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Security

Bolton Says Hillary Clinton’s Australia Trip Is ‘Very Important’

By Hamed Aleaziz on Nov 14, 2012 at 6:30 pm

Today John Bolton, former U.N. ambassador under George W. Bush, said that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s trip to Australia is “very important” and necessary, undercutting attacks from conservative news outlets such as Fox News and Drudge that Clinton is vacationing Australia rather than testifying in front of a congressional committee about the Benghazi attacks.

Speaking on Fox News today, Bolton said:

Let me first say a word in defense of Secretary Clinton and Secretary Panetta being in Australia. This is for an annual meeting called the AUSMIN that we have and I think it is very important that we demonstrate solidarity with the Australians so the fact that they’re out of town shouldn’t be concerning.

Watch the clip:

Specifically, Fox Nation propagated a myth that Clinton skipped a hearing on Benghazi to drink wine in Australia. The Drudge Report picked up the story as well, going even further with its headline: “Hillary can’t make House hearing on Benghazi; busy visiting friends, wine tasting in Australia.” Drudge and Fox link to an article in the Herald Sun, a newspaper, as Media Matters pointed out, that is owned by conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Indeed, the Australia meeting is crucial. At the meeting today, Clinton and Panetta announced that the military “will station a powerful radar and a space telescope in Australia as part of its strategic shift toward Asia.” Other key topics including Afghanistan will be covered as well, the Voice of America notes, “The two countries will also discuss plans to wind down the war in Afghanistan. Australia, which has 1,550 troops in Afghanistan, is the biggest military contributor to the campaign outside NATO.”

Alyssa

‘Any Day Now,’ Homophobia and Heroism

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Nov 14, 2012 at 6:02 pm

All anyone would have had to tell me to get me to watch Any Day Now was that it stars Alan Cumming and Garret Dillahunt as a couple. But that isn’t the only promise–with some caveats–of this period movie about two men fighting biases against gay couples in the adoption process:

I really appreciate the framing of the conflict here: the characters end up challenging laws that discriminate against them as gay men and as a gay couple that get in their way of doing something else that they’re both passionate about, namely, helping a neighboring teenager with Down syndrome. Anti-gay sentiment is a hurdle they face on their hero’s journey, not the only thing they’re interested in, and I hope the characters will get to be fuller people as a result. I am a little concerned about some of the more cliche dialogue it looks like Cumming is getting saddled with, though that man can sell pretty much anything.

But I do think it’s an interesting dynamic to have friction between him and Dillahunt as a reminder that not every member of every group that faces discrimination is a Hero Advocate. Within almost any community, there are people who are able to pass, or to accumulate enough social capital with the majority that it’s genuinely easier for them and their day-to-day lives not to advocate for equality and recognition. Abandoning that relative privilege to embrace solidarity is a kind of heroism, too.

Health

Why The Government Has A Health Care Cost Problem And Not A Spending Problem

By Jeff Spross on Nov 14, 2012 at 6:00 pm

At the end of last week, and just in time for the arrival of the so-called “fiscal cliff” debate, the Congressional Budget Office has released a report on lawmakers’s various options for reducing the deficit. One graph in particular shows that — contrary to conservative and Republican rhetoric — the long-term debt problem did not come from Congress’ “out of control” spending, but rather a technical problem with one specific area of government spending: health care costs.

Mitt Romney and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) pushed for budget cuts during their unsuccessful presidential campaign, warning about “unsustainable spending” on everything from food stamps to Pell grants. But spending is only unsustainable when it’s projected to perpetually increase as a share of the economy, and this graph shows that most government spending doesn’t actually meet that definition. Programs devoted to health care — Medicare being the bulk of the problem, plus Medicaid, CHIP, and the subsidies for Obamacare’s exchanges — are the only ones that do:

Social Security plateaus around 6 percent of the economy by 2035. All other spending outside of health care programs will actually drop to just below 10 percent by that time. That’s lower than the historical average for that spending, which was 11.6 percent of the economy from 1972 to 2011. And this is all according to CBO’s “alternative fiscal scenario,” which assumes that neither the budget sequester nor the cuts to Medicare’s payment rates go into effect — under CBO’s more optimistic scenarios, spending drops even further.

The unsustainable trend in health care programs is occurring simply because the cost of health care itself has been increasing much faster than growth in the overall economy. That problem spans not only the public and private sectors of the United States’ health care market, but most of the western world. Medicare’s budget is just riding the wave of overall cost growth, while actually keeping its costs lower than private insurers. In the realm of what it directly controls, Congress has actually shown significant spending discipline — perhaps too much, as cuts to “all other” spending often come at the expense of social programs that safeguard the nation’s most vulnerable citizens.

This is why Republicans’ approach to budget reform has been largely bizarre and backwards. They would have held to the same spending paths for Social Security and Medicare as President Obama, while getting their deficit reduction by massively slashing the one area of spending that’s already headed down. It’s something lawmakers should keep in mind for the upcoming debate over the fiscal cliff, which would impose yet another round of cuts on the spending in the “all other” category.

NEWS FLASH

Poll: Overwhelming Majority Of Americans Think U.S. Is Losing The War On Drugs | Only 7 percent of Americans think the U.S. is winning the War on Drugs, while 82 percent think we are losing, according to a new Rasmussen survey. The national telephone survey was conducted on Nov. 9 and 10, days after two states passed ballot initiatives that legalize and regulate recreational marijuana. Proponents, including prominent law enforcement officials, reasoned that state investment in research, education and a regulated industry will better serve public health and safety goals than criminalization and prohibition – the “War on Drugs” approach first adopted by President Nixon in 1971. The survey also found that 51 percent think alcohol is more dangerous than pot, and 60 percent think the states, not the federal government, should decide whether marijuana is legal.

Economy

New Measure Shows Government Assistance Kept More Than 25 Million Out Of Poverty In 2011

By Jeff Spross on Nov 14, 2012 at 5:45 pm

Last year, the Census Bureau began releasing the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) alongside the official measure its been using since the 1960s, in order to provide lawmakers with a more sophisticated picture of poverty in America. The Census Bureau today released its updated report on the SPM for 2012, which showed that about 16 percent of the country is living in poverty, roughly the same as last year.

Using that new data, the Center for American Progress determined that, all told, federal programs aimed at helping struggling Americans lifted more than 25 million people out of poverty in 2011:

Refundable tax credits for working families such as the earned income and child tax credits, for example, lifted 8.7 million people out of poverty in 2011, and the child poverty rate would have been 6.3 percentage points higher without them. Similarly, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program lifted 4.7 million people out of poverty in 2011. Without it, the child poverty rate would have been 2.9 percentage points higher.

The official poverty metric used in America since the 1960s takes the basic food diet for a household, accounts for various family compositions, multiplies that by three, and then looks at whether a family’s gross income before taxes and transfers meets that threshold. But that approach leaves out several important factors, including changes in family structures and circumstances since the 1960s, expenses such as clothing and medical costs, and geographic variation. And while it considers the effects of some government spending such as Social Security and welfare, it ignores others, as well as with the effects of many tax credits that help millions of American families.

Security

GOP Senator Opposes Susan Rice As Secretary Of State Because Bush Officials Misled On Iraq

By Hayes Brown on Nov 14, 2012 at 5:38 pm

During a press conference today, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) made it clear why he will oppose U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice becoming Secretary of State: the war in Iraq.

During the press conference, Graham and fellow Republican senators John McCain and Kelly Ayotte called for a Select Committee to investigate the attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya and Graham said he wouldn’t vote for Rice to become Secretary of State, arguing that her handling of the Benghazi attacks is similar to when the Bush administration misled the American public on the course of the war in Iraq:

GRAHAM: Somebody has got to start paying a price around this place. And back to the Bush administration. When we went to Iraq, we came back and said there are more than a few dead-enders. What they’re telling you, the Bush administration, about the level of security in Iraq doesn’t match what we see. And I voted against General Casey, because I didn’t think he deserved to be promoted after the way he did his job in Iraq. I don’t think that she deserves to be promoted. There are a lot of qualified people in this country the president could pick. But I am dead-set in making sure that we don’t promote anyone that was involved in the Benghazi debacle.

Watch Graham’s statement here:

But of course Graham’s comparison between the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq and the Obama administration’s response to Benghazi makes no sense. On the one hand, Bush administration officials, despite the obvious evidence, were saying the situation in Iraq was better than it was (one Bush official even admitted the administration was looking at Iraq through “rose colored glasses”). By contrast, the investigation into what happened in Benghazi is ongoing. When Ambassador Rice spoke to the public on Sept. 16, she presented the intelligence community’s initial assessment with a strong dose of hedging and provisos that the description of events may change as facts emerge. Rice was using available information to explain what happened. For that, Graham, McCain and others in the GOP have relentlessly attacked Susan Rice to tar her as being untrustworthy. President Obama, while not ruling out whether he would nominate, hit back against McCain and Graham for attacking Rice during this afternoon’s press conference.

And in terms of voting for a cabinet member with questionable credentials, back in 2005, Graham and McCain themselves were singing a different tune. They defended President Bush’s nomination of Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State despite her central role in spreading the false intelligence that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction.

Justice

EXCLUSIVE: Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS Never Filed Legally Required Registration

By Josh Israel on Nov 14, 2012 at 5:00 pm

When Karl Rove’s Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies (GPS) formed in 2010, it established its official address in Warrenton, VA, and registered with the Internal Revenue Service a tax-exempt 501(c)(4) “social welfare organization.” It apparently did not, however, register as a charitable organization with the Commonwealth of Virginia, as appears was legally required.

According to state code, non-profit groups that intend to solicit contributions must first register with the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services Office of Charitable and Regulatory Programs. Groups must pay an annual fee ($325 for groups raising over $1 million annually), provide basic information about their operations, and must sign statements affirming that no funds “have been or will knowingly be used, directly or indirectly, to benefit or provide support, in cash or in kind, to terrorists, terrorist organizations, terrorist activities, or the family members of any terrorist.”

The Virginia law explicitly exempts political campaign committees that are “required by state or federal law to file a report or statement of contributions and expenditures.” Crossroads GPS has consistently kept its contributors secret as it has raised and spent tens of millions of dollars against Democratic candidates.

While the group’s federal tax filings and registration with the District of Columbia indicate that it is a Virginia corporation — and Crossroads GPS did apparently register with the state’s corporation commission — the Office of Charitable and Regulatory Programs confirmed to ThinkProgress that no entity named Crossroads GPS or Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies has ever registered to solicit contributions in Virginia. Additionally, no entity with the tax identification number listed on Crossroads GPS’s tax filings has ever registered with the agency.

A spokesman for Crossroads GPS did not respond to a ThinkProgress request for comment.

Update

A spokeswoman for the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services told ThinkProgress that the department will be contacting Crossroads GPS to “notify them of the law and explain that if they are soliciting in Virginia, they are required by law to register.” If such a notification goes ignored, she noted, Virginia law “provides for both civil and criminal penalties,” if the group can be shown to have made such solicitations.

Climate Progress

How Would We Implement A Carbon Tax? (Almost) Everything You Need To Know

By Climate Guest Blogger on Nov 14, 2012 at 5:00 pm

by Richard W. Caperton

If you had told me on Tuesday morning that I was about to spend my day at a standing room only event that had nothing to do with the election, I would’ve said, “But, I’m not planning to go to a David Petraeus news conference!”  Ah, but it turns out that there are other topics that bring out the masses.  I did, in fact, spend the day at a standing room only event that had nothing to do with the election.

The topic?  Carbon taxes, of course.

Yesterday, the American Enterprise Institute hosted a conference to talk about anything and everything related to the economics of carbon taxes.  Normally, a full-day conference with more than a dozen speakers on a tax issue in DC will be lucky to get more than a few dozen attendees, even with a free lunch.  Carbon taxes, though, are different.  The enthusiasm for this issue is such that there were over 200 attendees, many of whom stood for half the day.

What makes carbon taxes different? Simply put, people across the political spectrum now know that putting a price on carbon is an indispensable tool for dealing with our climate and budget problems, and that a carbon tax is the most politically viable path forward.  This dynamic has created an exciting amount of momentum that now needs to be turned into policy.

Not only is the political situation ripe for a carbon tax, but yesterday’s AEI conference demonstrated that the thought leadership is ripe as well.  That’s not to say that there’s agreement on the best way to design a carbon tax; the ultimate design will likely be about political decisions as much as policy ones.  But, the implications of different policy choices are largely known, which was the focus of the conference.

The benefits of a carbon tax would be tremendous.  According to the Brookings Institution’s William Gale, the amount of money a carbon tax could raise is roughly comparable to the size of the Bush tax cuts, indexing the alternative minimum tax for inflation, or the budget sequester that’s part of the upcoming fiscal cliff.  Instituting a carbon tax would make it much easier to deal with our country’s budget crisis, because it would give us another tool for solving the problem.  And, a carbon tax can get significant reductions in greenhouse gas pollution.  Allen Fawcett presented findings from the Energy Modeling Forum that show a multitude of technology development scenarios that get to 50 percent reductions in greenhouse gases with a carbon tax.

Broadly speaking, there are two questions about designing a carbon tax: how to collect the money, and what to do with the money?  Neither of these is simple, and virtually every option involves tradeoffs.

Read more

NEWS FLASH

Obama Says He’ll ‘Make A Push’ For Dialogue With Iran ‘In The Coming Months’ | During his press conference today President Obama denied a recent New York Times report that bilateral talks with the Iranians are imminent, but said “there is still a window of time for us to resolve this diplomatically,” and that he would “make a push in the coming months to see if we can open up a dialogue between Iran and not just us but the international community, to see if we can get this thing resolved.” “We’re not going to let Iran get a nuclear weapon,” Obama said, adding that “there should be a way in which they can enjoy peaceful nuclear power while still meeting their international obligations.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made similar remarks in September.

By Hamed Aleaziz on Nov 14, 2012 at 4:54 pm

Election

Romney Says Obama Only Won Because He Gave ‘Big Gifts’ To Blacks And Latinos

By Igor Volsky on Nov 14, 2012 at 4:49 pm

Mitt Romney is attributing his loss in the 2012 election to the “gifts” President Obama gave to minority voters, the Los Angeles Times is reporting. Speaking to donors on Wednesday, the former Massachusetts governor praised his own campaign, but speculated that Obama won because he was “very generous” to his base:

Mitt Romney told his top donors Wednesday that his loss toPresident Obama was a disappointing result that neither he or his top aides had expected, but said he believed his team ran a “superb” campaign with “no drama,” and attributed his rival’s victory to “the gifts” the administration had given to blacks, Hispanics and young voters during Obama’s first term.

Obama, Romney argued, had been “very generous” to blacks, Hispanics and young voters. He cited as motivating factors to young voters the administration’s plan for partial forgiveness of college loan interest and the extension of health coverage for students on their parents’ insurance plans well into their 20s. Free contraception coverage under Obama’s healthcare plan, he added, gave an extra incentive to college-aged women to back the president. [...]

“The President’s campaign,” he said, “focused on giving targeted groups a big gift—so he made a big effort on small things. Those small things, by the way, add up to trillions of dollars.”

The comments echo the claims Romney made during a private high-dollar fundraiser earlier this year. In the video first published by Mother Jones, Romney argued that 47 percent of Americans are “dependent upon government.”

In his first interview since losing the election, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) also wouldn’t admit that voters rejected the ticket’s economic vision and instead chalked up Obama’s victory to a large turnout of the “urban vote.”

Romney and Ryan however, also lost states with very low minority populations, including New Hampshire, Iowa, Maine and Vermont.

Update

The New York Times has more quotes: “Our campaign, in contrast, was talking about big issues for the whole country —military strategy, foreign policy, a strong economy, creating jobs and so forth,” he said. “And by the way, as you’ll hear from Neil, our strategy worked well with many people, but for those who were given a specific gift, if you will, our strategy did not work terribly well.”

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