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Yglesias

Settlements Near Jerusalem

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 8, 2010 at 6:06 pm

Whenever I’ve spoken to visitors to the US who are concerned about the settlement situation in the vicinity of Jerusalem, the subject of hypothetical bloc E-1 always features prominently. You see maps like the one I’ve posted below:

ej-settlements-08 1

Build something on that pale blue splotch that becomes part of Israel, and East Jerusalem would be necessarily cut off from any hypothetical Palestinian state on the West Bank. Consequently, that particular plan has always been enough of a hot spot that US pressure has succeeded in getting it not built. Come to Jerusalem for yourself and instead of a splotchy map you get to see what it actually looks like:

IMG_0073

Quite a beautiful view of empty space leading into the unpopulated desert.

But in addition to those kind of measures, there’s also smaller-bore activities under way whereby Israelis claim pre-1948 ownership of East Jerusalem property, evict the current Palestinian residents, and then move in. Such goings-on in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood are now the locus of a lively protest movement that we visited briefly before an unexpected rainfall sent a lot of people scattering:

IMG_0081

Unlike E-1, something like one Jewish house more or less east of the old Green Line doesn’t permanently imperil the chances of peace. But the individual acts of injustice are more concrete. There’s also something deeply ironic about the way these claims are anchored in the idea of a “right of return” to pre-1948 Jewish-owned land when the crux of the Israeli position on the “right of return” to pre-1948 Palestinian owned land west of the Green Line is the observation that recognizing such a right in general terms would make a two state solution impossible. And so it would!

I also today had the opportunity to meet several Palestinians who explained that, in essence, the Israeli right is correct and all this talk of settlements is a red herring and Palestinians will never accept anything less than full equality between Jews and Arabs in all the land west of the Jordan River. And it’s of course possible that this is correct. But the Netanyahu government seems disinclined to actually find out. In general, a couple of days of sustained engagement with the participants in this conflict tends not to inspire a ton of optimism.

Politics

Anti-Muslim Group Wants Rep. Ellison Off Anti-Semitism Task Force He ‘Has No Business Being On’

By George Zornick on Oct 8, 2010 at 6:01 pm

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), one of two Muslim members of Congress, is under attack from an anti-Muslim group because he sits on the Congressional Task Force on Anti-Semitism. The paradoxically named Americans Against Hate held a rally in Florida this week to call for Ellison’s immediate removal, and issued a statement asking Rep. Ron Klein (D-FL), co-chair of CTFAS, to take Ellison off the task force:

Representative Klein has both the authority and the responsibility to remove Keith Ellison from the Congressional Task Force on Anti-Semitism, a group that Ellison has no business being on. We demand that he does so immediately. Every day that Ellison sits on that task force is an offense to those who fell victim to anti-Semitism and/or radical Islam.

AAH claims that Ellison has “associations” with groups that are supposedly connected to terror, but cites only speeches Ellison has given to Muslim-advocacy groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations and the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, which sponsored a recent trip Ellison took to Gaza. (When he came back from that trip, Ellison met with a local Jewish group and told them about his conversations with Gazans “who didn’t seem to appreciate how devastating the rocket attacks have been on Israel.”)

AAH’s founder, Joe Kaufman, is no stranger to mainstream conservatism. He spoke at a major Tea Party rally in Ft. Lauderdale this July, and has appeared several times on Fox News, including on Hannity. In his most recent appearance, on Fox & Friends, Kaufman decried a Muslim Family Day at Six Flags Great Adventure. Watch it:

Rep. Klein has denied AAH’s request to remove Ellison in the past, but apparently the group thinks it will be able to change his mind. Interestingly, AAH already approached Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) — CTFAS’s other co-chair — and Kaufman claimed that Pence told him that he simply “would defer his position on Ellison to Klein.”

Health

Minnesota Health Providers Defy Pawlenty, Send Comments On ACA Implementation To HHS

By Igor Volsky on Oct 8, 2010 at 6:00 pm

Three health associations representing state insurers, hospitals, and doctors have defied Governor Tim Pawlenty’s effort to resist implementing key provisions of the Affordable Care Act and sent “valuable information and suggestions” to HHS to help the agency in “promulgating future rules that will govern Minnesota’s health insurance exchanges and insurance markets.” The move comes just days after Minnesota joined one other state in refusing a million dollars in federal grants to begin planning its health exchanges.

Minnesota Departments of Health, Human Services and Commerce had prepared to send comments regarding the Exchange-related provisions in the Affordable Care Act, but never did after the Pawlenty administration claimed to have missed the submission deadline. The Minnesota Council of Health Plans obtained the drafted comments through a freedom of information request and sent that, along with a cover letter, to the federal government. The Minnesota Hospital Association, and the Minnesota Medical Association joined the effort.

The cover letter, obtained by the Wonk Room, reads:

The health care community in Minnesota, including health plans, hospitals and health systems, providers, employers, state agencies and consumers, have been actively and collaboratively evaluation and assessing the value than insurance exchange will bring to our marketplace and the communities we serve. While we are disappointed that Gov. Tim Pawlenty chose not to apply to your department for Exchange planning funds, stakeholders continue to work collectively to plan for the implementation of an Exchange in Minnesota.

Responding to the request for comments, the Minnesota agencies said that they anticipate “that Exchange-related issues will be discussed in our upcoming Legislative Session and that many creative ideas and questions will arise over the next few months and years.”

In August, Pawlenty issued an executive order preventing the state from applying for federal funding, but accepted abstinence-only dollars and $10 million in grants. None of the Republicans running for Governor have endorsed Pawlenty’s order.

Justice

Poll Indicates Public Perceptions Of SCOTUS Driven By Confirmation Fights, Not SCOTUS Decisions

By Ian Millhiser on Oct 8, 2010 at 5:00 pm

The Roberts Court has pursued an almost single-mindedly pro-corporate agenda, immunizing powerful corporate interest groups from campaign finance law, from laws intended to protect the environment, and from laws intended to protect women and older Americans in the workplace.  Unfortunately, however, a recent Gallup poll suggests that these actions are going largely unnoticed by Americans at large.  According to the poll, an individual’s opinion of just one justice — Justice Sonia Sotomayor — appears to drive their opinion of the Court at large far more than the Court’s actual decisions.

Justice Sotomayor joined the Court in August of 2009, and Gallup’s data shows a dramatic shift in public approval of the Court among both Democratic and Republican voters at the time of her confirmation:

gallup1

Apparently, Democrats love Justice Sotomayor, as their approval of the entire Court nearly doubled after she joined it.  Likewise, Republicans must loathe Sotomayor, since their approval of the very conservative Court declined 16 points the minute Sotomayor became a justice.

Both of these shifts bear little resemblance to the actual impact of Sotomayor’s confirmation.  Justice Sotomayor is a center-left moderate who replaced another center-left moderate, Justice David Souter.  And while there are some early indications that Sotomayor may be slightly to Souter’s left on corporate immunity cases and slightly to Souter’s right on executive power, it is diffcult to identify a single case that would have come out differently if Souter were still on the Court.

The “Sotomayor Effect” may also explain why an increasing percentage of Americans perceive the Court as “too liberal” even as the Court marches further and further to the right:

gallup2

Once again, the data shows an increasing belief that the Court is liberal at the same time that Sotomayor joined its ranks, and a decrease in the number of people who perceive the Court as conservative.  Likewise, the data shows a spike in the number of people who perceived the Court as “too conservative” at about the same time that conservatives Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito joined the Court.  In other words, many Americans appear to base their opinion of the overall Court largely on the political views of the last high-profile nominee to be confirmed (Justice Kagan appears to have had a minimal impact on public perceptions of the Court, but most of the nation was distracted from her confirmation by the Gulf oil disaster and other higher profile stories).

Most importantly, this data demonstates the challenges facing progressives trying to educate the public about the harm the Roberts Court has done to American law.  Hopefully, however, the public’s almost universally negative reaction to the Court’s most high profile corporate immunity case will begin to bleed through to public perceptions of the Court as a whole.

Security

Rebuking Pledge To America, Rand Paul Says Cutting Defense Spending ‘Has To Be On The Table’

By Zaid Jilani on Oct 8, 2010 at 4:45 pm

pie4 In their much-touted “Pledge To America,” Republicans last month said they plan to end the nation’s “crushing debt.” Yet they explicitly exempt the Department of Defense from any spending cuts, and even promise to “fully fund missle defense” — conservatives’ long-sought pipe dream program that would use domestic missiles to intercept incoming ones, which has never proven workable. In a recent interview with a local news station, Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA) said that reining in the deficit “begins with the Department of Defense,” a laudable sentiment that unfortunately has not yet been backed up by the senator’s actions.

Now, another major Republican is rebuking the Pledge’s call for declaring the defense budget off-limits from waste trimming. Kentucky GOP candidate for U.S. Senate Rand Paul was leaving an event at a local Chamber of Commerce in Kentucky yesterday when PBS reporter Gwen Ifill approached him and asked him about his views on various issues. At one point, Paul began to explain that while he’s running as Republican, he sees himself as being independent of the party, and complained that “often we get too distracted by getting too partisan.” As an example, he explained that to tackle the budget deficit, there has to be a “compromise” where Congress looks “at the whole budget.” He chided Republicans for “always” excluding the military from cuts and saying “we’re not gonna look at the military.” He concluded, “Everything has to be on the table. We have to do this intelligently“:

PAUL: I think the issues are more important than the party. I think often we get too distracted by getting too partisan. I don’t see people who are Democrats as always being wrong or Republicans as always being wrong. I think there has to be a compromise on the budget. In order to address the deficit the only compromise that I think we can have is you have to look at the whole budget. We’ve always excluded the military and said we’re not gonna look at the military. Or the Democrats exclude the social and domestic welfare spending. Everything has to be on the table. We have to do this intelligently.

Watch it:

If Paul is really serious about including the Pentagon’s budget in a deficit-reduction effort, they can look to The Sustainable Defense Task (SDTF) report released earlier this year. Assembled by Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) and consisting of the nation’s leading defense and budget experts, the SDTF identified nearly $1 trillion in waste that can be cut from the defense budget over the next ten years simply by eliminating outdated Cold War-era programs. He could also reference a recent report by CAP experts Lawrence Korb and Laura Conley that lays out $108 billion in defense cuts in the current 2015 budget forecast.

Yglesias

The Mood in Pakistan

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 8, 2010 at 4:27 pm

When my colleague Caroline Wadhams got back from Afghanistan recently I had a brief-but-depressing chat with her about her observations, and now you too can get depressed by her writeup:

I was struck by the deep pessimism I encountered from the moment I arrived in Kabul for the election observation mission. Each and every person I spoke to, whether foreign or Afghan, believed Afghanistan was deteriorating despite the infusion of U.S. troops and assistance. They also thought that the insurgency was spreading.

Conveniently, she reports that people also pretty universally feel that a quick US exit would be even worse than the deteriorating status quo. Basically, nobody knows what to do. I have some further thoughts on where that leaves us, but I want to express myself judiciously and am in a bit of a rush at the moment so I’ll just recommend her piece for now.

Health

GOP Attacks Admin For Missing Deadlines, Then Tries To Slow Down ACA Implementation

By Igor Volsky on Oct 8, 2010 at 4:00 pm

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX)

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX)

In recent days, Republicans have been trying to embarrass the federal agencies that are implementing the Affordable Care Act by requesting a series of reports suggesting that health reform is falling short of expectations. But this approach has resulted in a rather bizarre and contradictory message.

On Monday, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) released a memorandum requested by Sens. Tom Coburn (R-OK), Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and John Cornyn (R-TX), which found that HHS “missed seven deadlines mandated by the new law.” “Future months are unlikely to see HHS improve its record of compliance,” Coburn wrote on his Web site. “The Department failed to meet one-third of 22 deadlines in six months, yet now the Department has less than three months to meet another 29 requirements required by law.”

On Wednesday, in response to a request from Cornyn, CRS issued a different report showing that “of the 12 reform-related final rules issued this year by the Health and Human Services (HHS) Department, 10 came in the form of ‘interim final rules,’ which don’t include a public comment period.” Cornyn responded to the report by offering legislation forcing HHS to consider public comments for all new regulations.

Cornyn is trying to have it both ways. Forcing the agency to abandon the common practice of using interim final rules to meet legislative deadlines would only slow down the implementation process, bolstering the GOP’s claim that HHS was not complying with the law. Interim final rules allow federal agencies to issue regulations before responding to every public comment it receives. Agencies are required to respond to all comments and can address any concerns in the final rule.

In fact, relying on the very same technique that CRS used to identify the interim final rules in the ACA, I searched the GPO Access electronic rulemaking database using the advanced search mechanisms that allow identification of only final rules, and searching the phrase “Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003″ — signed into law by President Bush — found at least 6 interim final rules. Turns out this is a fairly common practice:

- “We implemented section 303 and 304 of the MMA in an interim final rule published in the Federal Register on January 7, 2004.

- Medicare Program; Competitive Acquisition of Outpatient Drugs and Biologicals Under Part B; Interim Rule

- Medicare Program; Physicians’ Referrals to Health Care Entities With Which They Have Financial Relationships (Phase II); Interim Final Rule

- January 6, 2004 interim final rule with comment period (69 FR 828), section 411(a)(1)(B) of Pub. L. 108-173 provided that hold harmless transitional corridor provisions shall apply to sole community hospitals located in rural areas.

- April 6, 2004 interim final rule with comment period excludes radiopharmaceuticals from the data reporting requirements that apply to Medicare Part B covered drugs

- On January 7, 2004, an interim final rule was published to implement provisions of the MMA applicable in 2004 to Medicare payment for covered drugs and physician fee schedule services.

Cornyn’s office did not return calls for comment.

Politics

Clueless Rick Santorum: ‘Bush Policies Worked’ To Reduce Poverty To ‘The Lowest Rate Ever’

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Oct 8, 2010 at 3:38 pm

Former Republican Sen. Rick Santorum appeared on Fox News yesterday to defend former House Speaker Newt Gignrich’s absurd war on food stamps, and threw in a factually-challenged defense of the Bush administration as well for good measure. Speaking of increased poverty rates during the recession, Santorum boldly stated that “Bush polices worked,” and resulted in the lowest poverty rates “ever in the history of this country” for African Americans and single women:

SANTORUM: Yeah, remember, under the Bush administration, welfare — I mean, excuse me, poverty among African Americans and among single unmarried women, poverty was at the lowest rate ever in the history of this country. So Obama’s policies are not working, Bush polices worked! For long a time as a matter of fact.

Watch it:

There’s one small problem with Santorum’s claim — it’s completely false. In fact, while the Bush years were disastrous for the economy as a whole, they were particularly devastating for the poorest Americans. Under Bush, the number of Americans living in poverty jumped an astonishing 26.1 percent. When President Clinton left office in 2000, there were about 31.6 million Americans living in poverty, according to the Census Bureau. When Bush left office in 2008, that number had jumped to 39.8 million — the largest number in absolute terms since 1960.

As for Santorum’s claims about Africans Americans, he is dead wrong. A Center for American Progress report found, “The percent of African Americans living in poverty increased from 2000 to 2006 by an average of 0.82 percent per year, after having declined by an average of 1.25 percent per year in the 1990s” — and that was before the recession. Poverty rates among African Americans climbed even higher in the last two years of the Bush administration, reaching an astonishing 24.7 percent in 2008.

And despite Santorum’s claims, the poverty rates for unmarried women also climbed under Bush. As a Center for American Progress report on single women found, single mothers were particularly hard hit, with nearly 30 percent living in poverty in 2008 — “a significant increase” over 2000 when fewer than than 26 percent were impoverished. And not only did the rate increase, but the gap between married and unmarried women grew: “The poverty rate of unmarried women was 13.4 percentage points higher than married women in 2000, but it was 14.6 percentage points higher in 2008,” the report found. Not surprisingly, that gap was even wider for women of color.

It’s unclear where Santorum came up with his bogus claim, as the data is easily accessible and irrefutable. Of all the issues on which to try to defend Bush’s record, poverty is among the most difficult. As the Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein noted last year parsing the Census Bureau’s annual report on poverty, “On every major measurement…the country lost ground during Bush’s two terms.”

Economy

Bank Of America Freezes Foreclosures In All 50 States — Other Banks Should Follow Suit

By Pat Garofalo on Oct 8, 2010 at 3:00 pm

Recently, three major banks — Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Ally Financial (a wing of GMAC Mortgage) — have instituted foreclosure moratoriums in some states, in the face of a growing numbers of revelations regarding the “robo-signers”: bank employees who were approving foreclosures, sometimes hundreds a day, without properly verifying documentation, in potential violation of the law. They were joined by a fourth, PNC Bank, late yesterday. And now Bank of America has taken its moratorium another step, freezing foreclosures in all 50 states:

Bank of America Corp. is placing a moratorium on all foreclosure proceedings and sales across the U.S. amid mounting political pressure on big U.S. banks to examine foreclosure-documentation problems…The decision by Bank of America to extend its postponement to all 50 states takes effect Saturday. The bank doesn’t intend to lift the moratorium until its assessment of all documentation is complete, a spokesman said.

The banks are realizing that they have a real mess on their hands. As the Washington Post detailed today, the banks have relied on a system of electronic document processing of questionable legality, so now the lenders can’t come up with the proper documents showing title to the homes they’re trying to foreclose upon. They don’t really understand what sort of legal trouble these revelations are going to bring them, so they’re stopping the foreclosure train in its tracks until they can sort it out.

At this point, the other large banks should be following BofA’s lead, particularly those like Wells Fargo that have yet to implement a moratorium of any kind (despite one Wells official testifying that he only checked the dates on the paperwork for the up to 150 foreclosures he approved daily). And while they’re pausing, it’s time for the government to gets its own foreclosure prevention programs in order.

President Obama’s veto yesterday of legislation that would have forced states to accept documents notarized documents from all over the county was a good step that preserved due process for homeowners, but that doesn’t address the underlying weakness in federal anti-foreclosure efforts, which have been quite disappointing. As I laid out here, there are some steps that the government can take, including allowing housing counselors to approve loan modifications and significantly ramping up mortgage mediation programs, that would significantly help troubled borrowers stay in their homes.

As David Dayen put it, “the lenders can assess the risks, and make the conclusion that the best-case scenario for them is to modify loans on a massive scale.” And the government should be doing all it can to facilitate that.

Read more about fighting back on foreclosures in today’s Progress Report.

Politics

Humane Society Condemns Subscription-Only Firefighters For Standing By And Letting Animals Die In Fire

By Zaid Jilani on Oct 8, 2010 at 2:36 pm

kittens2 As ThinkProgress has been reporting all week, South Fulton Fire Department firefighters from Obion, Tennessee, stood by and watched as the Cranick family’s home burned down because their fire-fighting services were available on a subscription basis only, and the family had not paid the $75 fee. Immediately, right-wing writers at the conservative movement’s bulkhead magazine, The National Review, and conservative radio host Glenn Beck defended the county and argued that firefighting should not be a public service available to all, regardless of ability to pay.

The Cranicks revealed in an interview with MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann that they lost four pets in the fire — three dogs and a cat. Now, the Human Society of the United States (HSUS) — the 11 million member-strong organization dedicated to animal welfare — has condemned the Obion County policy of only offering firefighting to rural residents through a subscription-based service. In their statement, the Humane Society writes that it’s “inexecusable that three dogs and a cat would have to die in such a horrible way, with firefighters ordered to not intervene, because of an unpaid $75 service fee“:

The Humane Society of the United States is issuing the following statement in response to the heartbreaking news that four animals died in an Obion County, Tenn., fire because the homeowner didn’t pay a service fee, and firefighters were told they could not extinguish the blaze:

“It is inexcusable that three dogs and a cat would have to die in such a horrible way, with firefighters ordered to not intervene, because of an unpaid $75 service fee. Putting out fires is a matter of life and death for people and animals, and South Fulton city officials should quickly reconsider their emergency response policies before others are put at risk,” said Leighann McCollum, Tennessee state director for The HSUS.

The Humane Society is not the only major national organization to condemn Obion County’s policy following ThinkProgress’s reporting. Earlier this week, the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) — which “represents more than 298,000 full-time professional fire fighters and paramedics who protect 85 percent of the nation’s population” — called the firefighters who refused to help the Cranicks “incredibly irresponsible. … [Firefighters] shouldn’t be forced to check a list before running out the door to see which homeowners have paid up,” said a statement by the group.

As the Progress Report writes, “The story of Gene Cranick’s home illustrates the ascendancy of a compassion-less conservative philosophy that believes in the on-your-own society and has virtually abandoned the common-good creed that we are our brothers keepers. Only by rededicating ourselves to rebuilding an American Dream that works for all Americans can progressives repudiate this merciless philosophy.”

Update

Change.org is organizing a letter-writing campaign to tell “Obion County Sherrif Danny Jowers, the main contact person for Obion County Office of Emergency Management, that letting pets burn to death over $75 is unacceptable.” The animal welfare group The Philanthropy Team is demanding the resignation of Mayor David Crocker and Fire Chief David Wilds.

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