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McGovern: If More People Paid Attention To Afghanistan, The Policy Would Change

By Zaid Jilani on Jun 30, 2010 at 8:55 pm

kormemorial Tomorrow, the House of Representatives is slated to take up a $93.5 billion spending bill that includes $33 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that the Senate passed late last month. The war supplemental has divided the Democratic caucus, with many Democrats uneasy about spending billions more on the war in Afghanistan while they are unable to scrap together the votes to extend unemployment insurance due to a backlash from conservative members claiming it would be too expensive.

In order to allay the concerns of Democrats who feel like they are paying for a war with no end in sight, Rep. Jim McGovern (MA) has authored an amendment, along with Rep. David Obey (D-MI), that would require the President to submit a timeline for the orderly withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Earlier today, Think Progress joined McGovern on a conference call and asked him why his more conservative colleagues see extending unemployment insurance as too expensive but raise no issue with the cost of the war. McGovern said that the unemployed have no lobby in Washington and suggested that if Americans paid more attention to the war, legislators would be less likely to vote for blank checks for the conflict:

TP: I have two questions. One, how much support do you think you’ll have from your caucus and also from the leadership tomorrow for the vote tomorrow on requiring the President to supply a timeline for the drawdown, the second question is why do you think your colleagues are able to easily dismiss additional aid for the unemployed or Medicaid expansions, or extensions rather, and yet are unable to continually vote for funding for the war?

MCGOVERN: We haven’t done the whip count, so we don’t know, we’re hoping for a very strong vote, we’re going to work it like we want to win it. [...] The question about unemployment insurance, the reality is the jobless, those who are unemployed, don’t have a lobby up here. [...] On the war quite frankly, it’s kinda moved to the background. [...] We’re not asked to pay for the war, there’s no war tax, there’s no draft, we’re all just weeding about our business, and even in our newspapers with the exception of the recent General McChrystal flap, the war has moved off the front page. So people just kinda go along to get along and we just keep on going along and not feel the pressure to change anything. Well, part of the reason we want this debate tomorrow and part of the reason we’re doing this call is because we want to increase the pressure on our colleagues is and get people across the country to understand this is a big deal, people are dying over there, we are going bankrupt as a result of this war, we don’t have a clearly defined mission on what we’re doing over there. [...] I think to the extent we can focus the attention on what’s happening over there, the more and more we’ll see people say we need to change this policy.

Listen to it:

Last month, Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) introduced a similar amendment to the Senate’s war funding bill that would’ve required the President to submit a timeline for withdrawal to the Congress. It failed 18-80. While President Obama has identified July 2011 as the date when he plans to start bringing troops home from Afghanistan, the administration has sent mixed signals about how many soldiers it will bring home and how long it will take.

Health

How Accurate Is The CBO’s 75-Year Cost Projection?

By Igor Volsky on Jun 30, 2010 at 8:35 pm

The Congressional Budget Office released two separate 75-year spending projections this morning. One estimated what would happen under current law; the other predicted what the deficit would look like if Congress patched the doc fix, ignored the cost controls in the health care law and extended the Bush tax cuts:

cbo75yr

The cynic in me believes that the bottom graph is probably more accurate than the top graph , but even that does not take into account all the possible changes — at least when it comes to the health care law. The problem is that CBO doesn’t score things like prevention and payment reform and relies on a narrow spectrum of evidence to estimate the costs and savings. This kind of math has gotten the agency in trouble before. For instance, CBO has consistently underestimated the savings from Medicare hospital payments in the early 1980s, (which ended up saving more in just one year than CBO predicted for three years) and the Medicare Part D legislation. In this report, it notes that “A wide range of changes could occur—in people’s health, in the sources and extent of their insurance coverage, and in the delivery of medical care—that are almost impossible to predict but that could have a significant effect on federal health care spending, both under the legislation and under prior law.”

Indeed, there is a whole body of research that quantifies the savings from the provisions that the CBO largely ignores. In May, the Commonwealth Fund and the Center for American Progress Action Fund released a study that relied on business literature about the inefficiency in the health care sector, experiences of health practitioners, and the real world experiences of Geisinger Health System, Health Partners, Denver Health and others and estimated higher savings from modernization and payment reform. As a result, they found that the annual growth rate in national health expenditures falls from 6.3 percent absent reform to 5.7 percent under the health law. Similarly, the administration’s Council of Economic Advisers also released a report last year which found that health reform would reduce health care spending by 1 “percentage point over an extended horizon.”

The point of this is to say that the 75-year estimate is a rough guesstimate that’s based on a very specific and narrow interpretation of data. It should be seen as such.

Politics

Why Aren’t Tea Parties Demanding That The Government Hold BP Accountable On Behalf Of Taxpayers?

By Zaid Jilani on Jun 30, 2010 at 7:45 pm

teab Tea Party activists’ self-proclaimed mission is to demand lower taxes. TEA, in fact, stands for Taxed Enough Already. As a part of this anti-tax crusade, the Tea Party has vehemently opposed comprehensive health reform, clean energy legislation, and even mandatory garbage collection.

Given that these protesters take their name from the Boston Tea Party, which was organized around protesting an unfair tax benefit given to a massive British corporation, and that British oil giant BP’s oil disaster could end up costing taxpayers billions of dollars, you’d think that Tea Partiers would be demanding that the government hold BP accountable and make the corporation pay the full costs for its bad behavior, so that taxpayers don’t have to foot the bill.

Yet the Tea Partiers haven’t descended on BP’s headquarters or marched on Capitol Hill demanding, for example, that the government lift the $75 million oil spill liability cap on BP so that the damages it pays aren’t severely limited. On the contrary, they’ve attacked President Obama for securing a $20 billion escrow fund from BP to recompense victims of its oil spill and cozied up to politicians who’ve sided with BP. As the Associated Press noted last week, “Tea Party candidates [have stood] by BP to rail against President Obama.” Here are just a few examples of Tea Party organizers and Tea Party-endorsed politicians siding with the foreign oil giant against American taxpayers:

– Republican Study Committee chair Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), who headlined a Tax Day tea party in the nation’s capitol this year, derided the escrow fund as “Chicago-style shakedown politics.” [6/16/10]

– Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), who has proudly boasted of supporting the “Tea Party movement and the people getting involved,” echoed Price’s language as he apologized to BP CEO Tony Hayword for the White House’s “shakedown” it performed while trying to hold his company accountable. [6/17/10]

– Conservative talk show host and chairman of the Tea Party Express Mark Williams compared Obama’s efforts to secure the escrow fund to those of “mobsters,” and added that where he comes “from, they call it extortion.” [6/21/10]

– The “tea party favorite” in the Oklahoma GOP gubenatorial primary, state senator Randy Brogdon, said that BP’s oil disaster was “a perfect example of why government should never be involved in the private sector,” while blasting efforts to properly regulate the foreign oil giant so that it couldn’t cause more devastation in the future. [6/21/10]

Without tough government action to make sure that BP pays for the own costs of its own disaster and doesn’t drop the tab on taxpayers — as leading right-wing figures like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce president Tom Donohue and House minority leader John Boehner (OH) have suggested — it is likely that the oil company will get off easy, much like Exxon did following its own oil disaster two decades ago.

If Tea Partiers truly want to defend taxpayers from facing undue burdens, it may be time for them to don their signs and demand that BP pay for the entire cost of its own disaster by lifting the oil spill liability cap and ask that the government end billions of dollars in special tax breaks for Big Oil (just as the original tea partiers wanted to end the tax advantages of the British East India Trading Company).

Economy

Alan Simpson Rebuts The ‘Plain Damn Lies’ Of Conservatives Who Say Reagan Didn’t Raise Taxes

By Pat Garofalo on Jun 30, 2010 at 7:15 pm

Back when he was first announced as co-chairman of the Obama administration’s debt commission, former Republican Senator Alan Simpson (WY) bucked today’s conservative orthodoxy by saying that the commission needed to consider tax increases as well as spending cuts to get long-term deficits under control. “To say that all we have to do is take care of waste, fraud and abuse, and foreign aid is a like a sparrow’s belch in the midst of typhoon,” he said. “That is nothing, less than 1 percent of the budget.”

Simpson has garnered criticism from the right for his stance. “He’s old and grumpy, and he doesn’t like the Reagan Republican Party,” said anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist said. Simpson was not cowed, however, and today went back on the offensive, slapping down the conservative ethos around Ronald Reagan and his supposed resistance to any and all tax increases.

At a public hearing of the commission, Simpson said that one of the “myths, and the misconceptions, and the distortions and, as one president said, the plain damn lies” promulgated by the right is that Reagan didn’t raise taxes when the situation called for it. As Simpson pointed out, he most certainly did:

Let’s just disengage ourselves from the myth that Ronald Reagan never raised taxes. He did. And here are four big ones. So I hope this will clear the air for some of the groups today. In 1982, the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, that rolled back about a third of his ’81 tax cuts, raised corporate tax rates, and to a lesser extent income tax rates. Raised taxes by almost one percent of GDP, which at that time was the largest percentage in peacetime increase ever. 1982 gas tax increase, 1983 Greenspan commission raised payroll taxes…Then there was the 1984 deficit reduction tax…Then there was the Railroad Retirement Revenue Act, Consolidated Omnibus Budget of ’85…So there were a lot of them. Just thought I’d throw that in.

Watch it:

Reagan, in fact, raised taxes in seven of his eight years in office. “No peacetime president has raised taxes so much on so many people,” Paul Krugman pointed out.

“Reagan was more pragmatic than those who now quote him,” said former Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM), who also is of the opinion that tax increases must be on the table to deal with the long-term deficit. “Those who claim they’re better Republicans than we are — put their solutions in front of us and let’s see if they’re doable.”

As former Reagan economic official Bruce Bartlett wrote, “every serious budget analyst — I mean every — knows that revenues must be part of the solution to our deficit problem…[T]he idea that we can or even should embark on serious deficit reduction with no tax increase whatsoever is grossly immature and unworthy of consideration.” But that is the idea that the modern conservative movement clings to, as unrealistic as it is.

Yglesias

Endgame

By Matthew Yglesias on Jun 30, 2010 at 6:14 pm

Do you know what you’re missing?:

— The CBO did a bad bad thing when calculating the alternative fiscal scenario.

— Continuity of Government.

— Before raiding streetcar funds Vince Gray was against raiding streetcar funds.

— Lawrence Korb on civil-military relations.

— There’s no contradiction between more stimulus now and more deficit reduction later.

— Elena Kagan’s questioners can’t decide if they want her to uphold precedent or overrule it.

Dressy Bessy, “If You Should Try to Kiss Her”.

Climate Progress

Global Boiling: Record June Heat Fells Robert Byrd, 18 Other Americans

By Brad Johnson on Jun 30, 2010 at 6:11 pm

June 2010 Temperature AnomalyCoal pollution may have felled Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV), the longest-serving member of the U.S. Senate, at the age of 92. The aged giant of the Senate had been in declining health for years, but died last week after suffering from “symptoms of heat exhaustion” during Washington’s record heat wave:

Mr. Byrd, a 92-year-old Democrat from West Virginia, was admitted to an undisclosed hospital late last week with symptoms of heat exhaustion and severe dehydration as temperatures in the Washington area approached 100 degrees.

The record mid-Atlantic heat wave is part of the global boiling enveloping the planet, caused by greenhouse gases from coal and oil pollution. The increasingly deadly heat waves fueled by man-made global warming are a real threat to the health of Americans, especially the vulnerable elderly. The record heat in June — continuing to make 2010 the hottest year on record across the globe — has been identified as the killer at least 18 Americans across the nation:

June 2: PENNSYLVANIA A 50-year-old man wearing a heavy three-piece wool suit was found dead on a South Philadelphia street. At 88 degrees, the high temperature was 15 degrees above normal.

TENNESSEE A 47-year-old North Memphis woman was found dead in her home. She had last been seen alive on May 29. The high temperature of 92 degrees was 7 degrees above normal.

June 3: PENNSYLVANIA A 77-year-old man died in in the West Philadelphia neighborhood of Wynnefield. At 89 degrees, the high temperatures was 15 degrees above normal.

June 19: TEXAS Anna Iovine, 79, died on her couch in North Dallas. At 98 degrees, the high was 9 degrees above normal.

June 20: TEXAS Dallas police “found the body of 73-year-old Rosie Mosley on her sofa” in southern Dallas. At 99 degrees, the high was ten degrees above normal.

June 21: TENNESSEE 70-year-old Robert Murry was killed in his Memphis home in the middle of an ongoing 23-day 90-plus heat wave.

June 23: TENNESSEE An “88-year old man was found dead in his North Memphis home.” The “high temperature was 95 degrees with a heat index over 100 degrees,” part of an ongoing 23-day 90-plus heat wave.

June 24: ARKANSAS “State health officials have recorded Arkansas’ first heat death of the year,” but “the state Health Department did not release details about the victim in an announcement today, citing patient confidentiality.” Little Rock suffered this month from 27 days of 90+ plus weather, more than twice the average.

June 25: TEXAS Rose Staubus, 73, was found dead in her Richardson, TX home, of high blood pressure and hyperthermia. She died on the 15th consecutive day of a 90-plus heat wave. Richardson, which normally has four days of 90-plus weather in June, had 26. Another Dallas-area resident was declared dead earlier in the month from heat exposure.

June 26: MARYLAND “Three heat-related deaths were reported in Maryland this week, as 90-degree temperatures ruled in the Washington region, and a 100-degree reading on Thursday broke a record that had stood for 116 years. Each of the people who died in Maryland was 65 or older and all had underlying health conditions, according to the state Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. One of the three died in Montgomery County, and the other two were Baltimore County residents.”

June 28: CALIFORNIA Alfonso Zarate, 56, died of heat stroke in Arvin, CA “on a day when temperatures climbed as high as 107 degrees,” about 11 degrees above normal.

PENNSYLVANIA A “46-year-old woman was found dead in a first floor bedroom at a home” in Philadelphia’s West Oak Lane neighborhood. The high temperature of 96 was 13 degrees above normal.

PENNSYLVANIA An “88-year-old man was found dead in a first floor bedroom of a house in Germantown,” outside of Philadelphia.

June 29: MARYLAND Two senior citizens in Maryland, one in Cecil County and one in Prince George’s County, died of hyperthermia “as the mercury climbed past 90 degrees for the 11th consecutive day and the mark for the hottest June on record was tied.” The average high temperature in the region is seven degrees cooler.

If greenhouse gas pollution is not sharply reduced, most of the United States will bake under 90-plus heat waves that last the entire summer, either killing thousands more people or overloading our decrepit fossil-powered electricial network as those who can afford air conditioners use them.

Politics

Klobuchar Hits Coburn For Saying America Was More Free When There Were No Women On The Supreme Court

By Guest Blogger on Jun 30, 2010 at 6:10 pm

As confirmation hearings on Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court proceed, Senate Republicans continue blustering through their arguments — even going as far as to lambast Kagan’s clerkship under Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American justice. Today, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) echoed classic Republican talking points under President Obama, lecturing the Supreme Court nominee about how Americans are “losing freedom,” and how we were more free “30 years ago.” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) then responded to Coburn by pointing out that Coburn’s idea of a more “free” society was when women had fewer rights:

KLOBUCHAR: I was really interested and listening to Senator Coburn. … He was actually asking you, just now, back 30 years ago if you thought that we were more free. … But I was thinking back 30 years ago, was 1980. … And then I was thinking, were we really more free, if you were a woman in 1980? Do you know, solicitor general, how many women were on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1980?

KAGAN: I guess zero.

KLOBUCHAR: That would be correct. There were no women on the Supreme Court. Do you know how many women were sitting up here 30 years ago in 1980?

KAGAN: It was very striking when Senator Feinstein said she was one of two women. I thought, how amazing. So, how many?

KLOBUCHAR: There were no women on the Judiciary Committee until after the Anita Hill hearings in 1991. Do you know how many women were in the United States Senate in 1980, 30 years ago?

KAGAN: I’m stumped again.

KLOBUCHAR: No women were in the United States Senate. There had been women in the senate before, and then in 1981, Senator Kassebaum joined the Senate. So, as I think about that question about if people were more free in 1980, I think it’s all in the eyes of the beholder.

(Klobuchar later corrected herself later to note that Kassebaum was already serving in the Senate at the time, having been sworn in in 1978.)

Watch it:

Kathryn Lopez, the editor of National Review Online, quickly responded to Klobuchar’s comments on Twitter, writing, “given the women who are in the senate now, i’d be happy with the zero number again.” Within moments, the insensitive comment had disappeared from Lopez’s Twitter page, but ThinkProgress captured a screenshot:

Ktweet

– Nina Bhattacharya

Security

Brutal Beating Of Staten Island Teenager Part Of A Spate Of Attacks Against Latinos

By Andrea Nill Sanchez on Jun 30, 2010 at 5:30 pm

Alejandro Galindo in the hospital.

Alejandro Galindo in the hospital.

Last week, Alejandro Galindo, a Mexican day laborer in Staten Island, was attacked on his way home. Galindo was punched in the face and suffered a fractured eye socket and brain trauma. A couple hours later, an 18-year-old Puerto Rican man was brutally beaten, leaving him in a coma with head trauma and a fractured jaw. Police classified the first incident as a hate crime, but have yet to connect Galindo’s attack to the one that followed. The father of the Puerto Rican victim, who did not want to disclose his name for fear of retribution, is convinced that the attack was racially motivated. If he is right, it will be part of a string of anti-Latino hate crime to occur in the North Shore region of Staten Island in the past couple months.

“A lot of people in Port Richmond, New Brighton, West Brighton, everywhere, it’s Latinos getting hit,” said the father of the latest victim. In early April, 26-year-old Mexican immigrant, Rodolfo Olmedo, was assaulted by four men who beat him with a baseball bat, wooden planks and a metal chain, and yelled anti-Mexican slurs at him. “You’re a f—— Mexican,” the suspects allegedly told Olmedo. “We’re gonna beat you up.” The next Sunday, another Mexican man was attacked with a bat. A third assault in April left a Latino man with a broken arm, and stitches across his forehead. Meanwhile, this past Tuesday, a Staten Island man was arrested for making threatening phone calls to the Rev. Al Sharpton over his opposition to Arizona’s immigration law.

Rep. Michael McMahon (D-NY) has condemned the attacks, stating, “[t]his attack is just the latest in a string of disgraceful violence against members of our community whose only crime is having a different background. It is very upsetting to me that such hateful crimes could occur on the streets of Staten Island.” So far, it appears his opponents in the upcoming election have remained silent on the attacks, but they have chosen to fan the flames of the related immigration debate. Fellow candidate Candidate Michael Allegretti (R) recently said that Arizona is “under siege by illegal aliens.” “We cannot allow people to be a drain on our resources, our schools, our hospitals, and our tax dollars,” stated Allegretti. Congressional candidate Michael Grimm (R) has stated he supports an immigration law that requires “all those detained or questioned by local law enforcement personnel for a specific suspicion of violating local or state laws to be required to produce appropriate identification.” Staten Island Borough President Jim Molinaro, who is not running in the race, slammed Mexican Felipe Calderon’s opposition to the Arizona law, stating “[t]he man should’ve been given a one-way ticket out of the country back to the banana republic where he came from.”

It might seem that the race for New York’s 13th Congressional District has little to do with the string of attacks against Latinos that is plaguing Staten Island, however, several reports over the past few years have indicated that the heated immigration debate has led to a nationwide increase in anti-Latino heat crimes. A report released by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) directly attributed a disturbing environment of “racial intolerance and anti-immigrant hatred” in nearby Suffolk County, NY in part to the fiery anti-immigrant rhetoric of local politicians and law enforcement. Allegretti and Molinaro’s comments probably didn’t motivate the Staten Island attackers, but they do contribute to an environment of fear and hate towards immigrants. Meanwhile, if Grimm’s policy were to go into effect, chances are crimes like these would never be reported in the first place.

Yglesias

Is Eric Cantor Smart?

By Matthew Yglesias on Jun 30, 2010 at 5:27 pm

Ezra Klein asks I question I’ve wondered about myself—whence comes the notion that Eric Cantor is a super-smart policy wonk? Is it just that he wears glasses? That he’s Jewish? That his district is close to DC, so it’s relatively easy for him to do schmoozing with Beltway types?

Or has he actually achieved some noteworthy feats of policy wonkery? I’ve never seen ‘em. Of course it’s easy to develop a low opinion of people whose political views you don’t admire, but I think we’d all have to concede that something like Paul Ryan’s “budget roadmap” is an intellectual ambitious document and not just a piece of political positioning. As best I can tell, though, Cantor hasn’t mastered any area of policy or really done anything at all to earn his reputation. I don’t just want to slam the guy, though, most members of congress don’t blaze exciting new trails of policy thinking. What’s weird about Cantor is the reputation, not the reality. But maybe one of my conservative friends wants to email me with some testimonials.

Politics

Sen. Bennett: ‘I find plenty of slogans on the Republican side, but not very many ideas.’

By Ben Armbruster on Jun 30, 2010 at 5:25 pm

bob-bennettLast month, Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT) came in a distant third behind two other GOP candidates vying for the three-term senator’s seat at the Utah Republican Party’s nominating convention in Salt Lake City. His defeat was heralded as a Tea Party victory and prompted Utah’s other GOP U.S. senator, Orrin Hatch, to say tea partiers “don’t have an open mind” and “won’t listen.” Yesterday, Bennett had some harsh words for his party and its future:

“As I look out at the political landscape now, I find plenty of slogans on the Republican side, but not very many ideas,” Bennett told The Ripon Society.

“Indeed, if you raise specific ideas and solutions, as I’ve tried to do on health care with [Oregon Democratic Sen.] Ron Wyden, you are attacked with the same vigor as we’ve seen in American politics all the way back to slavery and polygamy; you are attacked as being a wimp, insufficiently pure, and unreliable.”

Bennett predicted that the GOP would win back control of the House in this year’s midterm elections, but added, “The concern I have is that ideology and a demand for absolute party purity endangers our ability to govern once we get into office.”

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