Hot metal in the sun:
— State by state unemployment numbers; what happened to Rhode Island?
— Free markets and government intervention.
— New levels of ecological doom.
— TNR fabricates pro-terrorism statement from Fatah.
— Excellent marriage equality ad from Maine.
Going to see the Breeders tonight, here’s “Saints” though obviously “Cannonball” is the classic work.
On his radio show this afternoon, shock jock Rush Limbaugh wondered why Latino groups are “lobbying” for the health care bill if “illegal immigrants” aren’t covered:
“If illegal aliens are not going to get Obamacare — and he’s been telling everybody that this week — why are the following groups lobbying for Obamacare via Health Care for America Now?…Here are the groups: The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the National Council of La Raza — by the way, La Raza the steering committee for Health Care for America Now, The National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health — I’m sorry, the National Latina Institute for tax-payer funded abortion. If illegal immigrants aren’t going to get Obamacare, how come all of these Hispanic groups are lobbying for it?“
Listen:
It may come as a surprise to Limbaugh that not all Latinos are “illegal immigrants.” In fact, most Latinos have been here for generations and many are legal immigrants. Organizations like “La Raza,” LULAC, and others support health care reform because — despite explicitly excluding undocumented immigrants — they know it will benefit many in the Latino community who will be eligible to receive its benefits.
In response to Limbaugh’s comments, LULAC National President Rosa Rosales said:
“We want Rush Limbaugh to stop the lies about credible Hispanic civil rights organizations…If he had engaged in dialogue with us or read the proposed legislation he would have known and not falsified the facts. Limbaugh has insulted the largest and oldest Hispanic civil rights organization in the country.”
According to experts, one in three Latinos does not have health insurance.
Nice poll breakdown by Greg Sargent:
Here are the net favorability ratings for Obama — i.e., the difference between the favorable and unfavorable ratings — broken down by party and compared with the previous week:
DEMOCRATS: +72 (+78)
REPUBLICANS: – 86 (- 84)
INDEPENDENTS: +35 (+39)And here are the net favorability ratings for Congressional Dems, broken down by party and compared with the previous week:
DEMOCRATS: +55 (+65)
REPUBLICANS: – 90 (- 90)
INDEPENDENTS: – 20 (- 15)
The long hot summer of right-wing attacks on health reform has hurt Barack Obama’s standing among Republicans and Independents, but the esteem in which he’s held by fellow Democrats has declined further. And on the congressional side it appears that the preponderance of growing discontent with congressional Democrats is coming from their own supporters.
In a recent interview with the editorial board of a local Montana paper, Senate Finance Committee chair Max Baucus (D-MT) continued his advocacy for a “bipartisan” approach to health care, arguing that “it’s better for the country.” Yet, he also admitted that the GOP leadership is putting “intense political pressure” on his committee colleagues Olympia Snowe, Chuck Grassley, and Mike Enzi to defeat any health care bill:
“The Republican leadership in the Senate and in the House is doing its utmost to kill this bill,” he said. “They are putting intense political pressure on Chuck Grassley, Olympia Snow and Mike Enzi, to bow out, because they want to kill it. So I’ve got a challenge ahead of me to work out all this on policy as we go through these meetings.
“The other thing is the politics of it: ‘People, this is the right thing to do for America. I know you’re under intense political pressure, but do the right thing. I know it’s easy for me to say right now, because I’m getting beat up by both sides, but not nearly as much as you are by the Republican hierarchy.’ ”
Yesterday, in an interview with FOX News, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) underscored the GOP’s reticence to support health reform. He told Neil Cavuto that he doesn’t think “a single Republican” will vote for health care legislation that looks like the bills in the House or Senate HELP committee. And yet, Grassley and Ezni state that they want 75-80 votes for the bill in order to support it.
I think Josh Marshall is to some extent overthinking his analysis of Mike Huckabee’s claim that “generally Evangelicals are so much more supportive of Israel than the American Jewish community.” Everything he writes about Christian Zionist eschatology, the apocalypse, and Revisionist Zionism is true. But the larger truth is just that Evangelicals, on average, despite the fact that an intuitive reading of the Gospels points in a different direction, are just generally inclined toward an affection for violence, brutality, and authoritarianism.
If you look at support for executing felons or support for torturing terrorism suspects or support for launching aggressive wars, time and again you’ll see that white Evangelical Protestants are the leading proponents of violence as a solution to policy problems.
So if you totally ignore Israel, and just look at the “America debate” inside the United States you find that Evangelicals are much more inclined than Jews to believe that using the military to kill foreigners is a wise and moral approach to security issues. That’s not because Evangelicals are more “supportive of America” than Jews are, it’s because they’re more supportive of violence. Jews and Evangelicals, meanwhile, are both favorably disposed toward Israel. But “support for Israel” in the context of American political debates, is often glossed as meaning something like “proclivity to believe that killing Arabs is a wise and moral approach to security issues.” So it’s not really surprising that Evangelicals, who like violence, are more “supportive” than Jews who tend to be more skeptical of force.
[Obviously, this is all generalization; I know some Evangelical Christians who are pacifists, which is about what you would think a Christian would be if you read the Bible. But by-and-large the Evangelical self-identity correlates with hawkish opinions in the United States.]
Today, NumbersUSA’s Jennifer Magyari posted a video entitled “Grassroots America” which Magyari claims “explains the importance of taking a stand [on immigration] and forcing our Congressmen to listen to our opinions.” The video also features Mariann Davies, member of “You Don’t Speak for Me!,” saying that the idea that anyone who opposes immigration is a “racist” or a “nativist” is “simply not the case.”
That may be true, but the rest of the video’s speakers aren’t exactly the best spokespersons to prove her point. To begin with, the video was posted by NumbersUSA — an organization which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as the “leading immigration-restriction group” whose Executive Director Roy Beck’s “close ties to a key nativist raise questions.” Beck is said to have worked and vacationed with eugenacist John Tanton, edited a book by white supremacist Wayne Lutton, and been referred to by Tanton as his “heir apparent.” If that’s not enough, Davies’ own group was organized by the president of a designated hate group, Dan Stein of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). Both Beck and Stein are also featured in the “Grassroots America” video.
Davies’ argument is also weakened by John O’Sullivan — a conservative journalist who the Cato Institute describes as part of the “anti-immigrant crusaders” who “hijack legitimate concerns about security to advance their pet political cause [reduced immigration].” Davies claims that her colleagues aren’t nativists, but in “Grassroots America” O’Sullivan decides to attack bilingualism:
“I talked to people about the language issue. How it was that bilingualism was spreading everywhere, bilingual education programs were being increasingly adopted. The more people I spoke to, the more I became convinced that this was important, but also mistaken.”
In a separate clip, Spanish-speaking Cuban-American “activist” Roan Garcia-Quintana also stated:
“It’s overwhelming — the people that testify for doing something to stop the illegal alien invasion are average citizens who all they care is to protect our heritage, our American culture, our way of life, and our language and not have all this new poverty — what I call 21st century slavery — be imposed upon us.”
Garcia-Quintana has made a point of making sure people know that his “family’s roots are in Spain,” and has described Mexican and Central American immigrants as “Indo-Hispanics” who “impose” their culture on him.
Stein wraps the video up with some harsh words of warning:
“Nobody has the right to force their way into my home. Nobody has the right to force their way into my country. And millions and millions of Americans all across this nation believe it too. And they’re not going to take this lying down.”
Watch it:
Yesterday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said at a news conference that “there’s no way I can pass a bill in the House of Representatives without a public option.” But Pelosi’s refusal to back down on the issue was undermined a bit today by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD), who said that while he supports the public option, he was open to abandoning it to get a bill passed:
Hoyer (D-Md.) emphasized his support for a public option in a teleconference call with reporters, but also said he wants to ensure Congress sends a bill to the president.
“I’m for a public option, but I’m also for passing a bill,” he said. Democrats believe the public option is necessary, he said, “but we’ll have to see.”
He added that there are many other important parts of healthcare legislation approved by three committees in the House.
Hoyer’s comment echoes HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ recent claim that the public option is “not essential,” which the Obama administration has aggressively sought to walk back.
Exciting! Well, actually, if that doesn’t sound exciting note that according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ James Horman it’s actually even less exciting than you might thing. Next week OMB and CBO will release new deficit estimates and people will try to argue a lot of points based on them. But in fact:
1. Both reports will undoubtedly show that this year’s deficit will be the largest since the end of World War II, relative to the size of the economy. This is no surprise.
2. There will be no simple answer to the question of whether the new projections are bigger or smaller than was expected earlier this year.
3. Whether the new estimates exceed the highest previous estimate for the year will likely depend on the amounts recorded for a particularly volatile category of spending: assistance to troubled financial institutions.
4. The new projections won’t provide any evidence about whether the stimulus legislation is working or whether Congress and the President should continue to pursue health care reform.
5. The only clear conclusion that should be drawn from the new deficit estimates is the continued need for action on long-term deficits.
How to deal with long-term deficits is, of course, complicated and controversial. And yet it’s also in a way quite simple. We need to reform health care to slow the cost growth of Medicare and Medicaid. We need to steadily reduce defense spending as a share of GDP. We need higher taxes. And we need to reform the tax code to make it more efficient so that the higher taxes are economically viable. Given continued economic growth, future Americans will enjoy both more public services and more private consumption than current Americans. The politics, of course, is a different and more difficult matter.
Yesterday Afghanistan conducted its second presidential election since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. While we won’t know the official results for a couple weeks — despite frontrunners, incumbent Hamid Karzai and challenger Abdullah Abdullah, both claiming victory — the reports about the voting that are coming out provide some important indicators on the state of Afghanistan today.
First, despite fears of widespread disruption by the Taliban and other militants, voting did occur. While there was violence across the country — nine civilians and 18 Afghan security force members were killed — the Taliban generally failed to follow through on threats to attack polling stations. Nevertheless, these threats did appear to suppress turnout in the violent south of the country. In Garmser district, where recently deployed U.S. Marines have been fighting the Taliban for almost two months, only 1,683 men voted out of a population of 80,000. Even Kabul had low turnout, though reports indicate that the capital’s low turnout was more due to disillusionment with the government than militant threats.
Second, there’s a real effort on the part of the international coalition to manage expectations. Special Representative Richard Holbrooke noted that “every prediction of disaster has turned out to be wrong” and “it seems clear that the Taliban utterly failed to disrupt these elections.” Marines on the ground in the town of Khan Neshin expressed surprise that the 250 to 300 people who voted did so at all. The local battalion commander “didn’t think we’d even get 10 people, to be honest with you, because of the intimidation campaign.”
Finally, the legitimacy of the vote is questionable. Most notably, female turnout appears to have been low across the country. There are two interrelated issues to be concerned about here: first is the effective disenfranchisement of Afghan women, which is in and of itself enough to delegitimize an election in the eyes of the international community. But this disenfranchisement leaves the door wide open for fraud — there are suspicions that registered female voters, both real and fictitious, will be used to stuff ballot boxes. The fact that voter registration cards were on sale for $10 a piece before the election further heightens suspicious of fraud. (Even Britney Spears managed to get registered to vote in Afghanistan.) A close election possibly decided by fraud only two months after a fraudulent election next door in Iran is a recipe for instability. Add the possibility of a run-off and the United States and NATO are looking at a precarious couple of weeks in Afghanistan.
So far, the U.S. has been right to manage expectations and emphasize the established election process in Afghanistan. But as Holbrooke stated, “The test is going to be in the counting.” If there is instability resulting from the official election results, the United States should continue to emphasize the primacy of the process without favoring one candidate or another. The elections process may slow down the counterinsurgency campaign by holding the Afghan government in stasis, but it is simply something that needs to be plowed through with an eye toward the legitimacy of the future government.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai (wikimedia)
My read of the literature is that strong presidential systems, such as we have in the United States, are moderately ill-advised. The tendency in such systems is for the President and the legislature to every now-and-again find themselves in an intractable disagreement—the scenario knows as “gridlock” in American politics—that doesn’t admit of any clear mechanism for resolution. This often leads to either the President mounting a coup (as used to happen a lot in Latin America) or else to Congress mounting a somewhat specious impeachment drive (as happened in the US during the Johnson administration and has tended to happen more recently in Latin America) in an effort to convert the regime to something more like a de facto parliamentary system.
Be all that as it may, strong presidential systems are also pretty rare outside of the Western Hemisphere where the US influence was very strong during the days of independence. In the twentieth century when the United States was helping countries (Germany, Japan, Austria) under military occupation or emerging from Communist rule (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary) write constitutions even we didn’t advise them to adopt our system. Which led me to wonder how Afghanistan wound up with a strong president. My colleague Colin Cookman was kind enough to send me a not-online article by Barnett Rubin which explains:
The issue of governmental systems came into sharp relief at the CLJ as calls rang out for an up-or-down vote on presidentialism versus parliamentarism. Nearly all Pushtun delegates, joined by some members from other ethnic groups, came out for presidentialism. A bloc of non-Pushtun delegates, however, strongly supported a parliamentary system. Both sides made cases that mixed genuine public considerations with ethnopolitical ambitions. For Pushtuns and reformers, presidentialism provided a way for one of their own—everyone knew that the first incumbent would be Karzai—to emerge from the Bonn compromise with non-Pushtun armed factions as the popularly elected head of state. There would be no uncertainty about who held legitimate executive power in Kabul, and Washington would retain the benefit of having a clearly identifiable Afghan partner whom it would know well and indeed preferred. The largely non-Pushtun delegates who opposed presidentialism saw in it a risk of personal and ethnic dictatorship. A parliamentary system, they argued, would likely result in coalition governments that would be more representative and inclusive, safer from potential abuses of executive power, and hence more stable.
This seems like a really bad reason to favor a presidential system. The plurality ethnic group sees it as a way to entrench their power and, besides, everyone has a particular president in mind who they like. And Rubin’s account of the presidentialists’ more policy oriented case is also unpersuasive to me, “In his speech to the CLJ’s closing session, President Karzai cited post-1945 Italy and India since the Congress Party’s decline as negative examples.”
India seems like the relevant example, where a high level of diversity plus parliamentarism makes it difficult to assemble a stable coalition. Parliamentary government would have a similar problem in Afghanistan. But at the same time, shifting to presidentialism doesn’t actually make the underlying diversity and other social cleavages go away. Instead, it tends to ensure that presidential elections will become zero-sum contests of power between a Pashto candidate and a Tajik candidate in which both sides need to court the support of an Uzbek mass murderer and then deal with the inevitable ensuing legitimacy problems by informally assembling a coalition anyway.
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