Lawrence ticks off numerous examples. Now, to be sure, the difference is mostly in the positions the two men find themselves in: Obama needs to deal with a Senate where conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans hold swing votes, and McCain is fending off a right-wing primary challenge. Still, acknowledging that fact itself undermines McCain’s contention that his breaks with his party, most of them occurring from 2000-2003, were a mark of character. If they were a mark of character, then his current behavior suggests that McCain lacks character. But I think the evidence suggests that reading characterological traits into “maverick” votes is, at best, a wildly overstated exercise.

That’s true enough, if you assume the mavericky votes were honest expressions of McCain’s idiosyncracy. If, instead, you view them as votes primarily cast in opposition to George W. Bush in a fit of pique by the man Bush beat in a nasty GOP primary, then they make a lot of sense as a manifestation of characterological traits; they paint the picture of a man who is unusually petty and prone to pique, a view that makes even more sense when you consider that McCain was already abandoning his independent persona before J.D. Hayworth announced his challenge when it presented a chance to oppose the administration. And considering that McCain was a pretty down-the-line conservative Senator prior to 2001, I maintain this is the best way to understand John McCain’s professional evolution.

In other news, McCain is also claiming that even if Republicans can’t repeal the ACA because they can’t get past a Presiential veto, that’s okay, they’ll just refuse to fund it. The problem is that most of the spending is mandatory spending, not discretionary spending, which means the funding is automatically ppropriated year to year, and changing that would require passing a new law. Which serves as a nice reminder that on top of being a uniquely petty, crotchety old man, McCain also knows nothing about governanve, budgeting, or Congressional procedure, despite having spent nearly 3 decades in Congress.

Technorati Tags: John McCain

To criticisms, Obama supporters make two arguments. First, the CBO says the plan reduces the deficit by $143 billion over a decade. Second, the legislation contains measures (an expert panel to curb Medicare spending, emphasis on “comparative effectiveness research”) to control health spending. These rejoinders are self-serving and unconvincing.

Suppose the CBO estimate is correct. So? The $143 billion saving is about 1 percent of the projected $12.7 trillion deficit from 2009 to 2020. If the administration has $1 trillion or so of spending cuts and tax increases over a decade, all these monies should first cover existing deficits — not finance new spending. Obama’s behavior resembles a highly indebted family’s taking an expensive round-the-world trip because it claims to have found ways to pay for it. It’s self-indulgent and reckless.

As  brief aside, there was a point not that long ago when Samuelson couched his morally outrageous positions in much more clever arguments. But whether time is catching up with him or his position has gotten so cozy he can’t avoid the temptation to phone it in, these days Samuelson’s columns don’t even stand up to an initial skimming. In the next paragraph, for example, Samuelson argues that the CBO’s report is “misleading,” and bases this claim on a New York Times Op-Ed by Douglas Holtz-Eakin that Krugman absolutely shredded on the Times’ own website, and by invoking the “doc fix” that was going to pass regardless of the fate of healthcare reform. It’s the work of a complete hack, and not even original hack work at that.

But even leaving that aside, Samuelson’s argument, such as it is, falls apart under the weight of Samuelson’s own analogy. Samuelson would have you believe that expanding access to health insurance is akin to a family that finds some extra money in its budget opts to take a lavish vacation rather than pay down existing debt. I have a better idea, how about we compare it to a family who, rather than pay off some of their credit card debt, takes the newfound funds and…buys health insurance! Of course, that wouldn’t work for Samuelson’s point, because while people can generally agree that vacations should be sacrificed in the name of controlling your personal debt, they’d look at you like you had 3 eyes if you even remotely suggested that paying more than the minimum credit card payment should take precedence over getting your family health insurance.

It’s entirely possible that it didn’t occur to Samuelson that it would be better to compare expanding health insurance coverage to buying insurance rather than taking an extravagant vacation, but I doubt it. The omission is so egregious, and the example Samuelson chose so over the top (I mean really, how many people go on a globe-trotting vacation anyway?), that I can’t really imagine that Samuelson wasn’t deliberately trying to obscure how basic a necessity health insurance is in the modern world. Because, while a hostility to the social saftey net and social welfare spending is the animating factor of Samuelson’s existence, he’s aware enough of the larger political debate to know that most people would be appalled by his beliefs. And so, he’s left coming up with wild analogies to make giving people access to a basic necessity seem like a frivolous expenditure. Thankfully, he’s just not smart enough, nor his writing strong enough, to carry that sort of argument these days.

Technorati Tags: Robert Samuelson, Washington Post

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) lacks the votes to begin debating his targeted jobs bill, according to sources monitoring the legislation.

Reid needs 60 votes to open debate on the $15 billion jobs bill. The vote is scheduled for Monday, when lawmakers return from the Presidents Day recess.

“I understand Reid does not have the votes for cloture on Monday on his jobs bill,” one source said.
 
A Reid spokesman said the vote is in the hands of Republicans. Democrats have 59 senators in their conference.

What this underscores is the simple fact that whether you attribute the rise of the filibuster to a breakdown in comity amongst Senators or a rational response to systemic incentives, we’re to the point where there just isn’t any way to reasonably expect a return to the old social norms of the Senate. The minority has gotten to the point where they’re potentially willing to prevent the majority from even considering bills the majority party would like to pass, and they’re also in a position to benefit from that obstruction electorally. There may have been a time when the prevailing norm of Senate cuture was to eschew the potential rewards of blocking everything on the majority’s agenda, but those days are clearly gone. The minority recognizes that they have both the incentive and the means to keep the minority from doing anything, and they’ve decided they’re willing to excercise that ability. It’s just incredibly naive to imagine that things can go back to the way they were so long as the filibuster rule exists.

Technorati Tags: Filibuster

I confess, I’m pretty stupified by this:

At a time of increasing debate over the optimal relationship between government and business in the U.S., new Gallup polling shows that 57% of Americans are worried that there will be too much government regulation of business, while 37% worry that there will not be enough. Half of Americans believe the government should become less involved in regulating and controlling business, with 24% saying the government should become more involved and 23% saying things are about right.

My guess is that the results would change drastically if the generic “business” was replaced with “banks,” but anyway, there you go. Americans are skeptical of “government regulations.” Digby, in keeping with a general trend among some netroots bloggers to imagine that everything is about messaging, and a specific trend of her’s to argue that progressive politicians don’t make an explicit case for progressive beliefs, calls this “an epic failue of liberal politics.” But is it, or is it a success of conservative messaging?

At least since the late 1970′s, American conservative messaging has been based on two basic tactics; blatantly lying about things, and crafting talking points that drastically over-simplify issues to easy-to-remember, but highy inaccurate, dogma. In the case of regulations, the conservative line is pretty simple; regulations are bad, always in all places. What is the progressive line supposed to be in contrast? More regulations are always awesome? That’s ridiculous. As both Atrios and Yglesias point out, there really are bad regulations on business out there, mostly at the state and municipal level. Further, most local governments impose land use regulations that are bad for progressive goals, by limiting the amount of density that can grow in an area, leading to inefficient energy use, poor conditions for mass transit to grow, and adverse environmental consequences. These are all places where we really do need to deregulate, or at least re-regulate in a more intelligent way.

The problem progressive messaging has is pretty simple; progressives are still largely attached to reality, and still mostly trying to act like adults. They’re more comfortable handling nuance than conservatives, as opposed to constructing a religious like dogma to fit an entire worldview into. That makes it incredibly difficult to use rhetoric to change the way people respond to polls like this, unless Digby wants progressives to go all in with their own lies and over-simplified talking points, hoping they win out. Which I suppose they could do, but where does that leave us? With both sides living in their own personal reality, with their own religious-like views, talking in dogmatic, over-simplified absolutisms?

Matt Taibbi’s latest polemic in Rolling Stone has been the topic of the weekend, and since I’ve weighed in on it in comment sections elsewhere, I might as well add it to my own neglected blog. Kevin Drum, Digby, Matt Yglesias, Tim Fernholz, Ezra Klein, and Brad Delong have, in my opinion, the best responses, and you should read all of them. I’m not at all a fan of this article, and more generally I’m not a fan of Taibbi’s, but I suspect that’s as much because I’m not a fan of polemics in general more than anything else. I do, however, think this article does a good job exposing the genre’s weaknesses.

First of all, yes, there are factual errors, and no, they’re not really that important. Confusing various James Rubins and so on is embarrassing, but it’s not a mortal sin. I will give Taibbi that. The bigger problems come in the somewhat vague interpretation of “facts” and the interpretation thereof. For example, did Michael Froman have a large role in the transition process? Yes. Does that mean he “hired” Tim Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury? Of course not. Presidents-elect don’t outsource selections for top tier cabinet positions. It’s ridiculous. But it’s not technically wrong since it’s not technically a fact, it’s just a transparently absurd interpretation of events. And of course there’s the rather central notion that the corruption is represented by various officials’ connections to Robert Rubin, which is likewise completely ridiculous. Robert Rubin spent 2 years as the chairman of the National Economic Council under President Clinton and another 4 years as Treasury Secretary, meaning that you could pretty much connect anyone who worked on economic policy during the Clinton administration to Rubin. Does anyone expect that the Obama administration wouldn’t or shouldn’t have people who worked in the last Democratic administration in it? That facing a tough economic situation the administration should only be staffed with people who have never been around the job before? That seems, well, ridiculous doesn’t it?

More damning, I think, is the way Taibbi chooses to characterize the people he casts as the good guys, for lack of a better term. The stalwarts of the campaign who have supposedly been vanquished now that Obama no longer needs them to fool the lefties, namely Austan Goolsbee and Karen Kornbluh. Here’s how he introduced them:

In order to grasp the full horror of what took place, however, one needs to go back a few weeks before the actual bailout — to November 5th, 2008, the day after Obama’s election.That was the day the jubilant Obama campaign announced its transition team. Though many of the names were familiar — former Bill Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, long-time Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett — the list was most notable for who was not on it, especially on the economic side. Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist who had served as one of Obama’s chief advisers during the campaign, didn’t make the cut. Neither did Karen Kornbluh, who had served as Obama’s policy director and was instrumental in crafting the Democratic Party’s platform. Both had emphasized populist themes during the campaign: Kornbluh was known for pushing Democrats to focus on the plight of the poor and middle class, while Goolsbee was an aggressive critic of Wall Street, declaring that AIG executives should receive “a Nobel Prize — for evil.”

Well that’s great and all, but it isn’t anywhere near the full story. Goolsbee has never been a populist hero before Taibbi’s article painted him that way, at least that I’m aware of, and prior to this he was best known as being the guy who assured the Canadian government that candidate Obama’s anti-NAFTA rhetoric in Ohio shouldn’t be taken seriously. His description of Kornbluh isn’t inaccurate in its own right, but as Ezra points out, Taibbi conveniently neglects to mention that Kornbluh served in the Treasury Department under Clinton as deputy chief of staff to…Robert Rubin! Indeed as Ezra points out, it’s easy to imagine that had Kornbluh gotten a more prominent role in the administration, she’d be on Taibbi’s list of nefarious Rubinites. Unfair conjecture you say? Well, look at the treatment Taibbi gives Jason Furman:

Just below Summers is Jason Furman, who worked for Rubin in the Clinton White House and was one of the first directors of Rubin’s Hamilton Project. The appointment of Furman — a persistent advocate of free-trade agreements like NAFTA and the author of droolingly pro-globalization reports with titles like “Walmart: A Progressive Success Story” — provided one of the first clues that Obama had only been posturing when he promised crowds of struggling Midwesterners during the campaign that he would renegotiate NAFTA, which facilitated the flight of blue-collar jobs to other countries. “NAFTA’s shortcomings were evident when signed, and we must now amend the agreement to fix them,” Obama declared. A few months after hiring Furman to help shape its economic policy, however, the White House quietly quashed any talk of renegotiating the trade deal.

Now we could quibble with this all day if we really wanted to, but I’ll skip all that for the purpose of noting that whether you like Furman or not, he was a top economic adviser to the Obama campaign in 2008. So the larger takeaway here is that whether or not you agree with Taibbi on how bad the financial industry is, what he’s unquestionably doing is grossly misstating the nature of the Obama campaign. Which is what makes Drum’s defense of the article rather bizarre:

But look: this is all just nitpicky bullshit.  Taibbi’s piece is basically about how the finance industry owns Congress and the Obama administration, and that’s basically true.  In fact, I have a piece coming out in a week or so in the print magazine that makes pretty much the same point.  My approach is different, and my language is all PG-rated, but my conclusions are pretty much the same.  The finance industry, through both standard lobbying and what Simon Johnson calls “intellectual capture,” has, over the decades since Reagan was elected, convinced nearly everyone that what’s good for Wall Street is good for America, and that what’s bad for Wall Street would be catastrophic for America.  Everything else follows from that.

Well look, that’s all great, but that isn’t really the point of  Taibbi’s article. Hell, that would be a pretty boring polemic. After all, who needs Matt Taibbi to tell them that the banks own Washington, especially Congress? We all know that! What people need Matt Taibbi to do is spin entertaining stories of personal malfeasance. And Taibbi delivers in spades, but he isn’t writing about “intellectual capture,” his narrative is that Obama “sold out.” That’s a very specific charge that’s very different than simply claiming the Obama administration has too much affinity for the banking industry. It’s also entirely untrue, as evidenced by the fact that Taibbi had to a) reinvent Austan Goolsbee as a raging populist, b) ignore Karen Kornbluh’s rather direct ties to the dreaded Robert Rubin and, c) ignore Jason Furman’s role in the Obama campaign.

Now maybe this doesn’t bother you, but it should. For one thing, if it’s wrong for Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity etc. to feed their audience bullshit and conspiracy theories to validate their emotion based beliefs about politics and policy, then it should be wrong when someone “on the left” does it too. More importantly, painting an inaccurate picture of Obama the candidate’s views on economics and finance doesn’t really help anyone who’s actually interested in the problems with intellectual capture or Washington’s closeness to Wall Street. If anything, examining how much candidate Obama was in line with mainstream Washington/Wall Street during the campaign and why no one cared about it at the time would be a much more helpful piece of journalism. But it wouldn’t have been very entertaining, definitely wouldn’t have been as controversial as this piece has been (links baby links!), and wouldn’t have stoked the victim role a large segment of the netroots needs to survive. So that’s not the piece Taibbi delivers. Which is really a shame because the problem of Wall Street capture of Congress is a problem that really could use a good tongue lashing from a writer as talented as Taibbi.

Technorati Tags: Corruption, Financial Reform, Matt Taibbi

I’m not really sure this is news, in the sense that I thought it was fairly well known that heavy rain regularly overwhelms our sewage processing facilities and leads to lots of untreated sweage overflowing into water sources, at least amongst the sort of people who would pay any attention to that sort of thing, but it does serve to remind us of something fairly useful; there’s a lot of things this country needs to get to doing! Our infrastructure is crumbling, of course, but even if it weren’t, it’s simply not on par with other advanced countries anymore. In fact, it’s very conceivable that within a generation it will b a real stretch to call the United States a first-world nation.

But, on the other hand, we also have a lot of newly out of work people who would really like to have a job. And interest rates are pretty much as low as they can be. So we have a large pool of potential laborers perfectly willing to go to work dealing with these issues, and cheap money to finance the projects. If you’re a glass-half-full type, this is a perfect confluence of problems; the poor economy makes it possible to get to work fixing our decrepit infrastructure, and fixing our nfrastructure can pump new life into the economy. It’s the opposite of a catch-22!

But, of course, doing this would require, you know, spending. More to the point, we’d need government spending. And every Washington Post columnist and other assorted variations of idiots knows that government spending is bad! Not just bad!, but BAD!!1111!!111! So that’s pretty much impossible, because conservatives and Blue Dogs won’t be having any of that evil government spending on things like making sure our sewage treatment facilities don’t spill everyone’s waste into water sources. Besides, if sewage treatment was that important, the free market would take care of it for us. That it hasn’t is just proof that people actually like drinking shit water. Right?

More broadly, there’s actually a lot of places where this dynamic holds. I’m sure you’ve seen the lines of people waiting for H1N1 vaccines. Well, if you’re like me, your first response to that is to wonder if putting that money people together in one small place is really the best way to address a public health issue. Especially when the people are mostly made up of the demographics most susceptible to getting sick in te first place. It also seems that the long waiting time imposes another burden on getting vaccinated that might lead to more people deciding not to get the vaccine. What could fix that? How about a system of public health clinics that would be charged with handling these sorts of routine healthcare matters? It would make the delivery of basic healthcare more convenient for consumers, and would create thousands of jobs or nurses and primary care doctors. But, you know, SocialiZeD MediCinZ!!!qq!!111!1122111! So screw you and your “employment” commie!! We got military jets we’ll never use to buy!