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Politics

Cantor-led GOP delegation to Israel undermines U.S. policy on settlements.

By Ben Armbruster on Aug 6, 2009 at 5:36 pm

cantor-ericPresident Obama has made clear that, as part of his plan to achieve a resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Israelis should cease creating or expanding settlements in the West Bank (a position that has been official U.S. policy since 1967). Israeli officials have expressed displeasure with this demand and last Sunday, Israeli police evicted two Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem so a Jewish family could move in. The U.N., the U.S., and many E.U. states strongly condemned the evictions. However, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) and many of his GOP colleagues are in Israel this week undermining U.S. policy by not only offering support for Israeli settlement expansion but for the East Jerusalem evictions specifically:

Cantor said that instead of focusing on issues such as Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank, Obama should concentrate on “the primary issue of import … and that is the existential threat that Iran poses not only to the state of Israel but to the United States.” [...]

Cantor and others supported Israel’s handling of the eviction of two Arab families from a house in east Jerusalem earlier this week, a move criticized by the European Union and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“I don’t think we, in America, would want another country telling us how to implement and execute our laws,” Cantor said.

It’s not just the Obama administration that wants a settlement freeze, the Israelis themselves committed to one in the Bush administration’s 2003 Road Map. “Maybe it’s too much to ask Cantor and his colleagues to recognize the injustice and indecency of Israeli policy toward Jerusalem’s non-Jewish residents,” the Wonk Room’s Matt Duss writes. “But it shouldn’t be too much to expect them not to go abroad and provide cover for it.”

Yglesias

Congressional Action and Public Opinion

By Matthew Yglesias on Aug 6, 2009 at 5:28 pm

Chris Bowers surveys the evidence and reaches the conclusion that congress rarely passes laws that poll poorly:

To repeat, Congress is pretty cautious. They rarely pass anything that is unpopular, because they usually pay a heavy political price when they do.

It’s worth considering other causal factors. For one thing, as Chris notes congress frequently fails to enact popular proposals despite their popularity. So I think it’s misleading to portray congress as highly influenced by public opinion. A big part of the story is simply that congress has tons of veto points and thus an extremely strong bias toward the status quo. Obviously, popular bills are easier to pass than unpopular ones and in general bills are very hard to pass.

The other factor is that there’s some feedback in the other direction. If George W. Bush and Tom Daschle and Tom DeLay and Hillary Clinton and Mitch McConnell and John Kerry and Dick Gephardt all say it’s important to invade Iraq, then a lot of people are going to notice that “everyone” seems to agree about this and become more inclined to support the proposal.

Climate Progress

Tony Blair, Climate Group, and CAP call for strong technology deployment policy driven by a carbon price, innovative financing, and serious technology standards

By Joe Romm on Aug 6, 2009 at 5:02 pm

Tony Blair and the Climate Group have written an excellent report, “Breaking the Climate Deadlock: Technology for a Low Carbon Future (PDF).”

While they endorse strong investment in technology development — as the Center for American Progress (CAP) and virtually everyone else does — it is squarely focused on the crucial role that strong government regulations and standards play in achieving the rapid technology deployment needed to meet key 2020 greenhouse gas targets.  And it endorses a strong carbon price — as CAP and virtually all serious independent groups do (with a few strange exceptions) — as a necessary means of achieving emissions reductions sufficient to preserve a livable climate.

Let’s start with Blair’s detailed strategy for achieving significant global emissions reductions in 2020 — which is the cornerstone of any real plan to avert catastrophic global warming.  Here is the first conclusion from the executive summary:

Read more

Politics

Health insurance executives undermine insurance lobbyist’s pledge to reform insurance market.

By Igor Volsky on Aug 6, 2009 at 4:55 pm

Yesterday, during an interview with Bloomberg Radio, Karen Ignagni — the President and CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) — reiterated insurers’ commitment to reforming the health insurance marketplace:

That’s what people want. They want to be in. They don’t want to be rejected because of preexisting conditions, and they want to make sure they have continuity of care. We’ve committed to that. That’s what our industry is doing. We are one of the first to step up and offer real change that affected our industry. And we’re still committed to that.

While the insurance industry has publicly supported regulations that would guarantee everyone coverage and outlaw pre-exising condition exclusions, Ignagni may be overstating the industry’s commitment to so-called “market reform.” On June 16, despite Ignagni pledges of commitment, insurance executives from UnitedHealth Group, Assurant, and WellPoint specifically refused to “commit” to ending the controversial practice of rescinding coverage after an applicant files a medical claim. Watch a compilation of Ignagni’s claim and insurers’ refusal to end rescission:

As former health insurance executive Wendell Potter argues, insurers seek to “drive down” costs by refusing to insure “unhealthy people,” a tactic borne out by the fact that 47 million Americans currently lack health insurance. The “insurance industry has been one of the most successful, in beating back any kinds of legislation that would hinder or affect the profitability of the companies,” said Potter. The Wonk Room has more.

Yglesias

Afghanistan War Spending in Perspective

By Matthew Yglesias on Aug 6, 2009 at 4:44 pm

(dod photo)

(dod photo)

This isn’t exactly the point he’s making, but this observation from Mark Kleiman sure is striking:

US expenditure budget for Afghanistan this year is to be $65 billion; I’m not sure how much NATO and other countries add to that. The US budget alone is more than 5 times the Afghan GDP of $12.5B ($400 per capita).

This seems to me to really throw into relief some questions about the efficacy of what we’re doing there. If Afghanistan’s total output is only worth $12.5 billion, then think about how much you might be able to accomplish with $6.5 billion a year in bribes rather than ten times that amount in defense expenditures. Meanwhile in the real world all signs point toward an additional increase in the quantity of resources dedicated to the Afghan war.

Security

Lou Dobbs Show Cites Fear Mongering Anti-Immigrant Astronomer As Population Growth Expert

By Andrea Nill Sanchez on Aug 6, 2009 at 4:30 pm

angrybabyLast night, in a segment warning of the environmental perils associated with US population growth, The Lou Dobbs Show featured Ben Zuckerman — an anti-immigrant activist who attempted a nativist takeover of the Sierra Club back in 2004. Dobbs correspondent Casey Wian allowed Zuckerman to insert himself into a discussion about a new report released by Oregon State University (OSU) which unsurprisingly shows that having fewer children lowers total carbon emissions. Zuckerman is an astronomy professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and a self-proclaimed “environmentalist.”

ZUCKERMAN: The mainstream environmental movement has entirely dropped the ball on this issue. And I think that’s really been a disaster for our country…They list literally hundreds of sort of trivial ways in which one can reduce one’s environmental impact on the earth, but they don’t even mention population…

WIAN: UCLA’s Zuckerman says the U.S. government could and should be doing more to encourage limited preproduction and population growth, including controlling immigration, educating the public about the impact of multiple child families, and perhaps even structuring child tax credits to reduce tax breaks for larger families.

Watch it:

The OSU report claims that having one American child results in an environmental impact 160 times greater than a Bangladeshi youngster due to the wealth disparity between the two nations. However, OSU provides no policy prescriptions while Zuckerman seems to imply that the world is better off if that Bangladeshi child stays in his or her home country and Bangladesh remains poor and unindustrialized. The US Census Bureau meanwhile projects that the rate of US population growth will decrease by 50% over the next six decades.

Most of Zuckerman’s environmental policy prescriptions involve curbing “over-immigration” which he claims “contributes to environmental decay.” Zuckerman is the former director of an anti-immigration group called Diversity Alliance for a Sustainable America (now Alliance for a Sustainable USA) and led Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization. As a board member of the Sierra Club, Zuckerman tried to pass a resolution in 1998 that would have reversed the Club’s neutrality policy on immigration. Zuckerman and his cronies then blatantly attempted a “takeover” of the Sierra Club’s leadership by placing anti-immigrant candidates on the Club’s board ballot in 2004. The entire controversy subsided when Zuckerman’s candidates received less than 3% of all votes casted.

In recent years Zuckerman has stuck to star-watching and planet-gazing, but his recent appearance on Dobbs signals that he’s not ready to hang up his anti-immigrant towel quite yet. Zuckerman currently serves as vice-president of Californians for Population Stabilization’s board and sits on the Statistical Oversight Board of NumbersUSA. Both groups are financed by white-supremacist John Tanton, “the puppet master of the modern anti-immigration movement” who Zuckerman has referred to as “a great environmentalist.”

Politics

Contrary to Steele’s Claim, State GOP Are Actively Promoting Town Hall Mobs

By Zaid Jilani on Aug 6, 2009 at 4:00 pm

Yesterday in an conference call that ThinkProgress took part in, GOP Chairman Michael Steele told reporters that neither the national Republican party nor any state Republican parties are promoting town hall disruptions:

STEELE: I had nothing to do with that, I did not encourage that. And we’re not encouraging people to be angry I mean to the point of being nasty and brutish and ugly. That’s not what this is about. There’s no upside for the Republican Party or the people involved to do that. Now some people, you know, that’s how they express their frustration, that’s how they express their frustration. But that’s not something deliberately coordinated by me or any one state party.

Unfortunately, Steele’s statement isn’t true. This past weekend, Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) was harassed by right-wing protesters who refused to have a civil dialogue with the Congressman. The front page of the official website of the Texas Republican Party prominently features and endorses the incident. The website headline reads, “Doggett Fields Softballs“:

txgopdoggett

If you click on the picture, it links to a video of the incident, which is hosted by the Texas Republican Party’s official YouTube account, txgoptv. At the conclusion of the video, the words “Produced by the Republican Party of Texas” pop up alongside a legal disclaimer that proclaims the video was paid for the by the Republican Party of Texas.

The Texas GOP’s endorsement of these tactics joins remarks by Sen. John Coryn (R-TX) that the “fear” and “anger” of Americans over health care reform present “real opportunities” for the Republican Party.

The Texas GOP isn’t alone in encouraging the mob protests, though. On a blog post titled “Here’s to Mob Rule,” Connecticut GOP chairman Chris Healy yesterday listed off the times and locations of several health care town halls. In the post he wrote that “one perrson’s [sic] mob is another person’s concerned’s citizen’s group” and remarked that if members of Congress “get upset because people are shouting at them, maybe they should listen.”

ThinkProgress has contacted the both the Texas and Connecticut Republican parties for comment, but we have yet to recieve a response.

Culture

Leverage in the NBA

By Matthew Yglesias on Aug 6, 2009 at 3:58 pm

$14.2 million in 2009-10 plus an eight percent raise the next year.

$14.2 million in 2009-10 plus an eight percent raise the next year.

John Hollinger explains:

Allow me to explain. The entire guiding principle of most cap-related decisions in the past two decades is that the cap will almost always go up and sure as heck won’t go down. It’s embedded in the contracts, too, most of which contain either 8 percent or 10.5 percent annual raises. Thus teams feel safe gambling on a $5 million player. If they’re wrong, the cap will effectively erase the mistake in a season or two by continually rising.

In the current environment, however, some teams are going to be completely whipsawed by a cap that goes down just as their salaries go up. Clubs that have several players with long-term deals could be well under the tax threshold in 2009-10, and then be well over it in 2010-11 with more or less the same players. This is a real threat for the Philadelphia 76ers and Indiana in particular, and it could grab several other teams depending on what transpires in the coming months.

Since the salary cap and the luxury tax threshold in the NBA are both pegged to revenue, and since teams have a limited capacity (but there is some capacity) to reduce the number of players they field, average salaries need to go down. But because contracts are usually guaranteed, and most players have large raises written into their contracts, the decline in salaries is going to need to be borne by a relatively small number of players. Which means, basically, that any team with the financial resources to be hiring next offseason is going to be able to take advantage of incredibly employer-friendly labor market conditions.

Relatedly, right now the Miami Heat have only Dwayne Wade under contract for 2010-11. In other words, Pat Riley is in pretty good shape.

Justice

Kyl Falsely Accuses Sotomayor Of Perjury

By Ian Millhiser on Aug 6, 2009 at 3:36 pm

kylDuring Judge Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing, conservatives repeatly made the false claim that she believes that U.S. law is governed by foreign courts.  In a Senate floor speech yesterday, however, Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) doubled down on this lie, audaciously accusing Sotomayor of perjuring herself before the Judiciary Committee:

“Later in her hearing, Judge Sotomayor gave the following testimony: ‘I will not use foreign law to interpret the Constitution or American statues. I will use American law, constitutional law to interpret those laws except in the situations where American law directs the court.’ While this kind of declarative statement would normally provide some measure of comfort, it is belied by words Judge Sotomayor uttered less than three months ago, that judges were ‘commanded’ to look to ‘persuasive’ sources, including foreign law, in interpreting our own law. And it is even inconsistent with an exchange Judge Sotomayor had with Senator Schumer earlier in the hearing, in which she agreed that foreign law could be used for the same purposes as traditional interpretive tools, such as dictionaries.

“It gives me great pause that Judge Sotomayor could say one thing at a public speech earlier this year and say the opposite while under oath before the Judiciary Committee, especially since she never repudiated her speech.

No one, including Judge Sotomayor, actually believes that an American judge is bound by foreign decisions, and Kyl is simply lying when he claims that she does believe this.  One of the first things that any lawyer learns in law school is that not all citations are created equal, and so when a judge cites to one source or another they are not necessarily saying that this source is controlling law.  Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia recently cited to the Talmud in a judicial opinion, and a Seventh Circuit judge once cited hip hop artist Ludacris, but no one thinks that Scalia believes we should be ruled by unelected Rabbis, or that Seventh Circuit Judge Terence Evans believes that U.S. law is governed by unelected rappers.

As a general rule, citations to binding case law, statutes, regulations and the like are generally referred to as cites to “mandatory” authority, because they rely on legally binding materials that judges have no choice but to follow.  Other citations, to law review articles or holy texts or non-binding caselaw, are known as “persuasive” authority.  So when Sotomayor referred to foreign law as “persuasive” she was saying the exact opposite of what Kyl accuses her of.  “Persuasive” is the legal word for a citation to something that is not controlling law, and when Judge Sotomayor states that she relies on persuasive authority, she is endorsing a practice used by literally every member of the United States Supreme Court and taught to every single lawyer in the country.

Indeed, the difference between mandatory and persuasive authority is so basic, most law students are taught this distinction in their first few weeks of law school.  In light of the fact that Senator Kyl spent many years as a litigator before entering politics, it simply defies belief that he would not be aware of this distinction.  If Kyl actually believed that a judge’s citation to a persuasive source like foreign law indicates that they believe foreign law is binding, mandatory authority, it is unlikely he would have made it this far in his career without being disbarred.

Sadly, however, there is a narrow band of Kyl’s conservative base that gets charged up by false claims that liberals can’t wait to transform America into France.  In Kyl’s world, keeping these nuts fired up is apparently much more important than the truth.

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