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Powell: Advocates Should Not Pressure Congress To Repeal DADT Before It Is Ready, Study Completed

By Igor Volsky on Nov 15, 2010 at 10:19 pm

This evening, during an interview on CNN’s Larry King Live, Gen. Colin Powell reiterated his belief that repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell must “take into account the views of our military leaders,” but cautioned LGBT advocates against urging Congress to lift the ban before the Pentagon publishes its review of the policy.

Asked if he agreed with Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) evolving view on the issue, Powell said, “I share Senator McCain’s view that we ought to let the process unfold and not try to intercept it with court rulings or with people trying to get a vote out of the Congress when the Congress is not ready to vote on it”:

POWELL: My position has been, it has been 17 years since we put that policy in place. Lots of things have happened. Attitudes have changed within our society. But i always believe, as I believed in 1993, that we have to take into account the views of our military leaders who are responsible for the well-being of the armed forces.

KING: So you support the McCain’s view?

POWELL: Yes. But, you know, our military leaders have now spoken. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of Defense, there is some, some difference of opinion among the chiefs that will have to be resolved. But I wish that we would just let that study be finished, let it be published and let everybody read it and not leak parts of it. And so I share Senator McCain’s view that we ought to let the process unfold and not try to intercept it with court rulings or with people trying to get a vote out of the Congress when the Congress is not ready to vote on it.

Watch it:

Powell, who helped usher in Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, first announced his support for repeal in February of 2009, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen testified about their support for lifting the ban before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

His comments on King, however, place him to the right of Gates, who has recently called on the Senate to vote on repeal during the lame duck session. Recent leaks from the Pentagon’s study have found that repeal would not disrupt the military during a time of war, leading Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Susan Collins (R-ME) to call on the Pentagon to release the study ahead of the December 1 deadline.

Education

Florida Republican Officials Worry Rick Scott’s Economic Plan ‘Would Be Devastating’ To School Funding

By Pat Garofalo on Nov 15, 2010 at 7:25 pm

In August, I pointed out that the economic plan put forward by now Gov.-elect Rick Scott (R-FL) was full of regressive tax cuts, making the country’s second most regressive state tax system even worse. But another byproduct of Scott’s plan is that school funding in his state may be significantly shortchanged.

Florida’s schools — like those in many states — are primarily funded by property tax revenue. Scott, meanwhile, has pushed for a 19 percent reduction in property taxes, along with a vague promise to fill the resulting hole in school funding from “state funds.” At least one Republican lawmaker in Florida is not convinced that Scott’s numbers add up:

Sen. Evelyn Lynn, R-Ormond Beach, a former Volusia school administrator heavily involved in education issues during her stint in the Legislature, said that plan worries her. “Certainly we want to reduce taxes, but we don’t want to hurt education,” Lynn said, adding that Scott may have to temper some of his camping promises once in office. “He may change his thinking on some things when he sees how the process works.”

As the Pensacola News Journal reported, “Escambia County Superintendent of Schools Malcolm Thomas, also a Republican, said Scott’s plan to reduce state-mandated school property taxes by 19 percent would cause serious problems because school districts have little left to cut.” “If he’s expecting local school boards to deal with a 19 percent decrease in local funding, it would be devastating, unless he’s going to replace that,” Thomas said.

And with Scott’s plan to further blow a hole in the state budget by eliminating the corporate income tax, it’s hard to see where he would find funding to supplement the schools’ budgets. Florida is facing a $2.5 billion budget shortfall next year, before taking into account the effects of the Gulf oil spill.

This isn’t the first time that a Republican lawmaker has cast doubt on Scott’s plans. Back in September, Florida’s incoming Speaker of the House, Dean Cannon, said that when it comes to rooting out unrealized savings in the state budget — one of the linchpins of Scott’s plan to balance the budget — “Republican House members have been looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow marked ‘waste, fraud and abuse’ as a means to solve all of our problems. No one has found it, because it isn’t there.”

Politics

Mark Warner: We’re ‘Going To Have To’ Raise The Retirement Age To Keep Social Security Solvent

By Zaid Jilani on Nov 15, 2010 at 6:50 pm

Last week, the co-chairs of President Obama’s debt reduction commission released a report outlining their recommendations to reduce the budget deficit. Since then, a raucous debate has erupted over the proper measues that should be taken to rein in the U.S. debt.

Yesterday, Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Mark Warner (D-VA) appeared on CNN’s State of the Union to discuss various political matters. At one point, the senators addressed the proposals made by the commission. Warner said he had to give the “commission a lot of credit for, you know putting out some hard choices. It’s kind of where the reality meets the campaign rhetoric about deficit reduction.” He then went on to say that because “folks at 25 or 30 years old today aren’t going to get Social Security at 65 or 67,” that we’re “going to have to raise the retirement age slowly, in a slow way that doesn’t affect folks 50, 55. He concluded that “this is just math. We’ve got to do some of these things”:

WARNER: I actually give the budget commission a lot of credit for, you know, putting out some hard choices. It’s kind of where the reality meets the campaign rhetoric about deficit reduction. And I think there’s a lot in the plan that I could be supportive of. Listen, some of this stuff is not Democrat or Republican. Some of it’s just math. For example, 50 years ago, eight retirees for every worker, now only two. Look, folks at 25 or 30 years old today aren’t going to get Social Security at 65 or 67. We’re going to have to raise the retirement age slowly, in a slow way that doesn’t affect folks 50, 55. But this is just math. We’ve got to do some of these things.

Watch it:

Social Security is currently projected to be fully solvent until the year 2037. After that, it is expected to be able to pay out 75 percent of benefits until 2084 (once you account for inflation those basically consist of full benefits). It is far from in crisis. That does not mean that there aren’t positive and progressive changes that could possibly be made to the system.

Raising the retirement age, however, would be a particularly punitive way to solve future deficits in the program’s funding. While it is true that average life expectancy has increased over time, these gains are largely a result of life expectancy rising among upper income earners. Among moderate and low income workers, life expectancy has barely changed. And “nearly half of workers over the age of 58 work at jobs that are either physically demanding or involve difficult work conditions.” Raising the retirement age would create enormous burdens on those who work at these jobs.

A better, more progressive solution involves raising the payroll tax cap. Currently, only the first $106,800 of a person’s income is considered taxable for the purpose of funding Social Security. Raising this cap significantly or eliminating it would essentially leave the program fully funded for decades to come, and not create undue hardship on those working physically demanding jobs.

An Election Day poll by Survey USA found that 85 percent of voters are opposed to cutting Social Security, and that Republicans by a 2-to-1 margin back raising the tax cap over raising the retirement age.

LGBT

Lieberman And Collins Urge Pentagon To Release Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Study ‘As Soon As Possible’

By Igor Volsky on Nov 15, 2010 at 6:35 pm

Politico’s Josh Gerstein reports that Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Susan Collins (R-ME) have sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates urging the Pentagon to release the Working Group’s study of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell “as soon as possible”:

Some of our colleagues in the Senate share our view about the importance of passing a defense bill, but they are awaiting the release of the working group’s report before agreeing to begin debate on the bill. We are hopeful that release of the report and the opportunity for our colleagues to review its findings and recommendations will help inform their understanding and alleviate some concerns that they may have regarding the military’s capacity to implement repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in a manner that is consistent with our armed forces’ standards of readiness and effectiveness, unit cohesion, and recruiting and retention. Given the limited amount of time remaining in the 111th Congress, the soonest possible release of the working group’s report could therefore be instrumental in allowing the defense bill to move forward.

Indeed, my colleagues Jeff Krehely and Crosby Burns have released this list of 10 lawmakers “who have said they are waiting to hear from the troops and military leaders before deciding on DADT repeal.” These include: Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA), Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) and Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH). These senators should be held to task once the report comes out and forced to take a position on repeal.

Gates has urged the Senate to pass repeal in the lame duck session but at least two separate Pentagon spokespeople have thus far suggested that the study will not be released before December 1. On Friday, DoD spokesman Geoff Morrell suggested “the full report will be made public for all to review early next month.” Earlier in the week, Pentagon spokesman Col. David Lapan also said he was “not aware that there’s been any effort to speed it up.”

Yglesias

Endgame

By Matthew Yglesias on Nov 15, 2010 at 6:17 pm

I won’t ask to come in:

— Revisiting this makes me curious as to why Greg Mankiw hasn’t offered his take on this morning’s pro-deflation letter from conservative pundits and economists.

— David Frum is way off the reservation.

— Josh Marshall is not a blogger.

— Important tax chart.

— Monetary policy comic book.

— I always forget that New Jersey lets mayors also be state legislators, which I think is a good idea.

Thao, “Bag of Hammers”

Media

CNBC Aids Rep. Ryan In Pushing Falsehoods About The Bush Tax Cuts And Small Business

By Pat Garofalo on Nov 15, 2010 at 5:50 pm

One of the key justifications that Republicans use to support extending the Bush tax cuts for the richest two percent of Americans (at a ten-year cost of $830 billion) is that allowing those particular tax breaks to expire will disproportionately harm small business and job creation. “This is about stopping a job-killing tax hike on small businesses during tough economic times,” argued Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT).

This is a phony argument, as just three percent of people with income from a business large or small would be affected if the Bush tax cuts for the rich expire. Republicans eventually conceded this point, only to begin disingenuously arguing that half of small business income would be affected by the tax increase. Today, CNBC host Joe Kernen helped Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) spread this falsehood, and threw in the incorrect Republican assumption that extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich would spur job creation:

KERNEN: They say it every time, because only two percent of small businesses fall into that. So they say that and they know through their teeth, that they know they’re dissembling…Half the income of small businesses is hit by it!

RYAN: Drive to any town in Wisconsin, go to the outskirts and you’ll see an industrial park. And in that industrial park, nine times out of ten it’s going to be a sub-S corporations that has 50 to 250 employees, who are all in this category of making $250,000 or higher. They’re pass-through entities, they’re partnerships, sub-S’s, they’re the people who are creating the jobs. That’s where the economic engine rests, and that’s who’s getting the tax increases. [...]

KERNEN: But what I don’t understand is if they want jobs, if they want to help the country, with its 10 percent unemployment, why do they dissemble?

Watch it:

First, Kernen is flat-out wrong that half of small business income would be affected by the expiration of the Bush tax cuts for the rich. The Congressional Joint Economic Committee has estimated that half of net business income would be affected, and that its figures “do not imply that all of the income is from entities that might be considered ‘small.’”

As The Wonk Room explained, a lot of these “small businesses” are simply large businesses that are organized as “pass-through” entities, which means they don’t pay the corporate income tax, but “pass-through” their profits to the owners, who then claim the profits on their personal income tax returns. These include the Bechtel Corporation, which is the fifth-largest privately owned company in the United States, posting gross revenue in 2008 of $31.4 billion; the Wall Street buyout firm Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts, which has more than $54 billion in assets and 14 offices around the globe; as well as every partner in a law firm, every passive investor in an oil or gas venture, and anyone with a trust fund.

The GOP wants you to picture the local dry cleaners and hardware store as facing a crushing tax increase, but the fact remains that exceedingly few small businesses will be affected if the Bush tax cuts for the rich expire. And, contrary to Kernen’s assertion, such an extension is the least effective tax or spending step the government could take to boost the economy.

Climate Progress

Global Boiling: The Undersea Immolation Of 2010

By Brad Johnson on Nov 15, 2010 at 5:45 pm

We are killing the oceans, and in so doing, threatening our own survival. “Unusually warm ocean temperatures this year have led to mass devastation of the world’s corals, and prospects for their long-term survival are grim,” Scientific American reports. “Right now, coral reefs around the world are either bleached, dead from bleaching or trying to recover from bleaching,” said C. Mark Eakin, who coordinates the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coral Reef Watch:

2010 has been a major, major year of coral bleaching in all of the oceans around the world.

At Newsvine, blogger Colorado Bob has been compiling the extent of this unimaginable catastrophe, finding mass coral bleaching events in the waters off of at least 15 nations, a direct consequence of mankind’s unchecked burning of fossil fuels. The extinction-scale event — caused by the oceans getting hotter and more acidic as storms grow fiercer — is occurring throughout the global oceanic basin, from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, from the Pacific Ocean to the Arabian Sea:

Fiji: There are cases of coral bleaching in the furthest islands in the Mamanuca Island group.

Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Solomon Islands and East Timor: More than 500 types of coral, living in the so-called coral triangle, are particularly at risk of dying out due to bleaching, according to Andrew Baird of the Australian Center for Coral Studies. The area covers roughly six million square kilometers (2.3 million square miles) of sea bordering Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Solomon Islands and East Timor.

Seychelles, Sulawesi, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia: The worst coral die-off in ten years – possibly ever – has struck across the Southeast Asian and Indian Oceans. The bleaching event extends from the Seychelles in the west to Sulawesi and the Philippines in the east and includes reefs in Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia.

Madagascar: “The reefs around Mayotte have experienced the worst bleaching and mortality so far recorded in the Indian Ocean with over 50 percent of corals affected by the bleaching overall and up to 30 percent coral mortality at the worst-affected sites,” says Dr David Obura, Chair of IUCN’s Coral Specialist Group and Director of CORDIO.

Philippines: A severe wide-scale bleaching occurred in the Philippines leaving 95 percent of the corals dead.

Panama: “I’ve never seen bleaching like [it] in Panama,” said Nancy Knowlton, a coral biologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama who has been studying the local flora for 25 years. She and colleague Hector Guzman have seen massive reefs die in recent weeks in the enclosed lagoon of Bocas del Toro in Panama after becoming coated with giant sheets of slime, the remains of dead microorganisms. “This is NOT a normal condition on reefs, even bleached reefs. Where last year there were healthy corals, this year there was only gray ooze,” she wrote in an e-mail.

Maldives: The Maldives is currently suffering the most serious incident of coral bleaching since the major 1998 El Niño-event that destroyed most of the country’s shallow reef coral.

Kuwait: A group of Kuwaiti divers has reported bleaching in more than 90 per cent of the country’s coral reefs – a sign that the coral is either sick or dead.

In an added insult, most of the deep-sea corals near the BP oil disaster have been killed by toxic goo.

“Despite only comprising about 0.2 percent of the area of the oceans, coral reefs host a quarter of all marine fish species and perhaps 1 to 3 million marine species in total,” writes Asia Sentinel’s Alex David Rogers. “In economic terms, they provide goods and services estimated up to $375 billion per annum. Around 500 million to 1 billion people rely on coral reefs for food, and 30 million of the world’s poorest people in coastal communities depend entirely on reefs as their primary means of food production and livelihood.”

Yglesias

Nomination Fights To Come

By Matthew Yglesias on Nov 15, 2010 at 5:29 pm

With President Barack Obama seeking to move an ambitious legislative agenda through the molasses-like United States Senate,* it was fairly easy for Mitch McConnell and his colleagues to obstruct a given person’s nomination simply by threatening to drag things out. After all, Harry Reid and the White House had better things to do with their pressure floor time than quibble about district court nominees. But just as losing control of the House of Representatives increases Obama’s leverage over Bibi Netanyahu, with any hope of progressive legislation 100 percent dead in the House it would now make sense to dedicate much more Senate floor time to nominations.

Brian Beutler reports that advocates are making the case:

“Reid should concentrate Floor time on must pass bills, message and other votes that highlight differences and important matters that are or should be non-controversial, including confirming lifetime federal judges,” Glenn Sugameli, an advocate for swift judicial confirmations, tells TPM. “All of Obama’s nominees to circuit and district courts have had the support of their home-state Republican and Democratic senators and the vast majority have been non-controversial nominees who have been approved by the Judiciary Committee without objection and approved unanimously when they finally receive usually long-delayed Floor votes.”

“If one or more Republican senators force cloture votes on consensus nominees, they will accurately be seen as mindlessly obstructionist,” Sugameli says. “If they do not, nominees will be confirmed quickly.”

We’ll see if it happens, but it ought to.

That said, a serious push on nominations could become yet another test of the McConnell Way. My intuition is that blanket obstruction would prompt an initially flurry of high-minded denunciations of the GOP, but that if McConnell holds firm it will turn out that a strategy of deliberately sabotaging the executive branch is highly effective. The worse conditions become in the country, the more the President and his party will suffer politically. The idea that swing voters will be able to accurately identify who’s responsible for bad conditions sounds nice, but flies in the face of all the evidence.

Economy

CNBC Helps Rep. Ryan Promote Bogus Arguments About The Bush Tax Cuts And Small Business

By Pat Garofalo on Nov 15, 2010 at 4:55 pm

One of the key justifications that Republicans use to support extending the Bush tax cuts for the richest two percent of Americans (at a ten-year cost of $830 billion) is that allowing those particular tax breaks to expire will disproportionately harm small business and job creation. “This is about stopping a job-killing tax hike on small businesses during tough economic times,” argued Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT).

This is a completely bogus argument, as just three percent of people with income from a business large or small would be affected if the Bush tax cuts for the rich expire. Republicans eventually conceded this point, only to begin disingenuously arguing that half of small business income would be affected by the tax increase. Today, CNBC’s Joe Kernen helped Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) spread this falsehood, and threw in the incorrect Republican assumption that extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich would spur job creation:

KERNEN: They say it every time, because only two percent of small businesses fall into that. So they say that and they know through their teeth, that they know they’re dissembling…Half the income of small businesses is hit by it!

RYAN: Drive to any town in Wisconsin, go to the outskirts and you’ll see an industrial park. And in that industrial park, nine times out of ten it’s going to be a sub-S corporations that has 50 to 250 employees, who are all in this category of making $250,000 or higher. They’re pass-through entities, they’re partnerships, sub-S’s, they’re the people who are creating the jobs. That’s where the economic engine rests, and that’s who’s getting the tax increases. [...]

KERNEN: But what I don’t understand is if they want jobs, if they want to help the country, with its 10 percent unemployment, why do they dissemble?

Watch it:

First, Kernen is flat-out wrong that half of small business income would be affected by the expiration of the Bush tax cuts for the rich. The Congressional Joint Economic Committee has estimated that half of net business income would be affected, and that its figures “do not imply that all of the income is from entities that might be considered ‘small.’”

As I pointed out in this column today, a lot of these “small businesses” are simply large businesses that are organized as “pass-through” entities, which means they don’t pay the corporate income tax, but “pass-through” their profits to the owners, who then claim the profits on their personal income tax returns. They include the Bechtel Corporation, which is the fifth-largest privately owned company in the United States, posting gross revenue in 2008 of $31.4 billion; the Wall Street buyout firm Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts, which has more than $54 billion in assets and 14 offices around the globe; and the auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, which has operations in more than 150 countries.

Also included in Ryan’s definition is every partner in a law firm, every passive investor in an oil or gas venture, and anyone with a trust fund. The GOP wants you to picture the local dry cleaners and hardware store, but the truth is much more complicated.

The fact remains that exceedingly few small businesses will be affected if the Bush tax cuts for the rich expire. And, contrary to Kernen’s assertion, such an extension is the least effective tax or spending step the government could take to boost the economy. CNBC is helping Ryan distort the facts of the debate, to advocate continuing unaffordable and ineffective tax breaks for the very wealthiest Americans.

Politics

Amidst National Islamophobic Upheaval, Arizonans Protest Mosque That’s Actually A Church

By Tanya Somanader on Nov 15, 2010 at 4:50 pm

In an era saturated with absurd moments of anti-Muslim fear-mongering, mosques have become a touchstone for Islamophobia. Even unbuilt mosques have set off a wave of anti-Muslim sentiment in Tennessee, Texas, California, and most notably, New York. Not to be outdone, the people of Pheonix, AZ were quick to call foul over the appearance of a dome-like structure along an interstate. But in the clamor over the impending Muslim takeover, these Arizonans missed one small detail — the building is not a Mosque, it’s a church:

A new dome-like structure near 19th Avenue along Interstate 10 in Phoenix is the Light of the World church, a nondenominational Christian church hoping to modernize traditional worship services, a church spokesman said

Since the distinctive dome shape went up, church leaders said they have received phone calls from concerned neighbors who’ve mistaken the building for an Islamic mosque.

On Wednesday, church officials hung a sign reminding people they’re Christian congregation. “We’re trying to let people know that we’re Christian and our churches are modern,” said Uzieo Martinez.

Watch a report from KPNX-TV:

“It is unfortunate that people are so intolerant to differences that they aren’t willing to see that the place of worship is not a mosque,” said Tayyibah Amatullah of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Arizona chapter. But with so many high-profile figures selling unfounded, anti-Muslim fear to the public, is it any wonder that all many Americans can see in Islam is a phantom menace?

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