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Is Ginni Thomas Getting Rich Off Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court Decisions?

By Ian Millhiser on Feb 4, 2011 at 8:52 pm

Supreme Court spouse Ginni Thomas has a new job — as the head of a Tea Party lobbying firm called “Liberty Consulting.” Her new firm, which promises to give “voice to principled citizens and the tea party movement in the halls of Congress through governmental affairs efforts” also offers a very unusual service to its clients:

Liberty Consulting offers advice for short or long term projects and bringing resources to bear for impact — whether it includes a short term bill-reading project, assistance on congressional oversight efforts or an effective coalition for impact. Additionally, Liberty Consulting offers advice on optimizing political investments for charitable giving in the non-profit world or political causes.

Ginni Thomas’ new career advising clients on how to donate money to political causes is striking in light of the fact that this career path was much more difficult to break into just one year ago. In Citizens United v. FEC, Ginni’s husband Clarence cast the key fifth vote enabling corporations to spend unlimited money influencing U.S. elections. As a result of this vote, outside groups spent nearly $300 million influencing the 2010 elections — much of which would have been illegal before Justice Thomas greenlighted this spending.

Now, Ginni Thomas appears to have found a way to earn money off her husband’s actions as a justice. Clarence Thomas released countless amounts of corporate spending on U.S. elections, and Ginni Thomas can get rich advising those corporate clients on how to direct that spending.

To be sure, it is possible that Ginni is somehow limiting her advice to “political investments” that were legal before Clarence gave businesses like hers so many new potential customers. But if this is the case, Ginni has an obligation to explain just how she is limiting her advice — it’s the only way to remove the obvious cloud of corruption her actions have created around her husband.

Health

Do Americans Support Opting Out Of Health Reform?

By Igor Volsky on Feb 4, 2011 at 7:15 pm

Rasmussen has a new poll out that on its face would suggest that 54% of Americans support Sens. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) and John Barrasso’s proposal to allow states to opt out of the individual mandate, but I suspect that the response would be far different if respondents were informed of the consequences of abandoning the program or given another option. Rasmussen asks and finds:

- Should individual states have the right to opt out of the entire health care plan?
54% say they should.
30% say they should not.
15% are unsure.

- Should individual states have the right to opt out of portions of the plan that they disagree with?
54% say they should.
31% say they should not.
15% are undecided.

What’s happening here is the same phenomenon that we’ve seen in health care polls past. When voters are asked do you support the health law, a majority say they do not. But when they’re questioned on the law’s specifics — do you support the ban against pre-existing conditions, keeping children on their parents’ plan until 26 years of age, and closing the Medicare Part D doughnut hole — support greatly increases.

Consequently, if voters were told that opting out of the mandate would more than likely undermine the insurance market reforms, the number of respondents who favor leaving the plan would take a nose dive. The poll also has two key omissions (as far as I, a non-platinum subscriber to Rasmussen can tell): (1) it leaves out the fact that an opt out provision ALREADY exists in the law, but requires states to increase coverage and does not kick in until 2017 and (2) does not ask about a bipartisan proposal that would allow states to opt out of the mandate in 2014 if they can figure out a better way to expand coverage and lower costs.

Economy

Child Poverty Hits 25 Percent In Texas, But Gov. Perry Still Proposing Deep Cuts To Child Services

By Pat Garofalo on Feb 4, 2011 at 6:50 pm

After spending the last few years lecturing the country about how his supposedly “prudent fiscal decisions” stood in stark contrast to fiscal policy at the federal level, Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) is being forced to grapple with a huge hole in his own state’s budget. At $27 billion (more than twice what Perry had expected it to be), the state’s deficit puts it about on par with California.

It isn’t only Perry that’s been holding out his state as a model of economic performance. The “Texas miracle” has long been touted by conservatives as a success of an economy that is low-tax, low-regulation, and low-social service. But as a new report from the Center for Public Policy Priorities noted, Texas’ child poverty rate is going through the roof, with nearly one in four children living beneath the poverty line:

At the same time, Perry and the state’s Republican legislature are aiming to gut the child support services in his state to address his budget gap:

In the wake of a massive revenue shortfall the proposed state budget will invest $10 billion less in Texas kids over the next two years, even while more of the state’s children live in poverty, have no health insurance, and are born too early and too small…If current trends continue, the ‘Texas Century’ will likely will likely be one where [our] kids are sicker, less educated, and unprepared to take on the challenges of the 21st century.

While other governors, like Gov. Jerry Brown (D-CA), are at least trying to raise some revenue, in addition to implementing painful budget cuts, Perry and the Republican controlled legislature are going for the slash-and-burn approach. Not only are child services and health care coming up for cuts, but so are funds for education, highways, and law enforcement.

The worst part of this story is that Texas is currently sitting on a $8.2 billion rainy day fund that it refuses to use to prevent severe budget cuts. And some of the money in the fund is Recovery Act dollars that Perry squirreled away, instead of using them to actually boost the economy or preserve jobs.

The situation in the states is only going to get worse as the last drops of the Recovery Act begin to dry up, and states are going to have to budget responsibly to address their fiscal problems while still providing important services for their most vulnerable citizens. This nuance, however, seems to be lost in Texas.

Yglesias

Endgame

By Matthew Yglesias on Feb 4, 2011 at 6:11 pm

Monkey see, monkey do:

— Presidents’ droit du seigneur.

— College still not worthless.

— Publicly traded firms seem to be on the decline.

— Dating advice.

— “To form a government”.

Last night I learned that the otherwise estimable David Roberts is one of those misguided souls who thinks Ten is better than Nevermind. I think this is best refuted with reference to the casual brilliance of “Stay Away”, one of the superior album’s lesser tracks and yet still fantastic.

Health

The Problems With Searching For An Alternative To The Individual Mandate, Part II

By Igor Volsky on Feb 4, 2011 at 5:50 pm

Rep. Peter Defazio (D-OR)

Last night, I expressed my frustration at Democratic lawmakers flirting with alternatives to the individual mandate. This morning, that turned to anger after I saw Brian Beutler’s report on Rep. Peter Defazio’s (D-OR) proposal:

Under his plan, a person opting out “must file an ‘affidavit of personal responsibility’ with the state exchange. Such a filing will waive their rights to: 1) Enroll in a health insurance exchange; 2) Enroll in Medicaid if otherwise made eligible; and 3) Discharge health care related debt under Chapter 7 bankruptcy law,” DeFazio wrote in a letter to colleagues Tuesday.

Under his plan, if a person wants back into the system, they’d need to buy insurance on their own, out of pocket, for five years. The idea here, and with other, similar plans, is to moot one of the constitutional complaints about the mandate — that it penalizes “inactivity.”

The question is whether tweaks like this will create “adverse selection” in the insurance market. That’s what would happen if the people who opt out are broadly healthier than the people who don’t, and it would cause premiums to rise considerably.

Adverse selection — the idea that young people would simply opt out for a period of five years, leaving the risk pool full of sicker individuals who are more expensive to cover — is just one problem with this plan. The other very obvious shortfall is that if the individual does become sick during the five year period, he or she may have a hard time affording health insurance coverage and will pass on the costs of care to other payers in the health care system.

Again, this is not the time for Democrats to be publicly exploring alternatives to the mandate. Why add more weight to Judge Vinson’s decision finding the mandate unconstitutional? (And for the reasons I outline here). This time would be better spent reminding the public of the GOP’s past support for the policy and how the law benefits seniors and other key demographics.

Yglesias

Strangely Sensible Barber Licensing

By Matthew Yglesias on Feb 4, 2011 at 5:30 pm

A correspondent sent me a link to a North Carolina state legislator proposing “AN ACT PROVIDING THAT ONLY BARBERS MAY USE THE STRIPED BARBER POLE AS A MEANS OF ADVERTISEMENT.”

I don’t actually think this is a terrible idea. But what I’d like to see is a scenario in which that’s the only legal implication of a barber license. Let the state set up a barber licensing board, let the board devise whatever scheme it deems appropriate, and then give the licensed barbers exclusive right to display the barber pole and proclaim themselves “licensed barbers.”

But if some non-barber wants to cut hair, leave him in peace. Then we can see what the real value of the credential is. Personally, I have would have no hesitation whatsoever about checking out an unlicensed barber if a friend or colleague recommended one.

Politics

Bachmann Surrenders On Support For Draconian Cuts To Veterans’ Benefits

By George Zornick on Feb 4, 2011 at 5:19 pm

Last week, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) unveiled a plan to cut $400 billion in federal spending, and included a controversial target. The Tea Party favorite proposed freezing the Veterans Affairs Department’s health care spending and cutting veterans’ disability benefits. Her plan sliced $4.5 billion from the VA and reduced 150,000 veterans’ disability compensation and the amount they receive in Social Security Disability Income. Veterans groups blasted the proposal as “totally out of step with America’s commitment to our veterans,” and as something that shows “contempt for American servicemembers’ sacrifices.” Democrats outside her state even began targeting Bachmann’s proposal; Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) wrote her a letter which said her ideas were a “giant step in the wrong direction.” After days of similar criticism, Bachmann has finally retreated and withdrew that part of her spending reduction proposal today:

“One point on my discussion list was a $4.5 billion proposal that would affect payments made to our veterans,” Bachmann said in a statement. “That has received a lot of attention and I have decided that it should be removed from consideration. The problem of government spending must be solved, but not on the backs of our nation’s war heroes. I have always been a proud supporter of the United States military and I continue to stand with our veterans. In the months ahead I look forward to working with our Veterans Service Organizations to ensure that we fulfill our commitments to those who sacrificed so much in their brave service for our country.”

While Bachmann’s decision to retract her proposal is laudable, there are other elements to her proposal that are just as punitive to large groups of Americans: for example, she proposes reducing Pell Grants for college students (along with a complete abolition of the Department of Education). She also wants to eliminate the Maternal and Child Health block grant.

Climate Progress

After Koch Gathering In Her District, Mary Bono Mack Endorses Inhofe-Upton Pollution Act

By Brad Johnson on Feb 4, 2011 at 4:40 pm


Protesters outside Koch meeting at Rancho Las Palmas Resort, Rancho Mirage, CA

After the Koch brothers organized top Republican billionaires in Palm Springs to plan their 2012 agenda, the district’s representative, Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-CA), embraced their denial of the threat of greenhouse pollution. In 2009, Mack was one of eight Republicans who voted for sweeping climate legislation. The small group of science-enlightened conservatives were blasted by Republican operatives as “cap and traitors,” “Republican turncoats,” and “libtards,” but easily won re-election against Tea Party candidates. However, Politico reports that Mack will support a bill to outlaw action against global warming drafted by Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) and Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK):

The Southern California lawmaker will endorse a draft bill to stymie climate rules from Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI) “due to her long-standing concerns regarding the role of the EPA and the overly burdensome California standards,” her office told Politico. Upton and Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) on Wednesday unveiled the draft bill, which would repeal the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act and hamstring California’s authority to issue stricter vehicle emission standards than the federal government.

The Upton-Inhofe bill is a radical act of science denial on behalf of fossil polluters, preventing the Environmental Protection Agency from even “taking into consideration the emission of a green- house gas due to concerns regarding possible climate change.” It would reverse not only efforts to track and limit greenhouse pollution, but reverse the Supreme-Court-mandated scientific finding that global warming is dangerous to the American public.

Mack is not the only Republican to abandon the health and safety of her constituents to appease oil and coal polluters. Upton himself argued in 2009 that “climate change is a serious problem.” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL), and GOP presidential contenders Tim Pawlenty, Mike Huckabee, and Newt Gingrich have all flip-flopped on the climate threat, even while the world grows hotter, more polluted, and more dangerous.

In May, 2009, Bono Mack said that building a clean-energy economy and protecting our planet was an “issue that transcends political party.” It seems it doesn’t transcend the toxic reach of Charles and David Koch, however.

Alyssa

Dr. Luke and Max Martin’s Going-Out Guide for Girls

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Feb 4, 2011 at 4:32 pm

Because sometimes you just need to end the week with a dance party and a dissertation: I found myself kind of unable to stop listening to Avril Lavigne’s new single “What the Hell.” And it got me thinking about how perhaps the two most effective pop song writers of our age, Dr. Luke and Max Martin, think about the ethical function of partying, particularly for women. One thing I hadn’t realized before I looked at their discographies again was how heavily their respective catalogues were weighted towards dudes in the nineties in early oughts. In recent years, though, both men have made hay, and highly danceable music, for women that celebrates the right to go out and have good, clean, irresponsible fun. Unlike Andrew WK, who gets to have a liberation theory of partying without any particular complication, these songs usually do an effective, efficient job of stating the case for why women ought to be able to go out and get stupid, and then making it sound great*. To wit:
1. Partying unites America across race and class lines:

2. Partying is an act of feminist rebellion against the creeps who give you a hard time at bars:

3. After being denied the right to party, partying is a form of reparations:

4. Partying is an assertion of solidarity across lines of gender and sexual orientation:

5. Partying it will stick it to moralists:

6. And besides, it’s fun:

*Listen up, Caitlin Flanagan!

Yglesias

Bloodlands

By Matthew Yglesias on Feb 4, 2011 at 4:27 pm

Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin is a bit hard to take on account of all the killing, but it manages to actually say something new about some of the most covered subjects around.

Two key themes. One is that we misremember the Holocaust because we learn about it from survivors’ stories. In concentration camps like Auschwitz many died and many survived, that’s why there are survivors. But most of the dead weren’t in concentration camps, they were simply killed:

Under German rule, the concentration camps and the death factories operated under different principles. A sentence to the concentration camp Belsen was one thing, a transport to the death factory Bełżec something else. The first meant hunger and labor, but also the likelihood of survival; the second meant immediate and certain death by asphyxiation. This, ironically, is why people remember Belsen and forget Bełżec.

At Bełżec there were 434,508 deaths and maybe two or three survivors. And something similar happened on the Soviet side. We remember the Gulag because people survived the Gulag. Stalin’s wholesale massacring of ethnically Polish people living in pre-war Ukraine didn’t have enough survivors to be remembered.

There’s also this about the curious impulse to exaggerate the degree of suffering even when the true degree of suffering is astounding:

Belarus was the center of the Soviet-Nazi confrontation, and no country endured more hardship under German occupation. Proportionate wartime losses were greater than in Ukraine. Belarus, even more than Poland, suffered social decapitation: first the Soviet NKVD killed the intelligentsia as spies in 1937-1938, then Soviet partisans killed the schoolteachers as German collaborators in 1942-1943. The capital Minsk was all but depopulated by German bombing, the flight of refugees and the hungry, and the Holocaust; and then rebuilt after the war as an eminently Soviet metropolis. Yet even Belarus follows the general trend. Twenty percent of the prewar population of Belarusian territories was killed during the Second World War. Yet young people are taught, and seem to believe, that the figure was not one in five but one in three.

Snyder offers an account of all this with little effort at explicit theorizing.

(Incidentally, I’m trying to read more books and write more about them in part because I think the blogosphere has too many people reading and reacting to the same stuff on the Internet)

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