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Hatch On Egypt’s Autocratic Leader Hosni Mubarak: ‘I Feel Sad That He’s Going Through This’

By Lee Fang on Feb 9, 2011 at 8:00 pm

As a diverse, well-representative, pro-democracy movement representing unfolds in autocratic Egypt, few politicians in the U.S. have stood firmly to call for an end to the current regime controlled by Hosni Mubarak and his political party. Worse, a growing chorus of Republicans have voiced sympathy for the current autocratic government and are on the record opposed to a democratic transition in Egypt.

The Mubarak regime has maintained a grip over Egypt for 30 years using torture, child labor, censorship, violent political repression, and other brutal violations of human rights. Most recently, reports indicate that agents of Mubarak’s government have attacked journalists, killed 300 protesters, and are currently detaining and beating other people caught demonstrating against Mubarak.

Yesterday, at a Tea Party Express event at the Press Club, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) took questions from reporters. ThinkProgress asked Hatch about Glenn Beck’s latest absurd conspiracy theory that radical right-wing Muslim groups in Egypt are conspiring with left-wing progressives in America to create a “global caliphate.” Hatch dismissed the idea, telling us that he “hope[s] that’s not true.” However, he then told us that he has a personal relationship with Egypt’s autocratic leader, and that he “feel[s] sad that” Mubarak is “going through this”:

FANG: There’s been a theory that’s been out in Fox News and other places that the turmoil in Egypt has been planned by Islamists who are planning a global caliphate with Marxists in America and Western Europe. What do you think about that?

HATCH: We hope that’s not true. I know President Mubarak personally, he’s been a friend of America. I feel sad that he’s going through this. On the other hand, from what I see so far, the Muslim Brotherhood is not asking to be in the leadership in that country and they seem to be coming together under Suleiman and we’ll just have to see. We’re worried about it. And we should be worried about it because if the radical takes over, Egypt has been one of our best allies. It has helped maintain stability and peace in the Middle East. Mubarak deserves a lot of the credit for that. I’m not going to second guess the president or the current foreign policy establishment, but it does appear he can be a placeholder for the current position, but they’re going to move him out. That’s sad for America. I just the hope that the people who do take over keep relationship with America and maintain peace in the Middle East.

Watch it:

In our interview, Hatch ignored the Egyptian people being crushed under Mubarak’s boot and instead expressed remorse that Mubarak’s rule may have to end soon. However, Hatch did accurately repudiate fears that the Muslim Brotherhood will takeover Egypt. The Associated Press again confirmed today that the Muslim Brotherhood will not seek a leadership role in a post-Mubarak government.

Related Posts

Health

Judge Vinson Mangled The Constitution So Badly That Even Ken Cuccinelli Abandons Vinson’s Reasoning

By Ian Millhiser on Feb 9, 2011 at 7:30 pm

In an attempt to bypass the majority-Democratic Fourth Circuit, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli filed a petition today asking the Supreme Court to bypass this intermediate court and hear his challenge to the Affordable Care Act immediately. The petition, which is exceedingly unlikely to prevail, is vintage Cuccinelli. It warns of a “steady drumbeat of new lawsuits” that “punctuate the news.” It attacks the so-called “florid deal-making” that led to an act being “cobbled together in secret.” The ACA, Cuccinelli warns, “has roiled America.”

Yet, while the petition spares no adjectives in expressing Cuccinelli’s disdain for health reform, one thing is conspicuously absent from the petition — a key argument that formed the basis of Judge Roger Vinson’s erroneous decision that the ACA cannot be sustained under Congress’ taxing power.

Vinson’s opinion is absolutely awash with errors. One of his biggest mistakes is his claim that the provision of the ACA which requires most Americans to either carry insurance or pay slightly more income taxes somehow ceases to be a valid exercise of Congress’ power to “lay and collect taxes” because Congress did not use the word “tax.” Nothing in the Constitution requires Congress to use certain magic words to invoke its enumerated powers. And no precedent exists suggesting that a fully valid law somehow ceases to be constitutional because Congress gave it the wrong name.

Like Vinson, Cuccinelli also claims that the ACA did not validly invoke Congress’ taxing power:

On the tax issue, the threshold problem for the Secretary is that there is a justiciable difference between a tax and a penalty.  “ ‘A tax is an enforced contribution to provide for the support of government; a penalty . . . is an exaction imposed by statute as punishment for an unlawful act.’ ” A penalty not supporting a tax is not a tax penalty but a naked penalty requiring an enumerated power other than the taxing power to support it. Furthermore, even if the penalty were a tax “there comes a time in the extension of the penalizing features of the so-called tax when it loses its character as such and becomes a mere penalty with the characteristics of a regulation and punishment.” Because at this point the penalty requires a supporting enumerated power independent of the taxing power—and the only possible one would be the Commerce Clause—the tax argument collapses back into the Commerce Clause argument.

Much of this paragraph is gobbledygook, but none of it mentions Vinson’s absurd claim that a law magically becomes unconstitutional if Congress gives it a certain name.

It is very unusual for a litigant to ignore an argument that has already swayed a judge on a lower court. Perhaps this is a sign that even Ken Cuccinelli recognizes that Vinson reasoning was flawed.

Politics

Texas Tea Party Leader On Obama: He ‘Might Be Muslim’

By George Zornick on Feb 9, 2011 at 6:14 pm

On MSNBC this evening, Chris Matthews hosted two representatives of the Tea Party to analyze its influence in Washington: FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe and Phillip Dennis of the Texas Tea Party. Matthews asked Dennis if he thought President Obama is a Muslim, and Dennis immediately launched into a diatribe that ranged from offensive to confusing, but was outlandishly dishonest throughout. He first replied that he “didn’t know” if Obama was a Muslim, but then criticized Obama’s attendance in the Christian church of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Dennis then complained that Obama has a “soft spot in his heart” for Islam because he “changed our history saying that Islam has always played a major party in this country.” Dennis noted he had a “big problem with Islam” and concluded by saying Obama “might be Muslim”:

DENNIS: One thing is that President Obama certainly has a soft spot in his heart for Islam. You know, he’s gone back — his first speech was in Egypt, he’s reached out to the Muslims moreso than any other President in the history of the world. He’s even changed our history saying that Islam has always played a major part in this country, when everyone knows that’s not true. You didn’t see our Founding Fathers — weren’t Muslim, they weren’t breaking for prayers five times a day. But this is the type of thing that he’s done, is reaching out. Bowing to the leaders —

MATTHEWS: Where are you on Islam?

DENNIS: … Oh, I have a big problem with Islam. I think that it, uh, they call itself the religion of peace, when every day around the world it continues to show itself to be anything but. So I think those people have a right, certainly it’s understandable that they might have a problem that our President might be Muslim. Absolutely.

Watch it:

Dennis is a fairly major player in the Tea Party movement. He founded the Dallas Tea Party and is the Texas state coordinator of Tea Party Patriots. He is also an adviser to the National Tea Party Coalition. Aside from frequent appearances on Hardball, he writes for Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government site and has also written for CNN about the “real Tea Party.” He has previously said that “the Tea Party does not focus on the pigment of people’s skin,” but apparently it does focus on people’s religion, as his bizarre rant indicates. (For the record, President Obama has never said that James Madison faced Mecca five times a day.)

Update

During a segment on Hannity earlier this week, GOP strategist Frank Luntz interviewed a panel of Republican voters in Iowa, and half said they believe Obama is a Muslim. Watch it:



Security

$11 Million Price Tag Causes Utah Rep To Delay Hearing On AZ Immigration Copycat Law

By Andrea Nill Sanchez on Feb 9, 2011 at 6:00 pm

Today, Utah’s immigration copycat bill was supposed to get its first hearing before a state House Committee. However, it appears the hearing has been delayed due to concerns over a recent report which detailed the cost of enforcing the bill. NECN reports:

The sponsor of an Arizona-style immigration law in the Utah House is delaying a hearing on the bill because of the high price tag for enforcement. House Bill 70 was due for a committee hearing Wednesday afternoon. But it was removed from the agenda Wednesday morning.

Republican Rep. Stephen Sandstrom of Orem says in a statement the cost estimates for local law enforcement aren’t accurate. A fiscal note attached to the bill says the program would cost local government between $5 million and $11 million. Sandstrom says the fiscal note doesn’t account for savings generated by reducing the number of illegal immigrants. He says it also doesn’t consider how much money is being spent by local governments on crimes committed by illegal immigrants.

The article is referring to financial data released by the Legislative Fiscal Analysts office this past Monday. According to the office, “the expense of his legislation would range between $5.3 million and $11.3 million.” After the news came out, the bill’s sponsor — state Rep. Stephen Sandstrom (R) — started scrambling to find solutions which might help offset the costs.

One proposal Sandstrom is reportedly mulling is imposing a one-percent fee on wire transfers from non-citizens in Utah to a foreign country. Yet, if Sandstrom actually succeeds in driving undocumented immigrants out of his state, he may have trouble raising any significant amount of money from that initiative. Another idea involves levying a fee on the existing driving privilege card, something which is mostly used by the undocumented immigrants he hopes will leave his state.

Meanwhile, the estimated cost doesn’t seem that far-fetched. If anything, it’s low-ball. I previously reported on a Kentucky fiscal-impact statement which estimated that an Arizona copycat law would cost the state a net $40 million a year in court, prison and foster-care costs. That estimate did include savings from removing undocumented immigrants from the state.

Finally, neither of these reports included what the states will lose in the form of lost tax revenue and business activity. A 2008 study estimated that, if Utah successfully removed all of its undocumented immigrants, it would lose $2.3 billion in economic activity, $1.0 billion in gross state product, and approximately 14,219 jobs.

Update

Sandstrom claims that the hearing was cancelled so he could make some last-minute changes that will supposedly lower the cost. He hasn’t disclosed the changes, however, he did indicate that they have “already been run up the flagpole” with groups such as the Utah Minutemen and Kris Kobach’s Immigration Reform Law Institute.

Politics

House Republican Spending Cuts Target Programs For Children And Pregnant Women

By Pat Garofalo on Feb 9, 2011 at 5:44 pm

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) last week released the House Republicans first round of proposed budget cuts, laying out about $32 billion in overall cuts, but without naming any specific program reductions. Ryan has been justifying his refusal to name a specific program that he’d cut from the budget by punting to the Appropriations Committee. “[Naming specifics] is what is gonna happen in the appropriations process down the road. So I can’t tell you the answer to that because, as a budget committee person, we simply lower the cap and then those things go down,” Ryan said.

Today, the Appropriations Committee — chaired by Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY) — released the specific cuts that House Republicans are proposing to get below Ryan’s cap. Of course, the cuts consist of reductions to common GOP bogeymen like the National Endowment for the Arts and Amtrak. But the House Republicans have a preoccupation with cutting programs that affect women and their babies. For instance, the GOP proposed:

– Cutting $758 million from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), which amounts to about a 6 percent cut to a program providing food assistance to low-income women and their infants.

– Cutting $210 million from Maternal and Child Health Block Grants, which amounts to about a 33 percent cut in a program giving low-income pregnant women, mothers and their children access to health care.

– Cutting $27 million from the Poison Control Center, which would essentially eliminate a program supporting local poison control centers and funding a hotline directing residents to their local poison control office. Poisoning disproportionately affects children, with half the exposures at the National Poison Control Center last year occurring to children younger than six.

The House Republicans second-largest cut is to community health centers ($1.1 billion). In 2008, about one-third of community health center patients were children.

In the grand scheme of deficit reduction, these cuts will do absolutely nothing, but they will have extremely detrimental effects for those who depend upon the targeted programs. This shows the folly of the GOP’s approach to budgeting, which leaves huge parts of the federal budget immune to cuts (like the Pentagon), while taking an axe to non-defense discretionary spending. These cuts outlined above total about $1 billion, while simply retiring (and not replacing) one carrier battle group and its aircraft wing would save $1.5 billion.

“Make no mistake, these cuts are not low-hanging fruit,” Rogers said in the statement. “These cuts are real and will impact every District across the country — including my own.” While they may impact every district, they certainly don’t spread the pain equally.

Cross-posted on The Wonk Room.

Yglesias

Get Greenwald

By Matthew Yglesias on Feb 9, 2011 at 5:40 pm

A consortium of national security contractors, led by Palantir Technology, seems to have been shopping a counter-WikiLeaks strategy. This slide is about neutralizing Glenn Greenwald:

— Glenn was critical in the Amazon to OVH transition
— It is this level of support that needs to be disrupted
— These are established professionals that have a liberal bent, but ultimately most of them if pushed will choose professional preservation over cause, such is the mentality of most business professionals.
— Without the support of people like Glenn, Wikileaks would fold

I like that they’re on a first-name basis with Greenwald. Lee’s 2008 book, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food, is highly recommended. And remember, without the support of people like you, the Yglesias Blog would fold!

Health

NEW REPORT: Alternatives To Mandate Cover Fewer People At Higher Cost

By Igor Volsky on Feb 9, 2011 at 5:00 pm

MIT’s Jonathan Gruber has published a new paper modeling the proposed alternatives to the individual health insurance mandate. While that provision will expand coverage to 32 million Americans, the two most talked about substitutes — auto enrollment and late enrollment penalty — offer less coverage at a higher cost to the newly insured:

- AUTO ENROLLMENT – 24 MILLION GAIN COVERAGE : Under this option, an individual is automatically enrolled in insurance unless she or he opts out. Gruber writes that employers could have an incentive to lower their health care spending by actively discouraging workers to opt of insurance and that younger employees — whose participation is so crucial to balance the health risk pool — would be more prone to going without coverage. That would increase premiums in the non-group market by 11 percent, he estimates. What’s more, auto enrollment would reach a small percentage of the uninsured, since “only about one-third of the uninsured are actually offered employer-sponsored insurance in which they can be auto-enrolled.”

- LATE ENROLLMENT PENALTY – 21 MILLION GAIN COVERAGE: With this alternative, an individual can opt-in to insurance under the Affordable Care Act, but then pay a penalty for enrolling at a later date. The effectiveness of this approach will depend on the size of the penalty, but that poses its own set of politically challenging decisions. As Gruber notes, “It seems highly unlikely that the federal government would be willing to tell a 30-year-old individual with cancer that they can’t get insurance coverage because they didn’t sign up when they were 27 years old — or that they have to pay some very large amount of money in the same situation.” Moreover, if younger people stay out of the risk pool, “they will raise prices for those left behind, causing even further exit — and potentially unraveling the entire market.” Gruber estimates premiums in the exchange “would rise about 20 percent relative to the mandate case as the healthy exit the exchanges.”

Politically vulnerable senators like Sens. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Bill Nelson (D-FL) and Ben Nelson (D-NE) are publicly considering offering more popular alternatives to the mandate, but in doing so they should be mindful of the fact that any new solution should not go back on the progress made in current law. Democrats also shouldn’t be buying into the GOP’s premise that there is something inherently wrong or terribly coercive about asking able individuals to take personal responsibility for their health care expenses. Instead of playing defense, they should be reminding the public of the long history of Republican support for the idea.

Politics

After Voting To Repeal Health Care, GOP Members Without Coverage Fear Cost To Family Members

By Tanya Somanader on Feb 9, 2011 at 4:45 pm

House Republicans have pledged to repeal and/or defund the health care law. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) even adopted the effort as her sole “motivation in life.” But, for at least 16 GOP lawmakers, the reality of the party’s position is coming home to roost. These Republicans, “many of whom were swept into office fueled by tea party anger over the health care law,” are now facing the same expensive, unforgiving health insurance market as middle-class Americans the GOP wantonly abandoned:

“I have a niece who has pre-existing conditions, and I worry about her if she was ever to lose her job,” said Florida Rep. Richard Nugent, one of the freshman lawmakers who declined federal health insurance benefits.

Every single House Republican voted to repeal the health care law last month.

“I can simply, honestly say that this is going to impact my wife and I to a fairly serious degree, like it would any average American out there,” said first-time Rep. Joe Walsh of Illinois.

Walsh’s wife has a pre-existing condition and will need a procedure in the coming months, but because he declined federal benefits, they’re paying for it out of pocket. Meanwhile, Walsh is contributing to a health savings account to cover his expenses.

“It’s a cost we will feel, a cost I will have to pick up. I won’t turn down benefits because I have something to fall back on or because I’m independently wealthy,” he said.

But while recognizing that “there are 14 some million Americans and growing who are out there in the individual market who have a much tougher battle” than him, Walsh voted with every GOP House member to repeal the law that helps. And while they willingly deny millions of Americans, none see any reason to deny their staffs the taxpayer-funded benefit.

GOP lawmakers have struggled to explain why they deserve government-subsidized health care while ordinary Americans don’t. Rep. Aaron Schock (R-IL) said he accepted federal health care because he was “actually lowering” premiums for older lawmakers. When asked whether he’d turn down taxpayer benefits, Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL) actually said, “I don’t know. Am I a federal employee?” And Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY) offered a more blunt — and revealing — response: “What am I not supposed to have health care?…God forbid I get into an accident and can’t afford the operation. That can happen to anyone.”

Yglesias

Retirement Age Follies

By Matthew Yglesias on Feb 9, 2011 at 4:38 pm

Brian Beutler has Steny Hoyer reiterating his openness to the idea of a higher retirement age for Social Security benefits:

“Unlike Boehner [who supported raising the retirement age outright], what I said is it ought to be on the table,” Hoyer said. “We ought to consider all options, including raising the age, but there are a lot of other options also that can be considered and I also indicated that whatever we do needs to be done prospectively. And I think all parties agree with that.”

As it happens that puts him in just about the same boat as Boehner, at least with respect to the question of raising the retirement age. Many Democrats support the idea of raising the wage-cap on the Social Security payroll tax to shore up the program indefinitely, and the GOP doesn’t. But there remains fairly strong bipartisan support for considering a higher retirement age, too.

This idea has a kind of fake common sense quality to it. If I said, “how about a modest cut in Social Security benefits for rich people paired with a much larger cut in benefits for the poor” almost nobody would find that tempting. But life expectancy is correlated with income and this is getting truer over time:

In percentage terms, raising the retirement age from 68 to 70 would have a small impact on the expected Social Security benefits of a rich person and a large impact on the expected Social Security benefits of a poor person. It’s very regressive and a healthy share of the fiscal benefit will be lost on the back end in terms of increased disability claims.

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