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Can Bobby Jindal Drive Out the GOP’s Demons?

by huklx2 Posted on March 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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Illustration by Marc Burckhardt

BOBBY JINDAL has never been one to wait. And so in November 2012, just one week after Barack Obama was reelected in a race the conservative establishment had long refused to believe it might lose, the 41-year-old governor of Louisiana stuck a knife in Mitt Romney’s back.

The party’s old guard was reeling and Jindal seemed poised to take advantage and confirm that he was a contender to lead the party in 2016. In winning a second gubernatorial term one year earlier, Jindal had crushed his top Democratic challenger by nearly 50 points, helping Republicans take control of the state Senate for the first time since Reconstruction. As Romney exited the national stage, Jindal was locking down the chairmanship of the Republican Governors Association (RGA), a perch that is generally considered a steppingstone to bigger things because of its access to a national network of conservative donors. And in his personal story and ethnic heritage, he offered a walking counterpoint to his party’s demographic stagnation.

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Can Bobby Jindal Drive Out the GOP’s Demons?

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You can thank Warren Buffett for many of those exploding oil trains

by kowalski099 Posted on March 5, 2014

You can thank Warren Buffett for many of those exploding oil trains

By

Asa Mathat / Fortune MPW

We’ve written a lot about the dangers of shipping extra–flammable oil in flimsy rail cars that are prone to puncture and explode. Turns out you can blame a fair bit of the problem on billionaire investor Warren Buffett. As the Sightline Institute’s blog reports, “Arguably, he is the single most important person in the world of oil-by-rail.” More from the post:

Most people don’t realize it, but the tank cars that carry crude oil are not owned by the railroads that run them and are only rarely owned by the shippers who use them. In fact, roughly 80 percent of all the tank cars registered in North America are owned by companies that lease the tank cars to shippers. … These lessors … are the ones ultimately responsible for the fact that that the vast majority of oil trains today are largely composed of older models so riddled with obvious flaws that federal safety investigators have for years urged the entire fleet be retrofitted. …

Not only have they avoided pulling the hazardous DOT-111 tank cars out of service to retrofit them, but they have opposed and delayed meaningful federal regulation at every turn.

Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway investment group is the biggest player in the tank car leasing business with around 40 percent of the market … The next biggest player, GATX Corp, is scarcely more than half the size. …

Buffett is also a major player in the railroad side of oil-by-rail. Berkshire Hathaway has full ownership of BNSF Railway Company, and BNSF is the biggest railroad player in the Bakken oil region … And BNSF isn’t some side line business for Berkshire Hathaway; it’s a major part of the firm, making up 13 percent of revenues in 2012.

To protect that business, Buffett’s companies and the industry groups they belong to do a lot of lobbying against regulations — very effective lobbying. Sightline points out that other modes of transportation would never get away with such an abysmal safety record:

It doesn’t take much scrutiny to see that oil trains get special treatment. After all, if a jet plane has a battery fire problem, regulators immediately pull it from service and will ground the entire fleet until the manufacturer makes modifications to reduce the risk of fire. If an auto regularly bursts into flame upon impact, the feds issue a recall and mandate retrofits for all the cars with the defect. Yet despite explosion after deadly explosion — and safety report after federal safety report — government regulators, at the urging of the industry groups that represent Buffett’s holdings, have allowed unsafe DOT-111s tank cars to haul crude oil and ethanol.

Buffett admitted this week that “it’s more dangerous to move certain types of crude, certainly, than we thought previously,” but there’s no sign that he’s going to take action to make it any less dangerous.

You might think a man who is making so much money shipping oil by rail would oppose Keystone XL, but Buffett isn’t worried about the pipeline cutting into his business. From The Washington Post:

Buffett … said during a CNBC interview Monday he thought the controversial project was a “good idea for the country.”

Buffett, whose company has a major stake in the railroad company BNSF, said he did not see the pipeline’s construction as a major problem for rail firms. “It’s not that big a competitor,” he said.

Thanks to the epic oil boom, there’s plenty of crude to go around.


Source
The Man Behind the Exploding Trains, Sightline Daily
Buffett and Shultz, allies of Obama and Steyer, endorse Keystone pipeline, The Washington Post

Lisa Hymas is senior editor at Grist. You can follow her on Twitter and Google+.

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You can thank Warren Buffett for many of those exploding oil trains

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The War on Whistleblowers May Have a "Chilling Effect on Future Acts of Conscience"

by JoyBarnhill Posted on March 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

The Obama administration has just opened a new front in its ongoing war on whistleblowers. It’s taking its case against one man, former Transportation Security Administration (TSA) Air Marshal Robert MacLean, all the way to the Supreme Court. So hold on, because we’re going back down the rabbit hole with the Most Transparent Administration ever.

Despite all the talk by Washington insiders about how whistleblowers like Edward Snowden should work through the system rather than bring their concerns directly into the public sphere, MacLean is living proof of the hell of trying to do so. Through the Supreme Court, the Department of Justice (DOJ) wants to use MacLean’s case to further limit what kinds of information can qualify for statutory whistleblowing protections. If the DOJ gets its way, only information that the government thinks is appropriate—a contradiction in terms when it comes to whistleblowing—could be revealed. Such a restriction would gut the legal protections of the Whistleblower Protection Act and have a chilling effect on future acts of conscience.

Having lost its case against MacLean in the lower courts, the DOJ is seeking to win in front of the Supreme Court. If heard by the Supremes—and there’s no guarantee of that—this would represent that body’s first federal whistleblower case of the post-9/11 era. And if it were to rule for the government, even more information about an out-of-control executive branch will disappear under the dark umbrella of “national security.”

On the other hand, should the court rule against the government, or simply turn down the case, whistleblowers like MacLean will secure a little more protection than they’ve had so far in the Obama years. Either way, an important message will be sent at a moment when revelations of government wrongdoing have moved from the status of obscure issue to front-page news.

The issues in the MacLean case—who is entitled to whistleblower protection, what use can be made of retroactive classification to hide previously unclassified information, how many informal classification categories the government can create bureaucratically, and what role the Constitution and the Supreme Court have in all this–are arcane and complex. But stay with me. Understanding the depths to which the government is willing to sink to punish one man who blew the whistle tells us the world about Washington these days and, as they say, the devil is in the details.

Robert MacLean, Whistleblower

MacLean’s case is simple—and complicated.

Here’s the simple part: MacLean was an air marshal, flying armed aboard American aircraft as the last defense against a terror attack. In July 2003, all air marshals received a briefing about a possible hijacking plot. Soon after, the TSA, which oversees the marshals, sent an unencrypted, open-air text message to their cell phones cancelling several months of missions for cost-cutting reasons. Fearing that such cancelations in the midst of a hijacking alert might create a dangerous situation for the flying public, MacLean worked his way through the system. He first brought his concerns to his supervisor and then to the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general. Each responded that nothing could be done.

After hitting a dead end, and hoping that public pressure might force the TSA to change its policy, MacLean talked anonymously to a reporter who broadcast a critical story. After 11 members of Congress pitched in, the TSA reversed itself. A year later, MacLean appeared on TV in disguise to criticize agency dress and boarding policies that he felt made it easier for passengers to recognize marshals who work undercover. (On your next flight keep an eye out for the young man in khakis with a fanny pack and a large watch, often wearing a baseball cap and eyeing boarders from a first class seat.) This time the TSA recognized MacLean’s voice and discovered that he had also released the unclassified 2003 text message. He was fired in April 2006.

When MacLean contested his dismissal through internal government channels, he discovered that, months after firing him, the TSA had retroactively classified the text message he had leaked. Leaking classified documents is more than cause enough to fire a federal worker, and that might have been the end of it. MacLean, however, was no typical cubicle-dwelling federal employee. An Air Force veteran, he asserted his status as a protected whistleblower and has spent the last seven years marching through the system trying to get his job back.

How Everything in Government Became Classified

The text message MacLean leaked was retroactively classified as “security sensitive information” (SSI), a designation that had been around for years but whose usage the TSA only codified via memo in November 2003. When it comes to made-up classifications, that agency’s set of them proved to be only one of 28 known versions that now exist within the government bureaucracy. In truth, no one is sure how many varieties of pseudo-classifications even exist under those multiple policies, or how many documents they cover as there are no established reporting requirements.

By law there are officially only three levels of governmental classification: confidential, secret, and top secret. Other indicators, such as NOFORN and ORCON, seen for instance on some of the NSA documents Edward Snowden released, are called “handling instructions,” although they, too, function as unofficial categories of classification. Each of the three levels of official classification has its own formal definition and criteria for use. It is theoretically possible to question the level of classification of a document. However much they may be ignored, there are standards for their declassification and various supervisors can also shift levels of classification as a final report, memo, or briefing takes shape. The system is designed, at least in theory and occasionally in practice, to have some modicum of accountability and reviewability.

The government’s post-9/11 desire to classify more and more information ran head on into the limits of classification as enacted by Congress. The response by various agencies was to invent a proliferation of designations like SSI that would sweep unclassified information under the umbrella of classification and confer on ever more unclassified information a (sort of) classified status. In the case of the TSA, the agency even admits on its own website that a document with an SSI stamp is unclassified, but prohibits its disclosure anyway.

Imagine the equivalent at home: you arbitrarily establish a classification called Spouse Sensitive Information that prohibits your partner from seeing the family bank statements. And if all this is starting to make no sense, then you can better understand the topsy-turvy world Robert MacLean found himself in.

MacLean Wins a Battle in Court

In 2013, after a long series of civil service and legal wrangles, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit handed down a decision confirming the government’s right to retroactively classify information. This may make some sense–if you squint hard enough from a Washington perspective. Imagine a piece of innocuous information already released that later takes on national security significance. A retroactive classification can’t get the toothpaste back in the tube, but bureaucratically speaking it would at least prevent more toothpaste from being squeezed out. The same ruling, of course, could also be misused to ensnare someone like MacLean who shared unclassified information.

The court also decided that, retrospective classification or not, MacLean was indeed entitled to protection under the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989. That act generally limits its protections to “disclosures not specifically prohibited by law,” typically held to mean unclassified material. This, the court insisted, was the category MacLean fit into and so could not be fired. The court avoided the question of whether or not someone could be fired for disclosing retroactively classified information and focused on whether a made-up category like SSI was “classified” at all.

The court affirmed that laws passed by Congress creating formal classifications like “top secret” trump regulations made up by executive branch bureaucrats. In other words, as the Constitution intended, the legislative branch makes the laws and serves as a check and balance on the executive branch. Congress says what is classified and that say-so cannot be modified via an executive branch memo. One of MacLean’s lawyers hailed the court’s decision as restoring “enforceability for the Whistleblower Protection Act’s public free speech rights. It ruled that only Congress has the authority to remove whistleblower rights. Agency-imposed restraints are not relevant for whistleblower protection rights.”

The ruling made it clear that the TSA had fired MacLean in retaliation for a legally protected act of whistleblowing. He should have been offered his job back the next day.

Not a Happy Ending But a Sad New Beginning

No such luck. Instead, on January 27, 2014, the Department of Justice petitioned the Supreme Court to overturn the lower court’s decision. If it has its way, the next time a troublesome whistleblower emerges, the executive need only retroactively slap a non-reviewable pseudo-classification on whatever information has been revealed and fire the employee. The department is, then, asking the Supreme Court to grant the executive branch the practical power to decide whether or not a whistleblower is entitled to legal protection. The chilling effect is obvious.

In addition, the mere fact that the DOJ is seeking to bring the case via a petition is significant. Such petitions, called writs of certiorari, or certs, ask that the Supreme Court overturn a lower court’s decision. Through the cert process, the court sets its own agenda. Some 10,000 certs are submitted in a typical year. Most lack merit and are quickly set aside without comment. Typically, fewer than 100 of those 10,000 are chosen to move forward for a possibly precedent-setting decision. However, only a tiny number of all the certs filed are initiated by the government; on average, just 15 in a Supreme Court term.

It’s undoubtedly a measure of the importance the Obama administration gives to preserving secrecy above all else that it has chosen to take such an aggressive stance against MacLean—especially given the desperately low odds of success. It will be several months before we know whether the court will hear the case.

This Is War

MacLean is simply trying to get his old air marshal job back by proving he was wrongly fired for an act of whistleblowing. For the rest of us, however, this is about much more than where MacLean goes to work.

The Obama administration’s attacks on whistleblowers are well documented. It has charged more of them—seven—under the Espionage Act than all past presidencies combined. In addition, it recently pressured State Department whistleblower Stephen Kim into a guilty plea (in return for a lighter sentence) by threatening him with the full force of that act. His case was even more controversial because the FBI named Fox News’s James Rosen as a co-conspirator for receiving information from Kim as part of his job as a journalist. None of this is accidental, coincidental, or haphazard. It’s a pattern. And it’s meant to be. This is war.

MacLean’s case is one more battle in that war. By taking the extraordinary step of going to the Supreme Court, the executive branch wants, by fiat, to be able to turn an unclassified but embarrassing disclosure today into a prohibited act tomorrow, and then use that to get rid of an employee. They are, in essence, putting whistleblowers in the untenable position of having to predict the future. The intent is clearly to silence them before they speak on the theory that the easiest leak to stop is the one that never happens. A frightened, cowed workforce is likely to be one result; another–falling into the category of unintended consequences–might be to force more potential whistleblowers to take the Manning/Snowden path.

The case against MacLean also represents an attempt to broaden executive power in another way. At the moment, only Congress can “prohibit actions under the law,” something unique to it under the Constitution. In its case against MacLean, the Justice Department seeks to establish the right of the executive and its agencies to create their own pseudo-categories of classification that can be used to prohibit actions not otherwise prohibited by law. In other words, it wants to trump Congress. Regulation made by memo would then stand above the law in prosecuting–or effectively persecuting–whistleblowers. A person of conscience like MacLean could be run out of his job by a memo.

In seeking to claim more power over whistleblowers, the executive also seeks to overturn another principle of law that goes by the term ex post facto. Laws are implemented on a certain day and at a certain time. Long-held practice says that one cannot be punished later for an act that was legal when it happened. Indeed, ex post facto criminal laws are expressly forbidden by the Constitution. This prohibition was written in direct response to the injustices of British rule at a time when Parliamentary laws could indeed criminalize actions retrospectively. While some leeway exists today in the US for ex post facto actions in civil cases and when it comes to sex crimes against children, the issue as it affects whistleblowers brushes heavily against the Constitution and, in a broader sense, against what is right and necessary in a democracy.

When a government is of, by, and for the people, when an educated citizenry (in Thomas Jefferson’s words) is essential to a democracy, it is imperative that we all know what the government does in our name. How else can we determine how to vote, who to support, or what to oppose? Whistleblowers play a crucial role in this process. When the government willfully seeks to conceal its actions, someone is required to step up and act with courage and selflessness.

That our current government has been willing to fight for more than seven years–maybe all the way to the Supreme Court–to weaken legal whistleblowing protections tells a tale of our times. That it seeks to silence whistleblowers at a moment when their disclosures are just beginning to reveal the scope of our unconstitutional national security state is cause for great concern. That the government demands whistleblowers work within the system and then seeks to modify that same system to thwart them goes beyond hypocrisy.

This is the very definition of post-Constitutional America where legality and illegality blur–and always in the government’s favor; where the founding principles of our nation only apply when, as, and if the executive sees fit. The devil is indeed in the details.

Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement in Iraq in his first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. A TomDispatch regular, he writes about current events at his blog, We Meant Well. His next book, Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99Percent, will be available in April. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.

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The War on Whistleblowers May Have a "Chilling Effect on Future Acts of Conscience"

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Immigration Reform Is Dead Because of Bizarro Obama

by ErmaHarrvnkxahy Posted on March 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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John Boehner says he really, truly wants to pass an immigration reform bill, but he can only do it if President Obama gives him more help. Steve Benen isn’t buying it:

To a very real extent, Obama has already done what he’s supposed to do: he’s helped create an environment conducive to success. The president and his team have cultivated public demand for immigration reform and helped assemble a broad coalition – business leaders, labor, immigrant advocates, the faith community — to work towards a common goal.

But that’s apparently not what Boehner is talking about. Rather, according to the Speaker, immigration reform can’t pass because House Republicans don’t trust the president to faithfully execute the laws of the United States.

What’s Obama supposed to do about this? “I told the president I’ll leave that to him,” Boehner told the Enquirer.

I think that translates as “nothing is going to happen.” Boehner’s excuse, however, isn’t that tea party Republicans are obsessed about amnesty and fences and reconquista and all that. His excuse is that Obama has been so brazenly lawless that Republicans simply can’t trust him to enforce whatever law they pass. This is all part of the surreal “Obama the tyrant” schtick that’s swamped the Republican Party lately. Every executive order, every new agency interpretation of a rule, every Justice Department or IRS memo—they’re all evidence that Obama is turning America into a New World gulag. Never mind that these are all routine things that every president engages in. Never mind that they just as routinely get resolved in court and Obama will win some and lose some. Never mind any of that. Obama is an Alinskyite despot who is slowly but steadily sweeping away the last vestiges of democracy in this once great nation.

Barack Obama! A president whose biggest problem is probably just the opposite: he’s never managed to get comfortable throwing his weight around to get what he wants. He’s too dedicated to rational discourse and the grand bargain. He hires guys who want to nudge, not mandate. He wants to persuade, not coerce. That’s our modern-day Robespierre.

Strange times, no?

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Immigration Reform Is Dead Because of Bizarro Obama

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Here’s What Is Going To Happen With Ukraine

by DeborahESSM Posted on March 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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Following up on the previous post, if you do want to fret about Ukraine, I have just the thing for you. I’m going to tell you how this will all unfold:

  1. Vladimir Putin will do something belligerent. (Already done.)
  2. Republicans will demand that we show strength in the face of Putin’s provocation. Whatever it is that we’re doing, we should do more.
  3. President Obama will denounce whatever it is that Putin does. But regardless of how unequivocal his condemnation is, Bill Kristol will insist that he’s failing to support the democratic aspirations of the Ukrainian people.
  4. Journalists will write a variety of thumbsuckers pointing out that our options are extremely limited, what with Ukraine being 5,000 miles away and all.
  5. John McCain will appear on a bunch of Sunday chat shows to bemoan the fact that Obama is weak and no one fears America anymore.
  6. Having written all the “options are limited” thumbsuckers, journalists and columnists will follow McCain’s lead and start declaring that the crisis in Ukraine is the greatest foreign policy test of Obama’s presidency. It will thus supplant Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iran, and North Korea for this honor.
  7. In spite of all the trees felled and words spoken about this, nobody will have any good ideas about what kind of action might actually make a difference. There will be scattered calls to impose a few sanctions here and there, introduce a ban on Russian vodka imports, convene NATO, demand a UN Security Council vote, etc. None of this will have any material effect.
  8. Obama will continue to denounce Putin. Perhaps he will convene NATO. For their part, Republicans will continue to insist that he’s showing weakness and needs to get serious.
  9. This will all continue for a while.
  10. In the end, it will all settle down into a stalemate, with Russia having thrown its weight around in its near abroad—just like it always has—and the West not having the leverage to do much about it.
  11. Ukraine will….

Actually, there’s no telling about #11. Maybe Ukraine will choose (or have foisted on them) a pro-Russian leader that Putin is happy with. Maybe east and west will split apart. Maybe a nominally pro-Western leader will emerge. Who knows? What we do know is that (a) the United States will play only a modest role in all this, and (b) conservative hawks will continue to think that if only we’d done just a little bit more, Putin would have blinked and Ukraine would be free.

You may now go about your regular weekend business.

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Here’s What Is Going To Happen With Ukraine

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Obama Unveils Smart New Transportation Plan, But Not How to Pay For It

by ClarenceWiederm Posted on February 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in Grist and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The problems all started with Newt Gingrich. For decades, federal transportation funding had been a bastion of bipartisanship: The gasoline tax served as a user fee for our roads, 20 percent of the revenue went to mass transit and the rest to highways, and everyone kept the system running so their districts could get what they needed. Then, in 1994, Gingrich led the right-wing Republican insurgency that took over the House of Representatives. They did not want to raise the gas tax, even to keep pace with inflation. They actually tried to repeal the previous gas-tax increase, from 1993. Hatred of the gas tax, like hatred of all taxes, soon calcified into Republican orthodoxy. Rather than increase the gas tax, President George W. Bush presided over a growing gap between our transportation needs and the revenue the tax generated.

And the problem has not been fixed under Obama. With Republicans currently controlling the House, Congress cannot pass a reauthorization of the surface transportation law that would address our nation’s growing transportation investment needs. Instead, they have retained the status quo through a series of short-term extensions and then, in 2012, a two-year authorization (normally the law is extended for six years) that maintained current funding levels by using general revenues to patch a shortfall in the Highway Trust Fund, which is supposed to be fully supported by the gas tax. That authorization expires this year, so some kind of transportation deal will have to be worked out in the coming months.

On Wednesday, Obama went ahead and laid out a progressive vision for a four-year transportation bill, despite the fact that Republicans will never go for it. It would boost transportation spending to a total of $302 billion over four years and reorient that spending in smart ways.

Historically, transportation funding has been doled out by the Department of Transportation to states according to formulas. But under the 2009 Recovery Act, the Obama administration pioneered the use of competitive grant-making with a program called TIGER (Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery). Like Obama’s famous Race to the Top education initiative, which incentivizes states to make education policy reforms, TIGER incentivizes local governments to make more efficient investments in transportation, such as building a transit hub near an affordable housing development.

Obama’s new transportation bill would invest $600 million over four years in the TIGER program, and more broadly prioritize spending on projects with the most potential to improve environmental efficiency, create jobs, or link transportation to housing. Similarly, road spending would be doled out on a “fix-it-first” basis, focusing on repairing existing roads rather than building new ones. Obama would also spend a combined $91 billion over the four years on mass transit and inter-city passenger rail. That’s a roughly 30 percent share. Environmentalists and smart-growth advocates are praising the proposal.

And yet Obama has neglected to offer a solution to the single biggest transportation policy problem of all: how to pay for it.

In his speech Wednesday, the president said he will augment the Highway Trust Fund, which is once again suffering a significant shortfall, with $150 billion over the four years by closing tax loopholes. But he has not even identified which loopholes he would close, and still House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) declared the proposal dead on arrival in his chamber.

Obama and the congressional Democrats, never ones to capitalize on an opportunity when they could just blow it instead, failed to pass a reauthorization of the overdue transportation bill when they controlled Congress in 2009 and 2010. They spent some money on transportation infrastructure via the Recovery Act, but not enough, and they tossed around great ideas for how to spend a lot more money on a surface transportation reauthorization. But they were so scared of the public’s aversion to paying more at the pump that they did not suggest any gas-tax increases, or specific alternatives, to pay for it. And Obama’s new plan doesn’t either.

Even if Obama could get another temporary cash infusion for the Highway Trust Fund, it would be inadequate. Our transportation system has big problems, and to fix them we need a reliable revenue stream. Here are three growing transportation problems, in descending order of long-term importance, and ascending order of short-term urgency:

1. After decades of spending much more on roads than mass transit, we have a transportation infrastructure that’s totally at odds with what we actually need. It encourages driving and thus increases auto emissions, which worsen local air quality and climate change. It’s out of sync with trends in demographics and public preferences, which are leaning toward walkable urbanism and transit use, especially with an aging population. It’s also predicated on the availability of cheap oil, and thus is increasingly unaffordable as surging global demand boosts gasoline prices.

2. We have crumbling infrastructure. Many of our highways built in the middle of the 20th century are nearing the end of their natural lifespans, and our transit systems are dilapidated too. The American Society of Civil Engineers gives D grades to our highways and transit, and a C+ to our rail infrastructure. It notes, “Deficient and deteriorating transit systems cost the US economy $90 billion in 2010, as many transit agencies are struggling to maintain aging and obsolete fleets and facilities amid an economic downturn that has reduced their funding, forcing service cuts and fare increases.” And regarding highways, it says that while “federal, state, and local capital investments increased in 2013 to $91 billion annually, that level of investment is insufficient and still projected to result in a decline in conditions and performance in the long term. Currently, the Federal Highway Administration estimates that $170 billion in capital investment would be needed on an annual basis to significantly improve conditions and performance.”

3. We have a big Highway Trust Fund shortfall. We haven’t raised the gasoline tax from its 18.4-cents-per-gallon rate since 1993, so in inflation-adjusted dollars, it has fallen by 40 percent since then. And as Americans drive less and their cars become more efficient, they consume less gasoline. The current surface transportation law calls for spending more money than the Highway Trust Fund is actually bringing in, because it is based on outdated estimates of gas consumption. This year there is a more than $16 billion gap between authorized spending and gas-tax revenues. That means the fund will be dry in August. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chair Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) warned on Wednesday that without an infusion of cash, “obligations for new projects in 2015 would need to be reduced to zero.”

Even Boehner recognizes there is a problem. “We’ve got to find a funding mechanism to fund our infrastructure needs,” he told reporters Wednesday morning. “I wish I could report to you that we’ve found it, but we haven’t.”

We have! It’s called raising the gas tax.

Gasoline taxes are higher in every other developed country than they are in the US Obama complained in his speech on Wednesday that our international competitors spend more on transportation infrastructure than we do. These two phenomena are clearly connected, even though Obama refuses to draw that connection for the public. Why shouldn’t drivers be required to pay their fair share to maintain roads? Transit users pay fares to ride the buses and subways, in order to help cover the costs of building, maintaining, and operating those systems. Amtrak tickets, at least on the Northeast corridor, are obscenely expensive.

There are alternatives to raising the gas tax, of course. We could tax a related negative externality — like, say, carbon pollution — to pay for our infrastructure needs. But in order to do that, you need to accept the science of global warming and the necessity of taxation, and Republicans don’t accept either. When Boehner says they haven’t found a funding mechanism, what he means is that he hasn’t found a funding mechanism that he can corral his recalcitrant caucus to support.

If Republicans are going to reflexively block whatever Obama puts forward anyway, he should go ahead and propose an intelligent funding mechanism — a higher gas tax, a carbon tax, what have you — that will provide enough income over the long term to build the kind of modern transportation system the country needs. If you can’t pass good legislation, at least promote good ideas.

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Obama Unveils Smart New Transportation Plan, But Not How to Pay For It

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President Obama Is Fighting Cuts to the Military, Not Demanding Them

by CharissaGerald Posted on February 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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From Dick Cheney, commenting on President Obama’s proposed military budget, presented yesterday by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel:

I think the whole thing is not driven by any change in world circumstances, it is driven by budget considerations. He would much rather spend the money on food stamps than he would on a strong military or support for our troops.

This is, as Andrew Sullivan points out, loathsome:

He could have made an argument why he thinks we should maintain the stratospheric levels of defense spending that have been in place since 9/11; he could have argued that the US needs to maintain the ability to fight two major land wars simultaneously in perpetuity. He could have said a lot of things. But he decided to accuse the commander-in-chief of not supporting the troops and actually wanting to keep people in poverty. There is this belief out there that Republican extremism comes from the base and not the elites. But Cheney proves otherwise.

There’s more to this. You might disagree with Obama’s priorities, but Cheney’s claim is based entirely on the notion that Hagel and Obama are proposing military cuts. But they aren’t. Hagel proposed a change in force structure that would lead to a smaller Army, but his overall budget proposal is $115 billion more than the current sequester levels demanded by Republicans. Hagel is going to have plenty of fights on his hands, but mainly because he wants more money, not less. James Joyner explains:

Hagel, in a Pentagon speech on Monday, insisted that sequestration levels amounted to “irresponsible cuts” that would “compromise our national security for both the short- and long-term.” While acknowledging that they remain “the law of the land,” the secretary insisted that the only way to implement them “is to sharply reduce spending on readiness and modernization, which would almost certainly result in a hollow force—one that isn’t ready or capable of fulfilling assigned positions.” Hagel terms the administration proposal as “more reasonable and far more responsible” than the current approach.

….Further, the $115 billion figure actually understates the amount by which the proposal exceeds sequestration limits….another Base Realignment and Closure, or BRAC, round in 2017….proposed cut of 20,000 personnel from the Army National Guard by 2019….cancel the Army’s Ground Combat Vehicle program, end future upgrades to F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter and EA-18 Growler electronic warfare aircraft, and halt the buy of the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship….mothball its entire fleet of A-10 close air support planes….capping pay raises for troops at 1 percent (while freezing pay for general officers).

….At the same time, slashing the Army to its smallest size since before World War II, which essentially guarantees that the United States could not take on two simultaneous major conflicts, is likely to be accomplished without much resistance.

In other words, Hagel is going to run into a buzzsaw because (a) he wants a bigger budget and (b) he wants to cut a bunch of wasteful spending that’s near and dear to every congressman whose district might be affected. Cutting the size of the Army is just one small part of the whole package.

Naturally this is the part that Fox News focuses on and that Dick Cheney demagogues. But keep one thing firmly in mind: Even though it’s declined from its Iraq/Afghanistan peak, our military budget is still far larger than it was in 2000. Congress has made it clear that it wants further cuts, and in this case at least, Obama and Hagel are the ones fighting against the cuts. In his current proposal, Obama is asking for more money than current sequestration levels. He’s not cutting the military. Compared to what Congress asked for, he’s expanding it.

Original article – 

President Obama Is Fighting Cuts to the Military, Not Demanding Them

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Vladimir Putin May Be Tough, But He’s Also Destroying Russia

by Rafael40Ru Posted on February 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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Steve Benen catches Bill Kristol saying this about Ukraine:

So, look; it’s nice for President Obama to say it’s not “a Cold War chessboard.” I don’t know why he says that with some disdain. That was not an ignoble thing for us to play on that chessboard for 45 years. We ended up winning that Cold War.

And I do think Putin thinks he’s playing chess. He thinks he’s playing even a rougher game than chess and we have to be able to match it.

I don’t know squat about Ukraine, and I don’t really know much about Russia either. So take what I’m about to say with a big grain of salt.

That said, here it is: do guys like Kristol ever learn? Yes, Putin is playing a rough game. But why does Kristol seem to think that’s something we ought to emulate? Does he not realize that Putin is basically destroying Russia?

During the Cold War, hawks like Kristol routinely warned that the Soviet Union was overtaking us. And they honestly seemed to believe it. But why? Did they really think that the Soviet Union’s command economy was producing faster growth and better weapons systems than ours? They seemed to, even while extolling the virtues of liberal democracy and free market capitalism. But in the end, it turned out that liberal democracy and free market capitalism really were better. The Soviet Union was collapsing before our eyes and we were barely even noticing it.

The same thing is happening now. Has Putin temporarily shored up Russia’s standing in the world? Maybe. But if he has, he’s done it at the expense of Russia’s long-term health. This is, after all, country with serious problems: terrible demographics, a rusty and aging industrial sector, and endemic corruption. Putin has done nothing to address any of this. Instead, he’s papered it over by building an economy based on oligarchy, mineral wealth, and relentless bullying of both neighbors and citizens.

Will that work for a while? Sure. Russia has a helluva lot of mineral wealth. But it won’t last forever, and in the background Russia is getting frailer and frailer. This is the result of Putin ignoring real problems and instead spending his time projecting toughness on the world stage.

That’s what Kristol apparently thinks we should do. But he’s wrong. Putin acts the way he does because he’s ruling from a position of weakness and has no real solutions to Russia’s long-term decline. In the end, the oil and gas will run out; Russia’s neighbors will revolt the same way Ukraine is revolting; the oligarchs will cling on for dear life; and Russia’s place in the world will continue to deteriorate. Anyone who thinks we should adopt even the tiniest piece of Putin’s approach is just being willfully crazy.

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Vladimir Putin May Be Tough, But He’s Also Destroying Russia

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Chained CPI Was Never Going to Happen, And Now It’s Still Never Going to Happen

by SheilaGellert Posted on February 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Chained CPI is the dog that didn’t bark. President Obama’s latest budget proposal doesn’t include a switch to chained CPI, and this absence has put chained CPI back in the news. Does that make sense?

Probably not. In any case, you probably don’t care much about what chained CPI really is. I’m sure I’ve written up a technical explanation in the past, but I’m too lazy to—oh hell. Hold on. Here it is if you’re interested. Or you can just google it. Long story short, it slightly reduces the way we calculate inflation. And since Social Security benefits are indexed to inflation, it would slightly reduce future Social Security payouts.

Obama has proposed in the past that we adopt chained CPI. On its own, this is a terrible idea. However, under certain circumstances, it might be a good thing. At a minimum, those circumstances are threefold: (1) There would be some kind of adjustment to prevent low-income retirees from taking a hit. (2) It’s part of some broader deal on Social Security. (3) It’s adopted everywhere, including in the tax code, where it would raise taxes slightly by slowing down the inflation indexing of tax brackets. Hey, if it’s good for the goose, it’s good for the gander. Chained CPI is either more accurate or it’s not, and if it is, then we should use it everywhere.

If these circumstances were met, I’d have a certain amount of sympathy for switching to chained CPI beyond the purely wonkish consensus that it’s a more accurate measure. One reason is that it forces everyone to put their money where their mouths are. And by “everyone” I mean today’s retirees. You see, one of the things that pisses me off about discussions of Social Security is that it’s always future retirees who are supposed to take one for the team. We’re supposed to believe that Social Security is in crisis mode, a true threat to the republic, and therefore we have to cut benefits. But look. If this is really such a huge crisis, then we should all pitch in to save Social Security, including current retirees. If current retirees think their existing benefits are too generous, then they should support cutting them. If they don’t think that, then why should they get to keep their current benefits but cut them for future retirees?

They shouldn’t. Either benefits are too high or they aren’t. And one of the features of chained CPI is that it would have a small but immediate effect on benefits, cutting future COLA increases slightly every year. If that’s acceptable to current retirees, then I figure I can accept a cut too. If not, then I want the same benefits they’re getting. Deal?

In any case, none of this matters, because Republicans have never shown the slightest willingness to cut a broader deal. They want chained CPI, but they want it only for future retirees and they want it only for Social Security. They are willing to make precisely zero concessions in return for this. So as Jonathan Chait points out, it really doesn’t matter if Obama includes chained CPI in his budget proposal:

In reality, the fundamentals of the situation have not changed at all. Last year, Obama was willing to adopt C-CPI in return for concessions Republicans would never, ever make. This year, Obama is still willing to adopt C-CPI in return for concessions Republicans would never, ever make. Putting the compromise in his budget was merely Obama’s way of locating the blame for the reality that Republicans in Congress will never, ever, ever strike a fiscal deal with him. The disappointed deficit scolds sitting just to Obama’s right, and the joyous progressives just to his left, are committing the same fallacy. They are mistaking a step premised on an impossibility for a semblance of reality.

One thing I’m curious about in an academic sort of way is whether Obama ever really truly supported chained CPI. He’s enough of a wonk that he might have. Or, it might merely have been a bargaining chip that he knew would never go anywhere. We’ll probably never know.

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Chained CPI Was Never Going to Happen, And Now It’s Still Never Going to Happen

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Rand Paul is the P.T. Barnum of the Modern Senate

by AlfonzoIRKZ Posted on February 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Paul Waldman is impressed by Rand Paul:

Rand Paul continues to win my admiration, I have to say. There are people who come into the Senate with a kind of celebrity status and get lots of good press—one Barack Obama comes to mind—but I can’t think of anyone who has gotten so much good press through their own initiative, coming up with one clever way after another to get people to pay attention to them in ways that are almost always positive. His latest move required a subtle ideological tightrope-walk, one that Paul played perfectly. And all it took was a tweet.

It’s true. Rand Paul has a sort of Palinesque native genius for self-promotion. This isn’t going to get him any closer to the Oval Office than St. Sarah, mind you, but it’s still damn impressive. Like Waldman, I was nodding my head in admiration when I saw his tweet about Ted Nugent last night, because I knew instantly that it was perfectly suited to get him a whole gob of attention for a day or two. If he’s lucky, maybe even longer. For a tweet about Ted Nugent!

It’s genius, I tell you. He knows how to play both his own base and the media like a Stradivarius.

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Rand Paul is the P.T. Barnum of the Modern Senate

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