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Democrats Take Careful Aim at Feet, Prepare Both Barrels For Firing

by Trinida9037 Posted on November 13, 2014

Mother Jones

Sen. Mary Landrieu has a tough runoff election next month, and energy policy is a big deal in Louisiana. So Senate Democrats are planning to help her out a bit by holding a vote on the Keystone XL pipeline. Paul Waldman calls this one right:

The current Democratic effort to help Mary Landrieu win her runoff election by scheduling a quick vote on the Keystone XL pipeline has to be one of the most politically idiotic moves in recent history. As I argued yesterday, not only is it guaranteed to fail in its goal of helping Landrieu, it gives Republicans a huge policy victory while getting nothing in return. Runoff elections have extremely low turnout, and the only way Landrieu stands a chance is if she can convince lots of Louisiana Democrats to go to the polls to save her. This kind of me-too policymaking—I’m just as pro-oil as Republicans are!—is about the last thing that’ll pump up Democratic enthusiasm.

Keystone XL isn’t really one of my hot buttons. I figure that all that oil is getting to market one way or another, and blocking the pipeline won’t really make much difference. I know that’s probably a little too fatalistic, but we all have issues that strike us that way. Keystone XL is one of mine.

That said, Waldman is right. There’s simply zero chance that this is going to help Landrieu. There’s not a person in Louisiana who doesn’t know that she supports the oil industry and hates hates hates President Obama’s energy policy. She’s made that crystal clear, and everyone who’s persuadable has already been persuaded. A Keystone XL vote just won’t move the needle.

So Democrats would be giving something away and getting literally nothing in return. In fact, since this would outrage all the people who do care about Keystone XL, Democrats would probably be giving something away and losing support from key supporters at the same time. It’s crazy.

These are the same guys who whine endlessly about President Obama’s lousy negotiating skills. Someone just shoot me.

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Democrats Take Careful Aim at Feet, Prepare Both Barrels For Firing

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Jonathan Gruber Says Nothing New, Gets Hammered For It

by ToddBainerry Posted on November 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Jonathan Gruber is one of the intellectual godfathers of Obamacare. Here’s what he said last year about it:

“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes,” he said during a panel discussion at the University of Pennsylvania in October, 2013. “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the ‘stupidity of the American voter’ or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.”

….”In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had a law which explicitly said that healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed,” he said. “You can’t do it politically, you just literally cannot do it. It’s not only transparent financing but also transparent spending.”

I gather this has created a mini-firestorm, and obviously I understand why. If you imply that a bill was structured to take advantage of the “stupidity” of the American voter, that’s just bound to come back to haunt you. So the radio yammerheads are having a field day, and I guess I don’t blame them.

But if we can take just a half step up from radio yammerhead land, did Gruber say anything that isn’t common knowledge? I’m not playing faux naive here. I’m serious. Basically, Gruber said two things.

First, he noted that it was important to make sure the mandate wasn’t scored as a tax by the CBO. Indeed it was, and this was a topic of frequent discussion while the bill was being debated. We can all argue about whether this was an example of the CBO scoring process being gamed, but it has nothing to do with the American voter. Rather, it has everything to do with the American congressman, who’s afraid to vote for anything unless it comes packaged with a nice, neat bow bearing an arbitrary, predetermined price tag.

As for risk-rated subsidies, I don’t even know what Gruber is talking about here. Of course healthy people pay in and sick people get money. It’s health insurance. That’s how it works. Once again, this was a common topic of discussion while the bill was being debated—in fact, one that opponents of the bill talked about constantly. They complained endlessly that healthy young people would pay relatively higher rates than they deserved, while older, sicker people would get a relative break on their premiums. This was no big secret, but the bill passed anyway.

It’s true that the average Joe didn’t know anything about this, but not because the average Joe is stupid. It’s because most people simply don’t pay attention to this stuff even slightly. The fraction of the electorate that cares about the minutiae of policymaking could be stored in a pickle jar. That’s just life.

So basically, Gruber foolishly made a comment about the stupidity of the American voter—a comment that wasn’t even right, I think. But that’s it. Everything else he said was common knowledge during 2009 and 2010 among the pickle jar set. If you cared about policy, you knew this stuff. If you didn’t, you didn’t. But that’s true of everything, isn’t it?

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Jonathan Gruber Says Nothing New, Gets Hammered For It

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Obama Takes a Good Half Step Toward an Unequivocal Ban on Torture

by GloryGibbbrq Posted on November 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s worth mentioning that the Obama administration has finally decided to take a more expansive view of where torture and “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” is banned:

The Obama administration, after an internal debate that has drawn global scrutiny, is taking the view that the cruelty ban applies wherever the United States exercises governmental authority, according to officials familiar with the deliberations. That definition, they said, includes the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and American-flagged ships and aircraft in international waters and airspace.

But the administration’s definition still appears to exclude places like the former “black site” prisons where the C.I.A. tortured terrorism suspects during the Bush years, as well as American military detention camps in Afghanistan and Iraq during the wars there. Those prisons were on the sovereign territory of other governments; the government of Cuba exercises no control over Guantánamo.

Why exclude black sites? Administration officials apparently say this is just a “technical matter of interpretation, underlined by concerns that changing the jurisdictional scope could have unintended consequences, like increasing the risk of lawsuits by overseas detainees or making it harder to say that unrelated treaties with similar jurisdictional language did not apply in the same places.”

I can….almost buy that. Lawyers and diplomats get pretty hung up on stuff like this. Nonetheless, I’d be a lot happier if Obama could be a little more Bush-like here, and simply overrule the legal eagles and insist on a clear and unequivocal policy. It’s hard to believe there isn’t a way to do that which wouldn’t somehow wreck a bunch of other treaties at the same time.

So two cheers for doing the right thing. But not three.

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Obama Takes a Good Half Step Toward an Unequivocal Ban on Torture

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The Case Against Postal Banking

by DaltonHauslaib Posted on November 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Dean Baker thinks the Washington Post is wrong to imply that the postal service hasn’t been aggressive about improving its productivity. Agreed. Then this:

The other point is that the Postal Service could improve its finances by expanding rather than contracting. Specifically, it can return to providing basic banking services, as it did in the past and many other postal systems still do. This course has been suggested by the Postal Service’s Inspector General.

This route takes advantage of the fact that the Postal Service has buildings in nearly every neighborhood in the country. These offices can be used to provide basic services to a large unbanked population that often can’t afford fees associated with low balance accounts. As a result they often end up paying exorbitant fees to check cashing services, pay day lenders and other non-bank providers of financial services.

Color me skeptical. I know this sounds like a terrific, populist idea, but I can think of several reasons to be very cautious about expansive claims that the USPS is uniquely situated to provide basic banking services. Here are a few:

What’s the core competency that would allow USPS to excel at banking? The Inspector General says that “the first and possibly most important factor is the sheer ubiquity of the Postal Service.” In other words, they have lots of locations: 35,000 to be exact. But who cares? Physical real estate is the least compelling reason imaginable to think an organization would be great at basic banking. After all, you know who else has lots of branches? Banks. Even after years of downsizing, there are nearly 100,000 branch banks in the United States.
What else? The Inspector General suggests “trust and familiarity with the postal ‘brand.'” Meh. Americans trust McDonald’s too. That doesn’t mean they’d flock to do their banking there. This kind of thing reminds me of hundreds of really bad marketing presentations I’ve attended in my lifetime.
When you say “postal banking,” most people think about small mom-and-pop savings accounts. But that’s not really what the postal service has in mind. The IG report focuses more on (1) payment mechanisms (i.e., electronic money orders), (2) products to encourage savings, and (3) reloadable prepaid cards. The first is fine, but not really “postal banking.” The second is problematic since even the IG concedes that the reason poor people tend not to save is “largely due to a lack of disposable income among the underserved.” That’s quite an understatement, and it’s not clear what unique incentives the postal service can offer to encourage savings among people who have no money to save. That leaves prepaid cards—and maybe a good, basic prepaid card sponsored by the federal government is a worthwhile idea. But that’s really all we have here.
Finally, there’s the prospect of providing very small loans. But as much as we all loathe payday lenders, there’s a reason they charge such high rates: they also have high rates of default. The postal service can charge less only by (a) losing money or (b) providing loans only to relatively good customers. If you read the IG report, they basically recommend the latter. It’s not clear to me that this is truly an underserved niche.
Yes, other countries have postal banking services. But these were mostly established long ago, before commercial banking became ubiquitous. It may have been a good idea half a century ago, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea now.

If the government wants to provide basic banking services for the poor, it’s not clear to me why USPS should do it. They have literally no special competence at this, and the motivation behind it is to provide a revenue stream that offsets losses from mail services. That’s just dumb. Why on earth should public banking services subsidize public mail services? They have nothing to do with each other.

If we really want some kind of government-sponsored basic banking service, we should simply create one and partner with commercial banks to offer it. If this is truly profitable, banks will bid to host these accounts. If it’s not, the subsidies will show up directly in the annual budget accounts. That’s the way it should be.

I’m not yet convinced that this is a good idea to begin with, but I could be persuaded. However, if it is a good idea, there’s honestly no reason to get the postal service involved in this. We already have a Treasury Department, and we already have a commercial banking industry. They truly do have core competencies in offering financial services. Why not use them instead?

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The Case Against Postal Banking

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This Jeopardy Champ and Proud Geek Gives Swirlies to Gamergaters in His Spare Time

by ReneeQuisenberr Posted on November 11, 2014

Mother Jones

Like Disney and the WWF, the game show Jeopardy! has its villains—or at least one, in the form of Arthur Chu, the 30-year-old Cleveland native who took home nearly $300,000 after winning an 11-game streak and seemingly pissing off half of America. How? His sins ranged from “pounding the bejesus out of his buzzer” to skipping wildly around the board in search of Daily Doubles, setting longtime viewers’ heads on fire. The “Jeopardy! bad boy” has continued courting controversy since his February appearance with a number of provocative essays on race and gender issues. He’s recently had a lot to say about Gamergate, a fierce debate going on in the world of video games over issues of diversity and harassment of women. I talked to Chu right before his Jeopardy! return in this week’s Tournament of Champions.

Mother Jones: So how does one study for Jeopardy?

Arthur Chu: A lot of flashcards. There’s a whole online community where people archive clues from the past. Since I talked about using that, I think they’ve started writing the show to make it harder.

People say Jeopardy! is getting “dumbed down” because there are more pop culture questions. I think it’s the opposite. There’s only so many classic operas you can study. For pop culture, you have to actually watch the shows. There’s one every week! It’s much harder.

MJ: What’s your buzzer strategy?

AC: The thing about being a lifelong gamer is that my eye-to-hand reaction time is faster than average. I actually went on a website that tests your reaction time and verified this to my satisfaction.

I knew Ken Jennings loved to buzz in and then start to try to figure out the answer after buzzing. Ken’s very smart, but that’s a little too dangerous for me. Jeopardy! is won partially by keeping your mouth shut when you aren’t sure, so you don’t lose points by getting something wrong.

Really, when you practice watching the show, you should practice reading ahead of Alex’s talking so that by the instant he’s done talking, you’ve digested the question and decided whether you know it or not.

MJ: The times you’ve played, were there any categories you just dreaded, and prayed they wouldn’t come up?

AC: Sports was a huge handicap for me in my original run. And what’s worse, it’s known that it was a huge handicap for me because everyone reported on that famous Daily Double where I bet $5 and blew off the clue. So I felt like I had to shore that up, and studied a ton of sports.

MJ: Switching topics to another kind of gaming, the Gamergate debate is clearly on some level a backlash to demands for better diversity in video games. But a lot of gamers say the lack of female lead characters in games—or brown characters, queer characters, and so on—simply isn’t a problem that needs fixing.

AC: You hear a lot of this. “Why are you dragging real-life politics into cyberspace? I go to gaming to get away from real-life issues.” For a lot of geeks, gaming is all about stripping who you are completely and entering this imaginary space, this world that’s made for you, where winning and losing have nothing to do with real life. They try to argue that representation in games has not been an issue because nobody is really themselves in a game; it’s all just avatars. They’re not seeing the many ways in which that’s not true.

This is a conversation that we’ve needed to have for a long time. And now it’s being dragged into the open.

MJ: So why are we having this conversation now?

AC: From the beginning, the internet has been dominated by white men. So if you wanted to be a part of the internet and you weren’t a white man, you had to adapt yourself to their world. It became normal for women on the internet to adopt gender-neutral or male screen names. If you’re not white, you didn’t talk about your background. It became normal to subsume yourself into a generalized American identity.

We’ve sort of reached a tipping point where people are tired of that. People are saying, “Look, I’m gay”—for instance—”and being gay is important to me and I’m going to talk about it and I’m not going to just sit here and pretend that the many little ways you take a crap on my identity don’t matter.”

MJ: I’ve noticed that the vast majority of people supporting Gamergate online are using anonymous avatars, while a lot of the people they’re piling on to are writing under their real names.

AC: It’s part of the whole idea that the internet is just “for lulz,” that the internet’s not real. Look at 4chan culture, which is the ultimate version of shedding your IRL in real life identity—you don’t even keep a consistent screen name from thread to thread. That’s very important to them, this belief in the possibility that what I do online is completely separate from who I really am.

MJ: Do you have any empathy with the young men who are the bulk of this movement, who, whether they realize it or not, are pretty clearly grappling with some gnarly issues of identity and change?

AC: Oh yeah, I do. I think I’ve tried to be open about the fact that I’ve changed a lot. As an early adopter of the internet, I’ve changed as the internet has changed, and I regret a lot of the things that I used to believe or used to do.

MJ: Like what?

AC: For example, in college I was known as Mister Reasonable Neutrality, always trying to find the middle, to be “rational.” And now that’s almost a cliché—that annoying guy on the internet who insists on playing devil’s advocate, on having a “rational debate,” insisting that emotions are always wrong or biased.

It took me a while to realize that it doesn’t help anyone to have these rational debates. A rational debate is never going to lead to an objectively rational conclusion. It’s never going to pull people out of where they are.

MJ: I feel like anyone who’s spent any time on Reddit has met That Guy.

AC: The joke when I was a teenager was, “Someday you’ll all be working for me.” Being a nerd meant being good with computers, book knowledge, and data, and being bad with people. So the idea was that if you got really good at working with things and manipulating objects, you’d reach a point in life where you wouldn’t need people to like you. You’d win purely by merit. There’s nowhere on Earth where this is actually true, but there’s people who believe that.

That’s why so much of nerd culture involves these power fantasies full of magic—literally reshaping the world through thinking about it—and superheroes with super abilities. It’s also why a lot of the people in geeky subcultures gravitate towards libertarianism. There’s a strong ideological belief in wiping out “politics,” because politics means having to interact with people, and negotiating with people who have different interests.

MJ: So you know a bit about being on the receiving end of a lot of online hate. Most of us will never experience anything like this. What was it like?

AC: I’m glad it happened the way it did. I became a C-list celeb for being controversial. I’m the guy everybody hates. I’m the villain. I thought, I can embrace that.

Every time I write an article, it’s like, I’ve already been the “most hated man in America” for this really dumb thing. How could it get any worse if it were for something I actually believe? I’ve got the money already from being on this stupid game show. The limelight is an unexpected bonus. If I use the limelight to make people like me for a fake image of me, abandon these things I was so passionate about back when it was just me writing to a bunch of my friends on Facebook, then what kind of a person am I?

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This Jeopardy Champ and Proud Geek Gives Swirlies to Gamergaters in His Spare Time

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Republican Agenda Starts to Take Shape

by EmiliaSawtell Posted on November 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Reading between the lines, I gather that Republicans are starting to coalesce around a legislative agenda to celebrate their recent midterm victory:

Ban abortions after 20 weeks.
Wipe out all of Obama’s new and pending EPA regulations.
Repeal Obamacare bit by bit.
Figure out a way to obstruct Loretta Lynch’s nomination as Attorney General.

Oh, there’s still some desultory happy talk about tax reform and fast-track trade authority and other “areas of agreement,” but that seems to be fading out. Poking a stick in President Obama’s eye is very quickly becoming the order of the day.

And no reason not to, I suppose. Republicans won, after all. But they shouldn’t be surprised if Obama continues to plan to poke back.

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Republican Agenda Starts to Take Shape

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Supreme Court Takes Up Yet Another Challenge to Obamacare

by WendyHaddad Posted on November 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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It looks like the Halbig challenge to Obamacare is a go:

The justices on Friday say they will decide whether the law authorizes subsidies that help millions of low- and middle-income people afford their health insurance premiums. A federal appeals court upheld Internal Revenue Service regulations that allow health-insurance tax credits under the Affordable Care Act for consumers in all 50 states. Opponents argue that most of the subsidies are illegal.

In case it’s slipped your mind, this is the case that hinges on whether a typo in one sentence of the Affordable Care Act should wipe out health care subsidies in every state that uses the federal exchange. If the challengers win, subsidies will be available only in states that run their own exchanges.

Given the facts of the case, I’d normally say the whole thing is laughable. The intent of the law is, and always has been, crystal clear. But the current Supreme Court really doesn’t seem to care much about laughable. If they want to cripple Obamacare, they’ll do it. The shoddiness of the argument doesn’t much matter to them.

So this is going to be a nail-biter. If it goes the wrong way, 6 million people or more will lose access to affordable health care—and half the country will cheer giddily about it. Because there’s just nothing more satisfying than denying decent health care to millions of your fellow citizens.

UPDATE: Although this challenge is the same as the one in Halbig, the actual case the Supreme Court agreed to hear is King v. Burwell. Sprry for the mistake.

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Supreme Court Takes Up Yet Another Challenge to Obamacare

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My Fearless Predictions for the Next 18 Months

by HattieBrifman Posted on November 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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We are, tediously, hearing lots of jabber this week about how maybe this election finally sent a message to Washington that the public wants government to work, dammit. Compromise is the order of the day. Republicans need to show that they can govern. Obama needs to show he can be flexible.

Meh. I don’t see why anyone thinks this. Mitch McConnell has spent six years obstructing everything in sight, and there’s no special reason to think that’s going to change. John Boehner has spent the past four years in a wholly futile attempt to make his tea party crazies see reason, and there’s no reason to think he’s suddenly figured out how to do it. President Obama has spent the past two years convinced that executive action is his only hope of getting anything done, and there’s not much reason to think he’s changed his mind about that. As for the public, they don’t want compromise. They want the other side to give in. Nothing has changed there.

In other words, control of the Senate may have changed hands, but the underlying fundamentals of Washington politics have barely budged. With that in mind, here are my predictions about what does and doesn’t have a chance of happening over the next 18 months:

Tax reform: Forget it. All the usual fault lines are still around. In fact, with the Republican caucus now more conservative and the Democratic caucus more liberal, the usual fault lines are even bigger than ever. This is a nonstarter.

Immigration reform: Forget it. See above.

Keystone XL: This depends on whether Obama actually cares about it. I’ve never been sure about that. But my guess is that he doesn’t care very much, so some kind of budget deal that includes authority to build the pipeline seems fairly likely.

Trade agreements: This actually seems doable. It’s mostly been Democrats who are opposed.

Obamacare repeal: Forget it.

Tweaks to Obamacare: A bit of tinkering around the margins might be possible. The employer mandate, for example, was never a pillar of the law, and it wouldn’t hurt much to get rid of it. Ditto for the medical device tax. But that’s about it.

Repeal of Obama’s environmental regulations. Forget it.

Executive/judicial appointments: This is going to slow to a crawl. It’s a good thing Democrats killed the filibuster when they did.

Iran nuclear treaty: This is actually a tough one to predict, partly because I’m not clear on (a) just how far Obama can go without congressional approval, and (b) whether Iran is serious about a deal in the first place. At a guess, though, Congress might very well decide to throw a spanner in the works that kills any chance of a treaty. A bunch of new Republican senators, combined with the existing strength of the Israel lobby, could be enough to make a real difference here.

So there you go. Those are my predictions. Have I missed anything big?

POSTSCRIPT: Oh, and the 2016 candidates for president will be Hillary Clinton for the Democrats and Scott Walker for the Republicans.

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My Fearless Predictions for the Next 18 Months

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Nope, the Tax Revolt Isn’t Dead Yet

by Celia34Vuvukbw Posted on November 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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Alec MacGillis writes that there was a very specific reason for the surprising Republican win on Tuesday in the Maryland governor’s race:

I knew Democrat Anthony Brown was in trouble in the race for Maryland governor when every single voter I spoke with Tuesday—including several who voted for Barack Obama—at a polling station in a swing district in Baltimore County, just outside the Baltimore city line in the Overlea neighborhood, brought up the rain tax.

The rain tax is a “stormwater management fee” signed into law by Governor Martin O’Malley in 2012 that requires the state’s nine largest counties, plus Baltimore city, to help fund the reduction of pollution in Chesapeake Bay caused by stormwater runoff. The tax is hardly draconian—in Baltimore County, homeowners pay a flat fee that can range from $21 to $39, while commercial property owners are assessed based on the proportion of impervious surfaces (parking lots, roofs, etc.) on their land.

As a native Californian, this naturally brings back memories of the infamous “car tax,” which Arnold Schwarzenegger cynically rode to victory in a special election in 2003. And this wasn’t even a new tax. A few years earlier the vehicle license fee had been lowered under Governor Gray Davis, but with a proviso that it would go back up if state finances deteriorated. Sure enough, when the dotcom boom turned into the dotcom bust, the state budget tanked and eventually Davis signed an order restoring the old VLF rates. But the VLF never actually increased; it merely returned to the same level it was at before it had been cut.

It didn’t matter. Schwarzenegger ran endless TV commercials starring ordinary citizens who simply couldn’t believe that anyone expected them to survive if they had to pay the outrageous Democrat car tax. It was just more than a body could bear. (Yes, that really was the tone of the ads. I’m not making it up.) All this caterwauling was over an average of about $70 in taxes that everyone had been paying with no noticeable distress just four years earlier.

And Arnold won. Cutting the VLF made California’s finances even worse, of course, as did Arnold’s cynical-beyond-all-imagining bond measure a couple of years later to make up for the revenue shortfall. As usual, Californians were somehow suckered into thinking that this was free money of some kind, not something that would cost more in the long run than just paying the VLF in the first place.

Anyway, this is just a long-winded way of saying that lots of liberals have spent the past few years predicting the end of the tax revolt. I plead guilty to this once or twice myself. It generally seems to happen whenever some state or another successfully passes a tax for something, but as California showed a decade ago and as Maryland showed yesterday, it ain’t so. I think it’s fair to say that raising taxes is no longer an automatic kiss of death, but it’s still pretty damn dangerous. For the most part, we still live in Grover Norquist’s world.

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Nope, the Tax Revolt Isn’t Dead Yet

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Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There!

by AnneSASMfvyq Posted on November 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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National Review has an editorial today that’s headlined—deep breath, folks:

The Governing Trap

No, that’s not the Onion. That’s for real. NR is earnestly begging Republicans not to try to actually govern the country:

The desire to prove Republicans can govern also makes them hostage to their opponents in the Democratic party and the media. It empowers Senator Harry Reid, whose dethroning was in large measure the point of the election. If Republicans proclaim that they have to govern now that they run Congress, they maximize the incentive for the Democrats to filibuster everything they can — and for President Obama to veto the remainder. Then the Democrats will explain that the Republicans are too extreme to get anything done.

I wonder if NR’s editors have enough of a sense of humor left to be embarrassed by this? After all, this is precisely what Republicans have been doing to Democrats for six years: obstructing everything imaginable and then snickering as Dems helplessly try to explain to voters that Washington gridlock isn’t their fault, it’s the fault of that mean Mitch McConnell. Clearly NR understands how well this worked and wants to protect Republicans from having their own playbook used against them.

Beyond that, NR is afraid that trying to govern will just upset one faction or another in the GOP’s delicately balanced coalition, and that makes no sense. Who needs a bunch of crazy tea partiers stirring up trouble again? There’s no reasoning with those folks! Better to just lie low.

As cynical political strategy, it’s hard to argue with the logic here. Republicans probably are better off doing nothing for the next two years except mocking President Obama and throwing out occasional symbolic bits of red meat to keep the rubes at bay. Usually, though, this is the kind of thing you talk about quietly behind closed doors. It’s a little surprising that we’ve gotten to the point where apparently this level of cynicism is so routine that no one thinks twice about spelling it out in public in explicit detail. Welcome to modern politics.

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Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There!

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