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Yglesias

Pork-Hustling House Republicans Make The Case For Infrastructure Spending

By Matthew Yglesias on Jul 5, 2011 at 5:29 pm

Sam Stein profiles the efforts of spending-averse freshman House Republicans to secure millions of dollars in federal spending:

Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-Tenn.), a member of the freshmen Republican class of the House of Representatives whose district includes the port project, faced a predicament. Elected as a fiscal hawk, with pledges to get spending under control, he could either go to the mat for Cates Landing or make a philosophical, self-sacrificial statement.

He chose the former. On March 8, 2011, Gannett news service reported that the funding for Cates Landing was being targeted by lawmakers looking to slash the federal budget. The same day that report came out, Fincher spoke directly with Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood about the funds. The next day, he wrote a follow-up letter seeking assistance in “obligating” the $13 million grant for the port.

There’s much more there. And, look, not just to point fingers and cry “hypocrite” but the vast majority of these requests for funding seem justified to me. It happens to be the case that at the most, the interest rate the federal government needs to pay to borrow money is extraordinarily low. At the same time, the United States of America has a lot of idle resources. Under most circumstances, high levels of government borrowing risk “crowding out” valuable private sector activity. But that’s not the case currently. We have a shortage of jobs, not a shortage of workers. We have a shortage of investment opportunities rather than a shortage in savings. That doesn’t mean every random project every member of Congress can dream up is a good idea, but we should trust House members to be fairly good at figuring out whichever particular project is deemed particularly urgent or beneficial by the community that he or she represents.

The problem, though, is that all these different members with their hands out can’t all win. There’s a fixed pool of funds to go around. And House Republicans are fighting to shrink the pool when they should be expanding it.

Alyssa

‘Falling Skies,’ Iraq, And Afghanistan: What’s It Take To Harass An Invader Out Of A Country?

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jul 5, 2011 at 5:17 pm

Noah Wyle plays an academic forced to implement his theories in TNT's 'Falling Skies.'

I don’t think Falling Skies is the show to end all shows, but it does satisfy a craving I’ve had for a look at alien invasions that don’t just consist of a traumatic invasion that’s easily repulsed once humans figure out the aliens’ fatal weakness. Instead, it dispenses with the history of the invasion in a monologue by a group of children in the first minute and a half of the pilot: “I was in school when the ships came. They were really big. And they said we weren’t going to attack them with a nuclear bomb because they might want to be friends. But they didn’t want to be friends. Not at all…They blew up army bases, ships, the Navy, submarines, and all the soldiers are gone…Now the moms and dads have to fight…They kill parents. And they put harnesses on kids.” And then the show moves swiftly and efficiently into the question of what happens to individual humans and human society when it’s on the brink of extinction.

There are fairly obvious compromises. A criminal can be a useful addition to society if he knows how to cook, bringing some solace to everyday life — and if he’s developed a better theory of fighting the invaders. We’ll tolerate deviant behavior by doctors if they lead to medical innovation that can be an effective response to new threats. Shreds of normality, like a skateboard, can unify entire communities. Thank God America manufactured so much canned food.

But one of the things that’s most interesting to me so far is the debate over whether academic knowledge and theory or military expertise matter more in the current environment. That conflict’s embodied by Tom Mason (Noah Wyle, finally finding a decent outlet for his penchant for playing bookish action heroes), a military history professor, and Captain Weaver (Will Patton), an actual veteran of both the armed forces and the military reserves. Mason’s not a fantastic commander: he gets his squad captured, he brings back an alien prisoner of war without a sense of whether it’ll be feasible or wise to hold one, and it’s not necessarily clear that his theories about whether the Skitters (as the invaders are known) can be harassed off Earth the same way the British were harassed out of the colonies during the Revolutionary War carry water. But Mason does understand that in order to win, the human survivors need more than a military campaign, telling one of his fellow survivors, “I think civilians are a liability and a hindrance. I also think they’re the best motivation we have to fight.” When he has to choose what books he wants to take with him, he picks A Tale of Two Cities.
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Related Posts

NEWS FLASH

The Business Owners Who Fund Minnesota’s Marriage Inequality | Via The Minnesota Independent: Andy Birkey unveils six business owners who have each given tens — if not hundreds — of thousands of dollars to support Minnesota for Marriage and the Minnesota Family Council’s lobbying activities. They include Robert Cummins (Primera Technology), Rodney Huisken (Huisken Meats), Joel Jennings (Gopher Sport), Ron King (real estate developer), and George and Barbara Anderson (Crown Iron Works). The organizations successfully lobbied the legislature to attach a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage to the 2012 ballot, but the state’s Campaign Finance Board ruled last week that these groups will now have to disclose all corporate donors in addition to private donors.

Economy

Christie Vetoes Vital Funding For Low-Income Workers To Give Wealthy School Districts More Money

By Pat Garofalo on Jul 5, 2011 at 5:05 pm

Last week, Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) signed into law a plan that limits the ability of New Jersey’s public employees to collectively bargain for health care benefits, and cuts the paychecks of those workers in order to increase their contributions towards their health care and pensions. All of this was done under the guise of a budget crisis.

But at the same time that he’s asking the Garden State’s public employees to sacrifice in order to bring his state’s finances into order, Christie has let the wealthiest New Jersey residents off the hook, vowing to veto a millionaires’ surtax favored by the state’s Democrats. (A recent poll showed that nearly 60 percent of New Jersey residents approve of the surtax.)

But that isn’t the only way in which Christie is favoring the state’s wealthy over the rest of its population. New Jersey allows the governor to exercise a line-item veto over the budget, and last week Christie released his edits of the budget passed by the state legislature. As the Newark Star-Ledger reported, Christie saw fit to nix health care funding for low-income workers, tax credits for the working poor, and money for AIDS relief and mental-health services, while adding in money for school districts in some of “the wealthiest towns in the state“:

[Christie] mowed down a series of Democratic add-ons, including $45 million in tax credits for the working poor, $9 million in health care for the working poor, $8 million for women’s health care, another $8 million in AIDS funding and $9 million in mental-health services.

But the governor added $150 million in school aid for the suburbs, including the wealthiest towns in the state. That is enough to restore all the cuts just listed.

Senate President Stephen Sweeny (D), who is facing considerable blowback after collaborating with Christie on the pension deal, criticized the governor’s set of priorities. “[F]or him to punish people to prove his political point? He’s just a rotten bastard to do what he did,” Sweeny said.

Of course, providing more education funding is a good thing, but there’s no need to do it by raiding programs on which low-income workers depend. As I’ve noted before, adopting the millionaire tax that Christie is so dead set against would enable him to reverse all of the education cuts he’s proposed, with millions of dollars left to spare. In another signal of Christie’s priorities, he has recently been vociferously defending his decision to provide a $400 million bailout to a giant corporate mall complex.

Health

REPORT: White House To Extract Savings From Pharma In Debt Ceiling Negotiations

By Igor Volsky on Jul 5, 2011 at 5:05 pm

In response to my question about pharmaceutical cuts being included in the debt ceiling negotiations, The Hill’s Julian Pecquet reports that Republicans and Democrats may both agree on a provision to extend Medicaid drug rebates to dual eligibles:

By demanding that the rebates count as revenue raisers rather than spending cuts, Republicans would be able to say they’re meeting Democrats halfway — without actually having to raise taxes, which is anathema to conservatives. The proposal would extend Medicaid drug rebates to the nation’s 9 million “dual eligibles,” who are on both Medicaid and Medicare but aren’t currently covered by the rebates.

“This way [Republicans] can look like they’re going along with something that raises funds,” said a well-placed health policy consultant.

The source points out that there’s some precedent for that claim, since part of the drug lobby’s contribution to the healthcare reform law came in the form of rebates for seniors who reach the Medicare “doughnut hole.” And since drug rebates are already offered in the Medicaid program, Republicans could claim they’re simply extending current law into Medicare’s Part D drug benefit.

Back in 2003, the Medicare part D legislation moved the 6 million Americans who were eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid into the Medicare part D program, thus creating a windfall for the industry. Whereas Medicaid obtained an average discount of about 34 percent from pharmaceutical companies that participated in the Medicaid program, “the average discount obtained by the Part D plans was 14 percent,” according to a report issued by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA). As he put it, “The drug companies are making the same drugs. They are being used by the same beneficiaries. Yet because the drugs are being bought through Medicare Part D instead of Medicaid, the prices paid by the taxpayers have ballooned by billions of dollars.” CBO estimates that if drug manufacturers provided the Medicare Part D program with the same prices that Medicaid receives, the government could save $112 billion over 10 years.

One Washington investment analyst tells Pecquet, “PhRMA is scared, and I think they have reason to be.”

Politics

Rep. Duncan Hunter: Ronald Reagan ‘Would Never Be Elected Today’ Because He’s A ‘Moderate/Former Liberal’

By Lee Fang on Jul 5, 2011 at 4:48 pm

Rep. Duncan Hunter Jr. (R-CA) spoke recently to the Eagle Forum of San Diego, a right-wing group tied to Phyllis Schlafly’s anti-feminist organization. Hunter — who has previously touted his nationalistic bonafides with talk about how bike paths are unconstitutional — focused his remarks on the 2012 presidential election. Hunter said that conservatives should line up behind any electable Republican candidate because policy would still be driven by Congress, which he assumed would stay in the hands of the right.

Notably, Hunter said Ronald Reagan was too moderate and could “never be elected today.” Nevertheless, Hunter encouraged activists to get behind a “former liberal” like Reagan if they could defeat Obama. Hunter ominously warned that Obama, as well as “the communists in this country,” are going to “hang on for dear life” to bring the “downfall” of the nation”

HUNTER: This is it folks. This is it. There is nothing after 2012. [...] I don’t care if it’s a more moderate/former liberal like Ronald Reagan, who would never be elected today in my opinion. If it’s someone like him or a hardcore conservative, you gotta elect the most winnable person this time. I know it sounds bad, but Congress makes the law. You’ve got a conservative Congress. You’re one third there. [...] You gotta vote and get behind an electable person for president. I know after what I said, me saying that doesn’t go hand in hand. Obama’s going to raise a billion dollars. He’s going to hold on to this thing, the communists in this country, the community organizers in this country, are going to hang on for dear life. This is it for them. If they can change the balance of the scale of this country, they will affect it until our downfall.

Watch it:

Yglesias

The Significance Of The Constitutional Option

By Matthew Yglesias on Jul 5, 2011 at 4:45 pm

Katrina Vanden Heuvel points out that having the “14th Amendment option” available as part of the toolkit for dealing with the debt ceiling standoff could restore some much-needed balance to the current game of chicken:

President Obama should commit to exercising this obligation — as a last resort. And he should commit publicly, as soon as possible.

Doing so will give him the leverage he lacks in the debt-ceiling negotiations. Right now, Republicans’ willingness to let the economy default, consequences be damned, gives them enormous leverage. But presumably, if a deal is not reached by the deadline, and the president is forced to exercise his constitutional obligation, Republicans will get nothing at all. Not the trillion dollars in cuts already agreed to. Not the additional trillion in cuts they are seeking. The threat, alone, of invoking the 14th Amendment defuses the bomb Republicans have strapped to the hostage.

That makes sense to me. Ultimately, to get a bargain there has to be some reason to prefer a bargain to not having a bargain. The White House would clearly prefer a deal on the long-term deficit to trying to invoke a novel constitutional doctrine. But it seems like House Republicans might also plausibly prefer a deal to watching the president invoke said doctrine. In that case, you get a deal. But absent some kind of viable White House “Plan B,” then it’s difficult for the House GOP to agree to anything.

Climate Progress

Exxon Pipeline Spill Poisons Yellowstone River

By Guest Blogger on Jul 5, 2011 at 4:40 pm

Our guest blogger is Alexis Bonogofsky, Tribal Lands Senior Coordinator for the National Wildlife Federation. She lives on a goat ranch along the Yellowstone River, which was contaminated by a major oil pipeline spill late Thursday night. Her post originally appeared on NWF’s Wildlife Promise blog.

Oil in the Yellowstone River. Alexis Bonogofsky

The pipe ruptured Thursday night at around 11:30. I woke up around 7:45 a.m. Friday and went outside to do chores — let goats out to graze, feed and water chickens, let horses out, etc. I walked down to our bottom pasture because the river was supposed to flood and I wanted to see if it had come over its banks. Sure enough, there was about two feet of water in the pasture. I got this overwhelming smell of hydrocarbons — a very distinct smell, especially around here because there are three refineries. I checked our local paper and saw that a pipeline had ruptured. Even though this had been going on for over seven hours, and we are right on the river, we received no call, no warning…nothing. I had to find out about it by seeing it in our pastures. Apparently they evacuated people further up stream that were closer to the pipeline.

I spent all day yesterday calling our Montana Department of Environmental Quality who told me to call my local Department of Emergency Services. When I called DES, I got an answering machine that said they were on vacation. I was told repeatedly to call an Exxon hotline where the people that answered knew nothing about cleanup, if the oil is hazardous (which it is), and what was going on. They were just there to “take our information.” I called our County Health Department because they told people that the oil was just an “irritant.” When I talked to the lady there, she told me they were taking their information directly from Exxon and had done no independent research on the health effects of exposure to crude oil or the chemicals in it.

Oil slick in Yellowstone River. Alexis Bonogofsky

I saw birds trying to take off that couldn’t because of oil on their wings, I saw a spiny soft shell turtle dive into a glob of oil.

The government is telling us that Exxon is going to take care of everything and that they are doing oversight. I have seen no indication of this. I have called so many people that I know more than our government does about what is going on. We finally got a public relations person from Exxon to call us and he wouldn’t tell us what chemicals are in the oil or if any had been added. He told us to stay away from it and that we shouldn’t document the effects on the property “just to be safe” and yet no health warning has gone out to the public. They also told me “off the record” that I should move my livestock away from where the spill has impacted our farm.

Insurance agents for Exxon are already trying to get a hold of people to prevent people from organizing. Our summer pastures are ruined.

Update

Alexis was briefly hospitalized Monday after suffering from what doctors diagnosed as acute hydrocarbon exposure.

“She started getting shortness of breath, dizziness; we took her to the hospital and they took an X-ray,” her husband Mike Scott told Reuters.

Security

Jeffrey Goldberg And Dan Meridor Push Back Against Critics Of Military Option On Iran

By Eli Clifton on Jul 5, 2011 at 4:36 pm

Jeffrey Goldberg and Dan Meridor

It’s been nearly two months since former Mossad Chief Meir Dagan declared an Israeli strike on Iran as “the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard,” but backlash against both the content of his remarks and his decision to speak publicly continues to reverberate in both Israel and the U.S. as journalist Jeffrey Goldberg and Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor launched new attacks on the former intelligence chief.

Jeffrey Goldberg, writing for Bloomberg on July 4, describes Dagan as a “bungling strategist” and, through some impressive logical jujitsu, concludes:

If Israel does attack the Iranian nuclear program, it will in part be because Dagan undermined his country’s deterrent credibility.

While Israel’s deterrent credibility is a matter for debate — though deterrence theory suggests that Israel’s presumed second strike nuclear capability should be enough to deter any Iranian nuclear attack on Israel — Dagan’s remarks should undermine Goldberg’s previous reporting on Israel and Iran. Last year, Goldberg, after speaking with 40 current and past Israeli decision makers, observed, “there is a better than 50-percent chance that Israel will launch a strike by next July.” Neither his characterization of a consensus nor his prediction of a military strike have turned out to be accurate.

But Goldberg isn’t the only one hitting back at Dagan. Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor has been making the rounds discussing the Iranian threat and calling for tougher sanctions. ThinkProgress asked Meridor about Dagan’s comments in an Israel Policy Forum conference call today. He responded:

I know Dagan well. I dont’ think he’s against Israeli policy and [he] has a lot we need to thank him for. Whether he should have spoken out after leaving office is a good question of taste. I don’t want to get into that.

And in a France 24 interview from last week, Meridor hinted at the possibility of a military strike while implicity criticizing those who have spoken out against the “military option.”

He said:

I don’t think that in good families one speaks of military action. [It's] something that we don’t speak of. But I think that Americans usually say that “all options are on the table.” Leave it at that.

Watch his remarks here:

Goldberg and Meridor are clearly invested in maintaining the possibility of an Israeli military strike against Iran. But while they prefer to portray Dagan as the only outlier within Israel’s decision making elite, the reality is that a majority of living ex-Mossad chiefs are taking sides against the Netanyahu government’s position on Iran and/or the government’s intransigence on settlements and land swaps required for a two state solution. Goldberg and Meridor continue to cling to their hawkish positions even while an Israeli “consensus” favoring Netanyahu’s hawkish policies seems increasingly in doubt.

 

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