ThinkProgress Logo

Politics

Group Run By Anti-Stimulus Crusaders Rove And Gillespie Airs Ad Attacking Reid For Lack Of Stimulus Money In NV

By Ben Armbruster on Jul 16, 2010 at 7:20 pm

GOP operatives Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie recently founded a network of right-wing attack groups to rival what they view as inept and ineffective Republican National Committee. One of those groups, American Crossroads, is a 527 committee, formed to spend tens of millions of dollars on House and Senate races this year.

The group recently launched an ad in Nevada attacking Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D):

It’s bad enough that Nevada has the highest unemployment in the nation. And Harry Reid claims to be helping the jobs situation? Really Harry? Recent data show Nevada ranks 50th in the money received from Harry’s stimulus bill. That’s right — Senate leader Harry Reid has gotten his own state less help than every other state but one. And along with bailouts, deficits, and Obamacare, that’s what Harry Reid’s done for Nevada. Really Harry? That’s not the kinda help Nevada needs.

Watch it:

Is American Crossroads really concerned about who gets what monies from the Recovery Act? Here’s Rove and Gillespie attacking the stimulus:

GILLESPIE: The fact is that we’ve got unemployment at 9.5 percent. They said it wasn’t going to go above 8 when they passed the stimulus. We have a $1.4 trillion deficit. We have $13 trillion in debt.

ROVE: Look, the stimulus bill was not stimulative. The American economy is strong enough it’s gonna come out of recession. The question is did these policies impede or speed up its recovery. I think they impeded its recovery. I don’t think they sped it up.

Rove even attacked the stimulus for not creating jobs. “We’re approaching the anniversary of the stimulus package, and a recent poll shows, and I think it was 9 percent of the American people think the stimulus package has helped create jobs,” he said.

Moreover, Nevada is one of the smallest states in the U.S. and as the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson noted, “stimulus money went disproportionately to states with larger public sectors and higher Medicaid bills.” In fact, it’s Reid who has been trying to get unemployment benefits extended for out-of-work Americans, but Senate Republicans have been blocking it from getting though. “Almost two million people who are long-term unemployed. These are not numbers. They are people,” Reid said scolding the GOP for their obstruction.

“The ad is factually accurate, [but] It’s also an embarrassment,” Thompson noted. “Republicans have spent the last three months blocking a Sen. Reid-endorsed extension to unemployment insurance that would particularly help Nevada.”

Update

Political Correction notes that the ad isn’t factually accurate: “According to data from Recovery.gov, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act awarded 13 states less money than Nevada.”

Health

Bloomberg Poll: 61% Don’t Want To Repeal Health Law

By Igor Volsky on Jul 16, 2010 at 6:32 pm

Yesterday, I speculated that support for repeal will diminish as benefits like the new preventive care guidelines are rolled out and people actually realize what’s in this bill and now the Huffington Posts’ Sam Stein reports that this already seems to be happening:

A Bloomberg News poll released on Wednesday shows that a full 61 percent of respondents don’t have interest in repealing the health care legislation that Congress passed earlier this year (47 percent want to see how it works, 14 percent say it should be left alone). Just 37 percent want the bill repealed (as is the wish of the Republican leadership).

The numbers underscore increasing public approval of the health care reform law. It also illustrates the potential dangers the Republican caucus assumes by make the repeal agenda a major plank of its campaign platform.

I think these results generally mirror what we’ve been seeing in other focus groups around the country. People may not understand what exactly is in the bill but they’re also confused by the GOP’s knee-jerk repeal it now campaign. As the early benefits are being rolled out, taking away dependent coverage and high risk pool insurance will become politically unpopular positions and Republicans need to be asked if they support repealing those benefits. Already, polls have shown that this will be a tough question to answer as an increasing number of Americans are coming out in favor of the health law (even Rasmussen agrees).

The GOP leadership has thrown its weight behind two discharge petitions offered by Reps. Steve King (R-IA) and Wally Herger (R-CA) as recently as last month. The petitions will need to attract 218 members to force the House to take up repeal legislation that would eliminate the entirety of the health law. As of Thursday, 133 members have signed on to King’s petition and Herger’s repeal and replace bill has 42 co-sponsors.

Yglesias

Endgame

By Matthew Yglesias on Jul 16, 2010 at 6:13 pm

Stab your back:

— Fox News amping up the race-baiting.

— Voters have managed to forget that TARP was a Bush administration initiative. I might add that it was actually rare Bush administration success!

— Bad economics is much more harmful than mere voodoo.

— Central bank independence gone awry.

— David Frum and the lump of labor fallacy.

— Useless confirmation hearings for the Fed Board.

One time when profanity is appropriate in a prestige publication is when it’s inside quotation marks. Hence your song of the day, the Kills “Fuck the People”.

Politics

Report: ‘It’s Clear That Some With Racist Agendas Are Trying To Make Inroads Into’ The Tea Party

By Ben Armbruster on Jul 16, 2010 at 6:00 pm

obama-white-slaveryThis week, the NAACP approved a resolution condemning what it called “racist elements” within the Tea Party movement. “You must expel the bigots and racists in your ranks or take full responsibility for all of their actions,” NAACP President Benjamin Jealous said. Conservatives and tea partiers immediately took offense. Rush Limbaugh called the resolution “not true,” while Sarah Palin said it is “false” and “appalling.” Sean Hannity claimed he “can’t find any” racist Tea Party signs, while Tea Party Express founder Mark Williams attacked the NAACP, claiming it makes “more money off race than any slave trader ever.”

But as ThinkProgress has documented, there is racism in the Tea Party movement. Moreover, a new report from the Kansas City Star digs deeper into the racist elements of the Tea Party and citing various instances of racism linked to the movement, concludes that “it’s clear that some with racist agendas are trying to make inroads into the party,” noting that “in several instances, tea party members with racist backgrounds”:

Billy Roper is a write-in candidate for governor of Arkansas and an unapologetic white nationalist. “I don’t want non-whites in my country in any form or fashion or any status,” he says.

Roper also is a tea party member who says he has been gathering support for his cause by attending tea party rallies. “We go to these tea parties all over the country,” Roper said. “We’re looking for the younger, potentially more radical people.”

The Star also found that “white nationalist groups are encouraging members to attend tea parties”:

The Council of Conservative Citizens, a St. Louis-based group that promotes the preservation of the white race, has sponsored its own tea parties in some Southern states.

The council’s website has referred to blacks as “a retrograde species of humanity” and said non-white immigration would turn the country into a “slimy brown mass of glop.” Gordon Baum, the group’s founder, told The Star that the council encourages members to participate in tea parties. [...]

Roper, a former organizer for the neo-Nazi National Alliance and now chairman of White Revolution, said he has been attending tea party rallies to recruit members and garner support for his 2010 write-in campaign for Arkansas governor.

“Liberals think these are all poor, angry, working-class whites, but that’s not true,” said white nationalist movement scholar Leonard Zeskind. “It’s a solid middle class. The belief that these are people hit by the economic downturn is a myth. It’s people who have what they want and don’t want it taken away. They’re defending white privilege. Their slogan is ‘We want our country back.’”

Indeed, a New York Times/CBS poll found that 52 percent of Tea Party supporters said “too much has been made of the problems facing African-Americans” while 28 percent of Americans overall said the same.

Economy

Banks Take Aim At CFPB Director: ‘This Is Akin To A Supreme Court Nominee For Financial Services’

By Pat Garofalo on Jul 16, 2010 at 5:30 pm

Potential hard feelings between Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Elizabeth Warren aside, the financial services industry is already gearing up to influence the next stage of financial regulatory reform, which is the design of new rules reining in Wall Street and the actual construction of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. There are plenty of regulations that have to be made, and plenty of discretion for regulators in crafting them, so bank lobbyists will have ample opportunity to influence a process that will be nowhere near as high-profile as was the regulatory reform fight on Capitol Hill.

But, first things first, the financial service industry is trying to influence who becomes the inaugural nominee for CFPB director:

“This is akin to a Supreme Court nominee for financial services,” Richard Hunt, president of the Consumer Bankers Association in Arlington, Virginia, said in an interview. “We are taking this very seriously.”

“All of that power is in the hands of one person. It’s going to be the closest approximation to a czar that Washington has ever seen,” said Joseph Lynyak, a law partner at Venable LLP who represents financial services companies. This conveniently leaves aside that the CFPB’s rules can be vetoed by the newly created Financial Stability Oversight Council — which is composed mostly of bank regulators — but it’s true that the CFPB’s director is going to have a lot of influence over in which direction the agency sets its initial course.

As Matt Yglesias wrote, “effective, high-prestige public agencies (the United States Navy, the Federal Reserve) attract a lot of motivated applicants and thus get on a self-reenforcing path of effective personnel and high prestige. But when you start something new, everything is wide open.” And as the Bush administration ably demonstrated, appointing heads of regulatory agencies who have no interest in actually regulating anything can turn those agencies into nothing more than a punchline.

For instance, remember SEC Chairman Chris Cox? Under him, the agency meant to be on the front lines of policing financial fraud became an afterthought and then released a laughable response plan long after the financial crisis was already well underway. But that was just par for the course for administration that had no interest in reining in financial services industry excess. The CFPB has the potential to be a game-changer for consumers, but only if it does not come under the thumb of the bank regulators or have a director unwilling to stand up to the banks themselves.

“’There’s always that possibility‘ that Wall Street lobbyists will succeed in weakening the bill’s provisions during the rule-making process,” said Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT). So in that sense, the work of financial reform is still very much underway.

Yglesias

Who Pays the Bills?

By Matthew Yglesias on Jul 16, 2010 at 5:28 pm

Tim Lee has a smart post that conservative/libertarian fusionism seems to make sense largely because people have put time, money, and energy into making it seem like it makes sense—establishing dozens and dozens of “free market” institutions dedicated to talking about why there should be low taxes and a business-friendly regulatory climate while avoiding discussion of criminal justice issues, “social issues,” and national security policy.

So conceptually speaking, it wouldn’t be hard to create a liberaltarian movement. All you’d have to do is create a mirror image of the “free market” think tanks. Hire people like Radley Balko and Glenn Greenwald. Pay them to write about all the issues that “free market” think tanks don’t: foreign policy, civil liberties, gay rights, the drug war, immigration, torture, the death penalty, and so forth. Don’t hire anyone to write about taxes, school choice, guns, or other topics where libertarians and liberals have strong disagreements.

In the next paragraph, though, he writes that “[t]he big obstacle (other than the lack of obvious donors) to such a project is that a lot of libertarian intellectuals have so completely internalized the assumptions of the fusionist alliance that they have trouble writing about policy in a way that liberals find compelling.”

I think that what’s inside the parenthesis deserves to be highlighted here. Throughout the policy domain, you see large numbers of people working on the issues that donors want to see people working on. To take an example of an issue that “free market” think tanks and liberal ones alike could embrace, nobody seems interested in funding an Institute for Parking Reform with dozens of staffers to complain about parking mandates and the use of rationing rather than prices to allocate street spaces. Ergo, it doesn’t happen.

Economy

BP Launches Effort To Control Scientific Research Of Oil Disaster

By Brad Johnson on Jul 16, 2010 at 5:01 pm

bpclosedForeign oil giant BP is on a spending spree, buying Gulf Coast scientists for its private contractor army. Scientists from Louisiana State University, Mississippi State University and Texas A&M have “signed contracts with BP to work on their behalf in the Natural Resources Damage Assessment (NRDA) process” that determines how much ecological damage the Gulf of Mexico region is suffering from BP’s toxic black tide. The contract, the Mobile Press-Register has learned, “prohibits the scientists from publishing their research, sharing it with other scientists or speaking about the data that they collect for at least the next three years.” Bob Shipp, head of marine sciences at the University of South Alabama — whose entire department BP wished to hire — refused to sign over their integrity to the corporate criminal:

We told them there was no way we would agree to any kind of restrictions on the data we collect. It was pretty clear we wouldn’t be hearing from them again after that. We didn’t like the perception of the university representing BP in any fashion.

The lucrative $250-an-hour deal “buys silence,” said Robert Wiygul, an Ocean Springs environmental lawyer who analyzed the contract. “It makes me feel like they were more interested in making sure we couldn’t testify against them than in having us testify for them,” said George Crozier, head of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, who was approached by BP.

These efforts to buy silence and cooperation come in addition to the $500 million Gulf Research Initiative, a Tobacco Institute-like program managed by a panel picked by BP to disburse scientific research grants in the coming years. Louisiana State University, University of Florida’s Florida Institute of Oceanography, and Mississippi State University’s Northern Gulf Institute have already accepted $10 million each.

In contrast, the federal government has failed to coordinate the massive research program needed to save the Gulf, preventing academic researchers from observing the data collected by the NRDA teams that include both government and BP contractors. “The science is already suffering,” Richard Shaw, associate dean of Louisiana State University’s School of the Coast and Environment said. “The government needs to come through with funding for the universities. They are letting go of the most important group of scientists, the ones who study the Gulf.” (HT: The Independent Weekly)

Yglesias

Public Opinion and Supreme Court Confirmation

By Matthew Yglesias on Jul 16, 2010 at 4:44 pm

150px-Seal_of_the_United_States_Supreme_Court.svg

Via John Sides, a new paper from Jonathan Kastellec, Jeffrey Lax, and Justin Phillips on public opinion and Supreme Court confirmation votes:

We present the first direct evidence that state-level public opinion on whether a particular Supreme Court nominee should be confirmed affects the roll-call votes of senators. Using national polls and applying recent advances in opinion estimation, we produce state-of-the-art estimates of public support for the confirmation of 10 recent Supreme Court nominees in all 50 states. We find that greater home-state public support does significantly and strikingly increase the probability that a senator will vote to approve a nominee, even controlling for other predictors of roll-call voting. These results establish a systematic and powerful link between constituency opinion and voting on Supreme Court nominees.

My guess is that a lot of the causation runs in the other direction. Had 20 Republican Senators reacted to Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination by saying “she sounds like a great pick,” she probably would have been extremely popular right out of the gate. One of the virtues of party discipline is that it sends a message to both that party’s self-identified supporters and also to the self-consciously moderate.

Justice

Right-Wing Judges Suggest Reviving Discredited Bush-Era Detention Policies

By Ian Millhiser on Jul 16, 2010 at 4:40 pm

gitmoThe Supreme Court rejected President George W. Bush’s claim that a president may lock up anyone he wants without giving them a meaningful opportunity to prove that they are wrongfully detained on four separate occasions. Nevertheless, a panel of conservative judges on the right-wing D.C. Circuit recently suggested that they will carve a hole in these four decisions that is so big as to render them absolutely meaningless.

One of the most important questions in any lawsuit is what “evidentiary standard” applies. In criminal cases, for example, the government cannot win unless they prove their case “beyond a reasonable doubt,” thus requiring them to present a very convincing case in order to achieve a conviction.

Shortly after the Supreme Court’s last major detention case, all of the judges on the DC federal trial court charged with hearing detainee hearings met and decided that these cases should be decided under a “preponderance of the evidence” standard, and the Justice Department agrees that this is the proper standard. In English, this means that the government may only detain an individual if it can demonstrate that it is more likely than not that the detention is justified.

This week, however, in a case called Al-Adahi v. Obama, a panel of three right-wing appeals court judges claimed that this “preponderance” bar should be replaced by one that is so low that it would be almost impossible for a detainee to be released:

[W]e are aware of no precedents in which eighteenth century English courts adopted a preponderance standard. Even in later statutory habeas cases in this country, that standard was not the norm. For years, in habeas proceedings contesting orders of deportation, the government had to produce only “some evidence to support the order.” In such cases courts did not otherwise “review factual determinations made by the Executive.” In habeas petitions challenging selective service decisions, the government also had the minimal burden of providing “some evidence” to support the decision. Habeas petitions contesting courts martial required the government to show only that the military prisoner had received, in the military tribunal, “full and fair consideration” of the allegations in his habeas petition. And in response to habeas petitions brought after an individual’s arrest, the government had to show only that it had probable cause for the arrest.

Many of the standards listed here would turn detainees’ right to challenge their detention into an empty charade.  If the government, for example, only had to show “some evidence” proving that a person was a terrorist, then even the weakest case against a detainee would be sufficient to keep them locked up forever.

There are, of course, many open legal questions concerning detainees’ habeas rights.  If a person who was previously associated with a terrorist group convincingly reputates that group and its tactics, for example, must they be freed?  One thing is clear, however.  All detainees must be given a meanful opportunity to challenge they detention.  Al-Adahi is simply wrong to suggest that a detainee’s tribunal can be nothing more than a sham.

Yglesias

Inflation Still Below Trend

By Matthew Yglesias on Jul 16, 2010 at 3:57 pm

If the price level was above the long-term trend, and the inflation rate was above the Fed’s 2 percent target, the Fed would make money tighter. That’s its job. Instead: “The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) declined 0.1 percent in June on a seasonally adjusted basis [...] index for all items less food and energy rose 0.2 percent in June after increasing 0.1 percent in May.”

I think it’s important not to get too hung up on whether or not to characterize this as inflation or about whether or not the Fed should fear deflation. The Fed should try to hit its price stability target. It’s been undershooting the target for a while now. That means we need looser money, aimed at the goal of restoring the price level to its trend trajectory.

Older

Switch to Mobile
ThinkProgress Signup Overlay Skip and Continue to ThinkProgress Skip and Continue to ThinkProgress

Sign Up