F U G O P

Rhetoric

2005-11-08T08:04:00.000-05:00

Digby highlights a rhetorical trick. The Roberts Committee Report almost exclusively quotes material to criticize Joe Wilson, using paraphrases to present counter positions.

The effect is to subtly highlight the authority of the critics, while giving much bolder statements for quotation down the line.

Very clever (must remember).

National Sales Tax: Flat Out Bad Idea

2005-04-01T02:21:00.000-05:00

I’m annoyed but not surprised at the way George Will writes about Rep. John Linder’s bill to enact a national consumption tax, and do away with the IRS and K Street along with it. Of course, he attempts to appear neutral while giving a very one-sided description of a consumption tax. And of course, there is much more to the story.

A consumption tax is simply a tax on everything you buy. Also called a national sales tax or national retail sales tax, it entails taxing all consumption at a flat rate. Rep. Linder’s proposed rate is 23 percent (which works out to a 30 percent tax). Like in Rep. Linder’s bill, most proposals for a consumption tax involve doing away with the collection of other taxes such as those on income, payroll, capital gains, dividends, etc. This means that the wealthy citizens who can afford a high sales tax keep a lot more of their wealth and would likely spend a very low percentage of what they earn in sales taxes. Low-income earners who usually spend a much higher percentage of their earnings on consumption would be hit very hard by the tax. This makes a consumption tax very regressive, even with the "rebate for the poor" that Will mentions. Families with children would be particularly burdened as they generally buy more than those without children and would not benefit from any of the numerous family-friendly deductions in the current income tax system.

In his overview of a National Retail Sales Tax (NRST), William Gale of the Brookings Institution explains that in order for a consumption tax to replace current federal tax revenue, the flat rate would have to be much higher than most proposals advocate (like well over 50 percent). And the higher the tax rate, the more chance there would be for tax evasion, cheating, and so on. As Matt Yglesias points out, the evidence suggests that it is unrealistic to actually enforce a sales tax over 10 percent.

As with any tax reform proposal, there is a lot more to it than mentioned here. But just knowing the basics on this tax is enough to convince me it is a ludicrous idea. It is kind of scary that people are actually still talking about it.

Social Security's Safety Net for Women

2005-03-30T14:26:00.000-05:00

Dr. Bitch has a great post about how women’s choices early in their careers have major long-term effects – on everything from the ability to compete in the job market and earn a competitive salary, to the size of their retirement plans and Social Security checks. She raises a host of extremely important issues.

Taking even just a year out of the workforce to have a child sets women back in terms of competitiveness in the job market as well as long-term financial security. Not to mention that women are also more likely than men to take time off to care for elderly parents or relatives. I’m just hoping that the degrees I get as a result of the years I’m taking off to go back to graduate school will make up for the time it means I’m spending outside of the workforce while my peers, men and women alike, earn human capital in the workforce and contribute to their 401K’s and retirement funds. Dr. B is lucky she’s had Mr. B to support her through her education and contribute to their future together. I hope things continue to work out for them. Our system admittedly works best for people who get married; it’s hard to ignore the explicit pressure and financial benefits for doing so in our society.

But what about women who might want to get an advanced degree and have children, all without (god help them) wanting to get married? I can almost hear my father scoffing at the irresponsibility of such a scenario were I to consider it. It is unlikely that a woman making such choices could hope to live as comfortably in retirement (or before) as a man who chooses to obtain the same degree, have a family and work.

Clearly, these are pie-in-the-sky problems so to speak, as many women would love the financial opportunity to obtain an advanced degree and make the choice whether or not to have children afterward. Lots of low-income women don’t have the luxury of even considering quiting their jobs to go back to school, whether they already have children or not. There are many scenarios out there and a host of problems facing women who want to (or have to) work, and of course it isn't the case that all men have it made, either. But if we want women to be able to pursue careers while having families, and have equitable opportunities for economic security and retirement, then society has to adapt. Of course, many changes have been made in the workplace to address these issues, but many more are needed.

One thing is clear to me when thinking about the social and economic issues facing women today -- women still need and depend on the safety net that Social Security provides. The monthly Social Security checks are so critical for women whose retirement and other savings accounts are lower as a result of life choices they make. Due to the way the system currently works, there is inherently more financial risk for women who choose to have children. Even if they do so in the security of a marriage, women take a gamble that the marriage will last or that if it doesn’t they won’t shoulder the financial burden. It seems to me with so many other risks involved in the economic choices women make, the last place we want to add more risk is in the safety net that so many of them rely on at the end of their lives.

Effects of D.C.'s First-Time Home-Buyer Tax Credit

2005-03-25T13:59:00.000-05:00

The Washington Post writes on a new report [PDF] released by the Fannie Mae Foundation about the success of the D.C. First-Time Home-Buyer Individual Income Tax Credit. The tax credit of $5,000 is available to first-time home-buyers in D.C. making less than $70,000 per year for singles and up to $130,000 for married couples filing jointly.

Fannie Mae’s report highlights the multiple successes of the tax credit which include: boosting the numbers of low-income residents purchasing their first home; significantly contributing to appreciated housing values in the District; and contributing to the stabilization of the D.C. population by retaining District residents and attracting residents of the suburbs to buy in D.C.

The Fannie Mae report notes that 38.7 percent of those claiming the tax credit were low-income, earning between $30,000 and $50,000 per year – which is only 42 to 69 percent of the metro area median income. One adverse effect of the tax credit, however, according to the report, is the effect on rental prices which affects many low-income residents. In fact, Fannie Mae estimates that 2,800 District renters were displaced because of rent burdens in 1998.

From 1997 to 2001, first-time homebuyers claimed a total of $76.7 million using the tax credit, which represents a direct loss in income tax revenue for the District. However, some of this loss is offset by a subsequent increase in property tax revenues. Fannie Mae estimates that the tax credit contributed to a growth in home equity wealth estimated at over $2 billion from 1998 to 2002, which led to an increase in the city’s property tax revenue of over $50.2 million over that time period.

Read the full Fannie Mae Report here [PDF].

Social Security Testimony

2005-03-09T14:03:00.000-05:00

The opening Congressional hearings in the Social Security debate did not go well for the administration. Comptroller General David Walker stated that Social Security "does not face an immediate crisis," rather "a long-term financing problem." Walker "criticized President Bush for undertaking an aggressive two-month tour to try to sell his [privatization] plan...suggest[ing] that Bush and members of Congress focus on improving financing for the program..." Older details on Walker's views are available here. Walker's testimony will eventually be available here, and the highlights here [PDF].

Social Security Trustees Thomas R. Saving and John L. Palmer said that there would be "no major changes" in the Trustee's economic forecast for the program. Considering that economic performance over the last year has been considerably higher than that predicted in the 2004 Trustee's report, the projected dates at which benefit payments exceed payroll taxes and of trust fund exhaustion are both expected to be moved incrementally out.

New Cases of Private Information Theft

2005-03-09T12:14:00.000-05:00

Lexis Nexis's Seisint unit was breached, with ~32,000 names, addresses, social security numbers, and driver license numbers captured. An indeterminate but "sizable" number of customers at DSW Shoe Warehouse had their credit card information captured from a corporate database.

Bolton's Last Confirmation Hearing

2005-03-09T00:39:00.000-05:00

John Bolton was confirmed as Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security on May 8, 2001, by a vote of 57-43. He was voted out of the then-evenly split Foreign Relations Committee 10-8, with Senator Russ Feingold casting the deciding vote in favor.

The 57 senators that voted for confirmation included all 50 Republicans and Democrats Feingold, Bayh, Breaux, Landrieu, Lieberman, Miller, and Ben Nelson. The roll call:

I've uploaded PDFs of Bolton's 2001 confirmation hearing and both days of Senate floor debate. Many Democratic Senators rose in strong opposition to Bolton, particularly Sens. Wellstone and Dorgan.

Lugar on Bolton

2005-03-08T23:44:00.000-05:00

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Dick Lugar is "going to reserve any comments about the appropriateness or not of the president's choice [of John Bolton for UN Ambassador]." "Lugar wants to meet with Bolton 'before discussing his support,' Lugar spokesman Andy Fisher" told the Los Angeles Times. Mr. Fisher told the Washington Post not to "read anything into" Senator Lugar's failure to issue a statement of support for Bolton, "though he acknowledged that Lugar had urged Rice to submit nominees who would have 'wide support' and help build a 'consensus on foreign policy.'" A "Republican foreign policy official" informed the New York Times that Senator Lugar "told the administration that Mr. Bolton could not be confirmed for a job that had been discussed earlier, deputy secretary of state." An aide claimed Lugar "had assured Ms. Rice that the nomination would be considered swiftly and fairly."

John Bolton will have to be voted out of Lugar's Committee on Foreign Relations, which is composed of 10 Republicans and 8 Democrats. The Committee includes Dick Lugar, Chuck Hagel, Lincoln Chafee, George Allen, Norm Coleman, George Voinovich, Lamar Alexander, John Sununu, Lisa Murkowski, and Mel Martinez on the Republican side. Joe Biden is the ranking Democrat, with Paul Sarbanes, Chris Dodd, John Kerry, Russ Feingold, Barbara Boxer, Bill Nelson, and Barack Obama joining him. That's an excellent lineup on both sides of the aisle, and there're a number of persuasion targets among the Republicans.

It may be possible to bottle Bolton up in committee. There are two days scheduled for nominations, one Friday and one next Tuesday. There has been no word on when the committee might broach the Bolton nomination, but it's unlikely he can be put on the agenda that soon.

Bottom Dropping Out of Privatization

2005-03-08T23:15:00.000-05:00

Some harsh headlines for the privatization camp.

David Espo, Personal Accounts Tank in Polls, GOP Says, Associated Press, March 9, 2005. The National Republican Congressional Committee commissioned 14 focus groups, the results of which were distributed to Republicans on the hill yesterday. Though percentages are relatively meaningless with focus groups, 31% of the participants least liked the fact that government would administer the private accounts, and 24% "least liked the fact that workers would be required to accept a lower traditional benefit in return for participation." The focus groups reflected strong opposition to cutting benefits, without which a carve out plan is impossible.

Mike Allen, Graham Says GOP Erred By Focusing on Accounts, Washington Post (A08), March 9, 2005. Senator Lindsey Graham, "echoing" last week's comments from Senator Chuck Grassley, wants to narrow the social security debate to solvency issues, specifically and repeatedly referring to privatization as a "sideshow." Treasury Secretary John Snow disagrees with Senator Graham's belief that the solvency debate is seperable from the privatization debate: "[T]he administration is saying that the solvency issue, if it's going to be dealt with in a way that's fair to younger people, has to make available to them this opportunity to build a nest egg through the personal accounts."

President Bush would be upset if he read the papers.

Update, March 9, 2005, 11:52 AM EST: Dave Johnson's updated AP article has some different details, including:

Yet, the data also shows "there is a rejection of the term `crisis' as an accurate description of the state of the Social Security system, and this rejection increases in intensity as the respondents get older," according to a copy of a memo obtained by The Associated Press.

Sounds like someone's been having a positive effect.

House hearings start today on privatization, with testimony from Comptroller General David Walker and Social Security Trustees Thomas R. Saving and John L. Palmer. Saving traffics in bad numbers, while working for Progress for America.

Republican Assault on AARP

2005-03-08T19:45:00.000-05:00

Laura Meckler of the Associated Press neatly details the Republican strategy for fighting AARP. Bush claims that the AARP has no dog in the privatization fight, that "nothing changes" for anyone over 55, while USA Next attacks AARP as a bunch of liberal, gay-loving, troop-haters: "Everywhere he goes, Bush promises the group's members they won't be touched by his plan, while his backers charge that AARP is out of touch and prone to scare tactics."

AARP is planning a series of advertisements targeted toward youth, while USA Next is preparing a slur-riddled letter. I fear USA Next's letter, which is the proper posture given their origin as a frightmail mill.

"Moderate" Republicans Squishy on Tax Cuts

2005-03-08T19:37:00.000-05:00

Or so they say. It's unlikely that the moderates have grown a backbone this winter, so their nominal opposition to starving government of revenue won't have much of an impact. At least fiscal sanity still appears to have bipartisan support, even if it's not very deep on the right.

Bush wants a hundred billion in tax cuts over the next five years. Sen. Judd Gregg agreed to put $70 billion on the table at tomorrow's meeting of the Senate Budget Committee. Voinovich, Snowe, Collins, Chafee, and possibly McCain will push for the appearance of paygo, which conservatives will likely accede to, only to reneg.

Homeland Security Through Obscurity

2005-03-08T14:03:00.000-05:00

The NYT from over the weekend. The administration is contemplating removing security placards from train cars that warn about dangerous chemical contents, ostensibly to make it harder for terrorists to identify targets. In effect, it will make it harder for first responders to deal with accidents and put people in the vicinity at risk.

Gary Bass of OMB Watch is right when he says "You can hide the information, but if the vulnerability still exists, the bad guys will find it...So let's reduce the vulnerability instead." If you use Firefox over Internet Explorer, you know exactly what Mr. Bass is talking about.

GOP Senate Extends Bankruptcy Protection to Terrorists

2005-03-08T14:00:00.000-05:00

AP reporting:

In the first abortion-related test of the new Congress, the Republican-controlled Senate turned back a Democratic effort Tuesday to bar violent protesters from using bankruptcy to avoid payment of court judgments.

The 53-46 vote cleared one of the few remaining obstacles to passage of major bankruptcy legislation that is high on the GOP legislative agenda.

Wall Street and Privatization

2005-03-08T13:53:00.000-05:00

In what appears to be an ironic follow up to yesterday's article, Jeff Birnbaum writes in today's Post on Wall Street's apparently tepid support for social security privatization. Waddell & Reed, like Edward Jones before them, claims to have pulled out of the Coalition for the Modernization and Protection of America's Social Security. Of course, as yesterday's article noted, the finances of these groups are secret, and we have no way to determine who is and who isn't buying influence.

If Waddell & Reed tell us they are pulling out, only to stay in, do the American people lose? Perhaps the Labor campaign against Wall Street backers of privatization should get them to ask for refunds from the partisan advocacy groups of which they are erstwhile members.

Democracy Corp Offers Bad Advice

2005-03-08T13:40:00.000-05:00

I agree with Josh Marshall and Max Sawicky (particularly Max) : Carville and Greenberg need to shut the fuck up.

The only Social Security reform agenda I would support is one that would seek to make the bonds held by the trust fund legally enforceable. Either the trustees or individual retirees need to be able to sue to ensure that the money borrowed from American workers is repaid by the general fund.

Update, 2:56 PM EST: Citizen's Rent/Random Thoughts avoids the profanity:

I'll tell you something else, too. If the Republicans and any like-minded Democrats really don't think the trust fund is available to pay benefits when needed then no way in hell will I support any reform that provides more money than is needed in that year to pay benefits, I will not support anything that creates a surplus in the trust fund - not unless there's a balanced budget amendment that puts excess social security funds in that infamous lock-box. Burn me once, shame on me. I've been burned by paying taxes to build a surplus that has been raided with no plans to pay it back. Burn me twice, shame on me. I'm not volunteering to build another surplus. No way.

I feel screwed over by manipulative politics. Raise my lifelong payroll taxes to build a surplus to cover a projected need - one I'm willing to pay for - and then use that money for something else with no planning to replace it, then tell me you need to raise my taxes to pay back the money you took that I put in? The only response I have is profane. So I'm done.

Progress for America Rolls Out $2 Million Campaign

2005-03-08T13:09:00.000-05:00

Details in the NYT. Just a partisan Republican organization using secret corporate money to support the administration's dishonest partisan agenda. Nothing to see here.

Troop Armor

2005-03-08T13:05:00.000-05:00

What can I say? I didn't get through the entire New York Times yesterday. Here's their article on troop body armor, the acquisition of which was horribly mismanaged by the administration. 200 soldiers died while they twiddled their thumbs.

Over the last five years, George Bush has encountered innumerable forks in the road. Invariably, he has chosen the wrong path. Troop armor is a more salient example.

Update, 8:02 PM EST: Sens. Durbin and Levin have sent a letter to Rumsfeld asking why the troops don't have tourniquets in their first aid kits. The Baltimore Sun reported the problem over the weekend:

Even after the bullet cut through his leg and severed his femoral artery, 1st Lt. David R. Bernstein had a chance. The shooting stopped quickly, and a soldier trained in combat medical care was at Bernstein's side almost immediately. Helicopters landed, and minutes later the young platoon leader was surrounded by four surgeons and all the equipment of a modern battlefield trauma center.

Bernstein died that night in Iraq, despite getting the best emergency medical care the Army had to offer. But doctors who specialize in combat injuries, and who reviewed details of the case provided by The Sun, question whether the 24-year-old West Point graduate might have lived if the Army had had something else to offer: a $20 nylon-and-plastic tourniquet.

"What was available in the Civil War, correctly applied, would have been quite adequate here," said Dr. Howard Champion, a senior trauma adviser to the military and one of the nation's leading trauma specialists. "Unfortunately, they were left with less than that."

Since at least a month before the war in Iraq began, medical experts in the Army and other services have called on the Pentagon to equip every American soldier in the war zone with a modern tourniquet. The simple first-aid tool - a more sophisticated version of the cloth-and-stick device used by armies for centuries - could all but eliminate deaths caused by blood loss from extremity wounds, the most common cause of preventable death in combat, they argue. The cost would not likely exceed $2 million, or about two-thousandths of a percent of the $82 billion proposed for the war this year.

Please, No

2005-03-08T12:51:00.000-05:00

This is from yesterday's New York Times, and hence "old news," but I just want to ask a personal favor of the "centrists:" please don't compromise. The Republicans simply don't believe in Social Security, and anything you do will end up weakening the program.

We have time, decades even, to shore up America's productive capacity and strengthen the American workforce. If we make prudent decisions right now, the tenuously projected shortfalls will never materialize, not in 2018, not in 2019, not in 2042, not in 2052. Start by restoring funding for higher education assistance, job training, and community colleges. Restore funding for, and expand, programs to help disadvantaged children graduate from high school and go to college, if they so choose. Move to strengthening collective bargaining and cutting down on corporate financial abuses. Improve the health care system so that it no longer acts as an anchor on American economic growth.

Most of all, stop George Bush's "hurt America" agenda. From here on out, every new piece of legislation the Republicans introduce should be answered with: the social security debate is more important, let's not lose our focus. President Bush wants to talk about shoring up social security's finances, let's talk about his plan to do so.

We are gaining political capital on Social Security. We need to delay-delay-delay the under the table assault on the kitchen table while our capital accumulates.

Minimum Wage Votes

2005-03-08T11:16:00.000-05:00

Both Kennedy's and Santorum's minimum wage bills came to a vote today, and both were defeated - Kennedy's by a handful of Republican votes, Santorum's by all Democrats present and 17 Republicans. The Santorum bill would have raised the minimum wage by 1.10/hr while "includ[ing] business regulatory relief as well as tax breaks totaling $4.2 billion, most of it directed toward the restaurant industry." As noted by Nathan Newman and EPI, Santorum's bill also included serious anti-worker provisions that would have exempted certain firms and industries from the minimum wage, eliminated overtime pay, and superceded state and local minimum wage laws.

The debate about the bills was illustrative. Senator Mike Enzi (R-Wyo) argued that "wages do not cause sales. Sales are needed to provide wages. Wages do not cause revenue. Revenue drives wages." With what does Senator Enzi believe people buy things?

Sen. John Sununu (R-NH) argued that "when you raise the minimum wage you are pricing some workers out of the market...It is an economic fact, and the proponents of raising the minimum wage like to dismiss this by saying we have a hard time measuring it and the economy is large." Sen. Harkin (D-Iowa) responded that raising the minimum wage was "a values issue. This is at the heart of what kind of country we want," an important argument to be sure. But Harkin's argument is insufficient. Just as the conventional wisdom was long settled that the Social Security system was in crisis, the conventional wisdom has long been that raising the minimum wage has a disemployment effect - that it costs jobs.

Despite Sununu's "economic fact," the real impact of raising the minimum wage on job growth is decidedly muddled. 11 states have higher minimum wages than the federal floor, and 8 of the 11 have experienced faster job growth [PDF] than the national average. David Card and Alan Krueger (American Economic Review, 1994, 84:4, pp.772-793 ) looked at the impact of New Jersey's 1992 state minimum wage increase on employment in the fast-food industry. Compared to Pennsylvania, which tracked the national minimum wage, New Jersey actually experienced faster job growth. David Card also compared the impact of the 1990 minimum wage increase on employment in high wage states to low wage states. Low wage states, where the equilibrium wage would presumably be closer to the minimum, theoretically increasing the disemployment risk, did not suffer slower job growth than high wages states.

An Atlanta Fed article [PDF] came up with some hypotheses that attempt to explain the muddled data without challenging the applicability of neoclassical price theory. Nathan Newman also helpfully compiled reasons that labor markets are different from "normal" commodity markets. Thomas Leonard's The Modern Minimum Wage Controversy and Its Antecedents [PDF] (printed in Backhouse and Biddle, Toward a History of Applied Economics, History of Political Economy, Supp. to Vol. 32, pp. 117-144.) is an excellent look at the professional and institutional obstacles economists face in integrating evidence and theory.

Republicans and African Americans

2005-03-07T20:32:00.000-05:00

Any incursions Republicans make into the Black vote would be devastating both for African Americans and the Democratic Party. Mehlman continues to peddle his snake oil though, claiming "no matter how well we do in elections, the party of Lincoln will not be whole until more African Americans come home."

The efforts of Bush and Mehlman are, anecdotally, having some effect in Black evangelical churches. Gay marriage, abortion, and "faith based initiative" money may be coalescing into a wedge capable of splitting some Black votes into the Republican column.

Articles on the Black vote:

Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Black Evangelicals: Bush's New Trump Card, 1/27/05. (See also his Hutchinson Report).

Julia Scott (Salon), The Republican Gospel on Gay Marriage, 2/4/05.

Chris Bowers, Republican Lies About African Americans Appearing Everywhere, 2/3/05.

Peter Wallsten and Tom Hamburger, Black Clergy Wooed for Values Fight, LA Times, 2/2/05.

Pesudo-Adrienne, Personal Morality or Civil Rights?, 3/7/05.

Wes Allison, Black Conservatives Gather Momentum, St. Petersburg Times, 2/28/05.

Terry Neal, Republicans Come Up Short Courting Black Conservatives, Washington Post, 1/10/05.

Manning Marable and Donna Brazile, On the Future of the Democratic Party, Democracy Now, 12/17/04.

The Black Commentator has lots of good coverage of the issue. Political Research Associates' Deborah Toler published a history of black conservatism in 1993.

A history lesson, from T.H. White's The Making of the President 1960:

Time was, forty years ago, when Negroes voted solidly Republican out of gratitude to Abraham Lincoln and emancipation. ("I remember," once said Roy Wilkins, Executive Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, "when I was young in Kansas City, the kids threw rocks at Negroes on our street who dared vote Democratic.") But Franklin D. Roosevelt changed that. Under Roosevelt, the government came to mean social security, relief, strong unions, unemployment compensation. ("Let Jesus lead me, and welfare feed me" was a Negro depression chant.) And, like a heaving-off of ancient habit, as the Negro moved north he moved onto the Democratic voting rolls.

Many of the most eminent Negro leaders in America today have personally lived through this political transition. "I was born in Dougherty County, Georgia," said Congressman William Dawson of Chicago, senior Negro in the American Congress, several years ago, "just one step this side of Hell. I stood guard with my father all one night to stop a lynching when I was fifteen. I hated the word Democrat when I came north. I saw them bring Negroes up from the South in World War I and stuff them in here, into four and a half miles of the Black Belt, until it was the most populated spot on the face of the globe. I saw them ripping basements out of stores and pushing people to live in rat-infested filth, until the Black Belt was the damnedest pesthole ever conceived by the mind of man.

But Roosevelt made Dawson switch from the Republican to the Democratic side. Roosevelt brought assistance and relief in the depression. "Negroes would have died like flies if he hadn't kept his hand on the money until it got to them," said Dawson. And so Dawson became, as he still is, a Democratic political boss in Chicago, at first only of the Negro wards, then in the senior council of Cook County.

Just how much the Democratic Party owed to men like Dawson and the Negro did not become apparent until 1948. But when in 1948 Harry Truman squeezed ahead of Thomas E. Dewey by 33,612 votes in Illinois, by 17,865 votes in California, by 7,107 votes in Ohio, no practicing politician could remain ignorant of how critical was the negro vote in the Northern big city in a close election.

Since then, as the Negro migration from the South has quickened in pace and size, the importance of the Negro vote has grown to be almost obsessive with Northern political leaders. Running proportionately in some places (like New York) at 3 to 1 Democratic and in others (like Detroit) at 8 to 1 Democratic, the Negro industrial vote is one of the most solid political properties in Democratic custody. It represents power.

Republican Plans

2005-03-07T20:09:00.000-05:00

The Post wrote-up the competing Republican Senate plans for replacing Social Security. None of these are worth pursuing, compromising with, or even conceding as desirable in the abstract.

To date, the debate over social security has focused largely on the desirability of paying the costs of getting to a privatized retirement system. It can't be done without massive borrowing, massive benefit cuts, and generally trashing the guarantee at the heart of the current system. Whatever the benefits of privatization, they're not worth the costs.

The bigger picture question, though, has gone both unasked and unasnwered: if we could fiat a system of private accounts into existence, with no implementation costs involved, should we do so? I think not, but I haven't spent the mental energy necessary to come up with a set of coherent arguments one way or the other. I'll put some thought into it over the next couple of days.

Choice Quotes on Social Security

2005-03-07T19:59:00.000-05:00

This is language I like to see:

Susan Milligan, Boston Globe: "The president is committed to these private accounts," Treasury Secretary John W. Snow said yesterday on ABC's "This Week." "I'm committed to them." Snow said the accounts were "absolutely essential" to revamping the 70-year program. But Democrats, sparring with Republicans on the Sunday talk shows, said they would not even consider an overhaul that included privatization.

"Democrats have said what they'd do. We're not going to negotiate with someone that's trying to destroy [Social Security]. Privatization destroys it," Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said on "This Week." "Privatization cannot be on the table."

In a separate interview, the Senate minority whip, Richard Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, said his party was happy to work with the GOP on Social Security, but not if the president refused to budge on the privatization matter.

"The privatization proposal of the president is going to destroy Social Security as we know it. And let me tell you why. It doesn't strengthen Social Security. It weakens it. It doesn't address the solvency problem," Durbin said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

When Milligan attributes to Durbin the "estimat[ion] that the government would have to borrow $2 million to $5 trillion" to cover transition costs, I bet that first "million" is missing six zeros.

Secret Money in Social Security

2005-03-07T12:19:00.000-05:00

Jeff Birnbaum in today's Washington Post discusses the secrecy surrounding the financiers of the privatization fight. Conservatives in particular are using 501(c)4s to run their guerilla networks - Progress for America, USA Next, CoMPASS, Alliance for Worker Retirement Security, Americans for Tax Reform, FreedomWorks - and 501(c)4s need not dicslose their donors.

This is a crucial argument, and one that must enter the public debate about Social Security. The Republican privatization scheme is a handout to certain businesses and industries - in fact, it must be, as otherwise coporate donors would be breaching their fiduciary duties to shareholders, since secret donations garner no public brand advantage.

More importantly, we must identify which industries are benefiting. To date, the pro-privatization camp has effectively argued that investment firms and Wall Street are not behind the push, and media coverage has generally reflected this projected ambivalence. But we can not be certain of this unlikely assertion, becuase there is no disclosure. Perhaps it's time to start a public "disclose your donors" campaign?

Remember, the people pushing for privatization have a long history of deceptive and illegal tactics. United Seniors trafficked in frightmail and PhRMA money. Derrick Max, head of AWRS and CoMPASS, while an aide to Peter Hoekstra, was notorious for impersonating a National Endowment for the Arts staffer while trying to eliminate the organization in the 90s. These are people that can not be trusted. Nothing short of full disclosure will suffice.

Bolton Nominated for UN Ambassadorship

2005-03-07T12:03:00.000-05:00

This is crazy. Bush has nominated John Bolton to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Bolton's take on the UN:

At a 1994 panel discussion sponsored by the World Federalist Association Bolton claimed "there's no such thing as the United Nations," and stated "if the UN secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference."

For more on Bolton, see:

Council on Hemispheric Affairs: John Bolton's Appointment Would Destroy State Department Credibility, 12/15/04.

FUGOP: John Bolton and Arms Control, 9/3/04.

Update, 5:14 PM EST: A thicker AP write-up is out. Kofi Annan has a typically diplomatic response to Bolton's nomination:

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who was alerted in a telephone call from Rice in advance of the appointment, said through a spokesman he looked forward to working with Bolton.

"I don't know about what previous biases he may bring here," said spokesman Stephane Dujarric. "We have nothing against people who do hold us accountable. On the contrary, I think we do want to be held accountable."

Meanwhile, thinkprogress.org has been Bolton-blogging all day, noting Bolton's admiration of war-profiteers, his ideological and personal affinity with Jesse Helms, and his asinine hostility to the UN. An updated version of Brooke Lierman's bio of Bolton is available at www.americanprogress.com. It's important to remember that Bolton was a shock troop in the 2000 election recount fight.

Mark Goldberg of Tapped argues that Bolton's nomination would doom the already precarious possibility of the International Criminal Court presiding over the Darfur war crimes. Mark might be operating under a false assumption, though; Bolton has been nominated, not appointed - he will need to be confirmed by the Senate. 43 Democrats voted against him in 2001, which is enough for a filibuster (though we've lost 4/5 seats in the Senate since then). There may even be some decent Republicans who would recognize the folly of confirming Bolton [not holding breath].

Atrios argues that Bolton's appointment is counterproductive, regardless of what ends you think the UN should serve. His appointment only makes sense if you believe the UN should serve no end.

The New York Times article on the nomination carries a lot of "A says/B says" reaction, including Senator Reid's:

Mr. Bolton's confirmation hearings appear sure to generate controversy, possibly even among some Republicans, although few expect the nomination to be blocked. Mr. Reid, the Democratic Senate leader, said Mr. Bolton would have "much to answer for" during confirmation hearings.

"At a time when President Bush has recognized we need to begin repairing our damaged relations with the rest of the world," Mr. Reid said in a statement, "he nominates someone with a long history of being opposed to working cooperatively with other nations."

Again, I'm not so sure that Bolton's confirmation is a fait accompli. Raw Story has more details on Reid's comments, as well as excerpts from Senator Kerry's blistering reaction.

David Corn provides more background on Bolton, including his entanglement in a "fizzled" scandal involving a $100 million Taiwanese slush fund used "influence activities within the United States." Bolton got some undisclosed dough from Taiwan. Perhaps this fizzled scandal can sizzle in the confirmation hearing. I don't mean to quibble with Corn's nomenclature, but I think it's misleading to call Bolton a neoconservative. He doesn't fit the archetype - there's no evidence he was once a liberal, there's no ideological affinity for the Scoop Jackson tradition - there's merely Jesse Helms and his truculent isolationism.

On the other side, David Keene of the American Conservative Union applauds the nomination of his "good friend" Mr. Bolton, recipient of "the Courage Under Fire award at the 2004 Conservative Political Action Conference." Swift Boat Veterans for Truth received the award at the 2005 CPAC.

Via Reuters, Danielle Pletka also comes to Bolton's defense:

"It is very important that John remain a public voice. While John's approach may at times be abrasive, the principles he represents are clearly those of the president," said Danielle PLetka, vice president of the pro-Bush American Enterprise Institute, where Bolton once worked.

"Speaking softly and carrying a big stick has many virtues, but there's a still a role for loud and clear (especially) in an institution that needs to hear things loud and clear before they'll do anything," she told Reuters.

It looks like the debate over Bolton is going to break down like this: Republicans will falsely attribute to "some people" the idea that Bolton is unacceptable because he is "plain spoken." They will mercilessly beat this straw man, arguing that we need tough talk against evil regimes and feckless institutions.

Democrats will respond by noting that Bolton has affirmatively hurt our national security. He has hampered efforts, tacitly endorsed by the administration, to pursue diplomatic solutions to both the Iranian and North Korean nuclear proliferation threats. He has scuttled important treaties that would secure nuclear fissile material because of an ideological, Helms-inspired, objection to verification and inspection regimes. He delayed, at great risk to the country, efforts to control Russia fissile material stocks because he didn't want the U.S. to insure the program against accidents. Imaginary mushroom clouds in Iraq were worth $300 billion and 1500 lives and counting, but actually existing nuclear weapons in Russia weren't worth insurance premiums.

Republicans will counter these charges by accusing us of wanting tyrant/terrorist molly-coddlers to run the world.

Update, 3/8/05, 12:05 PM EST: Susan Rice has an oped in the Post criticizing the Bolton appointment, yet holding out a meager hope that "[Bolton] will have to be for the United Nations what Richard Nixon was for China: a hard-liner who effectively forged groundbreaking change." Rice discounts by silence the admittedly slim, but still real, possibility of defeating Bolton. Steven Weisman of the New York Times seems to think that Hagel is down on Bolton, and there is evidence that Lugar is as well.

Fred Kaplan in Slate argues that Bolton's appointment is a sign of administration contempt for the United Nations. This is evident, but the real question is if it does any marginal damage to our international standing. The 2004 election was the ultimate sign of contempt for international cooperation, but it came not from the administration, but from a subset of he American people. Appointing Gonzales to AG was more evidence, but once a case is proven, piling on does little additional damage. Bush's "conciliatory" tour through Europe last month is revealed as a farce by the Bolton appointment, but I doubt many were naive enough to believe it was sincere to begin with. However, Julian Borger at Salon disagrees about the extent of European naivete, and he probably knows more about this than me.

AP's Anne Gearan has more on Bolton's "tough talk." Remember, but for John Bolton, the threat of nuclear terrorism would be dramatically lower. Russian nuclear materials would be more secure, the fissile materials control treaty would be in force, and that idea of inspections and verification would be more legitimate.

No Payroll Tax Increases

2005-03-07T11:44:00.000-05:00

It appears that there is some agreement between liberal blogs and President Bush: Payroll tax hikes should not be part of any "solution" to the social security "crisis." Increasing revenue now (pre-funding) is only sensible if one accepts the validity of federal bonds. Republicans don't believe in the trust fund, dismissing it as empty IOUs. In the abstract, I think the word of the government is reliable; in reality, I think Republicans will break any covenant, sacrifice any lamb, in pursuit of power.

Increasing payroll taxes will do exactly three things:

Let Republicans brand Democrats as tax hikers;
Give Republicans more room to cut taxes on income and wealth;
Finance more of Bush's reckless fiscal adventurism.

What payroll taxes will not do is quash the artificial "crisis" talk. Republicans will continue to preach the dogma of default and to deplete the reserves of American trust in our government. Which is their goal: to make permanent the wedge they have driven between the government and the people from which it derives its power.

"Ramadi Madness"

2005-03-04T19:55:00.000-05:00

Read all about it. Torture & abuse.

Eason Jordan

2005-03-04T15:51:00.000-05:00

I haven't written anything about Eason Jordan, mainly because it's a waste of time, but this seems relevant to his assertion: Freed Journalist Fired on by U.S. Troops.

Bush in New Jersey

2005-03-04T15:39:00.000-05:00

David Stout, NYT:

"I didn't run for office to dodge problems," Mr. Bush said in Westfield, N.J., where he once again promoted the idea of optional private investment accounts within the retirement system for younger workers.

The president said he had a message for those younger workers: "You better listen carefully to this debate, because you're the ones who are going to have to pay for it. And if I were you, I'd be saying, 'Well, if we have a problem, Mr. President, what do you and the Congress intend to do about it?' "

The Senate minority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, said Democrats had an answer, drawn from the age-old words of Hippocrates: "First, do no harm."

Bush isn't doging problems, he's creating them. We who support Social Security have dropped the ball a bit in accepting the SS Trustees/CBO figures as accurate predictions, instead of what they really are: mere guesswork, and in the case of the Trustees, guesswork produced by partisan appointees. There is no decent evidence for the proposition that Social Security will begin paying out more in benefits by 2018/19. The pessimistic assumptions underlying those models are what we need to be fighting against, not just meekly accepting them.

Productivity growth, GDP growth, and the share of national wealth dedicated to wages are not received from on high. They are things directly impacted by our fiscal decisions. Our policies should be focused on preventing mediocrity, not managing it.

Bush's Deficit

2005-03-04T11:05:00.000-05:00

Some decent reporting from AP's Alan Fram:

President Bush's budget would keep federal deficits over $200 billion annually for the next decade, and add $1.6 trillion to the shortfalls that would occur if his tax and spending proposals were not enacted, Congress' top budget analyst said Friday.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the president's budget would leave a 2005 deficit of $394 billion and a 2006 gap of $332 billion.

But the budget office noted that Bush's fiscal blueprint omitted the costs of overhauling Social Security, which some analysts have said could cost $2 trillion over the next decade.

Bush's budget also omits any new money for U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan for 2006. The congressional analyst said to keep next year's military operations at this year's levels would probably add about $40 billion to the 2006 shortfall, pushing it to perhaps $375 billion.

By 2009, the deficit would be $246 billion, the budget office said.

That would fulfill Bush's goal of halving the $521 billion shortfall he projected for last year a projection that ended up being $109 billion too high. But it would not be close to cutting last year's actual $412 billion deficit in half.

Overall, the budget office said Bush's budget would leave deficits for the decade ending 2015 at $2.58 trillion, or $1.6 trillion over the $980 billion that would otherwise occur. The increase is mainly due to Bush's plan to make his already enacted tax cuts permanent.

Bush's budget projected figures only for the next five years.

Fram's a bit circuitous, and he leaves out the costs of Alternative Minimum Tax Reform, but he at least mentions most of the budget lies.

Bush on the Defensive on Social Security

2005-03-04T10:56:00.000-05:00

Robert Toner, New York Times:

President Bush dismissed the notion Thursday that his campaign to create private accounts in Social Security was in serious trouble, asserting he was still "at the early stages of the process."

Vowing to push ahead and acknowledging that "I've got a lot more work to do," Mr. Bush said he was open to ideas from both parties and tried again to allay the fears widespread in his own party that Social Security was "the third rail of politics."

"Ultimately," he said, "I think politicians need to be worried about not being a part of the solution."

Senate Democrats seemed unworried. They said they would work with Mr. Bush on Social Security only if he would "publicly and unambiguously announce" that he rejected his proposal for private investment accounts financed by payroll tax revenues.

Democrats have a solution to the Social Security problem. It's called investing in America's future. Rather than accepting as inevitable America's descent into mediocrity, we need prudently allocate our resources, investing in workers, future generations, and our national infrastructure. We can avoid stagnating wages, weak productivity growth, and slow GDP growth if we make the right choices today. President Bush would rather deal with symptoms than the disease.

Asa Hutchinson, War Profiteer

2005-03-04T10:13:00.000-05:00

New York Times: Official Leaving Security Dept. Shifts to Advising Contractors:

WASHINGTON, March 2 - Asa Hutchinson, who stepped down this week as a top administrator at the Department of Homeland Security, has joined a law firm based in Washington that represents major domestic security contractors and companies regulated by the department.

Mr. Hutchinson, 54, who as under secretary at the department oversaw transportation and border security, will be barred for at least one year from interacting directly with department officials. But he can advise companies that are pursuing contracts with the agency or are subject to its regulatory review.

The Right's Assault on Professionalism

2005-03-02T13:26:00.000-05:00

Strong, yet seldom connected, practices of the modern pseudo-conservative movement have been criticized on many fronts: their treatment of journalists, their treatment of scientists, their treatment of educators, their treatment of lawyers, their treatment of intelligence professionals, their treatment of professional civil servants, even their treatment of doctors. These targets of conservative opprobrium have each been attacked in different ways - the creation of micro-regulations that punish teachers, the injection of politics into the scientific community, the vilification of the legal profession and journalists, the legislative control of which medical treatments a doctor can offer. But there is a common theme: each of the targets is a profession.

This strongly suggests that the basis for pseudo-conservative hostility is not anything particular to the fields in which these professionals work, but to the very concept of professionalism.

Which makes sense. The core of the concept of professionalism is that a person can, by agreeing to constrain themselves by rules of conduct, advance a greater interest - a common good. Pseudo conservatives reject this idea. They believe that it is impossible to constrain ones' passions with rules, that personal biases are inevitably injected into every decision. They believe that one can never strengthen their position by agreeing to constraints. They believe that there is no "greater good" to be advanced by working in well-designed systems and institutions. In short, they reject all of the foundational assumptions underpinning the idea of professionalism.

Look at the media. The media profession is founded on an assumption about the ability of reporters to set aside their personal beliefs in a search for objective truth. It is founded on an assumption that following a set of reportorial procedures will increase the likelihood of discovering that objective truth. It is founded on the assumption that the public has a powerful interest in being informed of objective truths. Pseudoconservatives reject each of these assumptions. They have believed, at least since Nixon, if not before, that reporters intentionally interject their personal political views into their reporting, that "liberal media bias" can be proven by things like the voting records of journalists. They look at reportorial practices and see not a system for reliably arriving at truth, but an opportunity for bad-faith exploitation. They pay "journalists," elevate prostitutes into the rarified White House press corp, and attempt to manipulate the media's ethic of impartiality at every turn. They reject the idea that "truth" exists, attempting to replace reporters' professional and objective practices with "fair and balanced" reporting that emphasizes controversy and wordsmithing, without resolution. And they reject the idea that the public has a legitimate interest in reliable information. They shamelessly promote dis and misinformation, always in service of their agenda.

Scientists are attacked if they find evidence of global warming. They are attacked if they reject the profoundly unscientific concepts of divine design. They are attacked if they honestly report findings of well designed studies. And they aren't just attacked. They are replaced on advisory committees, blackballed from federal funding, and personally retaliated against. Hacks from industry (including the religious industry) and shills from diploma mills are elevated in their stead.

Lawyers perhaps face the broadest attacks, as the very idea of law has been under assault since the 60s, but never more so than following Bush v. Gore. The ABA's certification process for judges has been replaced by the Federalist Society and pseudoconservative fellow travelers, resulting in judicial nominees that display an alarming disdain for professional norms. The adversarial system is attacked with apocryphal anecdotes and misinformation, always to protect major conservative constituencies, whether it be homebuilders, insurance companies, or the general business community. Settled law on torture is discarded as "quaint."

Intelligence professionals are ridiculed for following the practices of their profession, for trying to report reality rather than the president's agenda. The civil service system is labeled an obstacle to national security, an impediment to Presidential flexibility. University professors are labeled fifth columnists, and pseudo-conservatives embrace affirmative action for disseminators of bad ideas. Elementary and secondary educators are denied curriculum control and discretion, forced to teach to the test. Doctors are told that medically necessary procedures are sins against God.

Again, all of this makes sense. Pseudoconservatives have an incredibly simple conception of power, entirely driven by their desire to realize their personal passions. In their Straussian fervor, the ends always justify the means - ideologically rejecting the reality that agreeing to principles of action can advance certain ends. It all comes down to power. Pseudoconservatives want it, and they don't want it to be mediated by anything. Especially not principles that might prevent them from indulging in their short-sighted, counterproductive passions.

This little rant was inspired by Eric Boehlert's article on the press, Michiko Kakutani's review of Ari Fleischer's book, and Chris Mooney's work generally.

Progress for America manipulating little boy

2005-02-26T09:31:00.000-05:00

Progress for America is sending a nine year old kid around to talk about social security privatization. Pathetic. The connection to the DCI group and Tom Delay via Stuart Roy is also worth noting.

NYT: Progress for America, which spent almost $45 million backing Mr. Bush last year, plans to lay out $20 million on Social Security this year. It has spent $1 million on television commercials and is working to send experts around the country. Among them are Thomas Saving, a trustee of the Social Security Trust Fund; Rosario Marin, a former United States treasurer; and one really, really young Republican. Noah will not be eligible to collect Social Security for nearly 60 years.

Noah will travel to a handful of states ahead of visits by the president and will go on radio programs, answer trivia questions and say a few words about Social Security. Though he is obviously not an expert (and not really a lobbyist, either), officials say the effort is a lighthearted way to underline Mr. Bush's message.

"What I want to tell people about Social Security is to not be afraid of the new plan," Noah said. "It may be a change, but it's a good change."

The trip was a brainchild of Stuart Roy, a former aide to Representative Tom DeLay, Republican of Texas, who recently joined the DCI Group, a political consultancy here with ties to the Republican Party and Mr. Bush.

The firm is heavily involved in Progress for America's efforts. The president of the organization, Brian McCabe, is a partner at DCI, and the organization contracts with the firm. In the 2004 campaign, the Progress for America Voter Fund paid DCI about $800,000, records show. Mr. Roy knew Noah because the boy lives in suburban Houston, part of Mr. DeLay's district, and the House majority leader has met him. "We'll have Noah there as the face of Social Security reform," Mr. Roy said. "It's about the next generation."

Noah became interested in presidents as a 5-year-old after a mock election in kindergarten. Today, he has more than 3,000 books on presidential history. He campaigned for Mr. Bush, speaking to Republican groups and handing out bumper stickers. After 27 trips to the first President Bush's presidential library at Texas A&M University in College Station, he scored a meeting with the former president.

Noah plans to run for the White House in 2032 - and he wants Social Security addressed before then.

"It will be bankrupt when I'm president," he said.

Stuart Roy's move to DCI merited an article in the Hill:

Roy’s job is to bring in business, and, in DCI’s press release, DeLay signaled potential clients that Roy was fine by him. The release also quoted from a new DeLay biography written by Lou Dubose and Jan Reid but omitted the book’s line: "[Roy is] the kind of guy who can stand in front of you and piss on your shoes while telling you with a straight face that it’s raining."

Asked why it was not included, DCI spokesman Adam Mendelsohn said, "We felt we included the accurate half of the description."

The Right Wing Social Security Network

2005-02-26T09:23:00.000-05:00

So here are the rudiments of the right wing network. There are basically four tiers: a funding tier, of corporate, foundation, and business association seed money, that has taken a long term approach to bankrolling the ideas industry that has fabricated the artificial case for undermining social security; the ideas industry itself, mostly think tanks and personalities, led by Peter Ferrerra and CATO; a second set of funders that have jumped into the debate now that they smell blood, basically business associations, corporations and partisan republicans; the final pr teams working on promoting the ideas generated in the think tank networks. Here are the names:

60 Plus Association www.60plus.org

Alliance for Retired Prosperity (ARP) www.arpnow.org

Alliance for Worker Retirement Security www.retiresecure.org

American Bankers Association
http://www.hillnews.com/thehill/export/TheHill/Business/011905_bankers.html

American Civil Rights Union http://www.civilrightsunion.org/
[no sign of activity at web site – no updates since 99]

American Conservative Union http://conservative.org/

American Council for Capital Formation http://www.accf.org/

Americans for Tax Reform http://www.atr.org/
http://www.atr.org/policybriefs/index.html#socialsecurity
Key role seems to be talking point and misinformation dissemination.

American Enterprise Institute http://www.aei.org/

American Institute for Full Employment http://www.fullemployment.org/
Site appears to be down, organization may be defunct. http://www.fullemployment.org/

American Farm Bureau Federation http://www.fb.org
http://www.fb.org/issues/analysis/Administration_Social_Security.html
"In short, Social Security is "technically solvent" for the first half of the forecast period – but the system will run large cash shortfalls as early as 2016 that, from a policy perspective, cannot be ignored. New solutions, including private plans, must be discussed."

American Legislative Exchange Council http://www.alec.org/
Major role seems to be dissemination of talking points to state and local government officials. http://www.alec.org/viewpage.cfm?pgname=4.45_ssm
Key People: David Keating http://www.socialsecuritychoice.org/bio-keating.php
Michael Tanner http://www.socialsecurity.org/about/staff.html
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=6336

Alliance for Worker Retirement Security (AWRS)
AWRS member in 2000 http://www.retiresecure.org/articles.php?id=11
Members in 2004: http://web.archive.org/web/20040211145353/www.retiresecure.org/members.php

America’s Community Bankers http://www.hillnews.com/thehill/export/TheHill/Business/011905_bankers.html

Black America's Political Action Committee (BAMPAC) www.bampac.org
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,147503,00.html
"This has been a BAMPAC issue since our inception," said Alvin Williams, president of Black America's Political Action Committee, which sees the future of the black community emboldened by free enterprise and conservative ideals. "We've explored the options and concluded that it's the way to go."
http://www.bampac.org/multimedia_SocialSecurityAD.asp
BAMPAC Print Advertisement
http://www.bampac.org/issue_Advocacy.asp
BAMPAC promotes legislation that will reform the current Social Security system through the creation of private investment saving accounts. Privatization will create more opportunities, economic development, and greater wealth for all Americans. The current system is unsound, but what is most troubling about the current system is its disproportionately detrimental affect on African American families, especially African American males. BAMPAC wants to educate the American people and reform Social Security to increase and ensure economic stability, security and opportunity for all generations
http://www.socialsecurity.org/daily/01-10-01.html

Boeing (AWRS member)

Business Council of Alabama

Business Roundtable

Cascade Policy Institute http://www.cascadepolicy.org/

CATO Institute http://cato.org/

CATO's Project on Social Security Privatization http://www.socialsecurity.org

Center for Freedom and Prosperity http://www.freedomandprosperity.org/

Center for New Black Leadership http://www.cnbl.org/

Center for Strategic and International Studies http://www.csis.org/

Charles Schwab http://www.unionvoice.org/firefly/notice-description.tcl?newsletter_id=1318731

Citizens Against Government Waste http://www.cagw.org/

Citizens for a Sound Economy http://www.cse.org/

Club for Growth http://www.clubforgrowth.org/

Coalition for Urban Renewal and Education http://www.urbancure.org/

Coalition to Preserve Retirement Security http://www.retirementsecurity.org/

Committee for Good Common Sense http://www.goodcommonsense.org/

COMPASS www.compasscoalition.org

Competitive Enterprise Institute http://www.cei.org/

Concerned Women for America http://www.cwfa.org/

Concord Coalition http://www.concordcoalition.org/

Council for Government Reform http://www.govreform.org/

Cumberland Associates LLC

Dennis Trading Group

Discovery Institute http://www.discovery.org/

E*Trade Financial

Economic Security 2000

Edward Jones

Employment Policy Foundation http://www.epf.org/

Empower America http://www.empower.org/

FedEx Corporation

For Our Grandchildren http://www.forourgrandchildren.org/

Forstmann Little & Company

FreedomWorks http://www.cse.org/

Frontiers of Freedom http://ff.org

Generations Together
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=109&STORY=
/www/story/02-17-2005/0003027201&EDATE=
http://www.generationstogether.net

George Public Policy Foundation http://www.gppf.org/

Heartland Institute http://www.heartland.org/

Heritage Foundation http://www.heritage.org/

Hewlett-Packard (AWRS member)

Hispanic Business Roundtable

Hoover Institution http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/

Hosiery Association

Hudson Institute http://www.hudson.org/

Independent Women's Forum http://www.iwf.org/

Institute for Policy Innovation http://www.ipi.org/

International Center for Pension Reform http://www.pensionreform.org/

International Center for Research on the Economics of Taxation http://www.iret.org/

Jeid-Wen

Koch Industries, Inc.

Leadership Institute http://www.leadershipinstitute.org/index_noflash.html

Lexington Institute http://www.lexingtoninstitute.org/

Liberty Media Corporation http://www.libertymedia.com/

Lone Star Foundation http://www.lonestarreport.org/

Mackinac Center for Public Policy http://www.mackinac.org/

National Association for the Self-Employed http://www.nase.org/

National Association of Manufacturers www.nam.org

National Association of Women Business Owners http://www.nawbo.org/

National Center for Policy Analysis http://www.ncpa.org/

National Center for Public Policy Research http://www.nationalcenter.org/

National Committee on Retirement Policy http://www.csis.org/retire/chron.html
[see CSIS]

National Council of Chain Restaurants http://www.nccr.net/

National Federation of Independent Business http://www.nfib.com/

National Paperbox Association http://www.paperbox.org/

National Restaurant Association http://www.restaurant.org/

National Taxpayers Union Foundation http://www.ntu.org/

National Tax Limitation Committee http://www.limittaxes.org/

New America Foundation www.newamerica.net

Padden & Company
http://www.heartland.org/archives/bios/padden.htm

PaineWebber
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=19990208&c=4&s=dreyfuss
Don Marron, CEO
Al From

Personal Retirement Alliance www.ioptout.org
[site appears to be down – reads "moving to new server"] http://www.praonline.org/

Pfizer Corporation (AWRS member – "Pfizer chief Henry A. McKinnell is also chairman of the Business Roundtable")
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/politics/
la-na-social21feb21,1,3949815,print.story?coll=
la-news-politics-national&ctrack=2&cset=true

President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security www.csss.gov

Printing Industries of America http://www.printing.org/

Progress for America http://www.progressforamerica.com/pfa/

RetireSafe.org http://www.retiresafe.org/

Rockport Financial Ltd. http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/personfactsheet.php?id=173

Seagrams & Sons, Inc.

Securities Industry Association http://www.sia.com/

Seniors Coalition http://www.senior.org/

Seniors Against Federal Extravagance http://www.s-a-f-e.org/

Small Business Survival Committee http://www.sbsc.org/ (Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council)

SocialSecurityChoice.org http://www.socialsecuritychoice.org/

Society for Human Resource Management http://www.shrm.org/

South Carolina Policy Council Education Foundation http://www.scpolicycouncil.com/

Storage Tek

Susquehanna International Group, LLP

Tamko Roofing Products, Inc.

Texas Public Policy Foundation http://www.tppf.org/

The Foundation Group http://www.foundationgroup.org/

Third Millenium http://www.thirdmil.org/

TRW (AWRS member) http://www.trw.com/

United Seniors Association (USA) NEXT http://www.unitedseniors.org/

U.S. Chamber of Commerce http://www.uschamber.com/

Waddell & Reed http://www.waddell.com/

Windway Capital Corporation http://www.wisdc.org/pr082504.html
"Terry Kohler, a conservative GOP Sheboygan businessman who owns Windway Capital Corporation, contributed $20,000 between April and June to bring his 2003-04 election cycle total contributions to 527s to $35,000 through June 30.

Terry Kohler, along with his wife Mary and their company, have contributed $76,500 mostly to two GOP 527s – the Club for Growth and GOPAC – from January 2003 through June 2004."

Women Impacting Public Policy http://www.wipp.org/

Women for Social Security Choice http://www.womenforsschoice.org/

Women for a Sound Social Security Choice

Women's Freedom Network http://www.womensfreedom.org/

Social Security's Human Face

2005-02-26T09:14:00.000-05:00

A commenter at Kos has put together a nice homage to the impact Social Security has had on his family. This is, at heart, what we are fighting for in this debate.

The Republicans are trying to divide us, black from white, old from young, man from woman. They will stoop to the deepest lows to achieve this end, the end of fragmenting America into easily-picked off factions, susecptible to bribe, intimidation and scare tactic.

We cannot let it happen. It's my parents and grandparents that benefit from social security right now. My grandmother gets to enjoy her retirement; she's traveled to Ireland & Scotland to see her origins, she's traveling with her daughters and granddaughters to Europe this summer. She's getting to live life the way it should be lived, after 70 years of working in the trenches of the American economy. I want her to have this opportunity, and social security helps make it happen. I want the same opportunity to be there for my parents, for my uncles, for my neighbors, and for my fellow citizens.

I want it to be there for me. I benefit from a healthy social security system right now, and I will benefit from a healthy social security system long into the future.

Conservative Action Alerts

2005-02-26T08:08:00.000-05:00

I've signed up for a bunch of conservative email lists. Here are some of their most recent emails: Americans for Tax Reform (Norquist's group):

Congressman Considers Breaking the Pledge and Raising Taxes!!

[Take Action Right Now!]

According to press reports, Congressman John Shimkus (R- IL) is considering breaking his Taxpayer Protection Pledge to raise taxes on households earning more than $90,000.

This is a very serious problem

The Pledge binds signatories to "oppose any and all efforts to increase the marginal income tax rates for individuals and/or businesses; and ... (to) oppose any further reduction or elimination of deductions and credits, unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing taxes."

Rep. Shimkus says that the tax increase would fund changes to Social Security, but raising taxes destroys the whole reason for making the changes in the first place. Social Security needs to be reformed because it offers today's workers a lousy rate of return . Taking more money from workers does nothing to solve this problem—in fact, it does just the opposite.

When Congressman John Shimkus took his Taxpayer Protection Pledge, he knew there would be tough times, and that it would force him to make the tough decisions. That's one important reason why voters in Illinois' 19th district voted to send him to Washington. At the time, Rep. Shimkus stated that his pledge would cover "any type of tax." Now he's thinking about turning his back on his constituents.

ALL MEMBERS OF CONGRESS need to hear from you that the Taxpayer Protection Pledge is inviolable. 222 members of the House have signed the pledge , and they all need to know that conservatives will not sit by while they break their word. Tax increases must be off the table.

TAKE ACTION TODAY!

Visit:
http://capwiz.com/atr/mail/oneclick_compose/?alertid=7102426

I've also got the latest from Generations Together, but it's not "cut and pasteable," and I'm too lazy to print it out as a pdf. If anyone wants to see it, leave a comment. It's not much but a press roundup and pictures from various events around the country. Pictures like this:

Social Security

2005-02-23T07:34:00.000-05:00

The Republican Party and its cronies are using dire predictions about America's economic future to sell the public massive cuts in Social Security benefits and huge deficit-financed giveaways to Republican political supporters. Stagnant wages, declining worker productivity, mediocre economic growth, and unmanageable budget deficits are welcomed by Republicans as useful for pushing their agenda. Democrats, on the other hand, believe that the best way to save Social Security is to invest in American workers and the American economy – that we should not accept as inevitable a decrepit future.

As Bush and his apostles of decline travel the country attempting to convince younger Americans that a secure retirement is a luxury they can not afford, they are cutting the very investments necessary to ensure that his dystopian future does not come to pass. Bush's budget proposes to cut Pell grants, cut student loans, cut college preparatory programs, cut investments in science, cut education funding, cut health care programs. He is telling young Americans that they should not work for a brighter future, that they should get out of the American economy while they can.

Democrats know that there is still hope for America. Just five long years ago, we enjoyed unprecedented economic growth, rising wages, and a booming stock market; the result of prudent investments and good government. Since then the administration's misplaced priorities, wasteful spending, counter-productive tax cuts, and military adventurism have almost erased our memories of those responsible times. But not entirely. We know how to move forward, how to solve the challenges looming on America's horizon: increase wages, raise productivity, improve health care, and lower barriers to education.

But first we must stop Republicans from accelerating the timetable for American decline.

Charlie Jarvis on the Medicare Drug Benefit

2005-02-22T05:25:00.000-05:00

Business Wire, October 1, 2004:

"We're calling on the nationwide network of Seniors and families to activate against forces working to destroy the first Medicare prescription benefit ever created," said Charlie Jarvis, Chairman and Chief Executive of USA Next-United Seniors Association. "Many millions of Seniors can lower their prescription costs right now, but some plan to dismantle the new Senior benefit."

"Groups like the Alliance for Retired Americans and others are clear in their goal -- Deprive Seniors of the benefits and advantages of this landmark legislation," continued Mr. Jarvis. "The brand of national scare campaign these groups and politicians sell is disreputable, and USA will continue to warn the public about these nationwide schemes against Seniors and their families. This same crowd has haunted America for decades with their plans for a bureaucratic, command-and-control, one-size-fits-all health care nightmare."

Congress passed and President Bush signed into law thereby creating the first Medicare Prescription Medicine Benefit since Medicare began. After decades of rhetoric, real results for Seniors were delivered. The program includes choices of new Medicare discount cards in 2004 and 2005 to cut prices paid by Seniors, with even more comprehensive prescription savings in 2006. Individual low income Seniors can receive right now an annual $600 credit and couples can access a $1,200 credit toward the purchase of their medications in 2004 and in 2005. The September 20, 2004, issue of US News and World Report(a) tells how a California man found his new Medicare prescription benefit helped cut his usual monthly prescription bill from $132 to less than $10 - a discount of over 92%.

"It is incomprehensible how these naysayers can work to destroy something that will help so many Seniors so much right now," continued Mr. Jarvis. "The groups and politicians working to dismantle the Medicare prescription benefit are so blinded by rabid negativity that they've lost sight of the very real needs of individual Seniors they claim to represent."

"There is something profoundly wrong about groups and politicians who focus on manipulating and scaring Seniors and their families, rather than helping them financially. USA is going to alert the American people about these plans to limit Seniors' health care choices. It is shocking to see how little these demagogues understand Seniors' practical prescription needs," said Mr. Jarvis.

(a) US News and World Report, September 20, 2004, "Savings In the Cards," p. 58

Note: It's easy to get information about a new Medicare Card that fits you and your family best and gives the best prescription deals. Go to www.USANext.org. Click the Medicare Rx box on the right side.

Schedule an interview with Mr. Jarvis by contacting William Brindley at (703) 359-6500, ext. 18.

USA Next-United Seniors Association (USA) is celebrating their 15th anniversary as the non-partisan, 1.5 million-plus nationwide grassroots network dedicated to Uniting the Generations for America's Future(TM). The organization's National Chairman is the renowned celebrity, businessman, and author Art Linkletter.

Charlie Jarvis of USA Next on Bill O'Reilly

2005-02-22T05:14:00.000-05:00

From the 2/16/05 O'Reilly Factor:

O'REILLY: In the "Back of the Book" Segment tonight, as we've been reporting, the AARP seems to be have taken a sharp turn to the left. They're latest position is adamantly against private Social Security accounts for younger workers. While that issue is very debatable, there are two sides. Some conservatives feel that the AARP does not look out for them.

With us now is Charlie Jarvis, the chairman of USA Next, an alternative senior group to the AARP.

You know, there's a lot of money in this. That's first of all. We've got to put it up there. The AARP makes a lot of money, and they sell a lot of products, insurance and discounts to this and that, and it's a big machine. But what are they doing or not doing that motivated you to start up an alternative organization?

CHARLES JARVIS, USA NEXT: Well, we've been around for 15 years, and, intensively, I have been going after them for four years since I came in as the chief executive.

O'REILLY: Four years.

JARVIS: And AARP basically, Bill, is the world's largest left, liberal lobbying organization in the world. They're huge, and they're masquerading basically as a benefits association because, essentially, over the last 15 years, they brought in $8.1 billion, and $1.1 billion of that came directly out of the pocketbooks of taxpayers.

O'REILLY: When you say they're a liberal organization, besides Social Security, what else can you point to to back that up?

JARVIS: Well, they're the organization that actually created a tax, which probably one out of eight of your viewers tonight pays, on their Social Security benefit. In 1984, they created with Congress a tax on seniors, seniors-only tax, double tax. They saved all their lives, and now they're going to pay taxes on...

O'REILLY: And there was a reason they did that. What was the ostensible reason?

JARVIS: Ostensibly, the reason was to bring -- Social Security, in 1982, was in trouble, and it was to try and bring it into balance. The problem is there's never been a tax increase they didn't love, there's never been a tax cut they didn't hate, and they are definitely against traditional values.

O'REILLY: All right. So you believe the AARP is a big government organization, wants the umbrella, wants the entitlements and wants to tax the workers to pay for those entitlements? That's what you believe?

JARVIS: They want to -- they do, $1.1 billion of...

O'REILLY: Well, I can't really argue with that. I mean, I think the AARP is -- wants big government and wants a lot of entitlements. Now your organization is more conservative? Are you just a right-wing doctrinaire organization?

JARVIS: No, we are basically a free-market alternative to AARP. Whereas we're the healthy, wealthy and wise organization, they're the tax, tax and spend organization.

O'REILLY: All right. So you're more smaller government, self- reliant. But seniors, a lot of them, need the entitlements. How do you attract them over?

JARVIS: Well, we think that there are free-market alternatives, and Social Security is a classic example. Why in the world would you take three workers -- you, me and one of my teenage sons -- and say you three are going to pay for the retirees of the future. And then when they get to be 40 years old, it's going to be two of my sons, not three.

O'REILLY: OK. I understand the Social Security debate. But what about prescription drugs? Lots of seniors need them, don't have a lot of money. Where do you come down on that?

JARVIS: Well, the interesting thing about prescription drugs is that AARP actually has gotten us into the situation we are in. They're heavily bureaucratic oriented. They're captives, and they capture bureaucrats who control the regulations on prescription drug approvals. They overcomplicate things.

O'REILLY: All right. So, if you think if there were a smaller government, there'd be more drugs available, more competition, lower drug prices.

JARVIS: We want open competition dynamic for...

O'REILLY: All right. And the final thing is -- we only have 30 seconds left -- one of the big selling points of the AARP is that they give you, you know, life insurance and they give you other kinds of insurance at very low rates. Can you compete with that?

JARVIS: It's a myth. It's a myth. We can compete with them right now on usanext.org. Anyone here can go on there and find better deals than they can do with AARP.

O'REILLY: All right. usanext.org. Well, we're glad you came in because we want the folks to have a choice. They can check you out. They know what the AARP is, and then they can make a decision, and that's -- you know, we report, you decide. That's perfect, right?

JARVIS: It sure is. Thank you, Bill.

O'REILLY: All right, Mr. Jarvis. Thanks for coming in. We appreciate it.

This man, head of USA Next, is a god damn idiot. Coporations could do a lot better for $20 million. He's leading the fight against AARP, apparently with lots of good evidence (at least as good as the Swift Boats had...) to back his weak shit up.

Generations Together

2005-02-21T23:24:00.000-05:00

The Alliance for Worker Retirement Security (AWRS) and the Coalition for the Modernization and Protection of Social Security (CoMPASS) have finally tipped their hands, revealing a glimpse of how they intend to manipulate the privatization debate: Generations Together, an astroturf organization that:

"will help educate the American people on the importance of reforming Social Security now, to ensure that our system will be viable for future generations," said Derrick Max, executive director of the Coalition for the Modernization and Protection of America's Social Security (CoMPASS).

The Generations Together campaign will engage voters in key states and congressional districts in order to educate the public on the need for Congress to act now; to dispel attacks by opponents; and to demonstrate how reform will give younger workers a chance to build a nest egg for retirement, while protecting the benefits of today's retirees and those who are on the verge of retirement."

CoMPASS is a 501(c)4 coalition established by the Business Roundtable to lobby for privatization, expected to spend up to $40 million in the battle. Derrick Max, CoMPASS's executive director, is also the head of AWRS, the National Association of Manufacturer's front orgnization, expected to spend more than $20 million for privatization. Both organizations refuse to disclose their donors, effectively using secret corporate money to manipulate American public opinion on behalf of the administration.

Generation Together's two co-chairs, Don Nickles and Sam Beard, have extremely close ties to the administration, both having served on Bush's "Commission to Strengthen Social Security." CoMPASS and AWRS are formally coordinating with the administration. They were responsible for turnout at the New Hampshire and North Carolina "bamboozlepalooza" events, both of which bombed in reality, though not in media.

"Generations Together" is an ironic name, considering that the administration is fomenting generational warfare, pitting youth against seniors at every turn.

Council on National Policy Likes Pawlenty for President

2005-02-10T16:24:00.000-05:00

ABC News: Conservatives Say Pawlenty Is Potential Presidential Candidate:

The confetti had barely settled after the inauguration of George W. Bush when hundreds of the nation's top conservative activists gathered in Orlando, Fla., during the last week in January for a meeting of the Council on National Policy.

Members of the council, an influential and private group that works behind the scenes to influence Republican politics, were already pondering the election in 2008.

Several noted that for the first time in many presidential cycles, prominent social conservatives have yet to identify a potential favorite.

In informal conversations, as described by two of the participants, more than a dozen names were thrown around -- most notably that of popular conservative Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty. Other potential candidates such as Tennessee Sen. Bill Frist and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush were discussed as well, though Bush has said he will not run in 2008.

Fineman Sucks

2005-02-08T05:51:00.000-05:00

It pains me that Howard Fineman is a fellow Louisvillian. His Newsweek article on the Social Security debate is filled with half-baked assertions and conservative rhetoric. He labels Reid and the Senate Democrats a "rejectionist front," and Howard Dean a "fire breather."

I happen to be buddies with Reid's director of internet communications (DIC), and Fineman is engaging in rank speculation when he turns to what the DIC is telling the blogs and why he was hired.

The only substance in the article:

In fact, Bush's GOP allies are moving cautiously. They won't even try, Hill sources tell NEWSWEEK, to unify behind a particular bill until the fall—hoping to lure Democrats to make a counterproposal first. That will leave plenty of time for more talk, more campaigning, more blogging—and rock concerts.

That this is important information is marginally redeeming.

Decembrist

2005-02-07T22:44:00.000-05:00

Mark Schmitt, newly of the New America Foundation, has had some great stuff at the Decembrist lately. For instance, he explains the monument gambit of budget trickery, provides a solid critique of the cult of Lakoff, and links to two academic papers on the relationship (or lack thereof) between policy and politics - Homer Gets a Tax Cut and Abandoning the Middle (PDF) .

No Courage

2005-02-07T13:12:00.000-05:00

Before the idea that Bush is "courageous," "bold," or "daring" for trying to privatize Social Security plants itself firmly in the public mind, I want to take the contrary position: he is a cowardly little shit. If he was really courageous, he would: 1. stop lying to the American people about the "crisis" he's trying to address; 2. hint to the American people that the programs he's proposing have serious costs; 3. put tax increases on the table. It's not courageous to attempt to dupe the citizenry, it's contemptuous.

The effort to brand Bush "courageous" brings to mind Bill Maher's comments about the 9/11 terrorists: is it really courageous to undermine the most effective and efficient government program in history?

Bush's Budget

2005-02-05T23:00:00.000-05:00

Bush is trying to change the cold class war into a hot class war with his budget.

President Bush's budget will propose slashing grants to local law enforcement agencies and cutting spending for environmental protection, American Indian schools and home-heating aid for the poor, The Associated Press learned Saturday.

Bush molded the roughly $2.5 trillion spending plan for 2006 as a response to a string of record federal deficits, and is sends it to Congress on Monday.

As Bush travels the country selling his privatization scheme, someone should ask him why he wants seniors to have to choose between heat and food:

The $2.2 billion program that provides low-income people - in large part the elderly - with home-heating aid would be cut to $2 billion. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said the reduction would be "wrong-headed and inappropriate," especially with this season's jump in oil prices.

Update, 11:20 PM EST: Robert Pear of the New York Times reported Friday:

Facing the prospect of record deficits, Bush administration officials laid out proposals on Thursday for deep cuts in spending on housing and community development.

At the same time, the nation's top health official fleshed out proposals to cut $60 billion from the projected growth of Medicaid, the federal-state health program for low-income people, in the next decade.

In another article, Pear looks at Bush's proposed cuts in the national health care system:

President Bush's budget for 2006 cuts spending for a wide range of public health programs, including several to protect the nation against bioterrorist attacks and to respond to medical emergencies, budget documents show.

Faced with constraints on spending caused by record budget deficits and the demands of the war in Iraq, administration officials said on Friday that they had increased the budget for some health programs but cut many others, including some that address urgent health care needs.

On the other hand, see Pear's third article:

President Bush will seek deep cuts in farm and commodity programs in his new budget and in a major policy shift will propose overall limits on subsidy payments to farmers, administration officials said Saturday.

Such limits would help reduce the federal budget deficit and would inject market forces into the farm economy, the officials said.

If not a "monument gambit," this is actually something commendable.

Big Liar

2005-02-05T22:37:00.000-05:00

Edwin Chen and Richard Simon of the LA Times catch this tidbit from Bush's appearance in Tampa:

Now, the president insisted, must be "a moment where people of both parties come together." He urged all who disagree with his proposals to offer their own ideas. "I promise you there won't be political retribution for doing so," Bush said.

Note the disembodied passive tense. Five bucks says his fingers were crossed.

Quote

2005-02-05T22:34:00.000-05:00

Reuters:

"I talked about Social Security in the State of the Union. Now that should signal that we've got a problem," Bush said. "Otherwise most presidents have shied away from talking about Social Security except to make the benefits better. I see a problem."

Outstanding.

Bush in Nebraska

2005-02-05T20:35:00.000-05:00

Peter Slevin in the Post provides an on-the-ground look at Bush's trip to Nebraska, home of Ben Nelson, the sole Democratic Senator not on the record opposing Bush's privatization scheme.

Nelson's spokesperson, David DiMartino, explains that Nelson is "refusing to take any position until the president offered a plan."

"Until you have an entire plan, you have people debating empty boxes," said Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska... [NYT]

Nelson's hesitance is actually a potential strategic advantage to the Democrats. First, having a single holdout on the Democratic side highlights the uniformity of Democratic opinion and emphasizes the weaknesses of Bush's efforts to reach across the aisle. Second, Nelson's fence-sitting highlights the imaginary details of Bush's plan, where unanswered questions abound. He's going to spend the next 8 weeks carrying around a fancy platter of lacquered turkey, hoping to make the American people salivate. Nelson's holdout ensures that people realize they have't tasted anything yet.

Slevin also highlights the extraordinary cohesion of the liberal coalition fighting to prevent privatization. Campaign for America's future sent organizers to the field, who worked with labor, the Alliance for Reitred Americans, the Fair Taxes Coalition, and Moveon to assemble an effective counter-demonstration. It's a tribute to our side's unity.

Steve Kraske of the Kansas City Star also had a good write up.

Bush's appearance in Omaha had many of the trappings of last year's presidential campaign. As usual, the backdrop was festooned with slogans, positioned so that the TV cameras would catch them as they focused on Bush. On Friday, facsimiles of giant Social Security cards with the words “Strengthening Social Security for the 21st century” were used.

And as usual, most of those inside the arena were supporters, although in a departure from his re-election events, the White House gave some tickets to a Democrat — Nelson — to distribute.

David Stout's NYT coverage emphasizes Ben Nelson's precarious political position ("Senator Nelson won by only 51 to 49 percent in 2000...").

Bush Barn Burning

2005-02-05T17:56:00.000-05:00

The Boston Globe notes the dim prospects for privatizing Social Security, highlighting that Bush's "campaign-style" barn storming tour has failed to sway any Congressional leaders. Even Nebraska's Ben Nelson is backing away from the table, the menu prices too high, the restaurant too riddled with vermin, and the food nowhere to be seen.

Senator Ben Nelson, of Nebraska, who has signaled more willingness to support Bush's ideas than any other Senate Democrat, said he needs more details before he can sign on to any reform plan.

Nelson noted that Bush has not yet said who would be allowed to establish the accounts, how deeply benefits would have to be cut for younger workers, or how he would manage the increased debt his plan would incur, which the White House estimates at $750 billion over the next decade.

Bush yesterday offered no new details of how his plan would be financed, but neither did he show signs of letting up in his attempts to lobby a skeptical public and skittish lawmakers on the need for major changes. He visited Nebraska, Arkansas, and Florida, capping a two-day campaign-style tour that took him to five states he carried in November -- each of which has at least one Democratic senator whom Bush is trying to win over.

"I'm going to spend a lot of time traveling our country talking about the problem, because I fully understand that in the halls of Congress, if people do not believe we have a problem, nothing is going to happen," Bush said in Omaha. "The debate should really shift to those who've got the most at stake in inaction. The status quo is unacceptable to younger workers, and younger workers understand that in America."

Bush's approach is to ratchet up the disingenuousness. If he doesn't convince the people of an untruth, his double-plus good agenda will fail. Democrats aren't buying:

"Democrats recognize that the Social Security system faces long-term challenges but are not going to lurch into a crisis where none exists," said Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

Bush said he would combat misconceptions surrounding his plan, and work with Congress to fashion a fair solution to the long-term problems in Social Security.

"I know you have all these wild estimates of costs -- Bush wants to spend this, that, and the other," the president said. "On personal accounts -- admittedly, new concept, hard for some to understand. And it's just going to take a while for people to hear the debate and get used to the concept."

Bush's plan doesn't start phasing in until 2009 - four years from now. Only the first six years of the plan, which phases in slowly over time, is included in the $750 million cost estimate produced by the White House. The "wild estimate" of $2 trillion over the first ten years of the program, also known as "accurate," will be difficult to dislodge from the public consciousness. Bush will try, of course.

Hubert Humphrey

2005-02-05T17:14:00.000-05:00

"We believe liberalism is more than intellectual capacity - intellectual liberalism must be buttressed with an understanding of people and a love of them that goes far beyond texts or documents. For if you can't cry a little bit in politics, the only other thing you'll have is hate.

The real contest in this world is not a military one; our real competition with the Soviet Union is not an economic one. Our struggle with totalitarianism and communism goes far beyond economics, science, education. It's a conflict over a system of values...It may be necessary for a moment of history to let other systems have their claim on areas - but it's another thing to accept it. We have to live with it - not accept it. This is a struggle between good and evil, between tolerance and intolerance, over the very nature of man; and we come from a civilization that believes as an article of faith that man is created in the image of his maker, of a spiritual heritage in which human dignity can never be debased or abused by sheer power. No man has the right to govern another without his consent, and unless people understand this real moral value they can be duped. All of history is a constant struggle for emancipation from fears, from tyranny, from ignorance. And we are the emancipators, that's what this is all about, even if we don't recognize it. What we're trying to do is get people to think about their own role in government, their own role in history.

To elect a President it's more important that he be good of heart, good of spirit, than that he be slick, or clever, or statesman-like-looking. To be a leader means a willingness to risk - and a willingness to love. Has the leader given you something directly from his heart?- or has it all been planned in advance, all been scheduled? Is it efficient? If you want efficiency in politics, you can go to the communists or totalitarians. I believe politics is simply to deal with people and to be human. Every now and then I read in the paper how disorderly Hubert Humphrey's campaign is and I say THANK GOD...

Thank God we are people, just people. Maybe we aren't efficient. But you can read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address, and you won't find even once in them the word 'efficiency.' And you can read all of Marx, all of Engels, all of Stalin, all of Lenin and you won't find even once in them the word 'love.'"

T.H. White, The Making of the President, 109-110 (HHH before the Milwaukee Jewish Community Center). The difference between authentic politics and the perverted politics of the present.

Crises

2005-02-05T16:33:00.000-05:00

In reading Dan Bartlett's pre-SOTU briefing, I am struck by an undernoticed emphasis: that Social Security needs a "permanent" fix. Frankly, Bartlett's right. There are crises confronting Social Security, though nothing real on the financial side.

There is a political crisis. The GOP and George W. Bush want to dismantle the program. They want to cut benefits by almost half, mire the budget in red ink that even Moses couldn't part, and default on the trust fund, breaking the promise America made to workers, families, widows and the disabled two decades ago. We need to ensure that this can't happen, and part of it should entail a "permanent," or legally enforceable, change to the system. The 1983 promise is a covenant that should be left in the hands of the GOP. The American people understand that the crisis is political, not financial. The AFL-CIO polling that has served as the baseline for much of liberal efforts to protect social security prove this overwhelmingly.

How do you give workers that have paid into the trust fund an enforceable claim on their excess payroll taxes? I can't think of an easy solution, but I'm merely an unemployed blogger. My best guess would be the replacement of the special bonds issued to the Trust Fund with a enforceable bond issued to workers that can only be redeemed through annuitization upon retirement. The annuity would be rolled into the scheduled social security benefit, ensuring its financial solvency. Workers should have the choice to forgive social security benefits, not the GOP and its minions.

There is a credibility crisis. The administration has reached new depths in its willingness to mislead the American people. The resevoir of trust that the American people place in the executive branch's administration of foreign affairs seems limitless, but social security is a much shallower well. This is our future, our retirements, the retirements of our mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, children and grandchildren. It's a pocketbook issue, and the administration is playing the role of the huckster. Americans don't like hucksters.

There is a moral crisis. The administration and the GOP believe that Social Security is an immoral program, welfare for the elderly. They believe that it is wrong to take care of seniors, families, widows, and the disabled. Instead, they want each to take care of his own, those we care about be damned or be undignified roommates. The Wehner email makes this clear:

For the first time in six decades, the Social Security battle is one we can win -- and in doing so, we can help transform the political and philosophical landscape of the country. We have it within our grasp to move away from dependency on government and toward giving greater power and responsibility to individuals.

The reach of this dystopian moral embrace of collective impotence is better shown in Richard Land's criticisms of Jim Wallis:

The most interesting part of the NYT's reporting, though, is the commnetary by Richard Land, of the Southern Baptist Convention, who "argued that Mr. Wallis misunderstood conservative evangelical voters because he conflated the moral issue of alleviating poverty with the practical issue of whether Democratic policies are the way to do it," claiming "that the debate is over, based on the 30-year experiment, about whether big government or free markets work better at producing wealth for everybody."

There should be no doubt that the moral position in this debate is to ensure care for everyone, not just those with trust funds and platinum parachutes. Roosevelt believed, in his heart, that government has a moral obligation to serve the people. We control it - we aren't slaves to it.

I put up the There Is No Crisis Social Security banner, but I believe that it is overbroad. There are crises, just no financial crisis. We we'll have to fix them, hopefully permanently.

Update, 6:06 PM EST: Nowhere are the moral stakes made more clear than in Warren Veith's Los Angeles Times article.

If private accounts wouldn't fix Social Security's finances, why bother? The answer, for Bush, appears to be partly economic and partly political. But at its core is an unwavering ideological commitment to personal ownership as an alternative to government assistance, his advisors say.

"People ought to be encouraged to own something in America," Bush said at Friday's second stop in Little Rock, Ark. "You'll be owning a part of your retirement account. It's actually your money to begin with. It's not the government's money. You're paying it in."

According to several administration allies and adversaries, Bush's bedrock belief in individual ownership as an antidote to collective dependence transcends for him any argument over the severity of Social Security's financial shortfall or the merits of other potential fixes.

"There is a tyranny of the Great Society that afflicts a lot of Americans," said Michael Franc, vice president of the conservative Heritage Foundation and an informal administration advisor. "The solution that is coming from Bush's conservative ideology is to give people some personal ownership and control. He is looking at this as a pivotal moment in what we do with all the promises that were made in the '60s and '70s. We can no longer keep those promises."

If weaning Americans from government assistance improves Social Security's finances and pays big political dividends, all the better, Bush allies say.

"The president just believes personal accounts are good policy in terms of giving people more control, more choice, the ability to pass money on to their kids," said Jeffrey Brown, a University of Illinois finance professor who is advising the administration on Social Security. "The issue of ownership and control would be important even if we were starting off with a system that was relatively balanced, which we're not."

If you clean up the fancy Luntz-provided focus group palaver, you get down to the "tyranny" of social security. My grandmother who gets to enjoy her retirement thanks to social security somehow manages to bear the boot of guaranteed benefits.

"The Social Security crisis is not that the system is bankrupt in 2042," said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and an administration confidant. "The crisis is that 25-year-olds get less than a 1% rate of return on their payroll taxes. That crisis is now."

Norquist acknowledged that for some conservative activists, including himself, the ultimate objective was to eventually replace traditional Social Security benefits with a system of individually owned accounts.

"If the left views the purpose of the New Deal as making older people dependent on politicians, then this will in fact undo the New Deal," Norquist said. "But if you view the New Deal as trying to give older people independence and dignity in retirement, then the president's reform provides that."

Some also see personal accounts as a way to constrain government growth. Bush's initiative would require Washington to come up with as much as $2 trillion over several decades to replace the payroll tax revenue diverted into private accounts. Although those "transition costs" eventually would be offset by benefit reductions, the initial effect would be to tighten the government purse strings.

"There is within the current Republican coalition a group of starve-the-beasters who believe that by keeping revenues low and keeping pressure on the budget, one can steadily reduce the size of government," said Henry Aaron, senior fellow at the centrist Brookings Institution.

Conservatives also cite a potential political benefit. Research suggests that support for Republican candidates and policies is higher among the roughly half of American households that own stock. Allowing younger workers to open private investment accounts in Social Security would further expand the pool of shareholders.

"If you can move from a nation where 50% of Americans own stock to a nation where 75% to 80% own stock, you could change political attitudes and the political culture in a way that's more conservative and more pro-Republican," said Stephen Moore, former president of the Club for Growth, who recently founded the advocacy group Free Enterprise Fund.

Fuckin shameless.

Update, 10:51 PM EST: Steven Thomma of Knight Ridder has summaries of the 1980 Ferrera/Cato memo and the 1983 Butler and Germanis/Cato memo. It provides some historical context for the underhanded Leninist efforts to undermine Social Security.

Petraeus on Iraqi Troop Levels

2005-02-05T16:20:00.000-05:00

Will Dunham, Reuters:

Army Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, briefing reporters at the Pentagon from Baghdad, said commanders planned to shift some U.S. troops from fighting insurgents to training new Iraqi security forces, but did not say how many.

The Bush administration says it will only withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq once an Iraqi force has been established that can provide security in the country, still gripped by a bloody insurgency 22 months after the U.S.-led invasion. There are now about 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.

Petraeus said the formation of Iraqi security forces was "behind a bit in raw numbers, but, again, not all that much" and put the number of trained and equipped forces at 136,000.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told a Senate committee on Thursday that Iraqi regular army units had absentee rates of about 40 percent.

Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the same hearing that about 40,000 of the 136,000 Iraqi security personnel were able to "go anywhere in the country and take on almost any threat."

Petraeus noted that Iraqi soldiers and police provided security at 5,200 polling sites around Iraq for last Sunday's elections and said there has been "no shortage of volunteers."

Petraeus declined to specify the desertion rate for the Iraqi security forces.

"There clearly was a huge challenge, particularly in the Sunni areas and in the area of Nineveh province, to a couple of regular army battalions," Petraeus said.

"This is an area where the insurgents were actually cutting the heads off soldiers as they were trying to come back from leave and so forth. Major challenge, retention in those units," he added, but said "we've turned the corner with that."

Eric Schmitt, New York Times:

The disclosures at the hearing appeared to support the contentions of Democrats who have accused the Pentagon of playing fast and loose with the number of Iraqis who can tackle the toughest missions in Iraq.

"We should stop exaggerating the number of Iraqi forces that have already been fully trained and capable, and willing to take on the insurgency," said Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the panel's ranking Democrat.

Asked about the numbers debate at a Pentagon briefing later in the day, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld denied that Pentagon had been misleading, and warned against relying too heavily on the figures themselves - which he and other administration officials have regularly cited - and focus instead on the Iraqi units' duties and improvement.

"It is flat wrong to say that anyone is misleading anyone, because they are not," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "We are providing the best data anyone has in the world to the Congress on a regular basis every week." But Pentagon officials conceded that they had done a poor job of explaining to Congress and the public a confusing accounting of Iraqi troops that reflected a wide array of training and experience among more than six classes of security forces, from capable commandos to less skilled guards.

There are two glaring absences in this reporting. One, it is crucial that we know the ethnic breakdown of the trained Iraqi forces. If the 40,000 troops that Gen. Richard B. Myers says "can go anywhere in the country and take on almost any threat" are all Kurdish peshmerga, then we have effectively accomplished little. The Kurdish troops were already dependable and well trained. And actually sending them "anywhere" is as likely to exacerbate tensions and violence than placate. Two, we neeed to ensure that the accelerated training mentioned by the DoD meets certain standards - everytime I hear about it, I wonder if part of that training includes the "Salvador option," of training death squads and special forces that are more likely to create a civil war than prevent one. The Iraqi forces need to be competent, professional, and national - not merely trained ethnic militia.

Update, 2/6/05: Joe Biden tries to lay out the facts in an editorial in the Washington Post.

After more than a year of drift, the administration took a critical step in the right direction: It put Gen. David Petraeus in charge of the security training. He has added counterinsurgency to the police curriculum, emphasized leadership skills and building cohesive units, and developed special forces with much longer training times. As a result some Iraqis are starting to get the equipment, training and leadership skills they need to fight the insurgency. They include police commandos (about 5,000), special intervention forces (about 9,000), SWAT teams and other specialized forces (about 4,000). These forces total some 18,000 men.

But that is far short of the administration's 136,000 estimate. And of those 18,000, many are rookies with little experience. Indeed, in testimony Thursday before the Senate Armed Services Committee, senior administration officials couldn't say how many Iraqi forces can operate independently against the insurgency. That's why I believe the number of Iraqis prepared to take on the insurgency is somewhere between 4,000 and 18,000.

Facts for the "Democratic Party Reformation"

2005-02-05T04:48:00.000-05:00

The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life has just published two important pieces on the role of religion in the 2004 elections. I strongly recommend that people read both, particularly if one wants to pontificate about the need for Democrats to find religion. I realize that facts tend to dampen the vigor of both hand-wringing recrimination and maniacal gloating, but they nonetheless tend to improve the utility of discussions.

2004 Election Marked by Religious Polarization

Religion & Public Life: A Faith-Based Partisan Divide

No Financial Crisis

2005-02-05T04:42:00.000-05:00

I realize that the liberal online community has effectively beat down the idea that there is a looming Social Security financial crisis. It's still nice to see good reporting on the issue, though, like this Miami Herald article. It provides a good analysis of the pessimistic economic assumptions, questionable immigration assumptions, and inherent uncertainty that combine in a perfect storm to produce poor projections. And even the bad projections are nowhere near a "crisis." Unfortunately, the Herald still gives "the other hand" to Michael Tanner of Cato, who tries to use obvious, and accounted for, arguments about demographics to gin up some hysteria. It's simply not credible.

Black Evangelicals

2005-02-05T04:34:00.000-05:00

Two important stories on the Rove-Bush effort to wedge off Black evangelicals in both 2004 and moving forward: Earl Ofari Hutchinson, AlterNet: Black Evangelicals: Bush's New Trump Card; Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallstein, GOP Sees a Future in Black Churches, LA Times, 2/1/05.

The Rove strategy is to use abortion, gays, and school in prayer to provide a cover for the patronage backed buyoff of significant Black religious leaders. I'll put more together on this effort soon.

Neocon Reader

2005-02-05T04:23:00.000-05:00

This book looks interesting. Unfortunately, this review is painfully stupid.

First, lets drop the Moynihan inspired canard that Democrats ceded the "Party of Ideas" mantle to the GOP or neocons at any point, ever. The only ideas ever produced by the GOP have been bad solutions to false problems. Welfare reform, social security privatization, the invasion of Iraq - these are "solutions" that would and have generated the very problems they were supposed to prevent or solve. Preemptive war should now be discredited, "broken windows" policing has been recognized as a failure by most criminoligists.

Second, the idea that Democrats are opposed to ideological diversity, to a clash of ideas, is absurd. Our Party currently represents every credible position on every issue - there is no need to listen to crackpot conservative ideas when legitimate conservative ideas are well presented by factions within the Democratic Party itself. We fight and bicker among ourselves because our tent is so fucking big.

Third, both the idea that liberals are Europe worshippers and that "Old Europe" is a cesspool of cultural stagnation are figments of the neoconservative imagination. I hate people who wear scarves around their necks, and proudly calledd myself a "mysofranc" back when I had to deal with the exchange students (most now conservatives) at Louisville who held their pointy noses in the air at us uncultured hicks. Nonetheless, French and German politics are as dynamic and fascinating now as ours have been since the sixties, with the struggles to assimilate new immigrants and deal with the relics of their colonial pasts.

This is just retread triumphalism, a failure to use the hindsight so generously bestowed upon us by our creator. Democrats suffer a marketing deficit, a PR problem. We'll fix that eventually. Pseudoconservatives will always be ignorant, paranoid hacks.

Elliot Abrams New Deputy NSA

2005-02-03T16:51:00.000-05:00

Via Max, Elliot Abrams is one of Steve Hadley's new deputy NSAs:

Washington Post: Elliott Abrams, who pleaded guilty in 1991 to withholding information from Congress in the Iran-contra affair, was promoted to deputy national security adviser to President Bush.

Abrams, who previously was in charge of Middle East affairs, will be responsible for pushing Bush's strategy for advancing democracy.

For information on Abram's political rebirth, check out this May 2003 Washington Post article.

For Abrams, fighting communism and promoting human rights were one and the same. Although he criticized the right-wing Augusto Pinochet regime in Chile, he played down or ignored human rights violations by pro-American governments in Central America, where the struggle for geopolitical influence with the Soviet Union was most intense. In an exchange with the human rights activist Aryeh Neier on ABC's "Nightline" in 1984, Abrams insisted that widely reported massacres by right-wing death squads in El Salvador "never happened."

"Elliott was willing to distort and misrepresent the truth in order to promote the policy adopted by the administration," Neier said. "His approach was that the ends justified the means." Abrams has replied to past criticism by Neier by describing his human rights work as "garbage" and "completely politicized."

David Corn has more background in his 2001 Nation article.

Hadley probably got to know Abrams while serving as counsel to the Tower Commission investigating Iran Contra in 1986 and 1987. He goes into this with eyes wide open. They may have bonded in their numerous first term trips to Israel, where they, along with Burns, muddled the security fence issue.

In other news, Hannibal Lecter's name keeps surfacing for a new post to combat international hunger.

Sunni Turnout Low

2005-02-03T06:28:00.000-05:00

Dexter Filkins of the NYT notes that Arab Sunni turnout was in fact quite low. Still no numbers, though.

Low Voting Rate Risks Isolation for Sunni Iraqis As poll workers tally the ballots from Sunday's election, Iraqi and Western officials say, it is increasingly clear that the country's once powerful Sunni minority largely boycotted the voting, confirming the group's political isolation.

While Shiites and Kurds, who make up more than 80 percent of the population, turned out to vote in great numbers, a Western diplomat said Monday, the turnout in Sunni areas appeared to be "quite low."

The thin turnout means the Sunnis, many of whom already feel deeply alienated from the American-backed enterprise here, could be vastly underrepresented in the national assembly. The 275-member parliament will oversee the drafting of a constitution, which is to be put before Iraqi voters later this year.

Update 2/3/05, 4:08 PM EST: Greg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher provides a much needed dose of reality on the turnout numbers. We have very little idea of what percentage of Iraqis voted.

Declining Fiscal Situation

2005-02-01T13:24:00.000-05:00

Source: The GAO Report discussed below.

Note that this doesn't assume Alternative Minimum Tax reduction or Bush's privatization scheme.

Comptroller General David Walker Dislikes GWB

2005-02-01T11:59:00.000-05:00

Just received in my inbox, a press advisory from the GAO:

The U.S. Government Accountability Office today is releasing a report from a forum of experts that sought to address ways to improve public understanding of the nation's growing fiscal imbalance. The report is available on the GAO website at www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-05-282SP.

The forum, convened by Comptroller General David M. Walker on December 2, 2004, included 63 representatives of think tanks, government agencies, key private sector players, the media, and public opinion experts. Under the ground rules of the forum, individual speakers are not identified in the report unless they made a formal presentation before the group, but the report reflects the discussion during the day-long gathering.

Commenting on the report, Walker states: "Simply put, our nation's fiscal policy is on an unsustainable course. As long-term budget simulations by GAO, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), and others show, over the long term we face a large and growing structural deficit due primarily to known demographic trends, rising health care costs, and relatively low levels of federal revenues as a percent of GDP.

Continuing on our present path will gradually erode, if not suddenly damage, our economy, our standard of living, and ultimately our national security. It will also increasingly constrain our ability to address emerging and unexpected budgetary needs.

"Regardless of the assumptions used, all reasonable simulations indicate that the problem is too big to be solved by economic growth alone or by making modest changes to existing spending and tax policies. Nothing less than a fundamental reexamination of all major federal spending and tax policies and priorities is needed. This reexamination should also involve a national discussion about what Americans want from their government and how much they are willing to pay for those things. This discussion will not be easy, but it must take place because time is
working against us.

"As with any major public policy challenge, effective and sustained leadership will be critical. But leadership cannot succeed without public understanding and support."

Walker also will address the impact of the government's fiscal imbalance on Wednesday, February 2, at a conference for state and local government officials at the National Press Club. Walker is the keynote speaker at lunch; the conference is sponsored by Governing magazine and the NCSL Foundation.

For more information, contact Paul Anderson, GAO managing director of public affairs, at 202-512-4800.

There is a crisis, and it's George W. Bush's misplaced priorities, fiscal mismanagement, expensive wars, and tax cuts for the rich. Bush will talk tomorrow night about how he's on track to halve the deficit - but it's lies, smoke and mirrors.

Below I've excerpted highlights from the GAO report [PDF], and reorganized them a bit. The report is really just a brainstorming session, with a number of contributors from academia, the financial community, think tanks, and government. My quick count indicated a pretty strong conservative bias, but it was a bias toward Concord Coalition conservatives, rather than complete idiots.

Highlights:

Fiscal Mismanagement

"In fiscal year 2004, the federal budget deficit increased and the long-term outlook worsened significantly. The unified deficit was $413 billion, or about 3.6 percent of the economy. This deficit includes $151 billion in Social Security surpluses, without which the deficit would have been that much larger.7 Indeed, the on-budget deficit for fiscal year 2004 was $568 billion, or 4.9 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Fiscal year 2004’s deficit followed upon several years of increasingly negative federal fiscal outcomes.

In addition, as the Fiscal Year 2004 Consolidated Financial Statements of the U.S. Government show, in fiscal year 2004 the federal government added $13 trillion in new liabilities, unfunded commitments, and other obligations, principally due to the new Medicare prescription drug program. The federal government’s net liabilities, unfunded commitments, and other obligations now amount to more than $43 trillion, or about $350,000 for every full-time worker, and these unfunded commitments are growing larger every day. [Page 6-7]
"If we assume that all tax cuts remain in effect rather than expire as scheduled under current law, and if we further assume that for the first 10 years discretionary spending grows with the economy rather than at the rate of inflation, a dramatically different picture emerges. This simulation is called “Discretionary Spending Grows with the Economy and All Expiring Tax Provisions are Extended.” (See fig. 2.) Under this alternative simulation, by 2040 the government would have only enough money to pay interest on the federal debt!" [Page 8]

Deficits are not necessarily bad. It depends on what use the borrowed money is put to. Defense Spending is an inefficient investment; interest payments are worse; policy that actually hurts the country, the worst. Education is generally a good investment, as is most infrastructure.

Social Security

"Health care is a bigger problem than Social Security. Participants acknowledged the need for Social Security reform but emphasized that Social Security is a relatively small part of the long-term fiscal challenge when compared to spending on health care. One participant noted that the estimated Social Security shortfall is about one-third the estimated cost of recent tax cuts if made permanent. Several participants observed that few members of the public are aware of this. Rather, the general public impression is that solving Social Security would solve most of the longterm fiscal challenge, and this is not correct. Indeed, one forum participant stated that it was only by attending this forum that he had learned that health care spending was a much more important, and potentially far more difficult, component of the long-term fiscal challenge than Social Security.

Participants expressed the view that in characterizing the long-term fiscal outlook, several key distinctions needed to be made between Social Security and the largest federal health programs, Medicare and Medicaid. Participants observed that the public was largely unaware that health spending accounted for a much larger share of the long-term fiscal problem than did Social Security.

In addition, many approaches to reforming Social Security have been articulated and were well known. For example, approaches included raising the retirement age, changing the indexation of initial benefits from a wage-based index to an inflation-based index, modifying the tax base, and so on. Many specific proposed solutions had been under discussion for some years. In contrast, many participants expressed the view that approaches to slowing the growth of health care spending remain elusive. [Page 12]"

Public Ignorance of Fiscal Mismanagement.

"Research on public opinion, however, shows that while the public is aware of the long-term fiscal challenge, it does not have a good handle on the size and implications of this challenge. In addition, the public consistently ranks our long-term fiscal challenge as low priority relative to other issues, such as the current state of the economy. This gap in public understanding of the nature and magnitude of the longterm fiscal challenge—and how to bridge it—was the subject of GAO’s December 2, 2004, forum on the long-term fiscal challenge." [Pages 2]
"Comptroller General [Walker] noted that describing the problem to the public presents numerous challenges. For example, estimates of future federal spending and deficits are so large—current longterm federal liabilities, unfunded commitments, and other obligations are estimated at more than $43 trillion1—that the numbers are beyond what most people can comprehend or relate to. Translating these numbers into a more human scale—such as “burden per capita”—might be helpful in communicating the magnitude of the challenge. In addition, how we measure the magnitude of the long-term fiscal challenge is complex. For example, tax preferences, such as the exclusion of employer-provided health benefits from individuals’ income, are usually not discussed although in some years their value may equal or exceed that of total discretionary spending (e.g., defense, homeland security, transportation, judicial system, education, environment etc.)." [Page 4]

In general, polling data suggests that the public is “worried but not that worried” about deficits, Ms. Belden said. Although aware of the long-term fiscal challenge and concerned about it, the public rates the federal budget deficit as of lower priority relative to other issues. In addition, a majority of those polled supported additional spending for highly valued programs over balancing the budget.

The public’s attitude toward federal budget deficits in general is complex. About two-thirds of those polled would prefer balancing the budget to cutting taxes, and about half of those polled expect today’s deficits to worsen in years to come. At the same time, the deficit is seen as far less prominent than many other issues. These higher-ranked issues include the economy, terrorism, jobs, education, and Iraq. In particular, over half of those polled indicated concern about the future of the economy. Only 4 percent, however, listed the deficit as their biggest concern." [Page 14]

Nowhere does the report discuss the obvious reason for public misinformation on the nation's fiscal health: the administration's deception and accounting trickery. They tell the American people that the deficits are nothing to worry about. The American people can still remember how painlessly Clinton was able to pull us out of deficits, and believe that we can do it again.

Media:

"Some media representatives suggested that there may be a sense in some editorial circles that deficits are especially “boring” for younger people, who increasingly tend to get their news from nonprint sources, such as Internet “blogs”—Web logs, or diaries—and television. Journalists and opinion writers may feel pressure to choose different material more likely to attract younger readers, who are crucial to the future of their publications.

Media representatives and other forum participants suggested that these nonprint media should be explored as ways to get the message to younger people, who will be most affected if the long-term fiscal challenge is not effectively addressed. Television programs that satirize current events and public television were also cited as venues for reaching out to younger people who do not regularly read print media.

Forum participants offered many specific suggestions for how to talk about the long-term fiscal challenge in media presentations. The main message of these suggestions was that presentations need to resonate with ordinary people; otherwise, nothing will change."

The report includes this piece of general information on Federal Trust Funds:

"Many forum participants noted that federal trust fund accounting is confusing and misleading, creating serious transparency and integrity issues in connection with financial reporting and budget matters. For example, the amount the federal government owes a trust fund is not considered a liability of the federal government under current federal accounting standards because it is a claim of one part of the government against another.

Unlike a private trust fund manager, the federal government both owns the assets of most trust funds and can, through legislation, raise or lower fund collections or payments, or alter the purposes of the trust fund. Also unlike a private trust fund, which can set aside money for the future, federal trust funds are simply budget and accounting mechanisms for the budget as a whole. They record receipts and expenditures earmarked for specific purposes.

When a federal trust fund such as the Old-Age and Survivors Disability Insurance (OASDI) trust funds for Social Security or the Medicare HI trust fund runs a surplus of payroll tax revenues over benefit payments, that surplus is invested in special, nonmarketable U.S. Treasury securities that are guaranteed for principal and interest by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, and the cash is used to meet current needs of the government. When a federal trust fund runs a cash deficit, as the HI trust fund did between 1992 and 1998 and again in 2004, it redeems these securities to pay benefit costs that exceed current payroll tax receipts. However, in order to redeem these securities, the government as a whole must come up with cash by increasing taxes, lower spending, increased borrowing from the public, retiring less debt (if the total unified budget is in surplus), or some combination thereof.

While the special Treasury securities in a trust fund do not have any current effect on the economy, they do have legal implications for the trust fund’s capacity to pay benefits. Projections of trust fund exhaustion may receive media attention because projected trust fund exhaustion has historically been perceived as the primary action-forcing event. An exclusive focus on these projections, however, misses the point. From a macro perspective, the critical question is not how much a trust fund has in assets but whether the government as a whole has the economic capacity to finance the trust fund’s claims to pay benefits both now and in the future and at what cost as it relates to other competing claims for scarce resources.

While projections of trust fund balances provide information on program solvency, they do not provide information on sustainability, that is, the capacity of the budget and the economy to pay benefits. In some cases trust funds may provide a vital signal of imbalances in the long term. A shortfall between the long-term projected fund balance and projected costs can signal that the fund, either by design or because of changes in circumstances, is collecting insufficient monies to finance future payments. This signaling device can eventually prompt policymakers to action. Trust funds for payroll tax-funded programs such as Social Security and Medicare HI can serve as a signal to policymakers in this way.

In other cases, the trust fund mechanism may provide no warning signals. For example, unlike the OASDI and HI trust funds, Medicare’s SMI trust fund is financed not by payroll tax revenues but by a combination of beneficiary premiums and general revenue. Under the legislative formulas governing SMI financing, the SMI trust fund can never be exhausted because general revenue will always fill the gap between payments and premium revenues.

As a result, there is no signal or “speed bump” provided by the trust fund mechanism for SMI. The Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 included a provision that focuses on monitoring the share of total Medicare spending financed by general revenues. Under certain circumstances, the Medicare Trustees are required to warn the President and Congress if the general revenue share is projected to be above a certain level. Where this is the case, the President is required to make a legislative proposal to address “excess general revenue” in Medicare, and Congress must consider the proposal." [Page 34]

National Women's Law Center Report on Social Security

2005-02-01T11:19:00.000-05:00

The NWLC has compiled statistics on women, children, and families in each state that benefit from Social Security. The press release is here, the reports here.

For example, here is Kentucky [PDF]:

KENTUCKY

Women rely on Social Security more than men do.

In Kentucky, 22% of adults receive Social Security benefits, including 24% of women and 20% of men. About 380,000 women, 297,000 men and 59,000 children rely on Social Security benefits in the state. (Social Security Administration and U.S. Census Bureau)
Women represent 59% of all people 65 and older in Kentucky who rely on Social Securitybenefits. (Social Security Administration)

Social Security is important for the economic security of elderly women.

Without Social Security, 57% of elderly women in Kentucky would be poor. (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities)

Social Security is more than a worker retirement program.

Many Social Security recipients in Kentucky are not retired workers. They receive benefits either as the widow or widower, spouse or child of a worker, or as a disabled worker. The overwhelming majority of these 360,000 beneficiaries are women and children. (Social Security Administration)

Widows would experience enormous cuts under the leading privatization proposal.

The typical recipient of a Social Security widow’s benefit in Kentucky receives $780 per month ($9,360 per year). According to the Congressional Budget Office, under Plan 2 of the President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security, today’s kindergarteners are projected to receive 45% less than they are promised under current law, even when the proceeds from their private accounts are included in the total. If such a benefit cut were to take effect currently, the typical widow in Kentucky would receive only $429 per month ($5,148 per year), an amount equal to only 60% of the poverty line. (Social Security Administration and Congressional Budget Office)

The Kentucky economy will lose a significant amount if Social Security benefits are cut.

In 2002, $6.9 billion flowed into the Kentucky economy through Social Security benefits. If the cuts expected under Plan 2 for today’s kindergarteners were to take effect currently, Kentucky would lose $3.1 billion per year, even including the proceeds from private accounts. This amount is equivalent to 18% of state government expenditures in fiscal year 2002 (state government expenditures include money generated from state funds, federal funds, and the sale of state bonds). (Social Security Administration, Congressional Budget Office, National Association of State Budget Officers)

Washington Post Editorial: There is No "Crisis"

2005-02-01T11:10:00.000-05:00

How does the Post manage to turn an editorial titled No Social Security 'Crisis' into an uninformed list of problems confronting social security? For instance, the argument that it's "undeniable that it's far easier to fix things now than later" assumes that something like a Trust Fund will be honored. If we were to raise payroll taxes now, the GOP would maliciously use that working class money to subsidize tax cuts for the rich. Any effort to fix the problem now will be sabotaged by the Republicans.

The argument that "Social Security's fundamental difficulty is a demographic one," where the number of workers per retiree is slowly shrinking, assumes that this is a problem that we haven't been solving for 70 years. Everyone has foreseen the inevitable reduction in that ratio - hence the Greenspan/Reagan compromise, where workers agreed to pay more now to build up a reserve for the future. The Republicans desperately want to reneg on the consideration for that promise - decent benefits.

4 Networks Reject Ad Opposing Bush on Lawsuits

2005-02-01T10:50:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > National > 4 Networks Reject Ad Opposing Bush on Lawsuits:

An advocacy group, USAction, said on Monday that four television networks had turned down its request to run an advertisement opposing President Bush's effort to clamp down on medical malpractice lawsuits.

The group wanted to run the spots just before Mr. Bush's State of the Union address on Wednesday. But networks said the advertisement violated their standards for advertising on controversial issues.

The NBC Universal Television Network, owned by General Electric, told the group, 'We are sorry that we cannot accept your ad based on our network policy regarding controversial issue advertising.'

As a general rule, the policy says, 'time will not be sold on NBC Network facilities for the presentation of views on controversial issues.' The policy does not apply to candidates for public office in election years.

ABC, CBS and the Fox Broadcasting Company said they had also turned down the advertisement.

But CNN plans to run the advertisement.

These policies are absurd and need to change. Halliburton advertises about how it's saving the troops with no problem; Walmart advertises about its great treatment of employees with no problems. Political speech deserves more access to the airwaves, not less. It's worth watching to see if the Chamber and NAM get more favorable treatment.

USAction, in coordination with Campaign for America's Future and AFSCME, is also directing an effort to counter Bush's privatization barnstorming tour.

Sunni Turnout

2005-01-31T19:53:00.000-05:00

The triumphalism over the Iraq vote seems premature. There are no reliable numbers, either hard or soft, on Sunni turnout. Anecdotal evidence is not reassuring.

The Associated Press reports that "preliminary results from Iraq's historic election could come as early as Monday, Iraqi officials said Sunday. But final results and an accurate estimate of turnout could take up to 10 days." The AP also reports that a "U.S. diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Sunni participation was considerably lower than other groups, especially in areas that have seen a great deal of violence, raising fears that the group that drives the insurgency could grow ever more alienated. Exact figures were not available, however." CBS News expands on the AP's anonymous diplomat: "A U.S. diplomat, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity, said 'good anecdotal information' indicated that 'Sunni participation was considerably lower than participation by the other groups, especially in areas which have seen a great deal of violence.'"

On the other hand, the BBC reports that "the UN's senior election official [Carlos Valenzuela] said turnout in Sunni areas - hotbed of the insurgency - was higher than expected," though "voting among Sunnis...was nonetheless low." Al Jazeerah had more from Valenzuela: "If the results are confirmed -- and the only reason to be cautious is the lack of a complete picture -- then it is very good news...The challenge is for the results to be accepted by the Sunni (Arab) minority."

The only figures out are piecemeal preliminary results. Reuters reports on Samarra: "According to preliminary figures provided by a joint U.S. and Iraqi taskforce who safeguarded Sunday's vote, fewer than 1,400 people cast ballots in the city of 200,000. The figure includes votes from soldiers and police, most of whom were recruited from the Shi'ite south." The Los Angeles Times reports on Al Anbar: "Unofficial figures from the province showed that only about 17,000 of as many as 250,000 eligible voters in Al Anbar participated in the first national election since a U.S.-led coalition deposed Saddam Hussein. The mostly Sunni province is home to the restive cities of Ramadi and Fallouja....Unofficial figures showed that 1,700 people voted in Ramadi, a city of nearly 400,000 residents; 8,000 in Fallouja, half the size of Ramadi; and about 5,000 in neighboring Nassar Wa Alsalaam, a mostly agricultural community. The remaining votes came from smaller towns in the vast province, which stretches from west of Baghdad to the border with Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia."

The English language version of the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq has not been updated since the election. The US embassy website contains no information other than George W. Bush's speeches and spin.

Update, 8:18 PM EST: More anecdotal evidence, this from the Washington Post:

In Sunni-populated regions of central and northern Iraq, where the insurgency has been most fierce, Sunday's turnout was far lower than elsewhere, a sign of the guerrillas' strength in those areas and their ability to intimidate.

Despite rumors that food rations would be taken away if residents failed to vote, few defied threats by insurgents to, in the words of one leaflet, "wash the streets" with the blood of voters.

In Ramadi, a western city of roughly 200,000 people along the Euphrates River, residents said only six people voted at one polling station: the provincial governor, three of his deputies, the representative of the Communist Party and the police chief. In Dhuluyah, a town north of Baghdad along the Tigris, the eight polling stations never opened, residents said, and in other towns in the region, voters usually numbered in the dozens as others ignored appeals broadcast by patrolling U.S. soldiers to vote.

But both the violence and the Sunni turnout proved to be the wild cards. After a slow start, growing numbers voted in heavily Sunni districts of the capital, including Khadra, Tunis and parts of Adhamiyah, residents said. Crowds in Baqubah, a mixed Sunni-Shiite town northeast of Baghdad, gathered with their children before polls opened and waited for tardy election workers as mortar shells detonated in the distance.

In the northern city of Mosul, scene of some of the fiercest fighting in recent months, turnout grew among both Sunni Arabs and ethnic Kurds as intense attacks failed to materialize. In the two weeks before the elections, the United States had increased its troop strength in Mosul by 50 percent, from 8,000 to 12,000, and brought in an additional 4,500 Iraqi security forces.

The Iraqi Election Information Network, a National Democratic Institute project, released a preliminary statement [.doc], but no figures. The Iraqi Election Information Network web page is loaded with typographical errors, and to date has received just 1686 hits.

Update, 2/1/05, 2:41 AM EST: The New York Times has more turnout stories, though nothing dispositive:

Although there were at least nine separate suicide bombing incidents in Baghdad, and insurgent attacks elsewhere across the country that killed at least 50 people, the rebel plans to torpedo the vote by frightening people into staying home appeared to have failed, even in areas where the rebels have been strongest, in the Sunni-dominated region of Babil Province, south of Baghdad, across Anbar Province to the west, and in Saladin, Diyala and Nineveh provinces to the east and north.

But as more details emerged of the pattern of voting, it remained uncertain how widespread Sunni voting in those areas had been. Both Mr. Valenzuela and Mr. Ayar, the election commission chief, spoke of higher-than-expected turnouts in Babil, Anbar, Diyala and Nineveh, and described lines at polling stations in cities that have seen major insurgent violence, including Falluja, Baquba and Mosul.

But other reports said that polling centers in Samarra, another trouble center north of Baghdad, as well as in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown, had been largely deserted, and that the turnout in Baquba, with a mixed Sunni and Shiite population, had been about 30 percent. Still, Mr. Ayar said, "there were no cities with no votes."

But he cautioned against the notion that the Sunni turnout in the troubled areas had been that high. "Everyone says it was better than what we expected," he said. "However, the expectations were very low. So it really doesn't mean very much, does it?"

Instrumental Truth

2005-01-29T20:36:00.000-05:00

The GOP clearly doesn't really believe that the Social Security system will be in crisis by 2008 - those who think that matters, though, are mere members of the reality based community. That which serves the Party is true.

The New York Times: Party leaders and White House officials who gathered at the Greenbrier resort also discussed a new rhetorical twist in their campaign to remake Social Security. In meetings on Friday, Treasury Secretary John W. Snow and Representative Bill Thomas of California, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, discussed redirecting public attention on 2008 as an imminent danger point for the Social Security trust fund because baby boomers will begin retiring, people present said. Even the most dire analyses say the fund will remain solvent for a decade or longer after that.

Democratic Policy Committee on Social Security

2005-01-29T20:26:00.000-05:00

This was live on C-Span yesterday. It was quite impressive.

Newsday: In addition to presidential speeches, the [Bush's] campaign [for privatization] includes television ads by groups supporting private accounts, appearances on Sunday TV news shows by administration officials, and, according to two Social Security Administration employees, a wide-ranging marketing strategy devised by political appointees at their agency that involuntarily enlists career employees and uses government resources.

The employees, Deborah Fredericksen and Steve Kofahl, testified Friday at a hearing by Senate Democrats who oppose Bush's plan. They said the strategy was devised by Social Security's Office of Communications. It was then disseminated to all of the agency's regional offices, which fell in line behind it.

Fredericksen and Kofahl said the strategy improperly uses public resources to sell two notions central to Bush's plan: that Social Security faces an imminent funding crisis and that any solution must include private accounts. Critics of privatization strongly dispute both points.

In her testimony to the Senate Democratic Policy Committee, Fredericksen presented several documents she said were from an internal Social Security Administration Web site that appeared to support her contention that the agency was promoting the underlying message of Bush's plan.

"That is a political message," said Fredericksen, who works in a Minneapolis field office and is a union official. "It's not my job as an agency employee to project a political message. ... It compromises the integrity and credibility of the Social Security Administration."

In a statement, Social Security Commissioner Jo Anne Barnhart denied that she had told agency employees to promote "any specific proposal for Social Security reform." She said the agency has sought to "educate the American public about the programs and finances of Social Security."

Jo Anne has steadfastly denied the politicization of the SSA, but the evidence is mounting. Bush is using our taxes to lie to us.

More from the Washington Post.

J.D. Crouch II

2005-01-28T14:30:00.000-05:00

Laura Rozen reports the rumor that J.D. Crouch II is "set to become deputy national security advisor, working under Stephen Hadley." Crouch was recently ambassador to Romania [Romanian Embassy site]. He was a fellow at the Claremont Institute, where he wrote against gun regulation, and a member of the Board of Directors at Frank Gaffney's Center for Security Policy.

Laura understates his lunacy.

Jim Lobe:

A champion of U.S. withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, Crouch has supported military action against Cuba; defended the development of offensive chemical weapons; opposed the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT); and advocated the development of new nuclear weapons for such purposes as destroying underground facilities (bunker-busters).

Before his appointment in 2001, he also strongly criticised the previous Bush administration decision to withdraw nuclear weapons from South Korea, and called for Washington to unilaterally destroy suspected nuclear and missile installations in North Korea unless Pyongyang complied with an ultimatum to dismantle them.

The details are in this Council for a Livable World report. Here's [PDF] his case for missile defense, presented to the Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2003. He was instrumental in the development and promotion of the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review.

Update, Tuesday 2/1/05, 12:29 AM EST: Laura reports that the rumor is confirmed, that Crouch is in as Deputy National Security Advisor. Coincidentally, Rumsfeld has just come out for resources for the bunker buster nuke, a controversial aspect of the 2002 NPR which was closely associated with Crouch. On January 10th, Rumsfeld sent a memo to then-Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham:

"I think we should request funds in FY06 and FY07 to complete the study," Rumsfeld wrote. "Our staffs have spoken about funding the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) study to support its completion by April 2007." He added, "You can count on my support for your efforts to revitalize the nuclear weapons infrastructure and to complete the RNEP study."

Progress for America Misinformation on Social Security

2005-01-27T17:59:00.000-05:00

An email sent out by Progress for America:

Dear PFA Supporter,

We need your help to save Social Security!

Although Social Security is sound for today's seniors, it lacks the resources to pay promised benefits to younger workers. While there were 16 workers per retiree in 1950, there are only three workers per retiree today and the government will begin to pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes by 2018. Further, unless we act now, the Social Security Trust Fund will be totally bankrupt by 2042 when today's younger workers begin to retire.

The longer we wait to fix Social Security for our children and grandchildren, the more difficult and costly it will be to solve the problem! In fact, the cost to reform Social Security increases $600 billion every year we delay reform.

Thankfully, President Bush and congressional leaders have the courage to make reforming Social Security - through the creation of voluntary personal retirement accounts - their top priority for 2005.

Here are some indisputable facts about Social Security:

• The Time is Now! The cost to reform Social Security increases $600 billion every year we fail to act;

• The Baby Boomers are Coming! Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system and 76 million baby boomers will begin to retire in less than 5 years. While there were 16 workers per retiree in 1950, there are just 3 workers per retiree today and soon there will only be two workers per retiree;

• "Doing Nothing" is Not An Option! The Social Security Trust Fund will begin to pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes by 2018 and it is projected to run out of money by 2042 if we do not act now;

• Massive Shortfalls. The Social Security Trustees estimate a shortfall of more than $10.4 trillion in order to meet Social Security's obligations and make it permanently solvent;

• Personal Nest Egg. Voluntary personal retirement accounts would provide younger workers - especially workers who could not otherwise afford to save - with a nest egg they can call their own, government cannot take away and they can pass on to their children;

• Optional. Voluntary personal retirement accounts would be 100% voluntary and future retirees have the option of staying in the current system;

• Good Investment. While retirees received a 114% return on their investment in Social Security in 1940, they only receive 1.7% today. Voluntary personal retirement accounts provide younger workers with a better vehicle to save and invest for their retirement; and,

• Protecting Today's Seniors. Reform will not change Social Security for those at or near retirement.

Progress for America (PFA) is working to support efforts to reform and modernize Social Security. PFA launched a new television ad - called "Courage" - which outlines the fundamental problems facing Social Security and applauds our leaders for having the courage to finally address them. We also began a telephone and email program to let Congress know that the American people support their efforts.

This week, PFA is gathering petition signatures to let Congress know that the American people support reforming Social Security now. Please take a minute to sign our Social Security petition today and urge your family, friends, neighbors and coworkers to do the same.

Unfortunately, some Washington special interest groups are more concerned with scaring seniors and demonizing Social Security reform than actually solving the problem. Indeed, some people in Washington continue to deny that there is even a problem. AARP has already spent $5 million attacking reform and other liberal interest groups have announced their intentions to join the fray. Incredibly, these groups will spend more than $100 million trying to convince Congress to "do nothing."

We need your help to counter their efforts and save Social Security! There are countless ways you can help and your support will send our leaders a message before it is too late. Please consider doing one or more of the following:

• Contact your Senators and Congressman to demand action now;

• Visit PFA's website to sign our petition;

• Visit PFA's website to make a financial contribution which will pay for future TV ads, mail and phone programs;

• Forward this email to five friends and urge them to join our efforts.

At the very least, let President Bush and Congress know that you want them to reform and protect Social Security by signing our petition.

We must deliver 100,000 petition signatures to Congress this week to send a message that reforming Social Security is too important to wait. Otherwise, our leaders will only hear from those want to pass Social Security's problems on to future generations.

So far, President Bush and congressional leaders are showing great courage in promoting reform and supporting voluntary personal retirement accounts. Please sign our petition today and help make sure that our leaders do not back down.

And after signing the petition, please help us counter the liberal misinformation machine by forwarding this email on to your friends and family.

Thank you for helping to save social security for future generations.

Brian McCabe
President
Progress for America

Progress for America has close ties to the administration - this email is a dry run of the arguments we'll be hearing over the next months. I am not familiar with the "$600 billion" claim, which is absurd on its face - the program's deficits aren't projected to reach $600 billion/year - paying any deficits with general fund revenue would cost less.

Annuity Dealers Abuse Seniors

2005-01-26T09:53:00.000-05:00

The LA Times reports on predatory annuity sales practices. The central example involves an elderly man purchasing an annuity to support his wife after he died, only for his wife to discover after his death that the annuity doesn't pay off until 2045 - when the man would have been 115 years old. A class action is in the works, as there are 10,000 similarly situated seniors.

California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer's staff is investigating a "living trust mill" that "used 60 telemarketers and 200 sales agents to offer seniors free or low-cost estate planning services as a pretext to pitch unsuitable annuities."

Of course, George W. Bush both wants to reduce people's ability to file class action lawsuits and force people to buy annuities to replace their social security benefits.

Disdain for the Law

2005-01-25T15:48:00.000-05:00

The Chirstian Science Monitor draws a connection between the Post's reporting on the DoD's increasing usurpation of overseas covert ops and the Times' reporting on the use of special forces to provide security at the inauguration. Neither use of special forces is authorized by law - both are based on "'special authority' from either the president or the secretary of defense."

Anti-Nuclear Petition

2005-01-25T14:38:00.000-05:00

People for the American Way is circulating a petition, targetting 18 "key" Republican Senators, in defense of the filibuster. Frist is sending increasingly clear signals that he will try to eliminate the filibuster as relates to judicial nominations. Reid has vowed to shut down the Senate in response, using procedural maneuvers to make any action extraordinarily difficult. PFAW's strategy is good, and it would be helpful to get some of these characters on the record.

PFAW's targets:

Sen. Ted Stevens (Alaska)
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska)
Sen. John McCain (Arizona)
Sen. Richard Lugar (Indiana)
Sen. Charles Grassley (Iowa)
Sen. Pat Roberts (Kansas)
Sen. Olympia Snowe (Maine)
Sen. Susan Collins (Maine)
Sen. Thad Cochran (Miss)
Sen. Chuck Hagel (Nebraska)
Sen. John Sununu (NH)
Sen. Pete Domenici (NM)
Sen. Mike DeWine (Ohio)
Sen. George Voinovich (Ohio)
Sen. Gordon Smith (Oregon)
Sen. Arlen Specter (Penn)
Sen. Lincoln Chafee (RI)
Sen. John Warner (Virginia)

PFAW's filibuster fact sheet.

An opinionjournal.com editorial from yesterday:

It's been a long time coming, but we now have an approximate date for a confrontation in the Senate on judicial nominations. Majority Leader Bill Frist has announced that if Democrats filibuster the nominations he expects to bring to the floor next month, he'll take action.

Finally. Perhaps the biggest failure of Mr. Frist's leadership in the last Congress was his inability to corral Republicans and stop the Democrats' unprecedented filibuster of 10 of President Bush's appeals-court nominees. It was the first time in U.S. history that the filibuster had been used against nominees to the appellate bench, as a Congressional Research Service paper has amply shown.

AP: Anti-Choice Graverobbers

2005-01-23T19:10:00.000-05:00

ABC News: Colo. Church Buries Aborted Fetuses' Ashes: "BOULDER, Colo. Jan 23, 2005. A Roman Catholic church buried the ashes of hundreds of aborted fetuses Sunday, a day after the 32nd anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal, drawing criticism that the church was exploiting women's grief to make a political statement.

A crowd of 250 parishioners prayed as the ashes were buried in the Sacred Heart of Mary Church cemetery, while a handful of protesters gathered nearby holding signs that read, 'This church is a grave robber.'

A mortuary hired by the abortion clinic to dispose of the fetuses had been giving the ashes to the church for years to be buried at a memorial. Dr. Warren Hern, clinic director, said he had no idea such an arrangement had been made and said his contract required the mortuary to bury the ashes in its own plot."

More Pletka

2005-01-23T17:52:00.000-05:00

Alec Russell, Telegraph, 1/21/05:: But the Republican-dominated Congress is arguing for regime change to be an explicit goal of America's foreign policy. For the moment, the US does not have an Iranian policy. But barring an utter disaster in Iraq, if Teheran spurns attempts to curb its nuclear ambitions, the administration will not turn its back.

"The idea that we will sit idly by is not right," said Danielle Pletka, a prominent neo-conservative at the American Enterprise Institute. "And Europeans are very mistaken to think that George Bush is an empty vessel. He is the hawk in the administration."

Craig Gordon, Newsday, 1/23/05: "I think people who write Iraq off as a failure don't understand the first thing about what failure really would be in a place like Iraq," said Danielle Pletka, an analyst with the conservative American Enterprise Institute who supported the war. "Failure would be that the elections didn't take place, that we would have installed a pseudo-Saddam when he fell, that there wouldn't be hundreds of political parties.

"It's not perfect. It's far from perfect," Pletka said, "but there's a tendency to forget just how bad it was under Saddam Hussein."

Armitage Farewell

2005-01-23T17:37:00.000-05:00

In bidding adieu to a "thoughtful advocate of the traditional Republican internationalist foreign policy," the Minneapolis Star Tribute indulges in a bit of fantasy:

Richard Armitage/Farewell to a truth-teller: "John Bolton, who was in charge of nonproliferation during the first Bush term, also is leaving the State Department, and good riddance. Bolton is the antithesis of a diplomat, a neo-con installed at state to keep an eye on Powell and Armitage. It seems Bolton's main goal is to be as irritating as possible to both friends and foes. Over the past several years, a delightful image has occurred to us numerous times in which Armitage picks Bolton up and pitches him head first into the Potomac, dusts off his hands, gives his gravelly chuckle and trots briskly back to Foggy Bottom, job well done."

The Chamber of Commerce, Mehlman & Vogel

2005-01-22T13:54:00.000-05:00

It is no surprise that the Chamber is deep in bed with the GOP, but the depth of the penetration is remarkable nonetheless. For instance, the Chamber of Commerce and the ILR hired the lobbying firm Mehlman & Vogel to work on limiting corporate legal liability. Firm co-founder Bruce Mehlman is the brother of RNC Chair Ken Mehlman, who we recently saw trumpeting limiting corporate legal liability as a way to reach out to Latino voters. Bruce Mehlman spent the last week partying it up around town, "spending more time as a brother than as a lobbyist, looking to celebrate with friends with whom I served in the administration, and worry about pushing policy the week after." [NYT] Co-founder Alex Vogel, meanwhile, "helped write the [Class Action Fairness Act] legislation, participated in negotiations on it and knows many of the key players, credentials that led the Chamber of Commerce to hire him for strategic advice to help 'drag it across the finish line.'" [NYT]

The Chamber spent $30 million on lobbying in 2004 and $34 million in 2003. The smaller 2004 figure should be augmented by the $3 million the Chamber spent on the November Fund to attack trial lawyers and the huge organizing effort the Chamber put together to oust Tom Daschle.

Washington business lobbyists made an extraordinary effort to usher Dashcle from power because they said they were frustrated with his role in blocking tax cuts, energy legislation and liability limits.

"It was Tom Daschle the obstructionist who motivated us to stand up publicly and form Team Thune," a coalition of two dozen trade associations and lobbying firms, Van Dongen recalled.

The group was modeled after efforts used in Georgia and Minnesota Senate races in recent years. "We recognized we can take the mechanism of a Washington legislative coalition and reposition it for political purposes," Van Dongen said.

In short order, the coalition raised half a million dollars for Thune from corporate contacts. By election day, it had funneled 200 volunteer lobbyists and lawyers from Washington to South Dakota, matching the labor organizers and Democratic lobbyists supporting Daschle. Similar business teams were organized to support the successful GOP Senate candidates in South Carolina and North Carolina.

Troop Armor

2005-01-22T13:04:00.000-05:00

Via PDB, Eric Umansky quotes Inside the Pentagon. Up-armored humvees are falling to powerful insurgent rocket propelled grenades and roadside bombs. Ideological head-in-assism delayed administration recognition of the need to improve armor, if it has actually been recognized.

Institute for Legal Reform

2005-01-22T13:03:00.000-05:00

The Chamber of Commerce's Institute for Legal Reform (ILR), "which is financed by large contributions from the most-often-sued corporations in America," [WP] has been very active of late. Its main agenda item has been limitation of corporate legal liability, which it has been pushing both at the federal and state level.

Jim VendeHei and John Harris of the Post mapped much of the terrain over which corporate liability issues will be fought. The ILR's strategy has three prongs: extorting state legislatures to limit liability, promoting apocryphal anecdotes in the media to skew the perception of the issue, and focusing on specific areas of liability rather than a single sweeping stroke.

The ILR has recently been active in Georgia, where corporations are extorting the state into protecting them from their wrongs. It is a classic example of the power corporations exert over state government finances. Lisa Rickard, president of the ILR, made the argument more explicitly in the Cincinnati Post:

As a state that ranked in the lower half (32 of 50) of this year's U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform/Harris State Liability System Rankings, legal reform in Ohio was long overdue. Employers are afraid to locate in states with abusive legal climates, and litigation forces the average Ohio family of four to pay an extra $3,200 a year in higher prices, higher insurance rates and skyrocketing health care costs.

Thanks to the recent action taken by the Ohio legislature, the scales of justice will be more balanced -- and less inclined to tip in favor of the select group of wealthy plaintiffs' attorneys who staunchly opposed these reforms. In conjunction with recent asbestos litigation reforms enacted last year, Ohioans can take heart that these changes will help the state enjoy the same level of success we've seen in the two other states -- Texas and Mississippi -- that recently have passed comprehensive legal reform legislation.

The economic dynamism of Texas and Mississippi - there's something for Ohio to aspire to. The ILR has also prominently attacked Madison County, Illinois.

The ILR is effusive in its praise for George W. Bush's efforts, through the "Class Action Fairness Act," to protect corporate wrongdoers against class action lawsuits. The same for his efforts to limit corporate liability for asbestos harms. The ILR is also working on "global forum shopping," medical malpractice, toxic mold, and obesity litigation, according to it's Legal Reform Now site. If you get a chance, browse through some of the Legal Reform Now newsrooms, to see how deeply the Chamber has burrowed into the heart of the peudo-conservative beast. Also note the prominence of pseudo-conservative WSJ editorialist John Fund on the ILR's home page.

AP Supreme Court Kremlinology

2005-01-22T12:58:00.000-05:00

Potential Supreme Court Nominees:
* James Harvie Wilkinson III, appointed to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., by President Reagan in 1984. He has built a solidly conservative record.

* Larry Thompson, deputy attorney general and the Bush administration's highest-ranking black law-enforcement official until he quit in 2003. He is general counsel at PepsiCo.

* John Roberts, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia since 2003 and former Rehnquist clerk.

* Michael McConnell, a judge on the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. A respected conservative legal scholar, he enjoys bipartisan support in the academic community.

* J. Michael Luttig, a Texas native who worked in the Justice Department during the first Bush administration. He was named to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 1991.

* Samuel Alito Jr., a judge on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. He is nicknamed "Scalito" because he has views like Scalia.

* Edith Jones, a judge on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans and former general counsel for the Texas Republican Party.

* Emilio Miller Garza, a judge on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. President Bush's father considered the Hispanic judge a Supreme Court prospect.

* Theodore B. Olson, Bush's solicitor general until last summer. He represented Bush in the 2000 Bush v. Gore case at the Supreme Court.

McConnell may be the best of these. Liberal academics that have worked with him note his intellectual integrity. Is a nutjob with integrity better than the alternative?

Conservative Organizations working on Judicial Nominations

2005-01-21T13:07:00.000-05:00

There are tons of pseudo-conservative groups that pay close attention to judicial nominations, but there are only a few that are involved in nitty-gritty strategizing. As far as I can tell, the three specialist groups are Kay Daly's Coalition for a Fair Judiciary, Sean Rushton's Committee for Justice, and Jay Sekulow's American Center for Law and Justice. C. Boyden Gray's network of interlocking organizations works on the issue, as does wildcard Manny Miranda. And then, of course, there is the Federalist Society, in all its illuminati glory.

They use right wing media to test out their talking points, notably Human Events and the Washington Times. Such a small universe is not hard to get a grasp on, and there's gold in them there gutters.

Tapped on the Nuclear Option

2005-01-21T11:11:00.000-05:00

Sam Rosenfeld at Tapped reflects on The Hill's warnings about Senate Majority Leader Frists' scheme to destroy Senate traditions. Ted Goldman a reporter for Legal Times, has a long piece on the controversy, Handicapping Bush's Judicial Nominations, Legal Times, 1/20/05.

Sam links to: Alexander Bolton, Frist aims nuke at the Dems, The Hill; Editorial, The Senate's Cold War, The Hill; Charles Babington, GOP Moderates Wary of Filibuster Curb, The Washington Post.

For a sampling of pseudo-conservative rhetoric on the nuclear option, see:

David Limbaugh, 'Nuclear Option' Not Really Nuclear, Washington Times 1/2/05; reprinted from Human Events, 12/28/04; Robert Bluey, Frist Fingers 'Nuclear' Trigger, Human Events 1/7/05; Editorial, Ending filibuster abuse: Show some guts, Pittsburgh-Tribune Review, 1/13/05; Terence Jeffrey, The Undemocratic Party, The Washington Times, 1/4/05; Sen. John Cornyn, Senatorial Resolutions, National Review, 1/4/05; .

Paperwight & Anti-Federalism

2005-01-21T09:45:00.000-05:00

I want to take a second to highlight Paperwight's Fairshot - he and Digby come about as close to representing my views as anyone in the blog-universe. Paperwight's most recent post is a column by Philip Freneau in the National Gazette, an early anti-Federalist newspaper. We have much to learn from this era (roughly 1790-1802 - the rise of the partisan political press), rhetorically, substantively, and strategically. Freneau, Benjamin Franklin Bache, James Callendor, William Duane - these are names that have fallen from progressive memory, though they shaped, even created, Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party. We remember, occasionally, Thomas Paine, and less often, the anti-Federalist papers, but we forget the context in which those conflicts arose and those arguments made.

The anti-Federalists, heavily influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment, were fighting a resurgent class structure in American society, best represented by the scoundrel Adams. They favored the French, who had just aided us in our war for independence. They favored expansion of the franchise to all free men, weak in retrospect, but radical for the time. They opposed corruption in government, particularly self-dealing on the part of the governing class. They took their fight to the common man and to the streets. For this, they were met with private arms and public laws. Who thinks of Scottish dissidents when discussing the Alien & Sedition Acts? That history wasn't in my law school classes. Adams tried to crush the anti-federalist presses, but succeeded only in dispersing and strengthening them. Major newspapers fled Pennsylvania, moving westward to near present day Pittsburgh, West Virginia, and Kentucky, and north into the Federalist base. Major anti-federalist presses worked out of Frankfort Kentucky, wielding frontier values against entrenched power in Philadelphia and Boston.

That heritage is ours, not theirs. The Federalist Society isn't a reference to the Federalist Papers, but to the Federalist Party. The American Constitution Society, formerly known as the Madison Society, was explicitly founded on the prudent democratic values of the anti-Federalists. It's counterintuitive, that the anti-Federalists should have inspired modern Democrats, and the Federalists the pseudo-conservatives, but the geneaology is clear. The tension is eased by the recognition that pseudo-conservatives want to own the state, not limit it; exploit class tension and anxiety, not reduce it.

For more, please read Richard Rosenfeld's American Aurora and Jeff Pasley's The Tyranny of the Printers. Pasley used to blog at the History News Network, but he's gone silent (despite my emails). I have been flogging these books in comments at places like Left2Right and Delong's place, but to no avail. Inspiration lies within - in less than half a decade, the anti-Federalists revolutionized politics, built a party, and won the presidency. (I also think we should use the word "calumny" more often.)

Update: Paul Glastris, invoking the era at Washington Monthly.

Wellstone Action in Kentucky

2005-01-21T08:55:00.000-05:00

I am working on getting Wellstone Action to hold a training program in Kentucky this Summer. As maybe one of a half dozen Kentuckians that worked on one of Senator Wellstone's campaigns, I can't stress how important it is that we Kentuckians learn to organize like Paul did.

Kentucky's tradition of progressive, decent, moderate politics is slipping, snared in the creeping Reedification of Midwestern politics. If Kentucky, always a border state, falls, Ralph Reed's pernicious politics will stand on the door step of the industrial Midwest. It's time to take our stand - indeed, it's time to push back. Kentucky can do it - Louisville is still solidly blue, and Lexington has actually grown increasingly blue in the last several cycles. The mountain counties of Eastern Kentucky shine blue, though a lack of organization and demographic shifts have reduced their electoral clout. It is the culturally deep South areas of Western Kentucky and the anomalous conservative Catholic areas of Northern Kentucky that weigh down the state, producing overwhelming margins for the GOP. Nonetheless, we won a special election in early 2004, and we almost won a Senate seat we had no business competing in. We still have a chance to hold the state.

Unfortunately, we won't have the party to help us. I don't want to be too down on the KYDP, but they are in organizational shambles. Digging themselves deeper, they recently elected a new chair, Jerry Lundergan, who is driving liberals out of the party:

Democratic State Representatives Kathy Stein of Lexington and Mary Lou Marzian of Louisville say there's a chance they could be registered Independents by the 2006 elections. Marzian and Stein are two of the more liberal state Reps. Both cite the reelection of Democratic House leaders, Democrats pushing the ban on gay marriage and the selection of Jerry Lundergan as state party chairman as proof the Democratic party is leaving its roots, becoming too conservative:

“We will continue to try to out-Republican the Republicans? I don’t think it can be done,” said Stein.

It's not that Lundergan is too conservative, or that he's a bad organizer (though to my knowledge he's never demonstrated any acumen), but that he has a ton of "ethics" baggage, including an illegal "$153,000 no-bid state contract for catering work" in the late 80s. Nonetheless, he received the tacit endorsement of House Democratic leaders, who still hold a sizable majority, and waltzed into the chairmanship.

The major selling point for Kentucky progressives is that the GOP are corrupt, power-hungry rogues. [See Bluegrassroots for more]. Lundergan will not be able to effectively make that case, and the fact that party leaders didn't oppose him demonstrates that they still don't see reality. Unpleasant as it may be, we must now work with the party when we can, without it when we can't, and against it when we must.

The first step is identifying, training, and energizing our activist base. We are there, even in Northern and Western Kentucky. We need to develop a plan forward. Wellstone Action can help us move forward. Leave a message or drop me an email if you are interested in helping make this happen.

Lincoln Chafee Vulnerable

2005-01-21T08:16:00.000-05:00

Reports the Providence Journal:

A public opinion survey commissioned by U.S. Senate Democrats shows Republican incumbent Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee to be vulnerable to a Democratic challenge in 2006, especially if the candidate is U.S. Rep. James R. Langevin, of Warwick.

The poll numbers released yesterday by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee show Langevin with 52 percent, Chafee at 32 percent and 17 percent undecided, said Cara Morris, spokeswoman for the committee.

The survey was done by Mark Mellman, a Washington, D.C.-based Democratic pollster who is familiar with Rhode Island politics. The poll of 500 registered voters was done from Jan. 11-13, Morris said. (The numbers do not equal 100 because of arithmetic rounding.)

Mellman asked this question: "If the November 2006 election were held today and the candidates were James Langevin and Lincoln Chafee, who would you vote for?"

An email to Jim Langevin, urging him to run, seems in order. 2004@jimlangevin.com

Fort Wayne Indiana, Victim of Liberal Conspiracy

2005-01-21T06:48:00.000-05:00

Movement fellow traveler Men's Health magazine declared Fort Wayne, Indiana "the dumbest town in all the land." Fort Wayne News-Sentinel columnist Kevin Leininger responded that the "'F' was basically 'an evil liberal media conspiracy.' He threw out the fact that 8 of the 10 smartest cities were in blue states, and eight of the dumbest were in red states. He doesn't think it's a coincidence that 'a certain amount of cultural elitism was at work here.'"

Inauguration Coverage

2005-01-21T06:30:00.000-05:00

I kept my head in the sand yesterday. I'll update this post with inauguration coverage worth reading. To start things off, people should check out Business Week's offering: Bush Sticks to His Guns:

You have to hand it to George W. Bush: He sticks to his guns, both literally and figuratively. In delivering his second inaugural address to thousands of loyalists, lawmakers, and dignitaries on Jan. 20, the 43rd President didn't reach out to defeated Democrats or alienated international allies.

The President expressed not a whit of regret at any decision he has ever made. Instead, he laid out his fundamentally dichotomous view of the world. Right vs. wrong. Good vs. evil. Us against them. In Bush's worldview, the U.S., through the force of its ideals and its military, is the anointed global defender of freedom and liberty. Whether you agree with him or not, there were no surprises.

Update, 9:52 PM 1/22/05:

Michael Berube: There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment and expose the pretensions of tyrants. And that is the force of human torture.

Ezra @ Pandagon: I don't think Bush, at this point, much cares what he says in public nor how closely it tracks to his agenda ("I'm a conservationist"). I've found he's never worth listening to but always requires watching (I'm a uniter, not a divider"). And that's why I had no interest in viewing his inaugural and Peggy Noonan was disgusted by it, we both know what the man is like -- though our attitudes towards him could hardly be more divergent -- and we both know yesterday's address had no relation to how he'll govern.

Matt Yglesias: Bush is more-or-less the reverse, a faux liberal. If you listen to his speeches, you would believe that his agenda consists of making the tax code fairer to people of modest means, improving the environment, expanding access to affordable health care, strenghtening New Deal/Great Society entitlement programs, and ending poverty. The fact that he isn't doing those things does, of course, matter. But the fact that he feels a need to pretend to be doing those things also matters. It shows that, roughly speaking, Bill Clinton succeeded in rehabilitating liberalism, even if he left office with the Democratic Party 100 percent out of power. The GOP has only been able to succeed by consistently adopting a pose of liberalism. This is a significant achievement, in and of itself, even if it would also be nice to win elections.

Marty Sieff, UPI, Analysis: Chasing liberty. Sieff is undoubtedly part of the reality based community, though conservative. He disagrees with the wisdom of Bush's course rather than his honesty.

Misleading Headlines

2005-01-21T06:27:00.000-05:00

The Cleveland Plain Dealer apparently has a copy-editor that doesn't read the articles. Take a look at the Plain Dealer's article on the inaurgural speech, titled "Empower Americans with an Ownership Society," which includes the following text:

Bush only briefly mentioned his goal to 'build an ownership society,' an allusion to his desire to give citizens more responsibility while lessening the government's role. Critics fear he will leave the needy without the necessary money or services.

He barely hinted at private Social Security accounts and other domestic priorities of his second term, saying, 'We will widen the ownership of homes and businesses, retirement savings and health insurance, preparing our people for the challenges of life in a free society.'

Bush acknowledged the racial divisions in the United States, saying, 'Our country must abandon all the habits of racism, because we cannot carry the message of freedom and the baggage of bigotry at the same time.'

But these were asides in a speech dedicated chiefly to the spread of freedom. With the nation still at war in Iraq, Bush did not threaten force against other nations' 'tyranny' - another oft-repeated word in his address. He specified, in fact, that spreading freedom 'is not primarily the task of arms.'

GOP Targets

2005-01-20T14:22:00.000-05:00

As usual, the LATimes article "GOP Sees Outreach Potential in Agenda" is about 90% garbage GOP spin, but about 10% noteworthy information. As we move forward, we need to improve our ability to monitor and track conservative political strategy, including which demographic groups they are actually targeting (as opposed to who they merely wish they could target). Knowing this, we need to preserve our base by countering their message. Jesse over at Pandagon has already dissected Ken Mehlman's LAT comments, but there's more in there:

President Bush's plans to overhaul Social Security and enact other sweeping policy changes are making some Republican lawmakers uneasy about the political risks. But the party's new chairman said Wednesday that the White House agenda actually could 'broaden and deepen' the GOP's dominance by attracting new voters, including young people and African Americans.

The comments by new Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman on the eve of Bush's second inauguration marked a rare acknowledgment that the president's objectives came with a political goal: GOP control in Washington for years after Bush leaves.

'When we push to save Social Security, we have an historic opportunity to bring more young Americans into our party,' Mehlman said, referring to Bush's proposal to let workers put some payroll taxes into private accounts. 'If you're 30 years old or younger and you care about a secure retirement, the Republican Party has a plan for you.'

Mehlman also told party leaders that debates over nominating judges, funding faith-based groups, offering school choice and limiting lawsuits added up to potential gains for GOP candidates in the future.

'When we debate who should sit on the judiciary, we have an opportunity to deepen the GOP by registering to vote men and women who attend church every week but aren't yet registered voters,' he said. 'We can bring new African American faces and voices into our party when we debate whether faith-based organizations should have a seat at the table and whether public schools need to be more accountable and parents need more choices.'

"We can deepen the GOP by identifying and turning out Americans who vote for president but miss off-year elections and agree with our work for a culture of life, promotion of marriage, and belief in our 2nd Amendment heritage.

"And," he concluded, "we can bring new Latino doctors, accountants and teachers tired of frivolous lawsuits into our party as we debate lawsuit reform.

Abolition of social security is apparently targeted toward young voters; base issues are aimed at sporadic voters; the "faith" claptrap is also a bas reduction strategy, aimed at African American Democrats; and tort reform will be part of a bizarre outreach campaign targeting Latinos. None of this makes any sense, but if the GOP sends its message into a vacuum, it will fill the void.

Nuclear Option

2005-01-19T19:44:00.000-05:00

From The Hill's January 20 Tipsheet:

Expect Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) to trigger the much anticipated and much feared nuclear option next month. The procedural tactic will strip Democrats of the ability to filibuster judicial nominees through a ruling of the Senate chair, upheld by a majority vote of the chamber. Some observers thought that Frist would reserve the controversial tactic for a Supreme Court nomination fight. But Frist indicated otherwise earlier this month when he said: “Next month we will have the opportunity to restore Senate tradition. I will bring one of the president’s very capable, qualified, and experienced judicial nominees to the floor.” Conservative advocates interpreted those remarks as a solid indication that Frist will go nuclear in February.

Pletka on Rice

2005-01-19T09:22:00.000-05:00

Guy Dinmore, Financial Times, 1/19/05: Danielle Pletka, foreign policy expert at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, said Ms Rice had in effect presented the president's views. Ms Pletka said the Bush administration shared the vision and goals of the neoconservatives, but that it would be wrong to portray Ms Rice as having been "hijacked" by them.

Pletka is right. There is no reason for optimism about Rice's tenure at state. Rice may have the President's ear, but more importantly, he has hers. She will reflect his views, not vice versa. Steve Clemons is similarly realistic:

A lot of people will be giving Bush a new honeymoon on foreign policy issues -- but all I can say is that all of those pundits who thought that Iraq had been so disastrous that the neocons would be out and the realists back in, were amazingly off target.

I argued that I saw no empirical evidence of neocon decline -- and I think that we need to be careful of giving Bush too much room to run right now.

Daily News

2005-01-17T09:41:00.000-05:00

Andy Card

The Boston Globe has an AP piece on Andy Card's "tight ship." In many ways, Card embodies the loyalty fetish typical of Bushism. The Washington Post published a personal look at Card back on January 5th, focusing on his memory devices and his organizational tactics.

Kennedy and Gonzales

Ted Kennedy, remaining true to his comments of a week ago, is "leaning against" confirming Al Gonzales. Said Kennedy: "This nominee is the principal architect, it appears, for the development of the changes in the Geneva Convention, and torture. And he has an opportunity in response to these questions to explain it. I don't think he did."

Rice

The Post manages to use Rice's failures to show that she is "really charming," in Brent Scowcroft's words. I heard, from some "bigs" at Steve Clemons' event a couple of weeks ago, the opposite, to say the least. The news of Zoellick's ascension had just broken, and people were wondering how State would work with two "rude" people at the helm. Many of their friends would probably agree that both Rice and Zoellick have brusque, abrasive personalities. In the midst of another fairly hagiographic piece, the NYT reports that Rice intends to restore "diplomacy" to the center of the Bush international agenda. All the evidence, though, points to Rice embracing public relations, rather than diplomacy, as her job - she wants to "restore America's reputation;" Bush wants her to "explain our motives and explains our intentions," "to do a better job of explaining what America is all about." The world doesn't want to be explained to, though - it wants to be listened to.

Private Military

Employees at some of the private contractors in Iraq don't fare so well, as shown in the story of Allen Petty, former KBR truckdriver. The stress and risk was great, the reward minimal. I would have liked to know what Mr. Petty thought about George W. Bush. His wife thinks KBR is to blame, he thinks the military is - but who really decided to invade with inadequate troop levels and an unrealistic strategic assessment, only to fill the gaps with private military forces?

Jim Wallis

Wallis, of Sojourners, met with Congressional and Senate Democrats to talk about faith. It would be nice if he could fill a Michael Gerson-like role, enabling Democrats to make clear that their positions are compatible with, or animated, by faith. We do not need someone to repeat the tired, ridiculous tripe that Democrats are hostile to religion. "Moral values" are a public relations issue, not a substantive issue: we are already the party of moral values. The most interesting part of the NYT's reporting, though, is the commnetary by Richard Land, of the Southern Baptist Convention, who "argued that Mr. Wallis misunderstood conservative evangelical voters because he conflated the moral issue of alleviating poverty with the practical issue of whether Democratic policies are the way to do it," claiming "that the debate is over, based on the 30-year experiment, about whether big government or free markets work better at producing wealth for everybody." Land is wrong as a matter of policy, but he shows the extent of interpenetration between free-market ideology and evangelicalism, the bizarre epistemological underpinnings of pseudo-conservatism.

Nick Confessore and Grover Norquist

That interpenetration, reflected in pseudo-conservative economics, is the central topic of Confessore's NYT article on Grover Nroquist and Bush's reactionary tax agenda. Pseudo-conservatives ardently believe in the inefficiency of taxing wealth, with no rationale but their moral sentiments.

Change Agent

2005-01-16T10:46:00.000-05:00

I spent Friday and Saturday night at the Emerging Progressives Forum, an event about which I will have a lot to say over the next couple of days. It has been an incredibly thought provoking event, a chance to revive old friendships, meet fellow activists, and talk with some big shots that don't usually mingle with the ground.

One of the big shots was Rahm Emanuel, the late Congressman Matsui's replacement as chair of the DCCC. Emanuel spoke, at some length, about the central failing of the Kerry 2004 message: Kerry failed to establish himself as an agent of change. Emanuel's explanation is that, since 1992 when he was a staffer in the Clinton campaign, each election has been won by the party more able to articulate a message of change. In 1992, Clinton was the party of change. In 1994, the GOP insurgency was far more dynamic. In 1996, Clinton, despite being the incumbent, was able to run as the agent of change ("building a bridge to the 21st century") against Bob Dole, who was still driving his horse and buggy across the bridge to the 20th century. In 1998, the Democrats were again the change agents, the party that wanted to "moveon" from the impeachment. In 2000, the Bush campaign was able to brand itself as change - the only time Gore experienced a bump in the polls was when he broke from the past, declaring himself "his own man." 2002 was muddled by 9/11, but there was certainly a dynamism that underlay the GOP.

That brings us to 2004. I haven't seen the figures Emanuel cited, but he claimed that over a quarter of the electorate identified Bush as the agent of change in the 2004 election. That's depressing, but not particularly shocking - the revolutionary aspect of pseudo-conservatism makes it look dynamic, and Kerry wasn't able to break through the initial credibility barrier to effectively lay out his vision for the future. People didn't trust him, both because of what his campaign let become the focus of the election and the effective viciousness of the Bush operation. Despite the Bush campaign's constant invocation of "steadfastness," "resolve," and "not changing horses in the middle of a stream," people thought of those as character traits and "moral values," not an endorsement of Bush's particular policy agenda.

Emanuel's hypothesis isn't a mantra, a key that opens the electoral lockbox. But there is no doubt that we need to reclaim the mantle of dynamism. About twelve hours after listening to Emanuel's explanation, I read Jim VandeHei and Michael Fletcher in the Washington Post, Bush Says Election Ratified Iraq Policy. Bush claims that his re-election was an endorsement of his policy agenda, particularly in Iraq:

President Bush said the public's decision to reelect him was a ratification of his approach toward Iraq and that there was no reason to hold any administration officials accountable for mistakes or misjudgments in prewar planning or managing the violent aftermath.

"We had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 elections," Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post. "The American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me."

How's that for change? This information needs to be force fed to people that think Bush is a change agent. When John Kerry said a vote for Bush was a vote for four more years of the same, Bush silently nodded in agreement. It's a shame he didn't tell his voters that.

Emanuel's hypothesis also has interesting implications for the social security debate. We are basically the party of stasis on social security, the conservative party that realizes the program works well and wants to preserve it, while every Bush invocation of "crisis" makes him a change agent. We shouldn't run away from that, but we need to make clear that preserving social security is the dynamic position. I'll try to throw out some ideas on the matter later today.

Nation Building as Special Operations

2005-01-16T10:13:00.000-05:00

I don't really have a strong feeling one way or the other on whether Civil Affairs troops should be part of the Army's special operations command or its "regular" army - if there was reason to grant Rumsfeld the benefit of the doubt, it could be a viewed as a relatively benign restructuring. The problem, of course, is that there is no reason to grant Rumsfeld such a benefit, and in fact, it would be foolish to do so. Everytime you see a glimmer of attachment to reality from him, it turns out to be a mirage.

Civil affairs offices oppose the change, and now is not the time to be upsetting morale. They are struggling to reconstruct Iraq in the face of a woefully deficient strategy, insufficient troops, and a determined insurgency. Now might not be the best time for a 'huge change' that would do nothing to resolve the short term challenges facing Civil Affairs.

What's really shocking in the Post's report on this issue, though, is Civil Affairs' very thinly veiled hostility and suspicion toward Rumsfeld. It's clear that they don't grant him the benefit of the doubt, and justifiably so.

The proposed reorganization is the latest issue over which the strong-minded defense secretary has tangled with the Army, which is the largest of the services, the one most enmeshed in Iraq, and the one that most consistently feels misunderstood. Over the last two years, the Army saw its chief of staff publicly rebuked by civilian leaders over the number of troops that would be required to occupy Iraq, and then, after the spring 2003 invasion, saw the firing of the Army secretary.

The Post doesn't flesh this out, but it's referring to the General Shinseki, whose troop level assessments were likely far closer to what we actually needed, and General White, who pushed for more development of a post-invasion plan, only to be rebuffed by Rumsfeld. In both cases, Rumsfeld spat on the far more informed estimates of the uniformed military.

The article also makes clear Rumsfeld's continuing inability to recognize that his military transformation strategy is misguided. He wants to emphasize the video-game aspect of war fighting, assassinations and snatches, to the exclusion of the more pedestrian, but more important aspects of war fighting. Just two months ago, Rumsfeld petulantly asked why his ill-conceived diktat wasn't being followed - despite what should have been the lesson learned from Iraq. The military can not make us safer if it's used the way Rumsfeld initially conceived it. We will continute to produce failed states and breeding ground for terrorists, rather than "drying up the swamps," or whatever the current metaphorical justification for our invasion is.

An overview of an indictment of Rumsfeld:

1. Rumsfeld has catastrophically mismanaged the Iraq war effort.

A. Not Enough Troops.

Secretary Rumsfeld "insisted on micromanaging the [Iraq] war’s operational details" from the outset, and insisted that the war would require minimal troop commitments. [The New Yorker, 4/7/03; Bob Novak, 5/1/03] Former U.S. administrator in Iraq Paul Bremer said troop shortages were what allowed the insurgency to get off the ground. [CNN, 10/5/04] Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski recently claimed that three times the current troop levels are required to produce a reasonably stable Iraqi government. [Los Angeles Times, 1/7/05] Senator John McCain "estimated that 80,000 more Army personnel and 20,000 to 30,000 more Marines would be needed to secure Iraq," and noted that he had "no confidence" in Rumsfeld's ability to do the job. [MSNBC 12/15/04]

B. No Post-War Plans.

Rather than plan for the worst and hope for the best, Secretary Rumsfeld "planned for the best and some of the worst has happened - they just don't seem to be capable of learning from that," said Senator Evan Bayh. [Indianapolis Star, 12/17/04] His war plan assumed that "Iraqis would welcome U.S. troops with open arms and Washington could install a favored Iraqi exile leader as the country's leader," so there was no need to plan for the post-war period. [Knight Ridder, 7/12/03] The "high-level failure" to produce a postwar plan has undercut the entire US mission in Iraq, according to Maj. Isaiah Wilson III, official Army historian of the Iraq campaign. [Washington Post, 12/25/04]

2. Rumsfeld distorted intelligence in the leadup to war.

The Department of Defense provided unreliable and false intelligence on Iraq's WMD capabilities and connections to terrorism to the White House. The Department of Defense consistently undermined the more sober and accurate analyses of the intelligence community while providing inflammatory arguments to the administration and sympathetic journalists. [Knight Ridder, 10/21/04; Levin Report (PDF)]

3. Rumsfeld tolerates torture.

A. Torture at Guantanamo Bay.

Secretary Rumsfeld explicitly authorized many of the abusive tactics employed at Guantanamo Bay, including stripping prisoners for humiliation and threatening them with dogs. [Washington Post, 6/23/04] New Guantanamo Bay abuse allegations surface regularly. [Washington Post, 12/21/04] Guantanamo Bay tactics migrated to Abu Ghraib, when the Department of Defense sent Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller to "Gitmoize" the prison. [Washington Post, 5/10/04; New Yorker, 5/15/04]. Torture allegations have greatly undermined America's international credibility and the global war on terrorism. [The Atlantic, July/August 2004]

B. Ghosting Prisoners.

Secretary Rumsfeld personally authorized at least one case of "ghosting," or hiding a prisoner from authorities and human rights organizations, ordering that a prisoner be held "off the books". [MSNBC, 6/16/04] Ghosting is a violation of the Geneva Conventions. [MSNBC, 6/17/04]. The ghosted detainee did not produce any high value intelligence.

4. Rumsfeld mistreats the troops.

A. Not Enough Armor.

Secretary Rumsfeld was asked by a soldier why his unit didn't have adequate vehicle armor. Rumsfeld responded, "you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time." [New York Times, 12/9/04] Years after the decision to invade was made, troops still lacked adequate vehicle and body armor, despite its ready availability to the Pentagon. [Washington Post, 10/18/04; Newsweek, 12/20/04, Newsweek, 5/3/04]. Senator Susan Collins noted that "the Department of Defense still has been unable to ensure that our troops have the equipment they need to perform their mission as safely as possible." [CNN, 12/16/04] Up to 20% of American troop fatalities are attributable to poorly armored vehicles. [Newsweek, 5/3/04]

B. Auto-Pen.

Secretary Rumsfeld didn't bother to personally sign condolence letters sent to the families of dead soldiers, "the least that we could expect out of the secretary of defense," according to Sen. Chuck Hagel. [NY Daily News, 12/20/04].

Bush Plan to Abolish Social Security Not in 2006 Budget

2005-01-14T14:20:00.000-05:00

From the CQ midday update:

The cost of the Social Security overhaul sought by President Bush will not be included in the president's fiscal 2006 budget proposal because the administration has not completed its proposal for the entitlement program, Office of Management and Budget Director Joshua B. Bolten said today during a question-and-answer session at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The news was not unexpected. The White House had previously indicated that Bush will not settle on a specific Social Security proposal in time for such a plan to be reflected in the budget proposal due Feb. 7 on Capitol Hill. Nonetheless, Democrats and some outside the White House -- including the Cato Institute, which supports Bush's Social Security proposal to allow a portion of payroll taxes to be invested in private accounts -- had said the budget should include at least a ballpark estimate of the cost.

"Crisis"

2005-01-14T13:48:00.000-05:00

In the adminsitration's mania to fabricate "crises" that justify the implementation of its ideological agenda, the administration actually succeeds in creating real crises. Their ill-formulated, misguided policies have invariably produced blowback far worse than the initial situations use to justify them. Just as importantly, their willingness to lie to advance their programme has created a credibility crisis that will burden the American people for generations to come.

The Iraq "crisis" was fake: there were no weapons of mass destruction there. Now, though, our military is broken and Iraq is a breeding ground for a new generation of terrorists. [BBC; report text]

The credibility crisis is real. The Bush administration is not believed around the world - if we ever saw an actual wolf, international leaders would not believe us. [See the transcript of Zbigniew's remarks over at the Washingtonnote] Many Americans would not believe Bush. We have frittered away our credibility on human rights.

More on the president's "crises:"

Jim VandeHei, Washington Post:

Painting a grim picture of problems is as old as politics itself. But Democrats and some presidential scholars say there is a danger for Bush if he appears to stoke fears for political gain. The Bush administration was criticized throughout the campaign -- and before -- for its repeated prewar warnings of Saddam Hussein's deadly weapons cache, which turned out to be based on faulty intelligence and proved largely untrue. Democrats contend Bush also exaggerated the nation's economic problems to justify tax cuts, terrorist threats to convince the public of the need for restrictions on civil liberties, and John F. Kerry's record to win a second term.

Harold Meyerson, Washington Post:

But when historians look back at the Bush presidency, they're more likely to note that what sets Bush apart is not the crises he managed but the crises he fabricated. The fabricated crisis is the hallmark of the Bush presidency. To attain goals that he had set for himself before he took office -- the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the privatization of Social Security -- he concocted crises where there were none.

Dick Meyer, CBS News.

Rolling Stone interview with Krugman on the social security "crisis."

Chicago Sun Times on the tort "crisis."

Nashua Telegraph:

But the American people, at least a majority, apparently have forgiven Bush for his foray into Iraq and backed his administration by re-electing him to a second term.

And that has apparently emboldened the administration to use the impending crisis device on the domestic front. Consider the changes Bush wants to make to the Social Security program. His rallying cry is that there’s an imminent crisis and action must be taken “now.”

But the crisis isn’t imminent. Sure, there’s fiscal trouble down the road but it’s at least a decade or more away.

Congress can take a few years to thoughtfully examine the program and make changes without gutting it.

Bush has gotten away with misleading the American public into war. But he shouldn’t try a similar “crisis” approach to ram through his proposed changes to domestic programs.

The public trust in his credibility may wear thin if he relies on this hyped-up crisis mode instead of true and reliable leadership, based on facts.

MSNBC:

Sen. Edward Kennedy accused President Bush Wednesday of hyping concerns about the nation’s retirement program just as he did on Iraq and urged Democrats to stand up to the "politics of fear"...

"We have an administration that falsely hypes almost every issue as a crisis," the Massachusetts Democrat said in a speech prepared for delivery at the National Press Club. "They did it on Iraq, and they are doing it now on Social Security."

"They exploit the politics of fear and division, while ours is a politics of hope and unity," Kennedy said.

"In the face of their tactics, we cannot move our party or our nation forward under pale colors and timid voices," said Kennedy, who at 72 has become an elder statesman in the Democratic Party.

"We cannot become Republican clones," he said. "If we do, we will lose again, and deserve to lose. As I have said on other occasions, the last thing this country needs is two Republican parties."

War's Hidden Costs to Military

2005-01-14T13:40:00.000-05:00

Boston Globe: A forthcoming request for additional funds to continue waging war in Iraq will not begin to address the "hidden cost" of the conflict, according to Pentagon officials and other government authorities who say that tens of billions of dollars more will eventually be needed to repair or replace heavily used equipment and to compensate for the wear and tear on members of the armed services.

The Pentagon next month plans to ask Congress for up to $100 billion in supplemental funds to pay for the ongoing combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing the total budgeted so far to well over $200 billion. But military officers say the administration's estimates do not include the investment that will be necessary to fix what they say they fear is becoming a broken ground force.

The administration's politically motivated practice of requesting war funding through supplementals, of minimizing public discussion of the cost of the war, causes it to "not account for the need to fund readiness for future missions." An "Army briefing estimates that in fiscal years 2005, 2006, and 2007, more than $35 billion could be needed to pay for backlogged equipment maintenance, battle losses, and to replace dwindling stocks prepositioned in the Persian Gulf."

Social Security Abolition

2005-01-14T11:54:00.000-05:00

Charles Stein gets a Boston Globe background series on social security off to a mediocre start. Following the excellent series on Republican corruption, I'm disappointed.

The article tries to explain the different assumptions that ground the competing social security camps. People who think the program is in good health assume that the government will not default on its debt, and that the promise made in the Greenspan 1983 tax increases should be kept. People who want to abolish social security think that we will not repay the debts we owe to those who've paid payroll taxes since 1983. The article explains the different assumptions, but it doesn't provide the tools for evaluating them (maybe later in the series?).

Debt owed the social security system is a "special class" - how is it special, and is there any reason to think it is less likely to be paid? Is it incorporated in the reported national debt figures?

The trust fund is operating exactly the way it was intended by the Greenspan Commission. Why do people now pretend that the promise underlying that compromise has no moral authority? Abolishing social security because "the trust fund is fake" is a dramatic reneg on a $1.5 trillion debt, debt that was paid by middle class workers.

Doris Matsui to run for Congress

2005-01-14T11:11:00.000-05:00

Doris Matsui is running to replace her late husband, Congressman Bob Matsui. I had the chance to meet Congressman Matsui a couple of times while volunteering with the DCCC. It's hard to believe he's gone.

Doris Matsui seems like an eminently qualified candidate. She will have a special voice, particularly on stem cell issues:

Matsui said stem cell research offers hope for the disease that caused her husband's death Jan. 1 pneumonia brought on by myelodysplastic syndrome, a rare form of bone marrow disease.

"Now I have joined the ranks of the hundreds of thousands of Americans nationwide for whom this is personal," she said, criticizing Bush's limited federal funding of stem cell experiments.

More on her candidacy at the Sacramento Bee, the Hill. The primary is March 8, and a general election will take place May 3 if no candidate wins 50% in the primary.

Gay Translators

2005-01-14T10:37:00.000-05:00

AP: Between 1998 and 2004, the military discharged 20 Arabic and six Farsi speakers, according to Department of Defense data obtained by the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military under a Freedom of Information Act request.

The military previously confirmed that seven translators who specialized in Arabic had been discharged between 1998 and 2003 because they were gay. The military did not break down the discharges by year, but said some, but not all, of the additional 13 discharges of Arabic speakers occurred in 2004.

Chamber of Commerce Goes Squishy on Bush Plan to Cut Social Security Benefits

2005-01-13T06:46:00.000-05:00

Newsweek: Senior officials at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents some of the nation’s biggest corporations, are now urging the White House to delay its Social Security reforms in favor of measures that would be easier to pass, such as tort reform and an energy bill. "A mandate lasts about 15 minutes in this town," Chamber president Tom Donohue says tartly. Instead Donohue wants Bush to "address the low-hanging fruit that’s already keyed up"—not the ambitious stuff that will require so much of the president’s political capital. While the organization does support a Social Security overhaul, Donohue said the president could better preserve his election momentum by pushing legislation that would have "a lot better chance of success."

The Chamber isn’t any old business lobby. It’s long been one of Bush’s biggest supporters in Washington. In the first half of 2004, alone, the group spent more than $20 million lobbying on some of the White House’s top agenda items, including changes in the tax code and medical liability reform. At the same time, Bush and other senior administration officials have tapped the Chamber as a friendly venue to deliver key speeches. In 2001, Bush kicked off his legislative push for tax cuts from the organization’s headquarters, while Vice President Dick Cheney has campaigned there for his energy policy. The White House downplays any notion of a rift with the Chamber. But it’s still awkward that Joshua Bolten, head of the Office of Management and Budget and one of Bush’s top economic advisers, is to campaign for Social Security reform at the Chamber on Friday.

The Chamber of Commerce invested a lot of money in the 2004 GOP, particularly in beating Daschle in South Dakota. They sensibly don't want to risk their return on investment.

More on Terror Squads

2005-01-12T11:25:00.000-05:00

Newsweek's Christopher Dickey has an analysis piece up on the Salvador option. He concludes by quoting Joaquín Villalobos,

El Salvador’s most brilliant guerrilla leader. Now at Oxford, he favored the Iraq war in 2003, but is dumbfounded by the direction the conflict has taken. Villalobos was dryly analytical, as ever. "The problem of repression and its possible effectiveness corresponds to five basic elements: proportionality, the scope of the conflict, time, a context that favors a multiplier effect or not, and the ability to control what you’re doing." If so, a helluva lot more fine tuning is needed than we're likely to see in Iraq any time soon. "If the generals think that with the hatred against the United States that exists in the region, with the divisions in Iraqi society, with Syria, Iran and others around, starting a dirty war is something that will give them an edge, they are totally and absolutely lost and desperate," says Villalobos. "Invading Iraq without a post-war plan created chaos, subsequent mistakes converted the chaos into organized resistance, and if they keep blundering ahead blindly, they’ll convert the resistance into a real civil war."

Whether civil war in Iraq is incipient or imminent, embracing terror squads ensures that it's inevitable.