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Justice

12 13 Senate Democrats Introduce Legislation To Repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell In 13 Months

By Igor Volsky on Mar 3, 2010 at 5:20 pm

LiebermanDADTSen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and 11 other Senate Democrats have introduced a bill to replace the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell law — which bars gay and lesbian service members from openly serving in the military — with a new nondiscrimination policy that “prohibits discrimination against service members on the basis of their sexual orientation.” The new legislation, called the Military Readiness Enhancement Act of 2010, mirrors Rep. Patrick Murphy’s (D-PA) repeal bill in the House but goes several steps further, laying out a timeline for repeal and setting benchmarks for the Pentagon’s ongoing review of the policy.

Under the Senate bill, repeal would need to be fully implemented within 13 months of enactment:

- Day of enactment: discharges would have to stop.

- Within 270 days of the bill’s enactment: the Pentagon working group must make its final recommendations on implementing repeal (the bill calls for a formal report to be submitted to Congress).

- Within 60 days of the final report to Congress: the Department of Defense must provide revised regulations reflecting repeal.

- Within another 60 days: each military branch must provide revised regulations reflecting repeal.

The bill’s sponsors — Carl Levin (D-MI), Mark Udall (D-CO), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Roland Burris (D-IL), Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Ron Wyden (D-OR), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Arlen Specter (D-PA), Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Diane Feinstein (D-CA) — told the Advocate Magazine that they hope to include their repeal legislation in this year’s defense authorization act and remained confident that they would attract greater Republican support. “In my opinion, this is non-ideological. In some sense, it’s libertarian, in the sense that it’s freedom – it’s giving people the right to serve their country. So this seems to be quite a consistent thing for the party of Abraham Lincoln,” Lieberman said.

At a press conference unveiling the legislation, lawmakers admitted that they did not yet have 60 votes for a repeal, but promised to ” fight for as much support as we can get.” “If we cannot get the votes [for repeal] … we would then at our markup try to see if we can get enough votes to at least suspend the discharges during this period,” Levin said.

Update

Full text of Lieberman bill is now up here.


Update

,I just noticed that Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) is also a co-sponsor.

Yglesias

EB-5 Visas

By Matthew Yglesias on Mar 3, 2010 at 4:44 pm

Village Gourmet Grill & Bakery

Interesting story in the Christian Science Monitor:

For Pierre Gama, the fourth kidnapping was the final straw. Armed carjackers made him drive his car in circles until he gave them the numbers to his credit cards. With two small children and a wife – who was with him during one such secuestro express – the security entrepreneur wanted out of Mexico City.

Mr. Gama proposed moving to Canada, but his wife said it was too cold there. So he opted for an escape route a growing number of his wealthiest countrymen are taking: He bought his family’s way into the United States by spending about $200,000 on a San Antonio restaurant and catering business.

It’s perfectly legal. Immigrants can bring in family on an EB-5 visa if they invest $500,000 to $1 million in a US business. Mexicans have a cheaper deal via E-1 and E-2 visas, thanks to a treaty with the US. Gama took a similar tack, buying Village Gourmet and transferring himself to the US as its new executive via an L-1 visa, designed for intercompany executive transfers.

Lowering the EB-5 threshold down to the Mexican level seems like a politically tractable, albeit small-bore, way to increase the volume of legal immigration to the United States. The investment requirement helps get around the widespread misperception that immigration harms the domestic economy.

Alyssa

Killer Tracks

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Mar 3, 2010 at 4:43 pm

I basically cosign the idea that artists these days might be better off just releasing mixtapes and singles, and making guest appearances on other artists’ songs rather than trying to make albums.  Although I bet my reasons for agreeing with that strategic plan are different than the ones the author original laid out, namely that Drake and Nicki Minaj have done absolutely fine without releasing albums.  As I’ve said, both here and in other venues, I’m not much of an album person.  I like some of them, but there are very, very few that I listen to repeatedly and all the way through.  Blood on the Tracks, for sure.  Stankonia, absolutely.  Both of Cee-Lo’s solo albums.  But most of the time, I tend to prefer singles.  If I find a new one that I like, I can listen to it for a couple of days straight.  I realize that’s somewhat unusual.  But I also think that most albums don’t remotely rise to the level of Blood on the Tracks.  Even Stankonia has filler, most notably the skits that have become an unfortunate, and wasteful, feature of most hip-hop albums and that show little signs of seriously abating.

And we live in an era when the economic model favors singles.  If you don’t have to pay for studio time to record twelve tracks that people will buy because they really like three of them, why make the investment in the studio time?  Why not concentrate on releasing the couple of tracks that are great, shooting killer videos for them, and selling the hell out of them?  Without the pressure to accumulate enough tracks to fill up an album, artists can release material whenever they’ve got good songs, without waiting for it to accumulate or releasing uneven records that taint their legacies.  If artists have an album’s worth of good material, nothing prevents them from releasing it, and from making it an unusual event in the music world.  Maybe I’m just myopic, or young, or something.  But if the age of the album is over, I wouldn’t be devastated.

Politics

Missouri lawmaker: Allowing gays to serve openly increases a military’s casualty rate.

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Mar 3, 2010 at 4:33 pm

Nodler4Missouri State Sen. Gary Nodler (R), who is running for Congress, recently argued that repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) “would offend the terrorists” and be a “cultuaral [sic] affront to the Muslims in who’s [sic] country we are operating.” When blogger Eli Yokley asked Nodler to clarify his comments, noting that many U.S. allies do not discriminate, Nodler suggested that the UK has a higher causality rate than other allies because it allows gay men and women to serve openly:

NODLER: The fact is, in Iraq, and for a period of time in Afghanistan, that happens to be the force that had the highest casualty rate. I can’t say with any certainty that I have any proof that that’s because there’s less comfort from the Iraqis and Afghanis in dealing with those forces, but it might be. And so, I believe the highest casualty rate in any of the allied forces has in fact been Great Britain.

Listen here:

As the Wonk Room’s Igor Volsky noted, Nodler is advocating a policy that allows foreign nations and cultures to “guide U.S. military policy.” Nodler has also expressed concern with women serving, saying that the policy might not be “advancing the goals of the U.S. military.” Moreover, every NATO member except the U.S. and Turkey allow gay men and women to serve openly. A recent report from the Palm Center found that “preliminary findings that open gays do not disrupt military effectiveness hold over time, including in Britain, whose policy of non-discrimination marked its ten-year anniversary last month.”

Economy

To Prevent Financial ‘Viruses,’ Dallas Fed President Calls For Breaking Up Big Banks

By Pat Garofalo on Mar 3, 2010 at 4:30 pm

Dallas Federal Reserve President Richard Fisher

Dallas Federal Reserve President Richard Fisher

Last month, Kansas City Federal Reserve President Thomas Hoenig openly advocated for the “dismembering” of financial firms that are “too-big-to-fail.” He said that carving out the portions of a firm that are taking risks with taxpayer dollars is a “fair thing to consider.”

Many other economists and elected officials have also thrown their support to breaking up systemically risky financial firms, and today they were joined by Dallas Fed chief Richard Fisher. In a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations, Fisher said that “a truly effective restructuring of our regulatory regime will have to neutralize what I consider to be the greatest threat to our financial system’s stability — the so-called too-big-to-fail, or TBTF, banks”:

Given the danger these institutions pose to spreading debilitating viruses throughout the financial world, my preference is for a more prophylactic approach: an international accord to break up these institutions into ones of more manageable size — more manageable for both the executives of these institutions and their regulatory supervisors. I align myself closer to Paul Volcker in this argument and would say that if we have to do this unilaterally, we should…And this should be done before the next financial crisis, because it surely cannot be done in the middle of a crisis.

Fisher has previously called huge megabanks “the blob that ate monetary policy,” saying that “the very existence of the blob of banks considered as too big to fail blocks, or seriously undermines, the mechanisms through which monetary policy influences the economy.”

As The Atlantic’s Daniel Indiviglio wrote, “breaking up systemically risky firms is the most direct way to address the too big to fail problem. It would be messy, but it’s also the only way we can have some certainty that firms can collapse without taking the entire economy down with them. It’s nice to see another Fed president join the cause, but unless others follow, it might not much matter.” Indeed, the tide in Congress seems to be moving away from even the more moderate provisions in the Volcker Rule, which would bar banks from trading for their own benefit with federally insured dollars, but stops short of explicitly breaking them up.

As James Kwak wrote, the current regulatory reform bill moving in the Senate is “a least-common-denominator reform package that leaves the basic financial system intact.” And while a robust resolution authority (like that in the regulatory reform package passed by the House last year) will go a long way toward preventing a financial firm’s collapse from costing taxpayers money, it’s still legitimate to ask why we would allow financial firms to exist that we know, from previous experience, are big enough to threaten the entire economy.

Climate Progress

Juan Cole’s advice to climate scientists on how to avoid being Swift-boated

By Joe Romm on Mar 3, 2010 at 4:15 pm

“Any broadcast that pits a climate change skeptic against a serious climate scientist is automatically a win for the skeptic, since a false position is being given equal time and legitimacy.”

Climate Scientists continue to see persuasive evidence of global warming and climate change when they speak at academic conferences, even though, as Andrew Sullivan rightly put it, the science is being ‘swift-boated before our eyes.’ (See also Bill McKibben at Tomdispatch.com on Climate Change’s OJ Simpson moment).

This article at mongabay.com includes some hand-wringing from scientists who say that they should have responded to the attacks earlier and more forcefully in public last fall, or who worry that scientists are not charismatic t.v. personalities who can be persuasive on that medium.

Let me just give my scientific colleagues some advice, since as a Middle East expert I’ve seen all sorts of falsehoods about the region successfully purveyed by the US mass media and print press, in such a way as to shape public opinion and to affect policy-making in Washington:

That is U. Michigan history professor Juan Cole writing on his blog, Informed Comment, Sunday.  Cole is “an American scholar, public intellectual, and historian of the modern Middle East and South Asia,” as Wikipedia puts it.

The full title of Cole’s piece is “Advice to Climate Scientists on how to Avoid being Swift-boated and how to become Public Intellectuals.”  I’ll excerpt it below with my comments.  The main issue I take with his piece is that the overwhelming majority of climate scientists don’t want to become public intellectuals, in part because that is perceived as the kiss of death for their scientific careers.

Read more

Yglesias

The Plausible Third-Party Scenario

By Matthew Yglesias on Mar 3, 2010 at 3:58 pm

File-Tom_Tancredo,_official_Congressional_photo

Every couple of months, a certain kind of Beltway punditry will go into paroxysms of joy at the thought of a “centrist” independent presidential candidacy. Even Harold Ford’s wildly implausible and now-dropped Senate big became an excuse for touting this sort of thing. Meanwhile, you hear much less about ideas like this which I regard as much more plausible:

Former Colorado congressman and Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo told WND today that if no one to his liking emerges in the 2012 run for the White House, he will consider another bid for the GOP nomination and would not rule out becoming a third-party candidate, as a “last option.”

Tancredo, known for his strong stance against illegal immigration, spoke to WND after a Dutch newspaper published an interview article in which he said he didn’t view the GOP’s 2008 vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, as “presidential.”

Now Tom Tancredo isn’t going to get elected President as an independent candidate. But there’s a real political space for an anti-immigration conservative candidate. The GOP keeps nominating pro-immigration presidential candidates despite very substantial resistance to this stance from within the party base and there’s an anti-immigration constituency among a lot of people who would self-identify as moderate as well.

If he was able to raise money—which would be a real problem—I don’t think it’s hard to imagine a conservative running as an anti-TARP, anti-immigrant “tea party”-friendly candidate getting enough electoral support to potentially impact the final outcome.

Economy

Rebuilding The Tool Belt Economy

By Guest Blogger on Mar 3, 2010 at 3:40 pm

Our guest blogger is Bracken Hendricks, a Senior Fellow with American Progress Action Fund and the founding Executive Director of the Apollo Alliance.

Yesterday President Barack Obama announced details of his proposed $6 billion energy efficiency rebate program, known as Home Star, at Savannah Technical College in Georgia. Informally known as “Cash for Caulkers,” the Home Star program would provide immediate rebates of up to $3000 to homeowners who invest in making their homes more energy efficient. President Obama described how Home Star helps Americans on several fronts:

Now, we know this will save families as much as several hundred dollars on their utilities. We know it will make our economy less dependent on fossil fuels, helping to protect the planet for future generations. But I want to emphasize that Home Star will also create business and spur hiring up and down the economy.

Construction job lossesWith unemployment in the construction industry at almost 25 percent, it is imperative that the Obama Administration implement innovative, effective programs to spur job creation in what has been termed the tool-belt recession. The tool-belt recession has a deep and far-reaching impact on communities. Construction job losses touch every state in the union and hit local economies hard, spilling over to other parts of the economy as well. Job loss in manufacturing industries tied to construction is higher than in manufacturing as a whole. Many construction related industries have shed 20 percent to 30 percent of their jobs since the recession began. Jobs in the construction sector and related industries are suffering more compared to other parts of the economy. It is time for a national response to this tool belt recession. Here are some of the numbers:

– The unemployment rate for experienced workers in construction was 24.7 percent in January 2010.

– Total construction payroll employment has dropped by 2.1 million jobs since 2006, with residential construction down by 1.3 million, or 38 percent.

– For 2009, 12.4 percent of all unemployed workers were previously employed in the construction industry.

– There have been 134,000 jobs lost (10 percent) in construction-related retail, such as building supply stores and lumber yards, since December 2007, with 186,000 lost (14 percent) since July 2006.

With demand for construction jobs at near depression levels, stimulating consumer demand for residential energy efficiency is a smart business. It creates high-paying jobs for idled construction workers, boosts sales of American-made building materials, and saves consumers money. American companies are ready to hire back crews if we can jumpstart demand for projects. Home performance contracting for energy efficiency is one bright spot on the horizon for the building trades today.

Matt Golden, CEO of home performance retrofit contractor Recurve, and co-author of our study explains:

The tool belt recession is devastating. There is an urgent need in every state of the union to generate skilled, high-paying, long-term construction and manufacturing jobs to grow our economy. But there is hope. As an employer in the hard-hit state of California, I have seen my efficiency business grow by 60 percent, even as the construction industry has lost over 35 percent of construction jobs, around me.

It’s time to launch a national Home Star program which includes incentives for homebuyers to invest in the energy efficiency of their homes, which will jumpstart demand for labor. Congress can quickly create jobs with policies to expand investment in commercial and industrial energy efficiency and financing for retrofit jobs.

Read the whole memo about taking on the tool belt recession here.

Politics

Is Taxpayer Money Being Funneled Through The Chamber Of Commerce To Kill Health Reform?

By Lee Fang on Mar 3, 2010 at 3:34 pm

Eric and Diana CantorThe U.S. Chamber of Commerce, an umbrella lobbying organization for international corporations and big business, is one of the driving forces fighting to kill health reform. In 2009, the Chamber dropped $123 million in lobbying, much of it against health reform, and organized an attack ad campaign against health reform, spending another $100 million. Now, as health reform enters its final stages, the Chamber is gearing up to blanket critical districts across the country with a new series of attack ads.

While the Chamber refuses to publicly list its membership, several confirmed Chamber members are banks which were bailed out by taxpayers and still have not repaid the TARP funds. For instance, New York Private Bank & Trust received TARP funds and still owes $254,892,509 back to the government. Diana Cantor, the bank’s managing director, is a board member of the Chamber Foundation and wife of Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA), two leading opponents of reform. How can taxpayers be reassured that Cantor’s bank, and other bailed out Chamber banks, are not using taxpayer dollars to fund the Chamber’s anti-reform activities? Here are the bailed out banks we know are funding the Chamber and have not paid back TARP:

– Citigroup, a member of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, received bailout money. Citigroup still owes taxpayers over $22 billion in TARP funds.

– Marshall & Ilsley Bank, a member of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, received bailout money. M&I Bank still owes taxpayers over $1.6 billion in TARP funds.

– New York Private Bank & Trust, a member of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, received bailout money. Diana Cantor, the bank’s managing director, sits on the Chamber Foundation’s board. New York Private Bank & Trust still owes taxpayers over $250 million in TARP funds.

To preserve brand identity and maintain secrecy, many businesses use groups like the Chamber to launder money for political means. For instance, health insurance companies lied and told the public all last year that they were supportive of reform — while simultaneously funneling up to $20 million dollars for attack ads through the Chamber (the other $80 million spent on Chamber attack ads against health reform is still unaccounted for).

Although reform would benefit the business community at large by controlling insurance costs and improving worker health, the Chamber is taking a rigid, ideological approach. Indeed, the Chamber is known to have become increasingly partisan under the leadership of Tom Donohue; an analysis by the Wonk Room found that the Chamber’s board is dominated by Republican donors. The Chamber seeks to kill large progressive reforms in order to kill progressive policies in general. Chamber officials have even gone on record noting they hoped to block health reform as a tactical measure to kill clean energy reform, a priority of many Chamber member companies.

As Matt Yglesias has observed, American trade associations like the Chamber “behave in a highly ideological, highly solidaristic manner rather than as narrow interest groups.” By promoting gridlock and the status quo, the Chamber hopes to stall other key progressive agenda items banks oppose, like labor and financial reform.

Related Posts

Yglesias

The Friedman Method

By Matthew Yglesias on Mar 3, 2010 at 3:14 pm

intelinside 1

I have to say it’s really remarkable that we live in a world where talking to the CEO of a large company reporting that the CEO wants tax breaks and subsidies for his firm counts as serious political commentary. Read today’s Tom Friedman piece and watch in amazement as he doesn’t even consider the possibility that Paul Otellini’s ideas might be motivated by anything other than a disinterested concern for the welfare of the American people. Has Friedman surveyed a lot of CEO’s who don’t think that shifting public policy to be more favorable to the firm they run would be a good idea?

Meanwhile, it just can’t be said often enough that the “competitiveness” frame is bunk. If the government of China makes some horrible policy error and 8 percent growth turns into 1 percent contraction, leading to widespread political protests, a violent crackdown, capital flight, and a decade of economic stagnation that will make the United States more “competitive.” But it would be bad for China, bad for commodity exporters, and ultimately bad for the United States.

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