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REPORT: A Statistical Analysis Of Policy Trends And Abnormalities In Sarah Palin’s Tweets

By Victor Zapanta on Jul 29, 2009 at 8:45 pm

090729-palin-computerAfter stepping down on Sunday morning, Sarah Palin posted her final Twitter update to her @AKGovSarahPalin account, which had close to 125k followers. With Palin’s refusal to specifically address her post-gubernatorial plans, speculation has run rampant over what she intends to accomplish out of office. She is reportedly considering joining the ranks of the esteemed talk radio punditry.

An analysis of Palin’s Twitter activity in the weeks leading up to her final @AKGovSarahPalin update on Sunday may provide the best insight into what issue most concerns the former vice presidential nominee.

A comprehensive analysis of Palin’s last two months of Twitter updates (May 26-July 26) reveals that she mentioned energy 53 times out of 400 updates, far more than any other single issue. That is nearly 4 times as many mentions than the economy, and just short of 11 times the mentions of health care. A word cloud based on her Twitter activity reinforces the fact that Palin has been focusing her efforts on leading the GOP’s opposition to clean energy reform. Here’s a chart tracking Palin’s tweets:

090729-palin-twitter-energy

Some of Palin’s energy policy insights:

Attacking Cap-and-Trade: “DC plan for Cap & Trade (huge tax) hurts AK’s potential to supply more than 20% of US energy incl nat gas pipeline, see WashPost OpEd today” 9:16 AM Jul 14th

Drill Baby Drill: “Alaska’s role is to provide domestic energy leading to less reliance on foreign sources…” 10:11 AM May 27th

Drill Baby Drill Pt. 2: “Disappointed Congress once again voted to keep Americans dependent on foreign energy by keeping ANWR closed.” 5:39 PM Jun 10th

Drill Baby Drill Pt. 3: “EIA estimates US energy consumption will INCREASE by 44% in next 20 yrs. We MUST utilize our local energy sources. http://tinyurl.com/lesekh” 3:17 PM Jun 12th

Drill Baby Drill Pt. 4: “Great comments re safe offshore drilling by Lt Gov Parnell published today, asks Interior Dept to use tools in hand to meet court’s concerns” 6:43 AM Jun 17th

As Think Progress noted recently, Newt Gingrich has been touting Palin as a conservative leader on energy issues. On July 13, Palin wrote an op-ed slamming the cap-and-trade measure as “an enormous threat to our economy,” in spite of her previous support for capping carbon emissions. And last week, MoveOn began airing ads calling Palin “the new face of Republican opposition to clean energy.” Palin continues along the same tired Republican trajectory on energy: continued dependence on fossil fuels combined with subsidies to the oil, coal, and nuclear industries.

Update

Last night, William Shatner performed a beat poetry rendition of Palin’s Tweets on Conan O’Brien’s show.

Watch it:

Health

What Does The Blue Dog Compromise On Health Care Say About The Blue Dogs?

By Igor Volsky on Jul 29, 2009 at 8:30 pm

bluedogsupersizeAfter arguing that the House health care bill did not do enough to lower long term health care spending, Blue Dog Democrats hijacked the House Energy and Commerce Committee and promised to vote down the bill unless Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) heeded their concerns.

Today, the Dogs and the Dems reached a compromise:

- Reimbursement rates for public plan should be no higher than market rates: Rather than reimbursing at five percent above Medicare rates, the new public option will now directly negotiate rates with providers.

- States can offer an insurance co-op alongside public plan: Presumably this state-based cooperative would act like any other not-for-profit insurer and will lack the market clout to drive bargains and lower costs.

- Premium cap goes from 11% of income to 12%: Loosening the affordability measures is certainly one way to bring down the cost of health reform, but it does little to help families purchase coverage.

- States must pay 7% of cost of additional Medicaid enrollments: States are already worried that the plan to expand Medicaid would leave them on the hook for financing the expansion after the five year grace period (for the first five years, the federal government funds the expansion, after that, the states would gradually assume half the cost.) This will likely stoke their concerns.

- Small business exemption for payroll up to $500,000; phases out at $750,000: The original language exempt businesses with a payroll of less than $250,000 and charged a penalty on a sliding scale.

- Cost of bill must come in at under $1 trillion: Most health reform advocates believe that is nearly impossible to provide everyone with affordable health care coverage under $1 trillion.

On the whole, these tweaks are rather minor. Most observers interpreted the hoopla surrounding the negotiations as a sign of serious trouble. If the outline above is correct, then the dogs came back with their tail somewhat between their legs.

Secondly, the agreement only reinforces the notion that Blue Dogs are more interested in ideological politics than lowering long-term health care spending. After all, if they really wanted to lower costs, they would support reform that includes a robust public option and generous affordability measures so that every American is part of the health care system and has access to needed care. After all, if the public plan pays bloated market rates (as this agreement states) it will fail to offer lower premiums within the Exchange, and would cause the government to spend more money on subsidies. Unfortunately, the Blue Dogs are trying to lower the costs by making insurance less affordable and undercutting a meaningful public option.

Climate Progress

Paper or Plastic? Neither.

By Climate Guest Blogger on Jul 29, 2009 at 8:22 pm


A supermarket employee in Seattle bags groceries into a cloth bag. On August 18, the city will vote on a plastic bag fee modeled after Ireland’s successful PlasTax fee.

We’ve all heard of the plastic menace. Plastic bags litter streets, trees, and streams. They suffocate wildlife. They can take over 1,000 years to decompose. And we’re only consuming and throwing away more of them every year.

They also have a knack for getting into the world’s oceans. Plastic bags and cigarettes account for more than 80 percent of marine litter, according to a recent landmark study by the U.N. Environment Programme, or UNEP. They are eaten by all kinds of fish and kill an estimated 1 million seabirds a year. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an island of litter twice the size of Texas floating in the Pacific Ocean, is largely made up of plastic. UNEP says cutting bags off at the source is much cheaper than removing them later.

Enter the bag tax. A bag tax works by charging shoppers a fee””typically between 5 and 30 cents””for every bag they get in a store. This fee drives consumers to buy reusable bags and change their habits. It also causes high-quality reusable bags to emerge and diffuse because it’s a market solution. The resulting revenue can be used to raise awareness, to pay for environmental clean up, or to subsidize reusable bags.

Read more

Politics

Conservatives fabricate ‘mandatory’ end-of-life consultations in health bill.

By Igor Volsky on Jul 29, 2009 at 7:40 pm

Yesterday, during President Obama’s AARP town hall, a caller stated that she had “heard lots of rumors going around about this new plan.” “I have been told,” she continued, “there is a policy there that everyone that’s Medicare-age will be visited and told to decide how they wish to die.” This “rumor,” which seems to have been started by infamous health care provocateur Betsy McCaughey, has made its way into the standard conservative critique of the Democrats’ reforms. Watch a compilation:

To substantiate their claims, conservatives point to Sec. 1233 of the House Tri Committee bill, a section titled “ADVANCE CARE PLANNING CONSULTATION.” But while the language allows Medicare to reimburse providers for consulting with patients about end-of-life issues, nothing in the section mandates a consultation. The Wonk Room has more.

Justice

Leahy Calls For Action On Stalled Legal Nominees

By Ian Millhiser on Jul 29, 2009 at 7:00 pm

leahyThere is “no excuse” for fact that conservatives are stalling many of President Obama’s top legal nominees, said Senate Judiciary Chair Pat Leahy (D-VT) at a committee hearing today.  Not one of President Obama’s judicial nominees has been confirmed by the Senate, and the nominees awaiting a floor vote include:

[F]our nominees for top Justice Department jobs, the nominee to chair the U.S. Sentencing Commission, and nominees for the U.S. Courts of Appeal for the 2nd, 4th, and 7th Circuits. . . .  Some of the nominees, such as Dawn Johnsen to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, have drawn threats of filibusters from Republicans. But others, including Thomas Perez to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, are largely non-controversial. In all cases, senators haven’t come to agreement to bring them to a vote.

Much of the right’s motivation for obstructing these nominees can be summed up in two words:  floor time.  Absent unanimous consent from all senators, no issue may be considered by the full Senate unless it is given time on the Senate floor for debate. Although such a debate can be cut off by a cloture motion — a vote receiving the support of 60 senators — such a motion itself consumes floor time. Thus, by indiscriminately objecting to President Obama’s nominees, a single senator can effectively force the Majority to choose between confirming essential government personnel or advancing health care reform, cap and trade, the federal budget or anything else on the Senate’s agenda.

But right-wing hopes that Obama will fail only partially explain conservatives’ strategy to keep the President’s nominees off the federal bench.  In truth, the far right has rallied behind seizing the judiciary to accomplish right-wing ends ever since they began dotting the South with “Impeach Earl Warren” billboards to protest desegregation.  More recently, the Republican-controlled Judiciary Committee gave a single senator authority to obstruct any one of President Clinton’s nominees–a power segregationist Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) used to block every single nominee from North Carolina.

During George W. Bush’s Presidency, however, the right hummed a different tune.  Suddenly, senators lost their power to veto nominees, and battering-ram tactics like the “Ginsburg Rule” and the “Nuclear Option” entered the political lexicon.  With a rubber-stamp Senate in his corner, President Bush confirmed some of the worst federal judges since the Hoover Administration; judges like Janice Rogers Brown, who believes that the New Deal is unconstitutional and the Social Security is “cannibalism;” Jeffery Sutton, who devoted much of his career to attacking Medicaid and immunizing state employers from civil rights law; and J. Leon Holmes, who once wrote that a “wife is to subordinate herself to her husband” and “place herself under the authority of the man.”

Moreover, conservatives have long understood the need to appoint young, up-and-coming attorneys to the courts in order to create a deep bench of future Supreme Court nominees.  So far, the average age of President Obama’s nominees is 55, five years older, on average, than the men and women given lifetime appointments by George W. Bush, and most of the names on Bush II’s “short list” of potential SCOTUS nominees were nominated by Reagan or Bush I when the nominees were in their 30s or early 40s.

In other words, the right has long followed a strategy of easing their own judges through the Senate, bottling up progressive nominees, and making sure that their team simply outlives ours.  The result is a judiciary that is both dominated by conservatives and free to impose a radical vision on the law.  If this trend is ever going to be reversed, the Senate needs to take up Leahy’s call to confirm Obama’s nominees right away.

Politics

Afraid Of NRA, Conservative Democratic Senators Waffle On Sotomayor Vote

By Ian Millhiser on Jul 29, 2009 at 6:45 pm

gunpointNoting Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s record on the Second Amendment, Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK) told Roll Call that that he is “undecided” on her nomination to the Supreme Court (although he added that he is “leaning toward voting in favor”). Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) expressed similar uncertainty:

“I accept her judicial philosophy of fidelity to the law,” Nelson said during a telephone conference call from Washington.

Nelson said he also believes Sotomayor is committed to supporting settled judicial precedent.

But, he said, he needs to “convince myself she won’t be an activist” on the court.

“I need an opportunity to review a few things,” the Democratic senator said.

Both senators’ equivocal statements come in the wake of the NRA’s decision to “score” the Sotomayor vote in determining where each lawmaker stands on the NRA’s pro-gun agenda. The NRA claims, falsely, that because Sotomayor once upheld a New York law against a Second Amendment challenge this somehow proves that she is hostile to gun rights. That decision, however, did nothing more than apply well-established law.

Because lower-court judges are required by law to follow the commands of the Supreme Court, Sotomayor once joined an opinion which followed a Supreme Court case holding that the Second Amendment doesn’t apply to the states. Nevertheless, the NRA launched a smear campaign against Sotomayor this month, claiming that she “deliberately misread Supreme Court precedent to support her incorrect view” in this case.

Frankly, the NRA is either lying, or it doesn’t know what it’s talking about. Not only was Sotomayor correct to follow the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment decision, but a unanimous opinion authored by Federalist Society darling Frank Easterbrook agreed with Sotomayor that state laws are not subject to Second Amendment scrutiny. Even the right-wing of the judiciary understands that judges are not free to ignore the law simply because the NRA doesn’t like it.

In the end, Begich and Nelson’s decision may be decided — not by Sotomayor’s actual record — but by how afraid they are of the NRA.

Update

To his credit, Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN), the third-ranking Republican in the U.S. Senate, is not caving to the NRA’s pressure. “Even though Judge Sotomayor’s political and judicial philosophy may be different than mine, especially regarding Second Amendments rights, I will vote to confirm her because she is well qualified by experience, temperament, character and intellect to serve,” Alexander announced on the Senate floor.

Yglesias

Endgame

By Matthew Yglesias on Jul 29, 2009 at 6:13 pm

It would be more convenient for bloggers if congress would rotate which issues it talks about instead of making us keep doing health care posts every day:

— Public comment at the Santa Cruz City Council.

— CAP internships are super fun.

— Fewer executions, coming soon to a People’s Republic near you.

— I think Ike Diogu is underrated.

— I guess I side with the fruit stand.

Going to see them play tonight, so your song of the day is Torche’s “Amnesian”.

Politics

David Vitter: ‘I’m on the side of conservatives getting back to core conservative values.’

By Guest Blogger on Jul 29, 2009 at 6:00 pm

vitterEarlier this week, Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) told the Columbus Dispatch that the GOP was “being taken over by southerners” and that the party has “too many Jim DeMints and Tom Coburns.” Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) responded today by slamming his colleague for being a “moderate, really wishy-washy” Republican. Vitter decried the influence of “moderates” in his party, saying that the GOP has not stuck to “core conservative values:”

“I’m on the side of conservatives getting back to core conservative values,” said Mr. Vitter, Louisiana Republican and member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “There are a lot of us from the South who hold those values, which I think the party is supposed to be about. We strayed from them in the past few years, and that’s why we performed so badly in the national elections.”

Vitter is an unusual standard-bearer for the “conservative values” wing of the Republican Party. As Steve Benen writes, “[E]very time Vitter mentions the word ‘values,’ it elicits the same response: ‘Aren’t you that ‘family-values’ guy who got caught with prostitutes?’” After confirming his involvement with the “DC Madam” escort service in 2007, Vitter admitted to a “very serious sin” but refused to resign, despite having previously called upon Bill Clinton to resign for marital infidelity.

– Ben Bergmann

Yglesias

The Public Plan You Won’t Have Access To

By Matthew Yglesias on Jul 29, 2009 at 5:27 pm

Ezra Klein defends his longstanding contention that the public plan isn’t the most important aspect of the health care debate by noting that as currently envisioned in even the liberal House version of legislation the public plan is available only to people in the Exchange and most people aren’t in the Exchange:

In all the bills we’ve seen, the public option is on the exchange. It is only available to those who are able to buy into the exchange. But most Americans can’t buy into the exchange. They’re not allowed. To make this very clear, imagine that the House and the Senate both pass Henry Waxman’s proposal tomorrow. Liberals would celebrate. That’s got a good, strong public plan. And I can’t use it. Not even if I want to pay for it out-of-pocket. I work at a large employer and thus I am not allowed to buy into the exchange.

The issue here is that the Obama administration isn’t lying when it tells you that you’re not going to lose your current health insurance. These plans all try really hard to avoid unraveling the employer-based system, meaning most people will be excluded from the exchange and the whole public option issue will be irrelevant.

That said, this also means that Ezra’s love of exchange-talk aside, the exchange isn’t the most important part of the health reform bills either. The most important part of the bills that actually exist—the part that will impact the lives of most Americans—are the new regulations on insurers.

The administration is proposing:

— A ban on discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions.

— Caps on out-of-pocket spending.

— No cost-sharing for preventive care.

— No “rescission” of coverage for people who get seriously ill.

— No gender discrimination.

— No caps on coverage, either lifetime or annual.

— Extension of family coverage for kids up to the age of 26.

— Guaranteed insurance renewal.

The fact that liberals like to talk about the uninsured and Peter Orszag likes to talk about bending the curve and I, personally, like writing about tax policy and don’t like seeing doctors has tended to obscure this whole set of issues. But your typical middle-aged, middle-class voter is going to be impacted dramatically by this stuff and fairly little by all the rest of it. This is also, in political terms, the stuff that polls really well. The “goodies.”

Media

Racist Former Cop Mark Fuhrman Calls Racial Profiling An ‘Ignorant’ Myth

By Nate Carlile on Jul 29, 2009 at 5:21 pm

Last night, Fox News’ Sean Hannity discussed whether President Obama has “alienated police” because of his recent comments on the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates. To investigate the issue, Hannity invited former Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman.

Fuhrman is best-known for having been convicted of perjury stemming from his testimony on the witness stand in the O.J. Simpson murder trial when he lied about having made racist remarks in the past. Fuhrman was subsequently investigated by the L.A. Police Department and found in 1997 to have been allowed to “act out his prejudices” toward minorities and female cops while serving as a police officer.

Fuhrman declared “Sgt. Crowley has absolutely nothing to apologize for. Professor Gates has everything to apologize for. And the president should publicly apologize to Sgt. Crowley for his comments.” Fuhrman went on to tell Hannity that Gates “hindered” Crowley’s investigation, “challenged him, assumed he was racist solely because he was white,” and warned that’s how “riots start.” Hannity then asked whether Gates was guilty of racial profiling:

HANNITY: What does it say about Professor Gates? Is he the one that racially profiled here?

FUHRMAN: First, there’s no racial profiling. That’s the most — that’s the most ignorant thing I’ve ever heard anybody say.

HANNITY: Did he have a racial predisposition?

FUHRMAN: He couldn’t have a racial predisposition unless somehow the radio gives him pictures of people before he gets there.

Watch it:

Fuhrman said on Fox News’ Hannity & Colmes two years ago that the “people” he “dealt with…for 20 years” will “kill somebody and go have some chicken at KFC.”

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