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Election

Conservative Group Compares Obama’s Policies To Hurricane Sandy

By Scott Keyes on Oct 30, 2012 at 8:33 pm

A day after Hurricane Sandy struck the East Coast, a conservative group is distributing a flyer in northern Virginia that compares President Obama’s policies to a storm rolling through the state.

“WE’VE SEEN STORMS IN VIRGINIA, BUT NONE LIKE THIS,” read the Americans for Tax Reform flyer, along a picture of Obama. ATR is an anti-tax group headed up by Grover Norquist, a federal lobbyist whose infamous “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” has hindered any possibility of compromise in Congress on taxes.

A northern Virginia resident found the flyer at her apartment door Tuesday morning and passed it along to the Houston Chronicle.

Sandy wrought devastation across the state on Monday, leaving more than 100,000 Virginians without electricity.

In total, 238 congressmen and 41 senators — nearly all Republicans — have signed Norquist’s pledge.

Politics

Why The Federal Government Should Handle Disaster Relief

By Zack Beauchamp on Oct 30, 2012 at 6:15 pm

Almost on cue after Hurricane Sandy, conservatives and libertarians have begun arguing that the federal government should get out of the business of providing disaster relief. The function could be delegated to states and the private sector, they claim, echoing an argument advanced by Mitt Romney last year.

But they’re wrong. The private sector and states cannot muster the resources that the federal government can. To deal with massive disasters like Sandy, we need the feds.

Conservatives touting the market often refer to one paper, by Professor Stephen Horwitz, arguing that Wal-Mart responded more efficiently to Hurricane Katrina than the federal government. While it’s widely agreed that Wal-Mart played an important role in the aftermath of the 2005 storm, it amounted to only $17 million in direct donations and roughly $25 million when you include in-kind work. By contrast, the federal government spends $10 billion every year on routine disaster preparedness, a figure that spikes in the case of severe disasters like Katrina. It’s simply inconceivable that corporations would be capable of filling that gap on their own.

But isn’t most of that federal money wasted? Not really, say the experts. Michigan State Professor Saundra Schneider wrote in her survey of recent American disaster relief efforts that “for the vast majority of natural disasters, public institutions respond very well.” When asked if the private sector could fill-in for the government, she scoffed. “The government is the only entity that has the power and resources to deal with this disaster of this scope,” Schneider said. “[There's] a pretty strong consensus in the literature, especially the social science literature, that that’s needed.”

Indeed, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) itself has had a rather sterling track record in responding effectively to crises like Sandy — but while the agency suffered under both Presidents Bush, it prospered during the Clinton administration. During the Bush administrations, FEMA was considered a backwater agency, led by unqualified nominees and given relatively little attention. The results were catastrophically bad responses to 1992′s Hurricane Andrew and 2005′s Hurricane Katrina. After Andrew, President Clinton’s renewed attention on FEMA revitalized the agency, resulting in a substantially more effective agency. As The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn notes, FEMA’s response to last year’s tornadoes was generally considered exceptional. And New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a prominent Romney surrogate and vice presidential contender, has praised the organization’s swift response to Sandy, saying “The federal government’s response has been great…The President has been outstanding in this and so have the folks at FEMA.”

Currently, federal, state, and local governments all play critical roles in managing disaster relief. The system works in the following way: local governments respond first, turn to the state government if the disaster exceeds their resources, who in turn may ask FEMA to step-in. This system works pretty well — as Richard Sylves, a disaster expert at the University of Delaware, notes, most disasters are handled by local and occasionally state governments. This means that most disaster relief is already delegated locally.

The principal federal role, Sylves writes, is to “supplement, not supplant, the efforts of others…[federal aid is designed to] stimulate and guide emergency planning efforts, furnish substantial response efforts after (and sometimes before) a governor secures help from the President, and fund many disaster mitigation efforts.” In other words, the feds provide money, material and coordination states can’t give on their own. Natural disasters often spill across state lines, requiring coordination and cooperation between states with different economic abilities and constraints. Moreover, the sheer expense of disaster relief stretches the limited resources of poor states and states with restrictive balanced budget amendments. Effective response to major disasters requires federal assistance.

Climate Progress

In Sandy’s Wake, Bill Clinton Calls Out Mitt’s Mockery Of Climate Action

By Brad Johnson, Guest Blogger on Oct 30, 2012 at 6:14 pm

After his adoptive hometown of New York City was devastated by Hurricane Sandy, former president Bill Clinton railed against Mitt Romney for having mocked the idea of climate action. In a campaign stop in Minneapolis, MN, Clinton criticized Romney for having “ridiculed the president for his efforts to fight global warming in economically beneficial ways.” “In the real world,” Clinton concluded, “Barack Obama’s policies work better.”

Transcript:

I was actually listening closely to what the candidates said in these debates. In the first debate, the triumph of the moderate Mitt Romney. You remember what he did? He ridiculed the president. Ridiculed the president for his efforts to fight global warming in economically beneficial ways. He said, ‘Oh, you’re going to turn back the seas.’ In my part of America, we would like it if someone could’ve done that yesterday. All up and down the East Coast, there are mayors, many of them Republicans, who are being told, ‘You’ve got to move these houses back away from the ocean. You’ve got to lift them up. Climate change is going to raise the water levels on a permanent basis. If you want your town insured, you have to do this.’ In the real world, Barack Obama’s policies work better.

JR: Romney’s mockery of Obama was in his Republican National Convention speech, not the first debate. Sadly, climate never came up in any of the debates.

Economy

What Spain Should Be Teaching U.S. Conservatives About Austerity

By Pat Garofalo on Oct 30, 2012 at 6:05 pm

According to the latest data from its government, Spain’s economy contracted for the fifth straight quarter during the three months ending in September. Despite this, Spain seems intent on doubling down on austerity measures, as Reuters reported:

Gross domestic product shrank for the fifth straight quarter between July and September, dropping 0.3 percent, while consumer prices rose by 3.5 percent year-on-year in October, the two sets of National Statistics Institute data showed.

Elected just under a year ago on an austerity ticket, [Prime Minister Mariano] Rajoy has signed off on a belt-tightening programme worth over 60 billion euros through to the end 2014 to cut the public deficit.

Spain, like most of the rest of Europe, has seen its growth stall as austerity measures have kicked in. Several European countries are facing recessions, or even depressions, due to misguided fiscal contraction amidst sky-high unemployment. And the countries that have done the most belt-tightening have seen the least growth.

U.S. conservatives continually claim that all the U.S. needs to do in order to boost its slow economic recovery is cut spending and reduce the nation’s debt. But Spain exemplifies how that approach can backfire. Not only has it been cutting spending since the financial crisis, but it ran budget surpluses before the crisis, having a lower public debt than Germany. Those surpluses didn’t protect it from its current catastrophe:

Now, Spain is facing 25 percent unemployment.

The U.S. is doing better than Europe because, among other factors, it didn’t go straight for austerity (and it has an independent central bank that could use stimulative monetary policy). However, the so-called “fiscal cliff” that is due to take effect at the end of the year would cause a more severe fiscal contraction than most of Europe has experienced.

Health

SURVEY: Americans Still Uncertain About What Obamacare Does

By Sy Mukherjee on Oct 30, 2012 at 5:10 pm

Findings from a new Stanford University survey demonstrate that while Americans have a vague understanding of the health reform law’s specifics, most remain uncertain about what Obamacare’s specific provisions actually do.

The survey asked over 2,000 participants to decide whether 18 statements about Obamacare provisions were true or false, and rate how certain they felt about their decision. Although participants generally knew which twelve policies were part of the law and which six weren’t, they had high levels of uncertainty about whether their understanding of Obamacare was accurate. Respondents were able to confirm just one of the twelve actual Obamacare provisions — the portion of the health reform law that allows children to remain on their parents’ insurance until age 26 — with high certainty:

Respondents correctly identified five of the six false statements about Obamacare, but also with low levels of certainty. They were also largely off the mark on whether or not Obamacare mandates free health care for illegal immigrants — it does not. But accurate knowledge of the health law tended to be divided along partisan lines, with Democrats knowing more about the law than Independents and Independents knowing more than Republicans.

And survey respondents with correct information about Obamacare provisions were also far more likely to approve of the law, in keeping with past evidence on Americans’ attitudes toward health reform. Before the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the health law this past summer, one poll showed that while 56 percent of Americans reported they disapproved of Obamacare as a whole, the majority actually supported its individual provisions. Although consistent misinformation campaigns about the health care reform law have successfully confused a large swath of the American population about Obamacare’s actual policies, this type of polling suggests that Americans will approve of the health reform law by increasing margins as they become better informed about what it actually does for them.

Justice

Flashback: Romney Compared Marriage Equality Case To Pro-Slavery Dred Scott Decision

By Ian Millhiser on Oct 30, 2012 at 5:00 pm

As ThinkProgress reported this morning, a top Romney surrogate told socially moderate Republicans this week that the GOP presidential candidate wouldn’t actually threaten Roe v. Wade if elected president, despite months of campaign rhetoric to the contrary. In addition to attacking Roe, Romney’s promised more justices who will immunize powerful corporations from the law, who are likely to roll back key victories for equality, who think the wealthy should be allowed to buy elections, and who believe corporations are people.

Perhaps the most telling sign of how Romney views the judiciary, however, is an op-ed he published just a few months after Masschusetts’ landmark Goodridge decision, which recognized that marriage equality is required under that state’s constitution. In his op-ed, Romney compared Goodridge to the most infamous court decision in American history:

Beware of activist judges. The Legislature is our lawmaking body, and it is the Legislature’s job to pass laws. As governor, it is my job to carry out the laws. The Supreme Judicial Court decides cases where there is a dispute as to the meaning of the laws or the constitution. This is not simply a separation of the branches of government, it is also a balance of powers: One branch is not to do the work of the other. . . .

With the Dred Scott case, decided four years before he took office, President Lincoln faced a judicial decision that he believed was terribly wrong and badly misinterpreted the U.S. Constitution. Here is what Lincoln said: “If the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.” By its decision, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts circumvented the Legislature and the executive, and assumed to itself the power of legislating. That’s wrong.

Mitt Romney is no Abraham Lincoln, and Goodridge could not be any more opposite the Court’s pro-slavery decision in Dred Scott. Dred Scott claimed that black people are “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

And yet, after drawing a comparison between extending the blessings of liberty to all Americans and keeping millions of innocents in shackles, Romney now wants to be able to choose the next justices on the Supreme Court.

[HT: Jeremy Hooper]

Alyssa

How Disney Could Make Star Wars Episode VII Awesome

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Oct 30, 2012 at 4:53 pm

In the rare bit of news that could blow Hurricane Sandy off the map, Disney announced today that it had purchased Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion—and announced that the company will debut Star War Episode VII in 2015. “It’s now time for me to pass Star Wars on to a new generation of filmmakers,” George Lucas said in the official announcement of the transaction, in what is a substantial understatement, given the creative quality of the prequels. “I’ve always believed that Star Wars could live beyond me, and I thought it was important to set up the transition during my lifetime.”

While this opens up a new chapter in the cinematic development of the Star Wars universe, that doesn’t mean Disney will be flying off into uncharted territory. The Star Wars Expanded Universe includes a huge number of licensed books (not to mention video games, comic books, graphic novels, and animated television series) that lay out the story of the franchise’s main characters, and in some cases, their distant descendants. Given that Disney will need to woo legions of long-term fans who love the larger Star Wars universe and were burned to greater or lesser extents by the awfulness of the prequels, and will certainly want to keep monetizing the expanded universe, I expect they’ll preserve that continuity. The question is just which stories they decide to use as source material. Here are five options:

1. Heir To The Empire: One of the most venerable entries in the Expanded Universe, this series of three novels, also known as the Thrawn trilogy, explore one of the most fascinating problems left behind in the wake of the battle of Yavin: how do you clean up a counterinsurgency that includes highly trained admirals with considerable industrial resources and military hardware at their disposal, not to mention a Dark Jedi? Chock-full of military strategy, major roles for all the core characters, and a romantic foil for Luke Skywalker who isn’t secretly his sister—the awesome former Imperial agent Mara Jade—Heir to the Empire is probably the strongest contender for Episode VII, and Episodes VIII and IX to follow—that is, if you want to stick with the original characters.

2. X-Wing: Rogue Squadron: That said, the smartest thing for this new franchise to do would be to move beyond the core cast Luke and Leia Skywalker and Han Solo. The actors who played them are too old to reprise their roles in storylines set relatively soon after the events of Return of the Jedi, and too iconic to be replaced. But there are a lot of terrific other stories set in the Star Wars universe, and for my money, the best is Michael Stackpole’s X-Wing quartet, which involves Wedge Antilles, a minor character who survived both Death Star runs, setting up a new commando squad of flying aces. The franchise introduced Corran Horn, a Corellian Security Force veteran (basically, a Star Wars cop), who joins the squadron and learns more about his family history, and the forces that make him such a remarkable pilot. It also featured Ysanne Isard, one of the great villains of the Expanded Universe era, a former Imperial agent who seizes control of Coruscant, the Imperial capital planet, and then when she risks losing control of it, wages a biological war on non-human species that can only be fought with an extremely expensive cartelized medicine. It’s still an Imperial-New Republic showdown, but in foregrounding commando skills, conflicts between humans and non-humans, smugglers, and trade wars, the Rogue Squadron books explored strikingly new dynamics and made the Star Wars universe a much richer, more thoughtful place.

3. Yuuzhan Vong: If you want to throw out the conflict between the New Republic and the Empire—by this point in the Expanded Universe a breakaway state called the Imperial Remnant—Disney could tell the long-arc story of the Yuuzhan Vong invasion of the galaxy. A wacky conquering species that worships pain, views mechanical technology as an abomination, and terraforms planets to their needs, the Yuuzhan Vong unites the New Republic and the Empire, explores all sorts of complex new dynamics in the Force, and gets seriously violent and crazy. This franchise could be an amazing match for a monster-builder like Guillermo del Toro or an innovator like District 9 director Neill Blomkamp. But it’s probably too far out of the core Star Wars brand for this to happen.

4. Legacy of the Force: The most conservative choice, but probably also the most sensible one, is probably for Disney to skip forward a generation. This franchise explores the rise of Han and Leia’s twins, Jacen and Jaina Solo, as powerful Jedi Knights in their own right, and stages a very different kind of deadly familial showdown as Jacen’s arrogance leads him to the Dark Side, and Jaina rises as the Sword of the Jedi, the greatest warrior of the order. There are big romances, explorations of Han Solo’s home planet, Corellia, the tragic death of Luke Skywalker’s wife, Mara Jade, and lots of other collective drama. I wouldn’t mind a Legacy of the Force series. But it would be giving away a lot of potential to truly develop the world George Lucas built, with much greater nuance than he lent to the prequels.

5. Indie Star Wars: There is a lot of delightfully weird stuff in the Expanded Universe, including The Courtship of Princess Leia, in which Han finally tries to get it together to put a ring on it, but not without kidnapping, incredibly awful attempts at cooking, and a bunch of Force-sensitive witches with pet Rancors; Children of the Jedi, which literally involves Luke Skywalker having ghost sex; Truce at Bakura, which involves soul-stealing aliens invading the fragile New Republic; and superweapon stories like The Crystal Star and Showdown at Centerpoint. I think, however, we’re safe from an adaptation of Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, which was written before the big Luke and Leia reveal, and reads as disturbingly sexual in retrospect.

Politics

Romney Campaign Plays Convention Video At ‘Non-Political’ Storm Relief Event in Ohio

By Adam Peck on Oct 30, 2012 at 4:43 pm

Despite promising to avoid political events while millions of residents in the northeast suffer through the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy, Mitt Romney made stop in the crucial swing state of Ohio on Tuesday morning and engaged in the very kind of electioneering his campaign pledged to forego.

The event itself was billed as a “storm relief” benefit, and the Romney campaign asked supporters to bring with them food and other goods to donate to victims of the storm. But soon, reporters poked holes in the campaign’s explanation for staging the rally. First, the relief event was scheduled for the same time and location as a recently canceled political rally. Then, photos emerged, showing that donors were asked to wait to drop off their goods until Romney arrived to accept them himself, suggesting a photo op not unlike the one his running mate Paul Ryan staged earlier this month in a soup kitchen. And Salon noticed that the targeted recipient of all of the donations — the Red Cross — doesn’t even accept most of what the Romney campaign collected in Ohio.

But just in case there were any lingering questions over the political nature of the relief rally, Romney’s staff left no room for doubt when they aired a biographical video that was part of the Republican National Convention in August (and used by the campaign at political events since).

Even Stuart Stevens, a Romney aide and longtime GOP strategist, admitted that the campaign engaged in politicking at the Ohio event during an interview with NPR political correspondent Ari Shapiro:

Stevens later offered a possible explanation for the video, blaming it on the venue’s in-house Audio/Visual staff for airing the video:

Update

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) condemned Obama in Ohio, while making an appearance on behalf of the candidate at a “storm relief and volunteer appreciation” event. “This president is either engaged in a massive cover-up deceiving the American people or he is so grossly incompetent that he is not qualified to be the commander in chief of our armed forces. It’s either one of them,” McCain told Romney volunteers.

LGBT

NOM Claims Maine Anti-Equality Fundraising Momentum Based On Its Own Contribution

By Josh Israel on Oct 30, 2012 at 4:30 pm

The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) has been the main funder of Maine’s anti-marriage equality ballot efforts. And while it has yet to disclose its donors, NOM is proudly promoting the large sums of money flowing to Protect Marriage Maine — from NOM.

In a post titled “Maine Opponents of Question 1 (Gay Marriage) Raise Almost $1M in Final Weeks,” on NOM Blog Tuesday, NOM highlighted a Morning Sentinel story about amount Protect Marriage Maine, the main group opposing Question 1:

We’re closing the gap in Maine!

The Morning Sentinel:

Opponents of same-sex marriage raised nearly $950,000 in October, a major push toward the end of the campaign as voters get ready to head to the polls Nov. 6.

But, the article continues to note, “The bulk of the money came from the National Organization for Marriage, which donated $800,000, and the Knights of Columbus, which chipped in $100,000, according to a campaign finance report filed with the state just before midnight Friday.”

NOM claims momentum based solely on its own contribution accounting for more than 84 percent of the October fundraising. Polls continue to show marriage equality likely to win next Tuesday.

Economy

What Massachusetts’ Slow Economic Growth Tells Us About Mitt Romney’s Economic Plan

By Travis Waldron on Oct 30, 2012 at 3:50 pm

Mitt Romney has touted his experience as a business leader as proof of his economic know-how, but his economic record as governor of Massachusetts doesn’t seem to back up his argument.

While Romney was in office from 2003 to 2007, Massachusetts lagged behind the rest of the nation in job growth and its economy grew roughly half as fast as the national average. It finished the four-year period 47th in job creation, and its economy never reached 2 percent annual growth, according to the National Bureau of Economic Analysis.

As this chart from the Center for American Progress’ Christian Weller and Sam Ungar shows, Massachusetts would have had to grow far faster to keep pace with the national average and even more quickly to keep up with the 4 percent annualized growth Romney now promises will occur under his economic plan:

Had Romney grown Massachusetts’ economy at the national average, the state’s economic output would have increased by 5 percent. Had he grown it as fast as he promises to grow the American economy, output would have been more than 10 percent higher, Weller and Ungar found.

Economist Robert Lynch, writing in the Baltimore Sun, found that if the American economy performed at the same growth rate as the Massachusetts economy under Romney, he would create just one-sixth of the 12 million jobs he has promised — a full 10 million short of his goal. Lynch also found that President Obama’s private sector job creation record is better than Romney’s was as governor: under Obama, the number of private sector jobs has grown 1.6 percent. It grew just 1.3 percent in Massachusetts during Romney’s term.

While the unemployment rate fell during Romney’s four years it office, it did so largely because of the shrinking of the state’s labor force. Only three states lost more people during Romney’s four years in office than Massachusetts, according to Lynch.

Romney often claims that he rebuilt the Massachusetts economy by making the state more business-friendly, and he promises to do the same as president by cutting tax rates for the wealthy and corporations. Weller and Ungar conclude, however, that the performance of the Massachusetts economy under Romney’s leadership “leaves little to brag about.”

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