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Yglesias

Census Conspiracies Strike Back

By Matthew Yglesias on Mar 30, 2010 at 3:58 pm

The far-right has been spreading a lot of nutty conspiracy theories about the Census lately which, as Dave Weigel notes, seems to be leading to below-average return rates in heavily conservative parts of the country. It’s like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife.

What’s more, the black fly in your chardonnay here is that well-documented census under-responses could be easily compensated for if the Census Bureau did the sensible thing and attempted to create a statistically accurate model of the American population. But instead—at the insistence of the American right—it’s legally required to just count up the forms, and undercount populations that don’t like to mail forms in.

Security

DOJ Cites Powell’s Past Support For DADT To Defend The Policy In Court

By Igor Volsky on Mar 30, 2010 at 3:49 pm

PowellHandsThe New York Times reported in January that President Obama, who deeply believes banning gay men and women from serving openly in the military is “just wrong,” was finally spurred to push for repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell by the realization that “if he did not change the policy, his administration would be forced to defend publicly the constitutionality of a law he had long opposed.”

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what the Justice Department is doing, defending the constitutionality of DADT against a lawsuit filed by the Log Cabin Republicans in 2004. This brief, submitted yesterday, notes that Congress is considering repealing the policy, but quotes “from retired Gen. Colin Powell’s statements nearly two decades ago in favor of the gays-in-the-military ban without noting that Powell has since reversed himself on the issue.” The brief also regurgitates numerous conservative talking points:

- General Colin Powell similarly testified that, “[t]o win wars, we create cohesive teams of warriors who will bond so tightly that they are prepared to go into battle and give their lives if necessary for the accomplishment of the mission and for the cohesion of the group and for their individual buddies.” Id. Congress found that unit cohesion is improved by reducing or eliminating the potential for sexual tension to distract the members of the unit, and by protecting the personal privacy of service members.

- General Powell testified that homosexual conduct in units “involves matters of privacy and human sexuality that, . . . if allowed to exist openly in the military, would affect the cohesion and well-being of the force.”…He further testified that “it would be prejudicial to good order and discipline” if the military required heterosexuals and persons who demonstrate that they do or are likely to engage in homosexual acts “to share the most private facilities together,” id. at 283, and that “[c]ohesion is strengthened or weakened in the intimate living arrangements we force upon our people.

- Among other things, Congress determined that the statute was necessary because “[t]he presence in the Armed Forces of persons who demonstrate a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts would create an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capability.

Gen. Collin Powell officially announced his opposition to DADT back in February, noting that “attitudes and circumstances have changed.” Yet DOJ continues to cite his outdated views to justify a policy that the government is supposed to be unraveling.

All this puts Obama and repeal advocates in a strange position. It’s difficult to push for reform and push back against supporters of the policy when the federal government is using their arguments to defend it. If anything will motivate the president and his national security team to begin working directly with Congress to get repeal legislation into this year’s defense authorization bill, this is it.

Justice

DOJ Cites Powell’s Past Support For DADT To Defend The Policy In Court

By Igor Volsky on Mar 30, 2010 at 3:45 pm

PowellHandsThe New York Times reported in January that President Obama, who deeply believes banning gay men and women from serving openly in the military is “just wrong,” was finally spurred to push for repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell by the realization that “if he did not change the policy, his administration would be forced to defend publicly the constitutionality of a law he had long opposed.”

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what the Justice Department is doing, defending the constitutionality of DADT against a lawsuit filed by the Log Cabin Republicans in 2004. This brief, submitted yesterday, notes that Congress is considering repealing the policy, but quotes “from retired Gen. Colin Powell’s statements nearly two decades ago in favor of the gays-in-the-military ban without noting that Powell has since reversed himself on the issue.” The brief also regurgitates numerous conservative talking points:

- General Colin Powell similarly testified that, “[t]o win wars, we create cohesive teams of warriors who will bond so tightly that they are prepared to go into battle and give their lives if necessary for the accomplishment of the mission and for the cohesion of the group and for their individual buddies.” Id. Congress found that unit cohesion is improved by reducing or eliminating the potential for sexual tension to distract the members of the unit, and by protecting the personal privacy of service members.

- General Powell testified that homosexual conduct in units “involves matters of privacy and human sexuality that, . . . if allowed to exist openly in the military, would affect the cohesion and well-being of the force.”…He further testified that “it would be prejudicial to good order and discipline” if the military required heterosexuals and persons who demonstrate that they do or are likely to engage in homosexual acts “to share the most private facilities together,” id. at 283, and that “[c]ohesion is strengthened or weakened in the intimate living arrangements we force upon our people.

- Among other things, Congress determined that the statute was necessary because “[t]he presence in the Armed Forces of persons who demonstrate a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts would create an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capability.

Gen. Collin Powell officially announced his opposition to DADT back in February, noting that “attitudes and circumstances have changed.” Yet DOJ continues to cite his outdated views to justify a policy that the government is supposed to be unraveling.

All this puts Obama and repeal advocates in a strange position. It’s difficult to push for reform and push back against supporters of the policy when the federal government is using their arguments to defend it. If anything will motivate the president and his national security team to begin working directly with Congress to get repeal legislation into this year’s defense authorization bill, this is it.

Yglesias

Bag Elasticity

By Matthew Yglesias on Mar 30, 2010 at 3:14 pm

plastic_bag_3_0 1

Washington, DC imposed a new five cent tax on plastic bags at grocery stores and other retail establishments this year which was supposed to (a) reduce the amount of plastic bags in the trash and (b) raise funds to pay for the Anacostia River clean-up. As Rebecca at We Love DC notes, it turns out that the price elasticity of demand for plastic bags is incredibly high:

The District’s 5-cent bag tax, which started in January 2010, netted approximately $150,000 during its first month of enactment. According to the D.C. Office of Tax and Revenue, only 3 million bags were issued in the month of January compared to 2009’s 22.5 million bags per month average, and it appears that the new law DC shoppers has been successful in altering shopping bag habits faster than was expected.

As a result, this is actually raising way less revenue than was project. But all things considered, I would say this is a good thing—we’re raising some revenue and drastically reducing the waste of resources. All these bags were being handed out for free, but it turns out that people only actually put a tiny value on access to them.

I think the moral of the story here is about the psychological power of zero. Raising the tax from 5 cents to 10 cents probably wouldn’t change much.

Economy

FLASHBACK: In 2006, Bankers Association Argued For Separating Consumer Protection From Bank Regulation

By Pat Garofalo on Mar 30, 2010 at 2:40 pm

One of the most common arguments employed by the banking industry and conservatives in Congress against the creation of an independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) — which would be empowered to police abuses in consumer lending — is that that it will divorce consumer protection from the “safety and soundness” of banks, unnecessarily undermining the health of the financial system.

“What we don’t want to do is separate out the regulation of the entity from the regulation of the product, which is what the CFPA would do,” Scott Talbott, Senior Vice President for Government Affairs at The Financial Services Roundtable, has said. Creating a CFPA “would actually impair the ability of regulators to monitor the health of our financial institutions and undermine the safety and soundness of our banking system,” added Tom Donohue, president of the Chamber of Commerce.

One of the organizations leading this charge has been the American Bankers Association, which has said that “a more workable approach [to consumer protection] would be to bolster consumer protection and oversight while ensuring that the existing regulatory agencies retain both safety and soundness and consumer protection responsibilities.” But the ABA evidently hasn’t always felt this way.

As Elizabeth Warren, Chairman of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, pointed out in a Politico op-ed today, the ABA in 2006 was advocating that consumer protection be broken away from bank regulation. Here’s what the ABA has to say regarding proposed guidance on nontraditional mortgage products:

The Guidance combines safety and soundness guidance with consumer protection guidance, creating confusion that is best addressed by separating the them [sic]…ABA is concerned that these apparent changes in supervisory and enforcement policy may arise simply from the Board trying to marry safety and soundness supervision with consumer protection supervision. The result of this marriage of inconvenience between supervision and consumer protection appears to blur long-established jurisdictional lines…[T]he combination of safety and soundness guidance with consumer protection guidance appears to create confusion in the Guidance.

ABA concluded that it “does not believe that the lender’s role is to limit the borrower’s choice of mortgage products or features for which he or she qualifies.” So the ABA explicitly argued that consumer protection is a responsibility is best taken on by an entity other than the bank regulators, adding that combining “safety and soundness” regulation with consumer protection would create confusion! As Warren put it, “this 2006 memo illustrates the ABA’s real consistency — consistent opposition to meaningful reform.”

The argument that consumer protection will undermine bank safety and soundness only holds water if you think that banks have to rip off customers in order to make money. And the ABA’s memo shows that it doesn’t actually believe in its own rhetoric; it’s just resorting to whatever argument will be most convenient in its push to derail financial reform.

Politics

Former Bush officials rip Tea Parties: They’re ‘outrageous,’ based on ‘fear and hatred,’ bad for GOP.

By Lee Fang on Mar 30, 2010 at 2:40 pm

Last night on CNN, Larry King discussed the growth of the Tea Parties and their effect on the Republican Party. While Nancy Pfotenhauer, a Republican strategist who has worked in the past for David Koch, the oil billionaire funding the top groups organizing the Tea Parties, praised the development as “phenomenal,” other Republicans were doubtful. David Frum, a speech writer in the Bush White House, and Scott McClellan, the former press secretary to Bush, decried the Tea Parties for their extreme views, like seeking to abolish Social Security. McClellan explained that the Tea Parties have “limited appeal” because they are simply a “divisive protest movement” that “plays too much to people’s fears and hatred”:

FRUM: When you bring on two people on to an important show like this, and they represent themselves as leading a conservative and libertarian uprising against the president, and you say what you would really like to do, and they say, we would like to abolish Social Security, if given half a chance, is that helpful to the Republican Party? There probably aren’t even two percent of the members of the Republican Party who think that way. But that — those are the people on television. That’s not helpful. [...]

MCCLELLAN: And then you also had the comments from the one Tea Party activist that was at the rally over the weekend in Searchlight, referring to President Obama as a terrorist. I mean, that’s just outrageous. You know, I think that there are probably many decent people in the Tea Party movement that have some legitimate concerns about their economic security. [...]

But this is a divisive protest movement that plays too much to people’s fears and hatred. And it’s got limited appeal. I think that after the 2010 elections, you’re going to see this party or the Tea Party movement dissipate to a great degree. … It has limited influence. It really hasn’t shown itself to be a strong, powerful force, even within the Republican Party. However, it is pushing Republicans too far to the right.

Watch it:

As ThinkProgress has documented, rather than lead the Tea Parties into a responsible direction, GOP lawmakers have sought to inflame the movement with violent rhetoric, outlandish conspiracy theories, and hate towards Democrats. The Tea Parties are providing loyal protesters and campaign volunteers to Republican campaigns though, so it is unclear if the Republican Party is even capable of separating from them.

Yglesias

Senate Finance Committee Gets a New Website

By Matthew Yglesias on Mar 30, 2010 at 2:29 pm

Welcome to the New Senate Finance Committee Website 1

I had the opportunity once in the past to mock the Senate Finance Committee for its straight out of 1997 website that advertised itself as “optimized for Netscape Navigator 4.x or Internet Explorer 4.”

Today, reader SP alerts me to the new Finance.Senate.Gov—full of snazzy, up-to-date Web features and nary a mention of Netscape Navigator. Surfing around, I even got Baucus’ statement on selling carbon emissions permits:

“There is no one-size-fits-all model for legislation to fight climate change, including the way emissions allowances are sold. I look forward to reviewing all of our options carefully to find the most efficient, effective and transparent system,” said Baucus.

Of course any effort to create a “one-size-fits-all” model is likely to be sub-optimal in some respect. At the same time, any effort to write up a bunch of detailed exceptions is also likely to be sub-optimal. If I were a Senator, I’d probably love the idea of doing lots of tweaks since I’m the tweaker. But one size fits all seems like a decent satisficing strategy on the merits..

Health

Obama’s RomneyCare Shout Out Puts The Former Massachusetts Governor In A Bind

By Igor Volsky on Mar 30, 2010 at 1:45 pm

Mitt Romney must have been squirming as he saw President Barack Obama defending the bipartisan nature of the new health care bill by citing its similarities with the 2006 Massachusetts reform. “I think that’s unfortunate because when you actually look at the bill itself, it incorporates all sorts of Republican ideas,” Obama said this morning on the Today Show:

OBAMA: I mean a lot of commentators have said this is sort of similar to the bill that Mitt Romney, the Republican governor and now presidential candidate, passed in Massachusetts. A lot of the ideas in terms of the exchange, just being able to pool and improve the purchasing power of individuals in the insurance market.”

Watch it:

It was as if Obama had taken a page from Romney’s own ever-evolving health care stump speech. Just yesterday, during an event in Iowa, Romney — who has previously argued that the Massachusetts and the federal health reform are “as different as night and day” — proudly acknowledged that his bill included a set of new insurance regulations that “President Obama always likes to talk about in his health care plan.” “Overall, ours is a model that works,” he said, before noting, “We solved our problem at the state level. Like it or not, it was a state solution. Why is it that President Obama is stepping in and saying ‘one size fits all?”

Romney’s rhetorical question aside — Obama proposed federal legislation because that’s what presidents do — his newest position highlights the awkwardness of his predicament. On one hand, Romney needs to bolster his can do image by arguing that the individual health insurance mandate, affordability credits, standard benefit package requirements, government-run exchanges and Medicaid expansion (elements of his health care reform) have improved the system. But to retain the conservative base, he is also claiming that these successful policies should not be exported to other states. Rather than building on success, lawmakers should implement a completely untested set of policies that would deregulate insurance markets and help states adopt reforms that are completely different from Massachusetts’ large risk pool approach.

This argument simply doesn’t make any sense and I suspect that primary challengers will ultimately force Romney to walk away from his own health care law. He could argue that the legislature changed his original proposal — Romney vetoed 8 sections of the Massachusetts bill — but if he does, he’ll have a hard time explaining why he called the final package “exactly what we’d hoped for’’ at the signing ceremony.

Yglesias

“Next Year in Jerusalem”

By Matthew Yglesias on Mar 30, 2010 at 1:44 pm

My extended family did a seder on Saturday because it’s more convenient for us, which should I think illustrate that we’re not the type to take religious injunctions hyper-literally. So the inclusion in our haggadah of a part where we all say “next year in Jerusalem” never really strikes me as super-noteworthy—we don’t actually incline when we eat, and we don’t intend to celebrate Passover in Jerusalem in the future.

But Jennifer Rubin brings it up in passing in the course of making a larger insipid point:

Obama, as presidents have traditionally done, released a Passover message. It is typical Obama — off-key, hyper-political, and condescending. The core of the message is this:

The enduring story of the Exodus teaches us that, wherever we live, there is oppression to be fought and freedom to be won. In retelling this story from generation to generation, we are reminded of our ongoing responsibility to fight against all forms of suffering and discrimination, and we reaffirm the ties that bind us all.

No, he didn’t have the nerve to recite the emphatic exhortation “Next year in Jerusalem.” And frankly, it sounds like Eric Holder and his civil rights lawyers drafted it. Is Passover really about discrimination?

On Rubin’s point, this is just a longstanding dispute between liberal Jews (which is like 70-80 percent of us in the United States) and the Commentary-reading minority. I’ve used three or four different haggadahs over the years and they all emphasize the quest for universal justice, as did my Hebrew school teachers and my rabbi growing up. Jon Chait’s has more on this.

But what about Jerusalem? Obviously as a historical matter this phrase enters our passover ceremonies before the creation of the State of Israel and is meant to suggest a hazy aspiration rather than a specific plan. But for the modern-day American Jew it’s a bit of a problem. After all, nothing is stopping us from taking a Passover trip to Israel or, indeed, from moving to Israel. But I would actually be pretty upset if President Obama expressed the view that in his opinion the meaning of Passover is that Jews should all leave America and go move to Israel. Which is why, obviously, he’s not going to say anything like that. But there’s clearly a tension inside present-day diaspora Zionism. Nobody in my family, including its members who are quite a bit more conventionally pro-Israel than I am, has any intention of moving to a Hebrew-speaking Middle Eastern country. And neither, I take it, does the gang at Commentary. So what’s the problem with Obama not pretending that this isn’t the case?

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