.

This was from the Onion back in March — Oklahoma Doctors Can Now Legally Pretend To Give Abortions:

Talk about life imitating parody. The Onion byline on the video:

Doctors in the state will now be able to act like they’ve just given a woman an abortion and send her on her way.

Between Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn who are afraid of Hillary Clinton’s and Audrey Tomason’s presence in the WH Situation Room and state legislatures across this country trying to send women back into the backalleys, might as well legalize fake abortions. Things have gotten so ludicrous that I’m surprised someone in the He-Man Woman Haters Club hasn’t tried the faux abortion tactic already… it’s just one step removed from all these attempts to ban abortion through backdoors and red tape.

In other news on the War on Women front, I hear from Dakinikat that the “Defund Planned Parenthood” control freaks are at it in Louisiana, so I’d like to end on a more proactive and possibly hopeful note…

Via Laura Bassett reporting for Huffpo… Federal Court May Strike Down Bill Defunding Planned Parenthood:

Gov. Mitch Daniels (R-Ind.) is on the verge of signing a bill that would bar Medicaid patients from receiving any kind of health care at Planned Parenthood clinics, and the family-planning giant is ready to retaliate in federal court.

Republican state lawmakers pushed the defunding bill in order to block taxpayer money to an organization that performs abortions (although the Hyde Amendment has blocked federally funded abortions for 30 years). But Planned Parenthood’s lead attorney says the law violates federal Medicaid rules as well as the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

“We’re going to file a lawsuit in federal court as soon after the governor signs this bill as we can get into court,” said Roger Evan, director of litigation for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “The funding ban is scheduled to take effect immediately, and we see Medicaid patients every day, so we will be seeking instantaneous relief against the law taking effect while we pursue the litigation.”

House Bill 1210, introduced by state Rep. Eric Turner (R-Cicero) in January, would prohibit the state of Indiana from contracting with “any entity that performs abortions or … operates a facility where abortions are performed.” But federal Medicaid rules state that Medicaid beneficiaries can obtain health services from whichever qualified institution or agency — including Planned Parenthood — the person chooses.

Further, Evan said, since abortion is legal on a federal level, the bill violates the 14th Amendment by punishing those institutions that offer it.

“A very essence of something being a constitutional right is that the states cannot punish you for doing it,” he said. “The problem here is that Indiana is penalizing Planned Parenthood for providing women with access to abortion services — an obviously constitutional realm of conduct. They’re trying to cut off more than a million dollars worth of funds. It’s punishment in disguise.”

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) said they never comment on pending legislation, but Indiana state officials have expressed concern in recent weeks that violating the federal Medicaid rule by discriminating against Planned Parenthood could cause the agency to cut off all $4 million in federal funds it gives to Indiana for family planning each year.

But Evan said Planned Parenthood is planning to stop the bill in its tracks before CMS has a chance to rule on it.

“If these contracts are canceled and Medicaid reimbursement is cut off, the consequences will be instantaneous to women in Indiana,” he said. “By the time the federal government goes through the process of levying a penalty, in a way, the damage would be done and irreparable.”

If Planned Parenthood is successful in court, the federal court will issue an injunction against the statute, and life will go on as normal at Planned Parenthood clinics. If the lawsuit is unsuccessful, the new law will take effect the minute Daniels signs it, ensuring that many Medicaid patients with appointments at Planned Parenthood over the next few weeks will have no way to pay for their services.

Here’s hoping the lawsuit goes somewhere… before the American Taliban omits women’s seats in any Situation Room altogether, sending us all off into the political back alleys (no photoshopping necessary.)

“Having a Republican Governor is associated with low Economic Growth”

Posted: May 9, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: academia, Domestic Policy, Economic Develpment, Economy, Republican politics | Tags: , , , | 13 Comments

The Miser Brothers as Republican Governors. Honey, we shrunk the state's prosperity but saved us a few pennies in tax dollars.

There’s a new academic study by professors from Tulane University and the Nevada state Department of Planning and Budget that’s sure to become the source of some very hot political debate.  I didn’t bury the lead.  It’s up there in the banner header, however, I’m sure you want to know the supporting evidence and tests.  There’s a brief overview of this study at The Atlantic written by Richard Florida who is the Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto

The basic research question for the authors was “What factors influence state economic growth?”.  Basically, the authors look at a state’s fiscal policy and regress it against various policy choices and factors.  Then, they run some Monte Carlo simulations to see what happens under various scenarios. It’s complex statistics but their findings  are somewhat intuitive to me for years as well as true to my experience working with the state of Nebraska as a consultant to its Economic Development Department. However, this is a solid academic study with oodles of data.  It’s the kind of study that will be talked about for some time in economic circles.

This is what I learned from my time dealing with people in state governments whose jobs are attracting and retaining companies.  Businesses tend to relocate to states with good public services and low cost, employees that come from good educational systems.  They look for decent public school systems and state universities that do research in their area.  They want good state recreational facilities and even professional sports teams and cultural venues.  Omaha used to lose out to all kinds of places over things like lack of recreational facilities and cultural venues all the time.  It lost two fortune 100 companies and possible new ones over no recreational facilities or sports venues.  They offered hugely attractive tax packages and ready to build land but they always lost out on the same reason that makes me not want to live there.  There’s really very few things to do there and you don’t spend your life at work.

If you haven’t figured out that all of those things people and corporations seek basically come from public tax dollars, you must be a Republican.  A state’s tax giveaways and tax rates aren’t as high up on the list of things attractive to business as most die-hard Republicans want you to believe.  That’s pretty much what this study shows.

A new study by Tulane’s James Alm and Janet Rogers of Nevada’s Department of Budget and Planning (h/t Ryan Avent, whose deadpan tweet noted that it was likely to spark a “lively discussion”) takes a close look at the effects of tax and spending policies at the state level.  Entitled  “Do State Fiscal Policies Affect State Economic Growth?”, it examines  50 years of data  (from 1947 to 1997),  tracking  the effects of state tax policies, spending policies, and political orientation on economic growth. Looking at the different policy approaches and strategies that have been pursued at the level of states and cities and comparing their results provides a useful lens through which to examine pressing national issues. Alm’s and Rogers’ main findings are certainly interesting; “lively” is quite likely an understatement for the sort of debate their findings should inspire.

There are two major take-aways. First, a “state’s fiscal policies have a measurable relationship with per capita income growth, although not always in the expected direction.” Tax impacts, they report, are “quite variable”; “expenditure impacts are more consistent.”

This particular statement is right up there in the author’s abstract.

Of some interest, there is moderately strong evidence that a states political orientation has consistent and measurable effects on economic growth; perhaps surprisingly, a more \conservative” political orientation is associated with lower rates of economic growth.

Wow. Austerity doesn’t work.  Not only does it NOT work, it’s detrimental to the state’s economic well being and future.  Again this should be pretty intuitive.  If you have a business, you need customers with paychecks. The higher the paycheck, the more they customer spends on nonessentials which  many business sell.  Also, you need good, happy, creative employees.  If you rely on professional people, these folks like good restaurants, entertainment, schools, and sports venues.   Every  one needs good transportation infrastructure like well maintained roads and airports.  Again, a lot of this must be provided by government for a variety of reasons having to do with the nature of public goods.

Their conclusion is pretty damning to current policy prescriptions.

… there is strong evidence that a state’s political orientation, as indicated by whether the governor is Republican or Democrat, whether the state has enacted tax and expenditure limitation legislation, and whether the state frequently elects a governor of the same party as the incumbent, have consistent, measurable, and significant effects on economic growth.  Perhaps surprisingly, having a Republican governor is associated with lower rates of growth.

I’m not the least bit surprised. This is good old fashioned, no-nonsense Keynesian results. Also, growth rates compound over time like interest compounds your savings account.  If the rates of growth are low during one administration, the state will fall farther and farther behind so one or two administrations of bad fiscal policy means that slow growth compounds over time and makes the results more noticeable as you go along.  This seems to be how they capture some of their significant differences.

That trend brings us back to the extremely low growth we had during the Dubya years and the paltry recovery we have now.  Traditional fiscal policy always tells us that the multiplying effects of tax cuts are less strong than increases in government spending because the first round of government spending gets spent 100 percent and because it usually is targeted at infrastructure or other types of spending that has long reaching impact.  Yes, you can actually see economic benefit from building football stadiums or airports.   When you give money to rich people or even business in tax rebates or tax cuts, there’s no way of controlling where it goes  or where  it’s spent.  That degrades the impact of  the stimulus as well as leads to lost revenues.  And, at the moment, those tax cuts at the state level are being coupled with excuses to raid basic government services like public education.  The result is basically a drain on the state’s capacity to grow as well as no stimulation to the economy.

Anyway,  I imagine the Cato Institute or the Heritage Institute will try to rush out some distorted studies of their own shortly depending on how much circulation this gets.  I would like to add that the state of Nevada is not exactly Massachusetts and even though Tulane is referred to as the Harvard of the South, it’s still Louisiana.  Let’s hope this does stir up some debate and that this study attracts attention in all the right places.

What part of “Beaches and Speeches” does Jonathan Alter not understand?

Posted: May 9, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Hillary Clinton, Media | Tags: | 24 Comments

I’d like to start off by flashing back to February 23, 2008. Here’s what one Jonathan Alter had to say back then: Hillary Should Get Out Now…

Hillary wins Texas and Ohio.

If Hillary Clinton wanted a graceful exit, she’d drop out now—before the March 4 Texas and Ohio primaries—and endorse Barack Obama. This would be terrible for people like me who have been dreaming of a brokered convention for decades. For selfish reasons, I want the story to stay compelling for as long as possible, which means I’m hoping for a battle into June for every last delegate and a bloody floor fight in late August in Denver. But to withdraw this week would be the best thing imaginable for Hillary’s political career. She won’t, of course, and for reasons that help explain why she’s in so much trouble in the first place.

Ah, yes, the most viable female candidate for president ever should have dropped out before she won two big primaries. How foolish of her to actually want to run for real and prove her mettle!

Fastforward to the June 2011 edition of Vanity Fair, in which the same Jonathan Alter has penned this profile on Hillary Clinton: Woman of the World…

VF illustration and caption from Alter's Woman of the World piece: THE PERILS OF HILLARY As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton finds herself dealing with foreign upheaval not seen since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Aloft, the secretary of state can often be found with a black binder clip in her hair instead of fastened onto classified documents. It helps. Her stylist, Isabelle Goetz, does her hair in Washington, but on the road—unless the ambassador’s wife can recommend someone good—she takes care of herself. For years she’s routinely done her own makeup, which is easier because she has good skin. And her genes seem unusually strong. Dorothy Rodham, Hillary’s mother, is 92 but looks more like 80. Hillary is 63 but seems a bit younger. She is one of those lucky people who look better—or at least not worse—with age.

All of this is relevant politically because it means that in 2016, when she’s 68, she is unlikely to be written off as too old to run for president. Since the beginning of the year, Hillary has said repeatedly that she will leave office no later than early 2013 and retire from public life. In Bahrain, just before the Middle East upheaval, I heard her be more direct than ever before on the subject: “I’ve had a fascinating and rewarding public career …. I think I will serve as secretary of state as my last public position and then I’ll probably go back to advocacy work, particularly on behalf of women and children, and probably around the world.”

Hillary isn’t as calculating as her public image. The 2000 Senate race, for instance, was practically serendipitous. But it’s hard to believe “Clinton” and “ambition” have been fully sundered. In 2016, the Democrats are unlikely to have anyone better or more acceptable to different parts of the party.

First. Was it really necessary to launch into a discussion of Hillary’s electoral fitness by saying she looks younger than her age? I mean, what is this? The progressive version of Rush Limbaugh?

Second. Hillary should have just gotten out of the race the week of February 23, 2008. That obviously would have been the best move for her career. So said the Clueless Class.

Staying in the race until June 2008 has clearly been oh-so-detrimental for Hillary, as evidenced by how the Jonathan Alters in 2011 are now clamoring for her to run in 2016.

Talk about the Audacity of Hope. They WISH Hillary would run in 2016.

Hillary in Harper’s Bazaar, February 2011:

As for Clinton’s own postsecretary course, she says, “I’d probably teach international relations, current events, something involving women’s roles and rights around the world. I have no idea what I’m going to do, but I have a lot of interests that I hope to fulfill. And then an occasional beach, an occasional time-out.”

And what of 2016, the next date Clinton could conceivably run for president? “I have no thoughts for 2016,” she says with a benevolent smile. “Beaches … speeches.”

What part of that does Alter and the rest of the Clueless class not understand?

Hillary has transcended both 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the clueless class that worships the empty suits that sit inside it.

Her “not fully sundered ambition” after leaving the Obama Administration will be to use her power as an emeritus stateswoman to make the rights of women and girls a hallmark of any human rights campaign and national security agenda. What she’s going to be launching in the near-future is her own foundation for women–we’d be only too lucky if she had time to launch another presidential bid. And, frankly, after watching the the Democratic party self-destruct and sell out their core constituencies for K-Street/C-Street gobbledygook , come 2016, I’d rather see Hillary become UN Secretary General than President of the United States.

You had your chance at Hillary, progressives. Somewhere between saying Hillary had “more baggage than Paris Hilton on the Riviera” (that’s from Alter himself) and chanting WWTSBQ, you blew it.

And, anyways, if Hillary was really going to run, you better believe these goons wouldn’t be floating her for 2016–they’d still be spending every waking hour cataloguing how unlikeable and unelectable she is.

Alter doesn’t still seem to get that Hillary has transcended all of this and truly is a “Woman of the World” whose horizons are bigger than what the pea brains in DC can comprehend. Here’s another excerpt from Alter’s current piece:

For any secretary of state, the prerequisite for success is a strong relationship with the president. “He’s hard for her to connect with,” admits one of her top people. “It’s hard for her to break through to the more-than-polite level.” That isn’t meant to suggest chilliness or dysfunction. “Is it Bush-Baker?” the aide continues, referring to the relationship between the first President Bush and James Baker, who was so tight with his boss that he felt obliged to resign as secretary of state to run Bush’s ill-fated re-election campaign in 1992. “No. But there’s a lot of mutual respect, and she feels like she’s always got a shot with him.” Imagine how it feels to be a supplicant, looking for her “shot” at impressing the president. It was only four years ago that Hillary said her main opponent in the Democratic primaries was “irresponsible and frankly naïve” when he promised to meet with the leaders of Iran, North Korea, and other rogue regimes without preconditions during his first year in office. She hasn’t forgotten who turned out to be right on that one.

Daydreamer Barack and Hillary in Midsentence: Does anyone look particularly "supplicant" here?

One day I asked Hillary point-blank how she gets along with Obama, with whom she meets a few times a week when neither is on the road. She gave me a predictable answer, that her relationship is “not only very good professionally but very warm personally.” Of course, “warm” is just another term of art in Washington, where the advice to anyone looking for a friend has long been to get a dog. When I ask for examples, she has to pause before recalling a very public moment: a spring day in 2009 when the weather was so good that the president suggested they go outside, where they were photographed chatting at a picnic table on the South Lawn. “It was exactly what I could have hoped for. It was spontaneous and heartfelt, and we had a good time,” she says. Her second example is a full hug she and the president shared in the Situation Room after the health-care bill finally passed.

What Alter et al. don’t get is that Hillary isn’t “looking” for “a shot to impress the president.”

It’s not her fault Obama’s a cold fish.

Hillary is a professional. She makes an effort to keep a working relationship with her boss. She gets things done.

What a bitch!

(Think Tina Fey, Bitch is the New Black.)

In fact, if you see Jonathan Alter discussing his June profile on Hillary on C-Span, you’ll see that at between the 1 to 2 minute mark, Alter himself concedes that:

She never has quite connected with the president on a personal level, but then there are not a lot of people that feel close to him, so that also is to be expected. They have a working relationship that is productive for the United States.

In his C-Span appearance, Alter also reiterates more emphatically that while he thinks Hillary isn’t “plotting” to run and thinks that *she sincerely thinks* she’s out of politics, he doesn’t think the “Democrats” can find anyone “formidable” besides her in 2016.

Alter notes in both his article and on C-Span that Hillary is “terrific off the record” but that she’s guarded on the record, defensive, yada yada. What is it with Jonathan Alter, Maureen Dowd (who once said of Hillary, “She has kept her sense of humor — which has a tart side — mostly under wraps, so she won’t be accused of being witchy”), and the rest of the press?

I’ve never seen this kind of obsession with a male pol for, you know, being a pol.

On Hillary’s resilience, Alter offers this commentary:

Even as she navigates these choppy waters, Hillary’s own vessel is solid and surprisingly leakproof. One of the least-noticed changes in American public life is how she has been transformed from a subject of constant gossip and calumny into a figure of consequence and little controversy. There are structural reasons: secretaries of state always exist in a zone slightly above grubby politics, which is meant—in theory, at least—to stop at the water’s edge. The right-wing attack machine can apparently concentrate only on one or two villains at a time, and since 2008 it has been Obama’s and Nancy Pelosi’s turn in the barrel, not Hillary’s. I tried for months to find people willing to lace into her. None would, not even politicians and TV blowhards who had once catalogued her distortions and dined out on despising her.

Well, of course they don’t want to go on the record taking her down now. Bullies don’t go after the smart girl when they need her to save their butts on a group project.

BTW, how many months has Alter ever spent “trying to find people willing to lace” Obama? Good grief.

Of course, Alter can’t resist this bit of Bill, Hillary, Obama commentary:

Despite running against each other, the president and secretary of state have a lot in common in the way their minds work—more, arguably, than either has in common with Bill Clinton. Staffers have noticed that both Obama and Hillary are methodical, secure, and human-scale when you talk to them; they’re deductive thinkers who drill down into a problem. The former president, by contrast, is discursive, needy, and larger-than-life; he’s an inductive thinker with a connective mind.

Bwhahahaha! Hillary is more disciplined than Bill, but both Clintons are wonks who make policy specifics accessible to the public, each in their own styles. They both blend populism with intellectualism in a way that’s been sorely absent from the White House since they left. Their styles complement each other. Where Hillary is focused like a laser, Bill is able to bring the big picture into focus.

Obama’s plenty disciplined, but he thinks the song is about him and doesn’t get deep in the weeds about the issues. (Either that or he doesn’t think he has to engage any of us little people on the issues.)

Then there’s this refrain from Alter throughout his piece:

On Egypt, it was Hillary who early on recommended caution and Obama who insisted that U.S. policy should be to push for an immediate transition.

What? Dakinikat, Minkoff Minx, bostonboomer, and I liveblogged Egypt at Sky Dancing.

Obama was just as foolishly entrenched in the “orderly transition” and “stability” memes as Hillary was. It took forever for Obama to respond and when he finally did, it necessarily fell short, by virtue of the Administration looking pathetic, having earlier had Biden opening his big mouth and saying he wouldn’t call Mubarak a dictator. It was officially Samantha Power who was pushing Obama to be more bold on Egypt, but all of this was probably good cop/bad cop shenanigans anyway, to give Obama cover to “evolve” his position once Mubarak’s ouster became a foregone conclusion.

Oh, and just look at how Alter wraps things up:

She has been involved in this cause for years, but now has a much bigger platform to push the idea of new cookstoves that cost as little as $25 each. “This could be as transformative as bed nets or even vaccines,” she says, the excitement in her voice palpable. “We are excited because we think this is actually a problem we can solve.”

That’s rare. Development challenges and global conflicts often seem intractable, and that has to be a little discouraging at three in the morning in the skies over Kabul or Cairo. “You can’t just look at these conflicts and issues and say, ‘O.K., that’s been solved,’” Hillary says to me at the end of an interview, starting to chuckle. “Because most of these problems are never solved.” Now she’s back in dutiful, dogged mode, which happens to be the mode that best fits today’s Hillary—the one almost everyone seems to like. “You know,” she says, “you just keep working at them and working at them and working at them.” Who can argue with that?

Likeable, congenial, hard-working, dutiful Hillary… meh.

There’s a lot more where that kind of faint praise came from in Alter’s profile of Hillary, stuffed between interesting details about her work at Foggy Bottom (e.g. at townterviews, “Often a questioner will refer to her in fractured English as ‘President Clinton.'”), but I think you get the point already.

I’m going to leave you with a passage where Alter actually lets Hillary’s merits as a stateswoman stand on their own somewhat, instead of trying to put too much of his own backhanded spin on it:

She accepted the post, in November of 2008, only after President-Elect Obama—in an inspired move over the objections of many on his campaign staff—twisted not just her arm, she informed friends, but her fingers, toes, and every other bone in her body. The president, for his part, is proud of himself for choosing her. He knows that she represents the United States better than anyone but him and is—to the surprise of many Obama veterans—refreshingly low-maintenance. When budget season arrived this year and the departments all faced drastic cuts, Hillary used a Cabinet meeting to offer tips on how to avoid making cuts that would affect vulnerable people—children, the elderly—and look bad politically. (She recalled that Newt Gingrich’s effort to slash the school-lunch program, which put Gingrich on the defensive, was the real turning point in the 1995 budget debate.) Several second-tier Cabinet members thought it one of the most useful White House meetings they had ever attended.

Wouldn’t you love to have Hillary as your boss?

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →