NEWS FLASH
Obama Overruled Top Justice And Defense Department Lawyers On Libya | In a breaking story, the New York Times’s Charlie Savage reports that President Obama “rejected the views of top lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department” when deciding that the U.S. military involvement in Libya was legal and did not amount to “hostilities.” By taking the “unusual” step of overruling Pentagon general counsel Jeh Johnson and the Office of Legal Counsel’s Caroline Krass, Obama made the argument that he is not subject to provisions of the War Powers Act that would have required him to terminate military activities or scale back the mission by May 20.
NEWS FLASH
Shawn Otto: ‘Science Is Never Partisan, But Science Is Always Political’ | “Science is never partisan, but science is always political,” says ScienceDebate.org‘s Shawn Otto at the Netroots Nation 2011 panel Science Policy in Unexpected Places. “We need to shame antiscience thinking into submission, just as we shamed racism.”
“It’s funny to talk about oil producers,” says Climate Science Rapid Response Team’s Dr. John Abraham. No one produces it. We extract it.”
-Don’t forget about the Red Mars book club.
-”America is not exactly starved of dissident humorists who take us to those ‘scary places.’”
-The combination of Darren Aronofsky, Michael Chabon, and Ayelet Waldman’s sensibilities will be…interesting.
-I really want to see a dragon with Benedict Cumberbatch’s voice declaring “bored!” as Cumberbatch does constantly in Sherlock.
-On women and infidelity.
-I want to spend my summer hanging out with Lady Gaga on a fire escape:
NEWS FLASH
Wisconsin Republicans Sneak School Voucher Program Into Late-Night Budget | Earlier this week, Republicans in the Wisconsin state Assembly approved Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) budget with a 3 a.m. vote, despite Walker’s previous promises to end late-night voting because “nothing good happens after midnight.” As The Capital Times reported, Assembly Republicans “sneaked in a last-minute budget item at 2 a.m.” that would expand school vouchers to up to 16 Wisconsin cities. The two-year budget cuts overall state education spending by $1.6 billion.
NEWS FLASH
Neoconservatives Urge House Republicans Not To Cut Funding For Libya Mission | Three prominent neoconservatives are circulating a letter to House Republicans calling on them to continue funding military operations in Libya despite concerns about the evasion of the War Powers Act. The letter – authored by Bill Kristol, Elliot Abrams, and Robert Kagan – warns GOP lawmakers that cutting funding would be “an abdication of our responsibilities as an ally and as the leader of the Western alliance.” The letter goes on to defend American intervention in Libya and criticizes the White House for doing “too little to achieve the goal of removing Qaddafi from power.”
NEWS FLASH
Fox’s Greta Van Susteren: GOP needs to explain ‘why they give Vitter a pass’ | Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren criticizes the GOP’s embrace of Sen. David Vitter after he admitted to frequenting prostitutes. Watch it:
Even friendly causes like clean energy have corporate money behind them, but is it really true as Lamar Alexander implies that “Big Wind” is a major influence on public policy? Sarah Laskow says no:
The [American Wind Energy Association] did contribute more to political candidates than any other renewable group from 2009-2010, but the group’s giving totaled just $338,348, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Compare that to the biggest player in the oil and gas industry, Koch Industries, which gave just under $1.9 million or more than five times what AWEA had to offer. The alternative energy industry, as a whole, spent $31 million on lobbying last year; the oil and gas industry spent $145 million.
It seems to me that the main problem here is that not only do the dirty energy and clean energy lobbies not offset, but the competition between them tends to suck oxygen away from the opportunity of simply using less energy. Obviously, nobody wants to live in a world without electricity but there are huge potential gains from conservation that tend to have almost no political voice at their back.
After passing its two-year, $66 billion budget through the legislature last night without a single Democratic vote, Wisconsin looks to be the fourth state nationwide to cut all state and federal funding for its Planned Parenthood clinics. Indiana, Kansas, and most recently North Carolina have all passed such amendments in the past two months in an effort to decrease the ease with which women can receive abortions.
Once Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) signs the Wisconsin budget as he is expected to do, all nine of Planned Parenthood’s health centers in the state will lose the funding they need to offer services to 19,000 uninsured patients each year. None of these clinics even offer abortion services to their patients. The Wisconsin budget also imposes severe restrictions on the state’s BadgerCare Family Planning Program that may lead to its termination.
The president of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Wisconsin, Teri Huyck, released a statement expressing her disappointment that the Wisconsin GOP would place political ideology over health benefits for thousands of the uninsured.
“It is greatly disturbing to me that some politicians’ personal beliefs are trumping our shared responsibility to make sure women and men have access to preventive reproductive health care, which is not only essential for their own lives, but also a cost-saver for all Wisconsin taxpayers,” she said.
But Wisconsin is not the only state where conservatives have pushed an anti-abortion agenda over the interests of an uninsured lower class. Indiana, Kansas and North Carolina have all passed legislation ending funding for Planned Parenthood, and Tennessee, Texas and Oklahoma are all working on similar measures.
Indiana: The first state to end funding for its Planned Parenthood clinics, Indiana cut all state funding for the organization along with $1.4 million in Medicaid funds. Planned Parenthood is currently seeking a preliminary injunction against the law and claims the measure is unconstitutional as Medicaid funds can be used at any qualified health provider. Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a briefing siding with the health organization against the state law. Planned Parenthood operates 28 health centers across Indiana and serves around 9,300 Medicaid patients.
Kansas: In May, Gov. Sam Brownback (R-KS) signed the law banning the use of over $300,000 in federal funding under the Title X Family Planning Program in Planned Parenthood clinics, redirecting the money to government clinics instead. Unlike in Indiana, the measure does not prevent Medicaid patients from using the clinics.
North Carolina: On June 15, the state legislature overrode Gov. Bev Perdue’s (D-NC) veto on its proposed budget plan and thereby cut all state and federal funding—totaling around $434, 000 annually—for its health centers. GOP lawmakers avoided the legal troubles Indiana is facing by staying away from Medicaid, but Planned Parenthood is still considering filing for an injunction. In a poll conducted recently, 57 percent of the state’s voters oppose the funding cuts to Planned Parenthood and its programs.
Tennessee: The day after passing the state budget, GOP lawmakers learned that the amendment they added to ban public money for Planned Parenthood had been secretly gutted before the late-night vote. In response, conservatives across the state called for the governor to revoke Planned Parenthood’s Title X funding. By June 13, all but one county had done so, even though none of Title X funds can be used to pay for abortions, and thereby removed support from the state’s nine Planned Parenthood clinics and their 9,000 patients. Currently, the public money goes toward providing the organization’s family planning services for low-income patients.
Protesting the adverse effect that such a move puts on the poor, president and CEO for Planned Parenthood of Middle and East Tennessee Jeff Teague said, “Tennessee is a rural and poor state, so it’s gonna put an additional burden on the population least likely to afford it. In a lot of cases, that means they are going to lose access to health care.”
Texas: GOP lawmakers are currently working on keeping Planned Parenthood from receiving nearly $20 million in public funding as a part of the Texas Medicaid Women’s Health program. None of the health centers run by the organization in the state offer abortion services, yet all 122,000 of its patients could suffer if the House and Senate can reach an agreement on the bill that currently includes the funding ban as an amendment.
Oklahoma: An amendment that would have removed funding from Planned Parenthood’s Women Infant and Child program died with the bill in a legislative committee on May 26. The program provides nutritional services and food vouchers to pregnant women and women with small children. It does not fund abortions.
Who will be next? In just the past few months, GOP lawmakers have targeted Planned Parenthood in states across the nation to promote their moral stance on abortion over the healthcare rights of poor and uninsured women. The Hyde Amendment may have prevented any taxpayers from paying for abortion services since the 1970s, Planned Parenthood may only spend less than three percent of its budget on abortions and hundreds of thousands of patients may depend on these clinics for their health needs, but conservatives will stop at nothing to have a pro-life talking point for their next campaign.
“We’re very underrepresented, as you can see in this conference,” Favianna Rodriguez said at the beginning of the best thing I’ve seen at Netroots Nation so far, a panel called “Educate, Agitate, Inspire: How Artists are Fighting Anti-Migrant Hate” that turned into a broader discussion of the arts and their role in progressivism—and that helped me articulate a lot of the things I’ve been thinking about since I came to ThinkProgress.
What the panelists said, and what I think is tremendously valuable, is that we are losing opportunities to make progressive messaging and campaigns more effective when we marginalize artists. Artists get brought into the conversation last, when, as Favianna put it, professional progressives have decided on strategy and message, and “when they think about engaging artists, they think about ‘here are talking points, reiterate them.’” That’s condescending, of course, and it means you can avoid building an infrastructure that supports and incorporates artists into the progressive movement if you just don’t think they matter very much. But more to the point, an approach to artists that treats them as if they’re just meant to execute messaging within a political context misses is a dramatic underutilization of artistic capacity.
That approach should be reversed, Ken Chen, the executive director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, said, to ask: “how do we taking things that are hard issues, like post-9/11 detention, and spin them in ways that enter people’s lives while they’re pre-political?” That kind of engagement is hard to measure, and because it doesn’t produce a white paper or a talking point, it “requires an investment on behalf of the artist,” that demands a measure of trust and patience, Favianna said.
And beyond politicizing people through the culture they consume, Chen pointed out that shaping campaigns with an eye towards what’s artistically effective can give them tremendous reach.
“There actually is an incredibly successful cultural campaign in Arizona, but it’s not on our side,” he pointed out. “It’s Joe Arpaio, who is probably the best performance artist of the last generation. He’s always thinking about things not in the way a traditional Pat Buchanan thing would think like. It’s like Christo does a crackdown on the migrant community…You can buy pink underwear autographed by Sheriff Arpaio. You can be deputized, and wear night vision goggles, and fulfill your fantasy. He has a tank that has his logo on the side. He raided a house with Steven Seagal.”
And artists can be a check on a progressive tendency to make politics deadening, said Javier Gonzalez, who is helping run the SoundStrike campaign that’s convinced musicians to avoid performing in Arizona to protest the state’s repressive immigration policies.
“The left comes from this rational, enlightenment period debate, we’re going to have a pipe and be Socratic, so we create these boring campaigns,” he said. “You can do the stuff they did in the sixties, ‘come to a forum on Palestinian liberation, discussion from 1pm to 6pm.’ People are not going to go to that stuff anymore. We have to be more creative.”
Progressives are good at recognizing that the medium is the message when it comes to technology. We’re much less good at that when it comes to incorporating art as a core tactic and a shaper of strategy.
By Matthew Cameron
Add this to the growing list of scary statistics related to the stalled economy: 28 million Americans who want to quit their jobs to pursue better opportunities, but are afraid to do so because of the poor labor market. As Bloomberg Businessweek puts it in an article running this week:
That’s a lot of careers slowed and dreams deferred. At double the number of the 14 million unemployed Americans, it’s also a huge swath of voters who may be in search of a Presidential candidate who they believe understands their discontent.
Making matters worse for Obama is the fact that most of those affected by this situation are young, up-and-coming workers who traditionally have been a reliably Democratic constituency. Mike Konczal had a good take on this back when the latest jobs data was first released. Essentially, the present situation is tremendously beneficial to existing managers because employees no longer have the bargaining position to extract concessions such as higher wages or improved working conditions. Managers and administrators tend to vote Republican no matter what, so Obama shouldn’t expect a surge of support from this bloc for his inability to adequately address the employment situation. But what he should fear is that young professionals will abandon his party if more isn’t done to rapidly strengthen the economy and improve their prospects for career advancement.
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