Tag Archives: republican

Without Fox News, There Would Have Been No Iraq War

by DerrickI62 Posted on January 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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Max Ehrenfreund points to an interesting tidbit this morning. A pair of researchers have released a working paper that attempts to figure out if watching Fox News makes you more conservative. They do this by exploiting the fact that channel numbers on cable systems are placed fairly randomly throughout the country, and people tend to watch channels with lower numbers. Thus, in areas where Fox has a low channel number, it gets watched a little bit more in a way that has nothing to do with whether the local viewers were more conservative in the first place.

So does randomly surfing over to Fox News tend to make you more right-wing? Yes indeed! “We estimate that Fox News increases the likelihood of voting Republican by 0.9 points among viewers induced into watching four additional minutes per week by differential channel positions.” And this in turn means that we owe the Iraq War to Fox News: “We estimate that removing Fox News from cable television during the 2000 election cycle would have reduced the average county’s Republican vote share by 1.6 percentage points.”

And what about MSNBC? It had no effect until the 2008 election, after it had made the switch to liberal prime-time programming. At that point, it becomes pretty similar to Fox in the opposite direction. But the effect is subtly different:

The largest elasticity magnitudes are on individuals from the opposite ideology of the channel, with Fox generally better at influencing Democrats than MSNBC is at influencing Republicans. This last feature is consistent with the regression result that the IV effect of Fox is greater than the corresponding effect for MSNBC.

….Table 16 shows the estimated persuasion rates of the channels at converting votes from one party to the other. The numerator here is the number of, for example, Fox News viewers who are initially Democrats but by the end of an election cycle change to supporting the Republican party. The denominator is the number of Fox News viewers who are initially Democrats. Again, Fox is more effective at converting viewers than is MSNBC.

The difference in persuasion rates is significant: the study finds that in the 2008 election, a full 50 percent of Fox’s left-of-center viewers switched to supporting Republicans. For MSNBC, the number of switchers was only 30 percent. That’s a big difference.

Now, in real-world terms this is still a smallish effect since neither channel has a lot of regular viewers from the opposite ends of their ideological spectrums in the first place. Still, this is interesting. I’ve always believed that conservatives in general, and Fox in particular, are better persuaders than liberals, and this study seems to confirm that. But why? Is Fox’s conservatism simply more consistent throughout the day, thus making it more effective? Is there something about the particular way Fox pushes hot buttons that makes it more effective at persuading folks near the center? Or is Fox just average, and MSNBC is unusually poor at persuading people? I can easily believe, for example, that Rachel Maddow’s snark-based approach persuades very few conservative leaners to switch sides.

Anyway, fascinating stuff, even if none of it comes as a big surprise. Fox really has had a big effect on Republican fortunes over the past two decades.

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Without Fox News, There Would Have Been No Iraq War

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Republicans Are Picking Exactly the Wrong Time to Push for the Keystone XL Pipeline

by RhondaD35k Posted on January 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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The New York Times tells us what to expect when Congress reconvenes this week:

Republicans hope to strike early with measures that are known to have bipartisan support. The House is set to pass legislation this week expediting the Keystone XL pipeline; the Senate is making it the first order of business as well. The House will also take up a measure that would change the new health care law’s definition of full-time workers to those working 40 hours rather than the current 30 hours — another proposal that has drawn backing from Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate.

….Mr. Obama, who will embark this week on a series of policy-related trips in advance of the State of the Union address on Jan. 20, says he is open to working with the Republican Congress but draws the line at unraveling some of his major domestic initiatives, particularly on health care, Wall Street restrictions and the environment. The Keystone XL pipeline bill could present him with an immediate decision about starting the year with a veto, and Senate Democrats are confident they could sustain one.

I wonder how big a deal the Keystone XL pipeline is these days? It won’t come on line for years, so current conditions shouldn’t logically affect anything. But the world doesn’t operate according to logic, and at the moment the world is awash in oil. Prices have plunged, OPEC is engaged in a production war, and gasoline is selling for two bucks a gallon. Does the American public really care very much right now about a pipeline that makes it easier for Canadians to ship their oil to Japan via the Gulf of Mexico?

I’m not sure, but I suspect Republicans may be choosing the wrong moment to take a stand on Keystone XL. Democrats can probably hold it up in the Senate without paying any real price, and even if they can’t, Obama can veto it without paying any real price. It’s lost its salience for the time being.

I suppose it’s too late for Republicans to change their plans, but they’d probably be better off picking other fights. Changes to Obamacare could spark battles they’re able to profit from. Keystone XL probably won’t.

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Republicans Are Picking Exactly the Wrong Time to Push for the Keystone XL Pipeline

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These Charts Show How Ronald Reagan Actually Expanded the Federal Government

by JaunitaA64 Posted on December 30, 2014

Mother Jones

One of the many, many problems Jeb Bush faces in his quest for the Oval Office is his break from Republican orthodoxy on president Ronald Reagan’s legacy. In 2012, Bush told a group of reporters that, in today’s GOP, Reagan “would be criticized for doing the things that he did”— namely, working with Democrats to pass legislation. He added that Reagan would struggle to secure the GOP nomination today.

Bush was lambasted by fellow conservatives for his comments, but he had a point: If you judge him by the uncompromising small government standards of today’s GOP, Reagan was a disaster. Here are a few charts that show why.

Under Reagan, the national debt almost tripled, from $907 billion in 1980 to $2.6 trillion in 1988:

Reagan ended his 1988 farewell speech with the memorable line, “man is not free unless government is limited.” The line is still a rallying cry for the right wing, but the speech came at the end of a long period of government expansion. Under Reagan, the federal workforce increased by about 324,000 to almost 5.3 million people. (The new hires weren’t just soldiers to fight the communists, either: uniformed military personnel only accounted for 26 percent of the increase.) In 2012, the federal government employed almost a million fewer people than it did in the last year of Reagan’s presidency.

Instead of praising Reagan’s small government philosophy, maybe Republicans should look to Bill Clinton’s action for guidance. By the end of Clinton’s second terms, the federal workforce was at its smallest size in decades.

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These Charts Show How Ronald Reagan Actually Expanded the Federal Government

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Cuomo and Christie Veto Port Authority Reform Bill. But Is It Permanent?

by BrookeV16j Posted on December 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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I’m as distant from the politics of New York and New Jersey as it’s possible to get, but I’m puzzled about today’s news that the governors of both states have vetoed legislation that would have reformed the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Here’s a typical piece from the New York Daily News:

Rather than sign the bill supporters say would have opened the bi-state agency to much needed transparency and accountability, the two governors crossed party lines to announce they would push a reform package recommended Saturday by a panel they had created earlier this year.

….The bill’s Assembly sponsor James Brennan (D-Brooklyn) and other critics argued there was no justification for the veto of legislation passed unanimously by the legislatures in both states.

Some, like former Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, a Westchester Democrat who in 2009 sponsored a public authorities reform bill that did not cover the Port Authority, suggested Cuomo, a Democrat, and Christie, a Republican, were more interested in protecting their own power than actually reforming the agency. “It’s shameful,” Brodsky said. “They ripped the heart out of real reform in order to maintain their control and power.”

….New Jersey Assembly Speaker Vincent Prieto said the vetoes were a slap in the face to commuters who “rightly expected more from the governors after the revelations at the Port Authority over the last year.”…Cuomo and Christie say the reforms they are recommending embrace “the spirit and intent” of the legislation….But critics suggest the recommendations were meant as a smokescreen to distract from the vetoes. “Power trumped good government,” Brodsky said.

Wait a second. The bills were passed unanimously in both legislatures. It should be a snap to override the vetoes, right? And yet, none of the stories I read so much as mentioned the possibility. The best I could find was the last sentence of an AP dispatch:

New Jersey Sen. Loretta Weinberg said the decision was a “cop-out,” and Assemblyman John Wisniewski said he’s disappointed the bill didn’t become law…..Both Weinberg and Wisniewski predicted that overturning a veto would be difficult.

Can someone fill me in on the inner workings of New York and New Jersey politics? Do legislators’ loyalties to their governors really carry that much weight? I mean, everyone knew Cuomo and Christie were opposed to the bill from the start. So if the legislatures passed it unanimously to begin with, why can’t they now muster a two-thirds vote to override? What am I missing here?

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Cuomo and Christie Veto Port Authority Reform Bill. But Is It Permanent?

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Are Republicans Really Ready to Embrace Net Neutrality?

by IvoryT33yv Posted on December 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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Well, this is unexpected. Democrats are generally in favor of net neutrality, the principle that all websites should be treated equally by internet service providers. Companies can’t pay extra for faster service and ISPs can’t slow down or block sites they don’t like. Naturally, since Democrats are in favor of this, Republicans are opposed. But maybe not all that opposed:

Republicans in Congress appear likely to introduce legislation next month aimed at preventing Internet providers from speeding up some Web sites over others….Industry officials said they are discussing details of the proposal with several Republican lawmakers, whom they declined to name. The officials also said the proposal is being backed by several large telecommunications companies, which they also declined to name.

One important piece of the proposed legislation would establish a new way for the FCC to regulate broadband providers by creating a separate provision of the Communications Act known as “Title X,” the people said. Title X would enshrine elements of the tough net neutrality principles called for by President Obama last month. For example, it would give FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler the authority to prevent broadband companies from blocking or slowing traffic to Web sites, or charging content companies such as Netflix for faster access to their subscribers — a tactic known as “paid prioritization.”

….“Consensus on this issue is really not that far apart,” said an industry official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks were ongoing. “There’s common understanding that rules are needed to protect consumers.”

Huh. I wonder if this is for real? The reported price for supporting this legislation is relatively small: the FCC would be prohibited from regulating the internet as a common carrier under Title II, something that even net neutrality supporters agree is problematic. The problem is that although Title II would indeed enshrine net neutrality, it comes with a ton of baggage that was designed for telephone networks and doesn’t really translate well to the internet. This would require a lot of “regulatory forbearance” from the FCC, which is almost certain to end up being pretty messy. A new net-centric Title X, if it truly implements net neutrality, would be a much better solution. It would also be immune to court challenges.

One possibility for such a law would be a modified version of net neutrality. My sense has always been that the real goal of net neutrality supporters is to make sure that internet providers don’t provide fast lanes for companies willing to pay more, and don’t slow down or block companies they dislike (perhaps because the companies provide services they compete with). At the same time, everyone acknowledges that video requires a lot of bandwidth, and internet providers legitimately need incentives to build out their networks to handle the growing data demands of video. So why not have content-neutral rules that set tariffs based on the type of service provided? Video providers might have to pay more than, say, Joe’s Cafe, but all video providers would pay the same rate based on how much traffic they dump on the net. That rate would be subject to regulatory approval to prevent abuse.

I dunno. Maybe that’s too complicated. Maybe it’s too hard to figure out traffic levels in a consistent way, and too hard to figure out how much video makes you a video provider. Maybe rules like this are too easy to game. In the end, it could be that the best bet is to simply agree on strong net neutrality, and then let ISPs charge their customers for bandwidth. If you watch a ton of Netflix, you’re going to pay more. If you just check email once a day, you’ll get a cheap plan.

In any case, it’s interesting that President Obama’s announcement of support for strong net neutrality has really had an effect. It apparently motivated the FCC to get more serious about Title II regulation, and this in turn has motivated the industry to concede the net neutrality fight as long as they can win congressional approval of a more reasonable set of rules. The devil is in the details, of course, and I have no doubt that industry lobbyists will do their best to craft rules favorable to themselves. Luckily, there’s a limit to how far they can go since it will almost certainly require Democratic support to pass a bill.

Anyway, this is all just rumors and reports of rumors at this point. Stay tuned to see if it actually pans out.

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Are Republicans Really Ready to Embrace Net Neutrality?

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Jeb Bush on Climate Change: "I’m a Skeptic"

by KatlynWutkgs Posted on December 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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Today, Jeb Bush, the former Republican Governor of Florida, announced that he would “actively explore” running for president in 2016. If elected, he’d have control over much of the US response to global warming. So how would Bush address the global climate crisis? With a mixture of skepticism, avoidance, and downright denial of the science—if his track record is anything to go by. Above is a quick sample of his views climate change.

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Jeb Bush on Climate Change: "I’m a Skeptic"

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Dems Have a Clever New Plan to Turn Florida’s Governor’s Mansion Blue

by FMTTillyxk Posted on December 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Over the past few years, Republicans across the country have adopted a novel strategy for winning elections: Change the rules to make it harder to vote against them. In seven states, Republicans passed new laws requiring voters to show photo ID before getting a ballot. They pared down early voting. In some states, they even contemplated changing how Electoral College votes are awarded in order to give the GOP candidate an advantage.

Now some Florida Democrats want to change election rules to benefit their own side—by holding big elections in the years that people actually vote. Over the past few election cycles, Democrats have thrived in presidential years, when more voters—especially young and minority voters, who tend to be Democratic—turn out to vote. But the party has floundered in off-year elections, which feature higher percentages of older, more conservative voters. Florida, like 35 other states, elects its governors in midterm years, when there is no presidential race on the ballot. Now a small group of political consultants is mulling a campaign to change that.

The Dems’ problem with midterm turnout has been particularly troublesome in Florida. Despite its purple tinge in presidential elections, Florida hasn’t elected a Democratic governor in more than 20 years. In an op-ed last month, Kevin Cate, an adviser for Charlie Crist’s failed attempt to unseat Republican Gov. Rick Scott, proposed a simple solution: Dems could change the state constitution so that Florida voters pick their governors the same years they vote for president.

In his op-ed, Cate explained why the elections are held during midterm years at all: Old-school, segregationist conservative Democrats were worried that they’d lose their control of the state party to more liberal Dems. So in 1961, they rewrote the rules to make sure state officials faced a more conservative electorate. “Today, because of this change, about 2.5 million presidential cycle voters entirely ignore the governor and the Florida Cabinet,” Cate wrote. “They could vote, or care, but they just don’t.”

Democrats have latched onto Cate’s idea. Sen. Ben Nelson—the only statewide Democrat left standing—endorsed the plan when a 20-person Democratic task force met last week.

Ben Pollara, a consultant who managed a marijuana legalization ballot initiative campaign earlier this year, has signed onto Cate’s cause and been talking with lawyers, activists, and pollsters about the viability of a waging a campaign to change the rules. “It’s a gigantic financial undertaking to put something on the ballot, much less pass it,” he explains. “It costs $2-4 million just to get something on the ballot.” Even then, 60 percent of the state’s voters must approve a measure before it changes the law.

This ballot initiative wouldn’t be an immediate fix for Florida Dems’ problems. Even if they passed the measure in 2016, it wouldn’t cut into Rick Scott’s current term. The next gubernatorial election would still happen as currently scheduled in 2018. But if Cate and Pollara’s brainchild becomes reality, Scott’s successor would only have two years in office before the new schedule kicked in for 2020.

I asked Pollara whether he was worried that Republicans would spin this idea as a desperate move, sour grapes from a bunch of political losers with no other options. “The argument for it is pretty simple, and the argument against it is cynical and partisan,” he said. “The argument for it is should our governor be elected by the most number of voters. The argument against it turns it into something partisan.” And as he noted, although such a change to the rules may help Democrats in the near term, no one can predict the ramifications decades down the line. After all, switching to midterm years was initially proposed by the state’s Democrats. “Politics is cyclical,” Pollara says. “What may help the Democrats in the short term may ultimately come back to bite them in the ass in the long term, but it remains that it is the right thing to do.”

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Dems Have a Clever New Plan to Turn Florida’s Governor’s Mansion Blue

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All About That Wall Street Giveaway That Elizabeth Warren Hates

by LinetteMHY Posted on December 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday evening, lawmakers released the text of the massive spending bill that Congress must approve to avoid a government shutdown. Buried on page 615 of that 1,603-page piece of legislation is a provision entirely unrelated to government funding that a few lawmakers managed to sneak into the bill without any public debate during last-minute negotiations. It’s a Wall Street giveaway—written by Citigroup—that would allow banks to engage in more types of risky trading with taxpayer-backed money. Progressive Democrats and their allies have since launched an all-out campaign to strike the Citi-written provision from the spending bill. Elizabeth Warren railed against the provision on the Senate floor Thursday afternoon, warning, “A vote for this bill is a vote for taxpayer bailouts of Wall Street.” As of Thursday afternoon, it was unclear whether House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) could secure enough votes to pass the spending bill containing this measure and send it to the Senate. (Update: The bill passed the House.)

Here are the problems with the Citigroup-drafted provision, according to Michael Greenberger, a former derivatives regulator at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission who is now a law professor at the University of Maryland.

What is so bad about this provision? If Congress okays this measure, taxpayers could be on the hook in the event of another financial crisis. This provision guts the so-called push-out rule created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform act. This rule forbids banks from trading certain derivatives—complicated financial instruments with values derived from underlying variables, such as crop prices or interest rates. Instead, banks would have to shift these high-risk trades into separate nonbank affiliates that aren’t insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and are less likely to receive taxpayer bailouts. If the Citi-written measure becomes law, the largest FDIC-insured banks in the country will be able to make a wider range of these risky trades.

What will happen if there’s another financial crisis? If there’s an economic downturn triggered by derivatives trading gone bad, banks will be able to count on a taxpayer bailout—just like they received in 2008. “It’s very dangerous,” Greenberger says. “If banks lose on this type of trading and that causes a disruption in the markets, the taxpayer will be confronted with whether to let the banks fail or bail them out to the tune of trillions of dollars.”

Could taxpayers be at risk even in boom times? Yep. In 2012, JPMorgan Chase lost $6 billion on a bad trade that has come to be known as the London Whale. “JPMorgan was essentially gambling with FDIC-insured money, secure in the knowledge that major losses would be borne by the public while profits would stay in the bank,” David Dayan wrote in Salon last year. JPMorgan, it turned out, was able to withstand that loss without a bailout, but a lot of other US banks couldn’t, Greenberger explains: “You could have a trade that loses a lot more than $6 billion by a rogue trader, in which case taxpayers have to foot the bill.”

How were lawmakers able to sneak this into the big appropriations bill? It’s common for lawmakers to force bills through Congress by attaching them to larger must-pass legislation. The practice is part of the wheeling and dealing that allows Republicans and Democrats to come to agreement on major legislation. But, Greenberger says, “putting these substantive provisions in appropriations bills is very, very dangerous stuff…If you want a controversial provision in there that you couldn’t get in under regular order, this is the way to do it.” He adds, “Then the president has problems vetoing it because the government will shut down. It’s a bad way to do business.”

If Congress approves this measure, what does it mean for economic populism? “Economic populism is alive and well,” Greenberger maintains. “It’s just that nobody in leadership wants to take advantage of it, whether they’re Republican or Democrat.” Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle worked to push the Citi-written provision into the spending bill.

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All About That Wall Street Giveaway That Elizabeth Warren Hates

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Assignment Desk: Is Obama More Polarizing Than Past Presidents?

by EloisaDeGroot Posted on December 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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Paul Waldman notes a recent poll that shows declining public support for the idea of giving undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship. In a familiar dynamic, though, this is mainly because Republican support has cratered since President Obama announced his executive order on immigration:

Before this latest immigration controversy, Republican voters were at least favorably inclined toward a path to citizenship. But then Barack Obama moves to grant temporary legal status to some undocumented people (and by the way, nothing he’s doing creates a path to citizenship for anyone, but that’s another story). It becomes a huge, headline-dominating story, in which every single prominent Republican denounces the move as one of the most vile offenses to which the Constitution has ever been subjected.

….What the Quinnipiac poll suggests — and granted, this is only one poll and we won’t know for sure until we get more evidence — this process also ends up shifting people’s underlying beliefs about the issue. In this case, the controversy makes Republicans more conservative

This, of course, is something that we’ve seen over and over, and it presents President Obama with an impossible dilemma. If he says nothing about an issue, he forfeits the chance to move public opinion. But if he speaks out, the subject instantly morphs into a partisan battering ram. Republicans will oppose his proposal regardless of how they felt about it before.

But I’m curious about whether this dynamic is stronger under Obama compared to other presidents. I figured Social Security privatization might be a good test, but I wasn’t able to dig up consistent poll information about it from before and after George Bush’s big push following the 2004 election. However, this is from Gallup’s Frank Newport in February 2005:

Basic support for the idea of privatizing Social Security has been at the majority level for well over a decade….But in the much more politicized environment of the last several months, survey questions asking about Social Security privatization show widely varying support levels.

….It is important to note that the privatization issue is rapidly becoming more partisan. The concept is now being actively promoted by a Republican president, and widely criticized by his Democratic congressional opposition. This suggests that public opinion on Social Security could devolve into nothing more than a referendum on the president.

This suggests, unsurprisingly, that Bush polarized public opinion in the same way Obama does. Perhaps all presidents do. Still, it sure seems as if Obama polarizes more than any previous president. I can think of several reasons this might be true:

Something to do with Obama himself. This could be anything from underlying racism to the nature of Obama’s rhetoric.
Our media environment has become increasingly loud and partisan over time, and this naturally polarizes opinions more than in the past.
The Republican Party has simply become more radicalized over the past decade or so.
In the past, liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats acted as natural brakes on viewing everything through a purely partisan lens. But party and ideology have been converging for decades, and this naturally makes every issue more partisan.

In any case, this would be an interesting project for someone with access to high-quality polling data that reaches back over several decades. Is the partisan response to President Obama’s proposals more pronounced than it was for previous presidents? If so, is it a little more pronounced, or a lot? Someone needs to get on this.

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Assignment Desk: Is Obama More Polarizing Than Past Presidents?

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Benghazi Is Over, But the Mainstream Media Just Yawns

by MandyToddmqo Posted on November 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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After two years of seemingly endless Benghazi coverage, how did the nation’s major media cover the report of a Republican-led House committee that debunked every single Benghazi conspiracy theory and absolved the White House of wrongdoing? Long story short, don’t bother looking on the front page anywhere. Here’s a rundown:

The Washington Post briefly moved its story into the top spot on its homepage this afternoon. In the print edition, it ran somewhere inside, though I don’t know where.
The New York Times ran only a brief AP dispatch yesterday. Late today they finally put up a staff-written story, scheduled to run in the print edition tomorrow on page A23.
The Wall Street Journal ran a decent piece, but it got no play on the website and ran in the print edition on page A5.
USA Today ran an AP dispatch, but only if you can manage to find it. I don’t know if it also ran anywhere in the print edition.
As near as I can tell, the LA Times ignored the story completely.
Ditto for the US edition of the Guardian.
Fox News ran a hilarious story that ignored nearly every finding of the report and managed to all but say that it was actually a stinging rebuke to the Obama administration. You really have to read it to believe it.

I get that the report of a House committee isn’t the most exciting news in the world. It’s dry, it has no visuals, it rehashes old ground, and it doesn’t feature Kim Kardashian’s butt.

Still, this is a report endorsed by top Republicans that basically rebuts practically every Republican bit of hysteria over Benghazi spanning the past two years. Is it really good news judgment to treat this the same way they would a dull study on the aging of America from the Brookings Institution?

UPDATE: Late tonight, the LA Times finally roused itself to run a non-bylined piece somewhere in the Africa section.

I should add that the stories which did run were mostly fairly decent (Fox News excepted, of course). In particular, Ken Dilanian’s AP report was detailed and accurate, and ran early in the morning. The problem is less with the details of the coverage, than with the fact that the coverage was either buried or nonexistent practically everywhere.

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Benghazi Is Over, But the Mainstream Media Just Yawns

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