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Economy

Anti-Government Spending Crusader Rick Perry Accepted More Than $80,000 In Farm Subsidies

By Guest Blogger on Aug 8, 2011 at 7:35 pm

Falling into line with the Tea Party rhetoric against “out-of-control” government spending, Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) is now supporting a move away from direct subsidies to the agriculture industry in favor of an incentives-driven model. But Perry himself has benefited from over $80,000 in farm subsidies over the years and publicly declared his support for farm subsidies when running for Texas Agriculture Commissioner in 1990. After his opponent accused him of wanting to terminate price supports for farmers, Perry was quick to deny the claim:

“[Former Commissioner Jim Hightower] says I support eliminating our farm program payments. That’s not true. I’ve participated in the program as a producer. My neighbors participate. I know what would happen to rural areas of Texas if these programs were discontinued. I do not support such an action.”

Perry certainly has benefited from the nation’s proclivity toward farm payouts; his 40-acre farm — which he finally sold in 1998 — brought him $72,687 in farm payments between 1987 and 1989 and even made him an additional $9,624 for leaving his land lying fallow. Perry’s father has also received $6,443 from cotton and wheat subsidies in 2002 and 2003.

When asked to comment on the subsidies, Perry’s office defended his record. “The governor is proud of his years in the farming industry, which he believes is an important part of the nation’s overall economy,” spokeswoman Katherine Cesinger said.

But she also reiterated Perry’s position on federal spending, saying, “Out of control Washington spending is threatening every aspect of our economy, and now, more than ever, the federal government has an opportunity and obligation to have a real conversation about how to get our country’s fiscal house in order.”

Perry is expected to declare his intention to run for president during a speech in South Carolina this weekend. If he is to win the GOP nomination, however, he will have to appeal to an anti-spending, anti-government base — something that his history of accepting farm subsidies may hinder.

– Sarah Bufkin

Media

Local Media Fail: News Stations Omit S&P Analysis On GOP Refusing To Raise Revenues

By Lee Fang on Aug 8, 2011 at 7:20 pm

When Standard and Poor’s issued its unprecedented downgrade of the nation’s sovereign credit last Friday, the rating agency blasted the GOP’s refusal to raise revenues in a press release accompanying the announcement. As Igor Volsky notes in today’s Progress Report, S&P referred specifically to Republicans when it said: “It appears that for now, new revenues have dropped down on the menu of policy options.” The S&P analysis also stressed that the final debt ceiling deal only reinforced its belief that the Bush tax cuts would not expire at the end of 2012, “because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues.”

However, a quick search of local news broadcasts from over the weekend shows that media outlets across the country have selectively omitted S&P’s reasoning behind the decision. Many local news outlets seemingly adopted the conservative narrative, arguing that the downgrade was only due to spending, rather than a holistic failure on both the spending and revenue sides. ThinkProgress has compiled a few examples below:

Amarillo, TX CBS affiliate: “The U.S. no longer holds the triple A credit we used to. Standard and Poor’s knocked us down to a AA+ citing the buzzer-beating deal to avoid government default did not do enough to cut back on spending.”

News 12 New Jersey: “The problem? Standard and Poor’s says the government is spending too much and has too much debt, so they downgraded us. ”

Boston, MA Fox News affiliate: “Essentially, Standard and Poor’s says that Washington didn’t raise the debt ceiling fast enough or cut spending deep enough.”

Las Vegas, NV NBC affiliate: “Rating agency Standard and Poor’s downgraded the U.S. credit rating for the first time in its history. The rating agency says it cut the nation’s credit rating down to AA+ because the deficit reduction package passed by Congress on Tuesday did not go far enough to stabilize the debt situation. S&P cited rising public debt, policy making, uncertainty, and failure to deal with spending on entitlements as major factors its decision.”

Watch it:

Education

Tired of Republican Stonewalling, Obama Pushes Ahead On Education Law Waivers

By Guest Blogger on Aug 8, 2011 at 6:40 pm

Our guest blogger is Theodora Chang, an education policy analyst at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Today, White House officials announced that the administration will provide waivers to states to encourage continued education reform and ease the burden of the most outdated provisions of the existing education law (No Child Left Behind). While states will have to wait another month to learn the specifics of the administration’s proposal, President Obama’s willingness to push education reform past congressional gridlock is necessary.

Early signs of hope for reauthorizing NCLB are long gone, leaving a largely broken piece of legislation. In spite of the growing need to fix the law, which the president and administration officials have recognized for months, Congress has been slow to move on the issue. After the recent debt ceiling debacle, Democrats in Congress now agree that there is little chance for a bi-partisan reauthorization, and they are backing the administration’s move toward waivers. However, Rep. John Kline (R-MN), Chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee, continues to argue that Congress is not the problem:

“I remain concerned that temporary measures instituted by the department, such as conditional waivers, could undermine the committee’s efforts to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act,” Kline said in a statement.

While the law illuminated serious achievement gaps by requiring better data collection and reporting, it also created sanctions for districts and states that fail to meet their targets. Under NCLB, states set their own achievement targets and academic standards, and they are expected to get nearly all students proficient in reading and math by 2014. One significant issue is that the law fails to adequately recognize states and districts making remarkable strides in student growth and sometimes even encourages states to adopt lower standards.

Regardless of the exact waiver process, it will be critical for the Department of Education to preserve an emphasis on accountability and disaggregated student data. It will also be crucial for reform efforts to continue focusing on teacher effectiveness and school improvement. The goal of these waivers should be to provide concrete but temporary solutions while reformers continue to push for more permanent fixes through reauthorization.

Republican lethargy on education has left it up to the White House to take action. With the clock ticking toward the first day of school, the Obama administration has wisely concluded that further progress will require solutions from a branch of government that is capable of acting – and it’s clearly not going to be Congress anytime soon.

Alyssa

What Does It Mean For Catwoman To Be An Abuse Survivor?

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Aug 8, 2011 at 6:38 pm

Apparently, in The Dark Knight Rises, Catwoman “has a history of abuse and works as a stripper and is also a pickpocket.” That Catwoman is or has been an abuse victim is, of course, canonical — though she’s introduced as an amnesiac flight attendant, that is later revealed to be a cover story for her flight from an abusive husband, from whom she stole her jewelry, launching her career as a cat burglar.

I feel some ambivalence about this. Trauma is a frequent trigger for a turn to superheroics, and of course women are more likely to be subject to certain kinds of trauma than men are. But if you’re going to use trauma as a motivating factor, it’s awfully easy to fall into the trap of using it as shorthand rather than as an opportunity to tell a personalized story. And abuse victim —> stripper is an awfully cliche sort of shorthand. It also perpetuates the idea that the only reason anyone could possibly have for doing sex work is because of trauma in their past.

The key is to hit upon a certain alchemy, a combination of signifiers that will give audiences a general idea of where the story is going, while having enough specificity and idiosyncrasy that they don’t actually know where it’ll end up. I actually thought Batman Returns did quite a nice job with this, using workplace harassment and violence instead of domestic violence for variation. And in the end, her murderous, electrified smooch isn’t straight retaliation, and is couched in an insight that “the law doesn’t apply to people like him, or us.” She won’t let herself get bought by the fairy tale, which by the expectations of conventional storytelling is surprising, discomfiting, and ultimately satisfying — being wrapped in cotton at Wayne Manor ultimately doesn’t satisfy her need for justice. I don’t think Nolan’s Bruce Wayne is going to get his kinky happy ending either. But it matters why that happens.

NEWS FLASH

Salazar: Obama Wants Alaska Offshore Drilling | Although Rick Santorum thinks President Obama is on the side of the caribou, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is assuring Alaskans the president is actually on the side of Big Oil. Meeting with Alaska businesspeople and a representative from Shell Oil, Salazar said the president’s attitude toward Arctic offshore drilling is “Let’s take a look at what’s up there and see what it is we can develop.”

By Brad Johnson on Aug 8, 2011 at 6:29 pm

Yglesias

Iran Does Not Justify Current Levels Of U.S. Defense Spending

By Matthew Yglesias on Aug 8, 2011 at 6:18 pm

Mark Thiessen argues that we can’t afford to cut military spending because “We face potential conflicts with Iran, North Korea, Yemen and Somalia.” This seems like a reasonable benchmarking exercise, but consider the actual gap in US and Iranian defense expenditures:

Israel’s defense budget is about 50 percent larger than Iran’s, as is the UAE’s. Saudi Arabia spends over triple Iran’s defense budget. So it’s not even clear that Iran’s regional adversaries require any backup from the US to match Iran’s fiscal muscle. But if that is what we’re trying to do, then we’re badly overspending.

South Korea has a defense budget of $27.6 billion. The entire GDP of North Korea is only $40 billion. Somalia’s GDP is less than $6 billion. There’s just nothing in these countries that remotely resembles the scale of what the Pentagon is doing. Which is for the very good reason that the Pentagon is scaled to face off against the Soviet Union in a quest for global domination. But the Soviet Union is gone.

Politics

Bachmann Disavows Pro-Union Bill She Sponsored To Help Firefighters And Police Officers

By Marie Diamond on Aug 8, 2011 at 6:10 pm

GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann (R-MN) is disavowing a 2007 bill she co-sponsored that granted collective bargaining rights to police officers and firefighters, Politico reports. Despite claiming as recently as 2009 that “I am not anti-union,” Bachmann has been one of the most outspoken critics of labor rights and a fierce defender of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) union-busting agenda that stripped public workers of collective bargaining rights earlier this year.

The congresswoman sponsored the Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act of 2007, which her fellow conservatives managed to kill after the legislation passed in the House. Spokeswoman Alice Stewart now says Bachmann’s vote was a mistake, and blames “bad information” for her decision to sign on to the bill:

When the congresswoman first went to Washington in 2007 she was presented this bill and was given bad information on the implications on the bill for firefighters and first responders. When she examined the bill, she came to the conclusion that it violated the 10th amendment, hurt the right to work of first responders in all 50 states, and hurt the ability of first responders to perform their jobs (especially volunteer fireman). When she came to that conclusion, she sent a letter to her constituents explaining why she would oppose the bill, rather than wait for the bill to come up for a vote.

Shockingly, Stewart actually seems to be admitting that Bachmann didn’t “examine” the bill before she signed on as a co-sponsor, claiming that once she did consider it carefully, she “came to the conclusion that it violated the 10th amendment” and somehow hurt the very public servants it empowered. This tacit admission flies in the face of a claim Bachmann consistently makes on the campaign trail — that unlike President Obama and many senators and representatives, she actually reads bills before she votes on them.

Opposition to union rights has become a key litmus test for the GOP field this year. Astonishing as it may seem that a candidate with such an abysmal union voting record could face criticism for a bill she now disavows, anonymous fliers are already circulating in South Carolina attacking Bachmann for “selling out to Big Labor.” Of course, the bigger issue is that supporting firefighters and police men has become such a toxic position among the Republican base that Bachmann feels it’s necessary to abandon hard-working public servants to scoop up votes.

Security

Hawks Push For Iraq-Style Sanctions On Iran

By Eli Clifton on Aug 8, 2011 at 6:03 pm

The announcement that 90 U.S. senators signed a letter to President Obama urging him to sanction Iran’s central bank has been described by some American officials, according to the Wall Street Journal’s Jay Solomon, as the “nuclear option” or, in the eyes of some Iranian officials, an act of war. But that hasn’t stopped some of Washington’s most outspoken Iran hawks from applauding potential legislation aimed at freezing Iran out of the global financial system.

The letter, cosponsored by Sens. Mark Kirk (R-IL) and Charles Schumer (D-NY), calls for blacklisting Bank Markazi, Iran’s central bank, and observes that, “If our allies are willing to join, we believe this step can be even more effective.”

But even advocates of ever tighter sanctions, like the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies‘ Mark Dubowitz, admit that getting U.S. allies to join in this extreme move will be difficult. Rubin quips: “The hang-up — no surprise — is that there is no — you got it! — international consensus.”

Rubin goes on to consult with Dubowitz who tells her:

When it comes to implementing tough measures to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program, there is no longer a “third rail” that should prevent us from trying any measure to squeeze the regime. The Obama administration must target Iran’s crude oil sales, designate the Central Bank of Iran, and sanction the Chinese, Indian and other companies that continue to do business in Iran’s energy sector. We don’t have time for half measures and slow, incremental changes.

Rubin and Dubowitz now warn that Iraq-like sanctions — those that caused infant mortality to increase more than three-fold in seven years — are the only way to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and avoiding a military confrontation, but just last week they were declaring the sanctions strategy dead. Dubowitz, quoted by Rubin, said on Thursday:

[The Iranians] are driving ruthlessly forward on their nuclear weapon program while we delude ourselves into thinking that sanctions are a silver bullet that will stop them. Sanctions are an important part of a comprehensive Iran policy that needs to include the real threat of force. Sanctions are an important part of a comprehensive Iran policy that needs to include the real threat of force.

The push for a risky, de facto oil embargo has been floated for the past few months but back in April, Dubowitz admitted that such extreme sanctions could have disastrous effects. Speaking on a Heritage Foundation panel, he said:

We’re playing very delicately with a very sensitive oil market and we have to be very careful not to shoot ourselves in the face by going after Iranian crude through an embargo or through the Iran crude oil sanctions act which sends a message to the markets that we’re going to take a million barrels of crude off line next week.

In June, the Atlantic Council’s Barbara Slavin told Think Progress that legislators pushing for ever tighter sanctions should be careful not to make the same mistakes the U.S. made with Iraq, an ineffective sanctions scheme which exacted a massive humanitarian toll. She said:

What they want is a stealth embargo. And they want it to be slow and quiet so it doesn’t cause shocks to the market, but that’s what they want.

If it starts to look like a total embargo, they will lose support. It starts to look like Iraq.

It’s worth remembering that while these calls for extreme sanctions against Iran are posited as a way to avoid military confrontation, the same coterie of neoconservative hawks never let up calling for military action against Iraq despite the draconian sanctions put in place.

LGBT

Santorum Explains Opposition To Marriage Equality By Pointing To Europe

By Igor Volsky on Aug 8, 2011 at 5:48 pm

Rick Santorum talks a good game when it comes to condemning same-sex marriage for destroying society and the family unit, but when the Des Moines Register asked him what he would do to impose his views of heterosexual marriage on the nation if elected President, the former Pennsylvania senator was left practically speechless. He promised to advocate for a federal constitutional amendment outlawing such unions and “go out and speak and talk” about the issue.

During these trips, Santorum said he’d argue that providing the benefits of opposite-sex marriage to same-sex relationships would devalue the entire institution. Pointing to his relationship with is aunt — whom he assured the board he loves very much — Santorum claimed that that relationship wasn’t as valuable as the one he shares with his wife and if the government said it were, his marriage would lose its value. The national marriage rate would plummet:

SANTORUM: What happens with marriage is — you’ve seen it in Europe and places where you’ve seen this over a long period of time. Fewer people get married. They get married later. They have children out of wedlock before they get married and marriage has become a more casual relationship. Why? Because these other relationships because they are not built on the natural units of the procreative elements of what marriage is about and the stability of having children, they’re not as stable over time. In fact, they don’t even claim to be as stable over time.

Watch it:

Had the editorial board pressed Santorum to substantiate his claims about same-sex relationships devaluing opposite-sex marriages, he would have faced as much difficulty coming up with real word examples as he did explaining how he would act as president.

After all, conservatives made this very same argument after Massachusetts began granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples in 2004, warning against a rapid deterioration of heterosexual partnerships and broken families. Their European statistics were wrong then — after Denmark’s passed its registered-partner law in 1989, marriage rates actually climbed, as did the rates in other Scandinavian countries — and their doomsday projections never materialized in the states that do recognize same-sex unions today.

In fact, Massachusetts recorded the “the lowest divorce rates in the entire country” and Iowa has posted the lowest number of divorces since 1970. As FiveThirtyEight.com pointed out last year, “states which have tended to take more liberal policies toward gay marriage have tended also to have larger declines in their divorce rates,” while the seven states with the highest rates “all had constitutional prohibitions on same-sex marriage in place throughout 2008.” And although the causation may still be unclear, it’s certainly not the case that same sex marriage leads to the kind of disintegration of the institution that Santorum is describing.

Health

Rick Santorum Inadvertently Makes The Case For An Individual Mandate

By Igor Volsky on Aug 8, 2011 at 5:35 pm

In the video below, Rick Santorum says that he would allow insurers to deny coverage to individuals with pre-existing conditions because the problem of people being turned away from coverage is “fairly limited.” This, despite the fact that an estimated 50 to 129 million Americans likely suffer from some kind of pre-existing ailment and run the risk of being denied coverage. In the course of his remarks to the Des Moines Register on Friday, Santorum also inadvertently explained why the individual mandate is so crucial to maintaining the pre-existing condition clause:

SANTORUM: The reason for the pre-existing condition clause is that you don’t want to create a situation where you don’t get insurance until they get sick or have an accident and the reason why Barack Obama did not, you’ll notice, enforce the pre-existing condition clause is until the mandate as put it. Why? Because if you enforce it before, what you do is you encourage everyone to drop their insurance. Because if you don’t have to have insurance until you’re sick, then of course why pay the premiums and particularly if you’re young and you’re single and you don’t have to worry about children and the complications of that. So what the pre-existing condition clause would do without an individual mandate is lead to much higher rates of uninsurance and much higher premiums for everyone who is insured.

Watch it:

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