Can Both Sides just agree on something about mass shooting in schools, ask a couple of TV pundits

Joe Scarborough and Nick Confessore on this Morning Zoo segment illustration the influence of the NRA, the gun lobby operating as a gun cult, has on the national discussion of mass murders in schools. We could call it "cultural hegemony," a decades-old left concept that more recently has been adopted by the alt-right. Although the hegemony here is less on the consciousness of the general public and more on the part of lawmakers, especially Republican ones, and elite journalist and TV talking heads.

Santa Fe High School Shooting: How To Find Common Ground On Gun Reform Morning Joe/MSNBC 05/21/2018:

Scarborough and Confessore wring their hands over what consensus agreement Both Sides in the gun-proliferation debate we might be able to get. Scarborough offers up the NRA standard of more attention to "mental health." Will you be surprised to hear that the segment fails to mention Republicans cutbacks in mental health programs?

To do away with the current level of small-arms proliferation in the US, there will first have to be a partisan demand by Democrats to oppose the pro-gun proliferation policy of the Republican Party that is in both financial and spiritual hock to the gun lobby.

The Second Amendment and militias

I want to expand a bit on the Second Amendment issues I mentioned in the previous post. Here with reference to Putting the Second Amendment Second by Akhil Reed Amar Slate 03/17/2016.

My first reaction to Amar's article was that it sounds like he may be up to some Tenther/states-rights mischief. (Why, yes, I do think I'm jaded about some things, why do you ask?)

He seems to be arguing straightforwardly for an NRA-friendly interpretation of the Second Amendment and gun regulations.

My understanding without doing an OCD web search is that the federal courts had few if any Second Amendment cases until the 1930s, because there weren't many federal gun regulations. One of the biggest federal mistakes in US history was to allow the soldiers in the disbanded Confederate Army to keep their weapons. It mattered a lot in the mid-1870s when just getting enough weapons for the legitimate state militias to defend democratic government against the pro-"Redemption" terrorist groups was itself a major problem. The "Redeemers'" violent overthrow of the democratic state governments in the South is the only real example of guns being used to defend against the "tyranny" of the federal government, the "tyranny" in that case being required to recognize the citizenship of black people.

Amar pretty much tires to stand that history on its head. Mississippi's last Reconstruction Governor Adelbert Ames could have given a graphic description of who was more desperately in need of weapons, the biracial official militia or the Klan groups of former Confederate soldiers. I don't need to re-parse that statute he cites to know that nobody in their right minds expected individual black people, much less black people organized into their own anti-Klan private militias, to be the main guarantors of democratic government. That's why the US kept an actual military occupation in place in the former Confederacy until 1877.

But from the 1930s until Heller in 2008, the federal courts including SCOTUS held the Second Amendment to apply only to state militias. That's partially because of the plain language of the Amendment, "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Presidential candidate Barack Obama in 2008 endorsed the personal-rights interpretation before SCOTUS issued their ruling. Bipartisanship!

The actual text of the Consitution matters as well as the legislative history. And the legislative history is also pretty straightforward. The Second Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights at the demand of slave states who wanted to be sure the federal government wouldn't ban slave patrols, the institution by which white non-slaveowners were required to patrol for escaped slaves. As I mentioned in the preceding post, it was an important institution in terrorizing slaves and free blacks, as well as giving nonslaveomwning whites the dubious satisfaction of getting to harass and brutalize black people just like their slaveowning betters. They were also a direct predecessor of the post-Civil War Klan-type terrorist groups.

In that last post, I also linked to Robert Bateman's article on the legal and historical meaning of "militia," Hey Oregon "Militia": Here's the History Lesson You Missed 01/07/2016. http://bit.ly/1Pl4s2P Short version: it has never meant some white guy sittin' at home with his own AR-15 waiting for a scary black kid to step on his property so he can finally git him the chance to exericse his Second Amendments rights to murder black people. (Did I mention I'm jaded about certain things?) Bateman writes: "There is no such thing as a 'locally organized' militia that is not subject to the authority of a State or the Federal Government. Indeed, such is almost explicitly prohibited, in no small part because the Founding Fathers wanted to prevent something like Shays' Rebellion [of 1786-7] from happening again."

NRA anti-science

Scientific American in "Ready. Aim. Investigate" in the March 2013 edition took note of the NRA's efforts to suppress research on the negative health effects of gun proliferation:

... the National Rifle Association of America (NRA) has been scandalously successful in suppressing public safety research into guns. The problems began when investigators funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that having a gun in the home tripled the chance that a family member would get shot. Outraged that reality was not falling into line with presuppositions, then representative Jay Dickey of Arkansas added language to federal law in 1996 that barred the CDC from conducting research that might be used "to advocate or promote gun control." This deliberately vague wording, coupled with a campaign of harassment of researchers, effectively halted federally funded gun safety research.

This is a great example of how the political power provided by money actually influences the course of science, how it is developed, what kind of research is done, how it is applied. And in this case, the influence is directed toward narrow commercial ends.

At least President Obama found a way to take direction action on this:

In January, President Barack Obama instructed the CDC to resume studying the causes and prevention of gun violence. He also asked for $10 million to support gun safety research at the CDC - a request that Congress must pass. But these measures are not enough. If history is any guide, the NRA will attempt to impede these new investigations. Doctors, scientists and ordinary citizens will have to keep up the pressure to protect research (and researchers) from political meddling. [my emphasis]

We shouldn't let Obama off the hook for direct actions he can take under Executive power.

But what can be done by direct Executive power can be ended by Executive decision. Or by Congressional action. Aside from the fact that Obama is notoriously timid in sticking by liberal decisions that play in some way into the "culture war," as gun proliferation does, good Executive actions don't end the need for good legislation.

Tags: gun control, gun proliferation, gun regulation, NRA, obama administration

The Villagers protest that anyone would expect democracy to work

The Beltway Village seems to have finally decided to bring Maureen Dowd to heel on something. Something that she actually got right.

That would be her column, No Bully in the Pulpit New York Times 04/20/2013, in which she said that Obama lost the Senate vote on gun regulations because, "No one on Capitol Hill is scared of him."

Obama apologists often make the argument that (when a Democrat is President), the Presidency is a fairly weak office that can't get much done. But neither the liberal-leaning ones nor the conservative ones seemed to have thought that when Bush the Magnificent, Scourge of the Heathens and Liberator of Peoples, was at the helm. At least prior to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when wound up making even the Village recognize that he wasn't all that.

In Obama and the Myth of Arm-Twisting NRB Blog 04/26/2013, Elizabeth Drew explains why poor Obama can't get a background check supported by 90% of the public passed, because he's only the President, after all. He doesn't have that much power. She doesn't mention Dowd specifically. But the concept that MoDo wrote about that Drew wants to shoot down.

This line is a beauty: "Arm-twisting is particularly futile on an issue involving ideology." Yes, because Members of Congress are such highly principled characters.

Drew somewhat carelessly explains that Republican Presidents and their Congressional allies can get their programs passed against stiff opposition, apparently forgetting momentarily that what the Beltway accepts as self-evident - Republicans President have enormous power, Democrats very little - isn't at all self evident to the plebes out here:

Persuasion on such procedural maneuvers can come from congressional leaders as well as from the White House (though they are often on its behalf). Probably the most flagrant example in modern politics was the colossally expensive (and unpaid-for) addition of drug benefits to Medicare in 2003—at once a play for reelection support for George W. Bush, whose second term didn't seem at all a sure thing at that point, as well as a boondoggle for the drug industry, which also got itself exempted from competitive bidding by the government. In their efforts to get the bill through the House, Republican leaders held the final vote open for an unprecedented three hours—fifteen minutes is usually the max, so they froze the clock as if this wasn’t happening—while House majority leader Tom DeLay, who did not come by his sobriquet "The Hammer" for no reason, “persuaded” enough of them to vote for the bill. Members literally ran and hid from DeLay, who later was reprimanded for his heavy-handedness; unperturbed, two years later DeLay handed out checks from the tobacco industry while the House was considering the elimination of a tobacco subsidy.

Remarkably, she blandly adds, "No president since [Obama being the only one so far] could come close to matching such methods of persuasion, nor would he or she be advised to."

Now I don't want the Democrats to stoop to DeLay levels of corruption. But if, for instance, 50 Senate Democrats and the Vice President were willing to vote to do away with the filibuster, that 54-vote majority the background check bill did get would have meant that the Senate passed it. Drew mentions the filibuster rule, but only to describe as though it were an immutable law of nature. Though she does observe, "The march away from majority rule picked up its pace." Which doesn't merit her outrage, because carping about such a breakdown of democratic processes would be "totally irrelevant to the current state of our politics." What she means here is totally irrelevant to the Villagers who don't give a flying fig if representative democracy is completely corrupted by lobbyist money.

And, of course, any attempt for Democrats to insist on their representatives supporting what they voting base needs and overwhelmingly support, why, my dear people, that would be so, so un-centrist:

Much wrath has fallen on the head of Heidi Heitkamp, a freshman senator from North Dakota, for having voted against the bill, since she has more than five years to go before reelection; but memories in Washington are long. Some liberal groups have said that they will go after Mark Pryor, of Arkansas, who faces a difficult reelection—though the result might be the election of a Republican who will oppose them on many more issues than gun control. Outraged liberals intent on punishing Democrats who didn’t support the background checks—all of them from states where the feeling for gun ownership is strong—could end up getting Republicans elected instead.

In other words, Drew is saying that not only is a mere President unable to insist that Democrats in Congress support him on something overwhelming popular with the Democratic base and virtually everyone else in the country. But any attempt for Democratic voters in their own states to hold them accountable, why, it's just not done! Only Republicans might do such a thing. It's worth noting in her example that Clair McCaskill of Missouri, a not especially popular Democrat who was generally expected to lose, won re-election in 2012 by a strong margin because her opponent Todd "Legitimate Rape" Akin imploded. Harry Truman's observation (perhaps slightly overstated) that, given the choice between a real Republican and a Democrat trying to act like one, the public will prefer the real thing every time, just wouldn't register for today's Villagers. The concept couldn't even settle in most of their heads long enough to consider it.

I hope Elizabeth Drew writes a piece soon on Obama's proposal to cut benefits on Social Security and Medicare. Those positions are as unpopular as gun backgrounds checks were popular. But the Villagers take it as a matter of faith that benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid should be cut. And think it amusing that the silly proles should think otherwise. We'll see if she's as convinced that the political system is utterly incapable of passing those measures.

Drew is outraged that any of those airhead 90 Percenters would expect Obama to get a background check passed. It doesn't seem to bother her at all that the democratic system is so obviously stymied that such a popular and necessary bill get even get through one house of Congress. But she's obviously disgusted that anyone should be outraged. Because she's clearly not.

For more Village conventional wisdom on this, see: Glenn Thrush and Reid Epstine, Gun control: President Obama’s biggest loss Politico 4/17/13 ("The president ... broke his own informal 'Obama Rule' — of never leaning into an issue without a clear path to victory."); Jonathan Chait, How America’s Crappy Political System Killed Background Checks New York 04/17/2013 ("that’s how American politics works ... Presidential leadership doesn't matter.").

Tags: filibuster, gun control, gun regulation

Man-bites-dog alert: MoDo gets something right!

I find that saying very useful that even a stopped clock is right twice a day. With MoDo, it's more like twice a year. Or once every two years.

But in this column, No Bully in the Pulpit New York Times 04/20/2013, she actually has a point that she doesn't bury in dumb snarky remarks.

She says that Obama lost on gun regulations because, "No one on Capitol Hill is scared of him." Of course, in 2008 she directed a stream of her crackpot gender-identity weirdness at Hillary Clinton, who actually was more familiar with knocking heads with the Republicans and more willing to do it to get stuff done. But it's surely a measure of the magnitude of his failure on this that even Maureen Dowd can more-or-less see what went wrong.

I mean, this is MoDo, so even her decent analysis is shaky in some ways. You can't really describe why the gun legislation went down without talking about the state of the what Charlie Pierce calls the "feral children" of the Republican Party in Congress. And the NRA gun lobby to which they are subservient. Digby wrote the other day, "It's hard to know what to say about this, but increasingly I believe that the NRA is actually a suicide cult." (Crazy talk for crazy times Hullabaloo 04/19/2013) Digby, BTW, writes several posts a day, all of them more sensible than pretty much anything MoDo ever published in The Paper Of Record.

MoDo also seems to accept without question that 60 votes is the normal standard for a Democratic proposal to get through the Senate. "It’s unbelievable that with 90 percent of Americans on his side, he could get only 54 votes in the Senate," she writes. In fact, it's a procedural standard that the Democrats in the Senate could abolish at any time with a majority vote. But they leave it in place, month after month and year after year, with an intransigent Republican Party ready to filibuster pretty much anything they don't like. Fifty-four votes is, after all, a solid majority vote in the 100-member Senate. Even the most loyalist-minded Democrats must wonder if the Democrats aren't leaving the filibuster in place as an excuse not to pass a lot of things that are highly popular in the country.

Some of this has to be just bad negotiating skills, and we've seen numerous examples of it before. I was always dubious that Obama was serious about the assault weapons ban, but he pretty clearly did want to get some kind of background check passed. But, as MoDo quotes him, he said in the State of the Union address this year, "The families of Newtown deserve a vote." That in itself sounded like Obama's famous President Pushover act, already signaling that he was ready to compromise with Republicans on gun regulations. And she is right in saying, "he was setting his sights too low. They deserved a law."

But it's also driven by Obama's themes of making Bipartisanship and Compromise into goals in themselves. With those as goals, and more specifically with his new budget proposals to cut benefits on Social Security and Medicaid, he needs Republicans and Blue Dogs to buy into those proposals and vote for them in the Congress. And that severely limits his negotiating room. When he's already offering up the crown jewels of Democratic social policy as a starting point for the budget negotiations, what's he going to offer Republicans for a supportive vote on background checks?

Tags: barack obama, grand bargain, gun control, gun regulation, medicare, republican party, social security

More on the Social Security/Medicare wobble watch

This has been a real "what Digby says" week. Because she has been following Obama's push for a Grand Bargain since before he was first inaugurated. In It's Official Hullabaloo 04/05/2013, she writes:

Mark this day. For the first time in history, a Democratic president has officially proposed to cut the Democratic Party's signature New Deal program, Social Security ...

Meanwhile prepare for a barrage of savvy, world weary commentary from your fellow liberals telling you that this is no big thing and that Democrats will not suffer even a tiny bit if they vote for a common sense proposal like this one. You will be shushed and told to calm down and take a chill pill. In other words, you will be gaslighted by fellow liberals who are embarrassed that you aren't being coolly accepting of something that is completely unacceptable. This is how this works. Tell them to STFU and move out of the way.

In A couple of elite Villagers explain their formula for deciding what's "sensible." 04/06/2013, she quotes from the bipartisan consensus between SocSec/Medicare opponent and "liberal" E.J. Dionne and SocSec/Medicare opponent and conservative David "Bobo" Brooks. She calls attention to their mutual joy at hippie-punching (a phrase which I believe she popularized in Left Blogostan). Here's establishment liberal Dionne: "I'm very glad a lot of Democrats came out against the president's proposal to change the index for Social Security because, if nothing else, this shows that President Obama has really been willing to put some hard stuff on the table."

And our old friend Bobo: "I, too, am glad Democrats came out against because it suggests there's something sensible in what Obama has proposed."

Digby observes:

It's good to know that one thing hasn't changed, even in this era of right wing cranks and Tea Party intransigence: Villagers automatically approve of anything the liberal faction of the Democratic Party is against. I'm a little bit surprised that it still has such salience but I shouldn't be. These people are very uncomfortable with the idea that the salt-o-the-earth Real Americans might be the true radicals while the tired old hippies and their nerdy political heirs are just trying to hold on to a country that doesn't starve old and sick people.

It's a very lazy and convenient way to order the world, but I'm afraid that when it comes to Social Security and medicare [sic] it might not be the best guide to how the people feel about it.

Part of this is a reflection of the extent to which the "culture wars" as they played out in 1968-72 still influence the frameworks used by today's Beltway Villagers. They're still assuming that the Democrats to be successful have to run away from George McGovern. But "liberals" like E.J. Dionne who oppose Social Security and Medicare can go [Cheney] themselves. McGovern himself addressed this issue last year, a few months before his death (George McGovern's Comments on Social Security and Medicare - January 2012):

Digby again:

Oh, and unlike a lot of important issues, these are issues voters understand very well and they vote on them. It's not abstract and theoretical. It will affect every American.

Not that it matters in the Village. To them the world stopped sometime around 1975 and "sensible" policies are defined by opposition to the crazy hippie fringe[.] I guess it makes them feel young again[.]

Here is what SocSec/Medicare opponent Barack Obama had to see in his weekly Saturday address today. He sidestepped any mentioned of cuts in benefits to Social Security, but he does promote the Medicare cuts:

I’ve already signed more than $2.5 trillion in deficit reduction into law, and my budget will reduce our deficits by nearly $2 trillion more, without harming the recovery. That surpasses the goal of $4 trillion in deficit reduction that many economists believe will stabilize our finances.

We’ll make the tough reforms required to strengthen Medicare for the future, without undermining the rock-solid guarantee at its core. And we’ll enact commonsense tax reform that includes closing wasteful tax loopholes for the wealthy and well-connected – loopholes like the ones that can allow a billionaire to pay a lower tax rate than his or her secretary.

This is the compromise I offered the Speaker of the House at the end of last year.

The framework he's building here is, not surprisingly, the same as that of the Republican Party, the Peterson Foundation and its various front groups, and other opponents of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, which is to cast programs that benefit the elderly or the poor as detracting from programs that benefit the young and productive.

This guy was more supportive of Social Security in 2008:

Bobo was also doing his weekly schtick with Sleepy Mark Shields on the PBS Newshour yesterday, Shields and Brooks on the Job Numbers, Obama's Budget Bargaining Prospects 04/05/2013:

Bobo at around 6:00 talks his pet Hernert Hoover nonsense about how unemployment is all structural and the federal gubment can't really do anything about it starting at around 6:00, and does the generational-accounting pitch, also known as the "greedy geezers" line. And he uses the you-do-this construction like a mechanic explaining to someone how to repair a flat tire:

You increase training. You increase infrastructure spending. You get the education system, and mostly you devote less resources, fewer resources to the elderly and consumption on health care for the affluent, and much more to young families and young workers, and shift what's turned into a -- really a redistribution machine at the age scale. [my emphasis]

This was their bridge to talking about Obama's proposed cuts in benefits to Social Security and Medicare. Here's how the liberal lion Sleepy Mark approaches it:

I mean, this is a real body blow to those who have accused President Obama of being a socialist.

This is hardly a socialistic approach.

In addition, I mean, for not taking difficult political stands, he's been bombarded by the liberal part of his own party and many liberal groups. You know, I think, Judy, that he's probably the last best chance we're going have to reach any kind of a big or semi-big agreement is in what the president is going to unveil in his budget next Wednesday.

And I think it's an absolutely legitimate point on his side to say that the Republicans have to come up with revenue if we are going to do this, because this is a blow to the Democrats. It's been the Holy Grail of the Democratic Party platform for the past 70 years, Social Security.

And, you know, I think, in that sense, we will find out whether the commonsense caucus that editorial writers and some of the leading pundits have spoken about, whether it's the Loch Ness Monster of American politics or whether it's a reality. [my emphasis]

If someone had nudged him fully aware, his response might have been a bit more coherent. But last week he sounded like he was on a double-dose of caffeine and was ranting about how the Roe v. Wade decision had been a big mistake and Real Americans oppose gun control, so being back to his normal state of semi-stupor was an improvement, I guess.

But he's clearly hopeful that the cuts to Social Security and Medicare go through, because that's the consensus of "the commonsense caucus that editorial writers and some of the leading pundits have spoken about," i.e., the conventional wisdom among the Villagers. So Sleep Mark's on board.

And so is Bobo:

Well, I think he's taking the right approach.

I mean, we have the Patty Murray, the Senate Democratic budget over here. We have got the Ryan budget over there. He's sort of a little closer to Murray, obviously, but he's sort of in the ballpark of where a deal will be cut.

And so some of the things I think are right and good policies, this chained CPI, which will be adjusting Social Security revenues or benefits. Some of the things, I think, are a little less persuasive. He's got some Medicare things which are not structural reform, but just trying to tamp down reimbursements at the same time as we are just running away from any kind of effort to control Medicare costs.

But if he can take this chained CPI, this Social Security thing, and he can put in a few little more moderate Medicare reforms, structural reforms, like combining Medicare A and B and some other things that I think that has some bipartisan agreement, then I do believe there are a number of Republicans who would be willing to give on revenues.

And then you -- we're not going to have a grand bargain, but then do you see a bargain. You see a functioning government making progress.

As Digby characterized his performance on NPR, Bobo "needs a little bit more in cuts for the elderly and the sick to truly make him happy. And Lord knows, the White House yearns to make David Brooks happy."

This will be a real dividing point in American politics, maybe as much so or more than the Iraq War has been.

Oh, yeah. The idea of cutting benefits on Social Security and Medicare ain't popular: As Sequester Deadline Looms, Little Support for Cutting Most Programs Pew Research Center 02/22/2013. All of 10% of the public supports cutting Social Security benefits, with 6% supporting cutting veterans benefits. "Chained CPI" that the White House says Obama will formally propose in his budget cuts both. Support for cutting Medicare is all the way up at 15%. The disconnect between the public and and the political/media elite on these issues is amazing.

Will the Bobos and the Dionnes and the Mark Shieldses who are so spectacularly wrong about this be discredited as Very Serious People when it turns out to be a screamingly unpopular idea and derails what's left of Obama's second-term agenda? Were those who were wrong about the Iraq War so discredited? Who knows, miracles can happen. But in any case, we should give all opponents of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid the chance to sympathize with each other that they were neglected prophets on this issue by defeating Obama's proposals to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Tags: austerity economics, barack obama, comprehensive immigration reform, grand bargain, gun regulation, medicaid, medicare, republican party, social security

Social Security/Medicare wobble watch

Now that the Democratic President is endorsing cuts in benefits to Social Security and Medicare in his budget to be formally proposed next week, we're going to see various Democratic partisans, Obama admirers and left-leaning journalists who prefer to stay on the good side of White House finding ways to go wobbly on defending Social Security.

Josh Marshall's Obama’s Dangerous Game TPM 04/05/2013 shows some hints of this. He articulates what he sees as the White House position:

In conversations with the president’s key advisors and the President himself over the last three years one point that has always come out to me very clearly is that the President really believes in the importance of the Grand Bargain. He thinks it's an important goal purely on its own terms. That's something I don't think a lot of his diehard supporters fully grasp. He thinks it's important in longrange fiscal terms (and there's some reality to that). But he always believes it's important for the country and even for the Democratic party to have a big global agreement that settles the big fiscal policy for a generation and let's the country get on to other issues — social and cultural issues, the environment, building the economy etc.

Watch for those phrases like "(and there's some reality to that)."

No, actually, long-term fiscal healthy does not require cuts in benefits for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and veterans benefits. The long-term problems of growth in health care costs also adversely impact Medicare. But Medicare actually acts as a restraint on health care costs. And some more recent data on health care cost increases project lower growth than what has been assumed in previous years.

There's a good, very practical case for expanding both Medicare and Social Security.

But the conventional assumption is that "entitlements", the propaganda term for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid preferred by their opponents to make them sound like "welfare", are some dire threat to the country's economic well-being. As conditions change, the justifications for cutting benefits and putting those programs on the road to abolition also shift. But they are based in Herbert Hoover economics. And more specifically in the greed of Wall Street financiers who would love to have retirement and health care fully privatized so they could take huge cuts in fees from the funds that now go to retirees and to health care costs.

At this point, I'm ready to shift by assumption about Obama's understanding of the whole framework of social insurance. I've assumed up until now that his concept of the Grand Bargain was something like Josh describes, "to have a big global agreement that settles the big fiscal policy for a generation and let's the country get on to other issues — social and cultural issues, the environment, building the economy etc." Although I would add that he seems to think this postpartisan heaven would reduce those other issues to more technical issues that reasonable elites could handle in an agreeable fashion without a lot of noisy and annoying interference by voters and ordinary workers who are the most directly affected by them. The "end of ideology," as the dream was called in an earlier incarnation, or "the end of history" in another.

But I imagined that he thought that cutbacks in benefits to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid would be a one-time thing that would then lead to full acceptance by the Republicans of those programs.

Now I'm starting to think he buys into a more radical privatization framework. His healthy care program, which the Republicans are shrieking is a totalitarian imposition, is famously similar to that on which Bob Dole campaigned when running for President as the Republican nominee in 1994. Obama may well see 401(k)'s and the remnants of the private pension system as an adequate and preferable substitute for Social Security. And Obamacare, with its absence of a public option, as a desirable substitute for Medicare and Medicaid.

That implies even more cynicism on Obama's part than even most of his sharpest Democratic partisan critics have assumed so far. But since his course opens those programs up to even more aggressive political attacks the moment his Grand Bargain deals gets enacted, that's a straightforward possibility. Assuming he hopes for a postpartisan state of "end of ideology" harmony at least allows him a dream of a more harmonious state. But it's delusional. Take your pick.

Rick Perlstein at his Facebook page today quotes from that paragraph of Josh Marshall and gives his own translation:

Yes. Me: "There’s something so arbitrary about it, so cliché: pick the one thing that Republicans are supposed to cherish most (tax cuts!). Pick the one thing Democrats are supposed to cherish most (spending!). If you get both to give up what they cherish, something transcendent has occurred; something mystical; something deep, deep inside America's soul—healing! It’s almost as if, were the Democrats' most cherished nostrum was that the sky is blue; and if the Republicans’ most cherished nostrum were that the sky is red, Obama somehow imagines that if he can somehow get both to agree that the sky is purple, lo and behold, America will finally be a warm and conciliatory place."

Josh claims to be giving context to the proposed cuts:

First, though I think these cuts are a bad idea, they’re are qualitatively different from efforts to dismantled and phase out Social Security through privatization and private accounts.

Yes, I suppose you could say that serious and damaging cuts that make many people's lives visibly harder are qualitatively different that immediately abolishing the programs altogether.

There are also a number of progressive economists and policy analysts that think this might be a positive step in the context of other changes to get the country’s longterm financial house in order.

He doesn't name any. And since supporting cuts in benefits to Social Security and Medicare make someone by definition something other than "progressive" the way I look at it, I have no idea who or what he means here.

But that last point is key: it doesn't make sense if you just do it alone, if Social Security doesn't get anything back as part of the same bargain. Otherwise, when you do finally come to a deal that brings major new revenue in (and it will come) Social Security and other similar programs will be asked to take yet more hits.

Even the sentences don't make sense there. If we raise or eliminate the cap on Social Security taxes, that takes care of any financing problems with Social Security for upteen years and probably until hell freezes over. But he seems to be saying that it only makes sense to cut Social Security benefits unless Social Security also gets more revenue which means benefits have to be cut even more if it does. Which really doesn't make jack for sense to me.

Second, on the politics, President Obama and his advisors have made clear this isn’t what President Obama is actually for. He doesn’t think it’s a good idea.

This is generous way beyond what the facts indicate. Obama has been talking about the Grand Bargain to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid since before his first inauguration. Digby at Hullabaloo has been faithfully tracking it ever since then. Maybe Josh should check out her blog occasionally.

So really this is just the President negotiating with himself, validating the wisdom of big Social Security cuts while Republicans are still saying — and show no signs of not saying — that no more taxes should ever go up ever.

Now, the counter to this is that the optics of going the extra length helps the President with swing voters who want to see he’s trying to compromise. I’m uncertain about that. But that’s certainly part of the calculus.

The whole argument is silly. Polls consistently show that cuts in benefits to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are very unpopular: with Democrats, with swing voters, with Republicans. Even if Josh's sources at the White House are claiming that, they have surely seen the polls. Josh is being very credulous to credit them with thinking that. Obama is trying to make a deal by doing something he knows is very unpopular because it very damaging.

Robert Reich explains why the "chained CPI" proposal is such a scam and why the benefit cuts involved in using it the way the Democratic President is now proposing is a really bad idea, Robert Reich on Chained CPI (the proposal to cut Social Security benefits) 04/03/2013:

Tags: austerity economics, barack obama, comprehensive immigration reform, grand bargain, gun regulation, medicaid, medicare, republican party, social security

Radical Republicans and fumbling corporate Democrats

Krugman, after analyzing columnist Jonathan Chait for going brain-dead over Matt Yglesias' recent real estate purchase, writes, "The lesson here is never to take right-wing huffiness about the process of politics and political debate seriously. These guys don't actually believe in any rules at all; whatever rule they may lay down in one case, they’ll break in an instant if they think they see an advantage." (Attacking Success 03/23/2013)

"Never," of course is a big word. And, not so long ago, I would have probably qualified a statement like that by saying it applied to hardline, dogmatic rightwingers including a lot of prominent Republican figures like Newt Gingrich. But I would have added that it wasn't so much the case with moderate Republicans like [fill in your favorite example from bygone times].

But now, when "moderate Republican" has become as self-contradictory a term as "lightweight heaviness," I can't really say that any more.

And when I think about it a bit, "not so long ago" in this case basically means 10 years ago, the beginning of the Iraq War. The Republicans were so cynical and so self-righteous in the face they put on their cynicism, and so openly contemptuous of those who disagreed that I lost any real sense from the Republican side of goodwill or serious consideration of the common good in their positions. It was quite a contrast to what Linda Feldmann in 2006 referred to as "the serious, dignified tone of deliberation that preceded the Gulf war, in 1991." (The Iraq war debate reopens in Washington Christian Science Monitor 06/13/2006)

But you have only to look at the full sentence in which that phrase appears to see how much things have changed: "House majority leader John Boehner (R) of Ohio, who has long planned for this week's debate, hopes to match the serious, dignified tone of deliberation that preceded the Gulf war, in 1991." And if you think that there might have been some tiny amount of seriousness in Boehner's expressed intent, you have only to read the immediately following sentence, "Most of his GOP colleagues support the idea."

And it's gotten steadily worse since 2003. As Charlie Pierce chronicles weekly at the Esquire Politics Blog, not only are the Republicans in Congress as happily hardline as ever. But the Republicans in statehouses and state legislatures even after the resounding Democratic win nationwide in 2012 are going full speed ahead on trying to wreck unions, dismantle public education and establish new controls over what women do with their ladyparts.

And in Congress, they are conducting themselves more like a revolutionary party intent on discrediting the entire existing form of government than on anything resembling pragmatic solutions for major national problems. Our Pod Pundits, reciting their Washington Beltway Village lines, chatter about some struggle between moderate and conservative Republicans. But that debate is occurring in their Village imaginations. Yes, there is a Tea Party faction that raves about the insufficient conservatism of the "Republican establishment." But it usually means something like that the "establishment" candidate hates immigrants, but isn't vocal and nasty enough about his hatred. Or that the "establishment" candidate thinks you should only say "some girls rape easy" (Wisconsin State representative Roger Rivard) when there are no microphones around, while the Tea Party zealot thinks it should be obvious that if a woman gets raped, "the bitch was asking for it." OK, I haven't heard any prominent Tea Partier say the latter outright, but it's the obvious meaning of Rivard's comment, Richard Mourdoch's comment that pregnancy resulting from rape "it is something that God intended to happen" and Todd Akin's "legitimate rape" nonsense; see Erin Gloria Ryan, Team Rape Lost Big Last Night Jezebel 11/07/2012. Though all Republicans would take a different attitude if the rapist were black and the victim white.

As Henry Decker reports in 'GOP Autopsy’ Is Dead On Arrival National Memo 03/18/2013, the Republican Party sees no strong motive to change anything but its marketing. "With the exception of a qualified push for immigration reform, the [Republicans National Committee's] Growth and Opportunity Project centers around the idea that the Republican Party’s platform is sound, while the messaging is at fault. That comes as no surprise — it was RNC chairman Reince Priebus, after all, who recently declared "I don’t think our platform is the issue."

But Robert Reich comments on a major reason, maybe the major reason, why the Republican Party feels no obvious pressure to de-crazyfy itself in Selling the Store: Why Democrats Shouldn't Put Social Security and Medicare on the Table 03/21/2013:

Prominent Democrats — including the President and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi — are openly suggesting that Medicare be means-tested and Social Security payments be reduced by applying a lower adjustment for inflation.

This is even before they've started budget negotiations with Republicans ...

It’s not the first time Democrats have led with a compromise, but these particular pre-concessions are especially unwise. ...

Social Security and Medicare are the most popular programs ever devised by the federal government, which is why Republicans hate them so much. If average Americans have trusted the Democratic Party to do one thing it has been to guard these programs from the depredations of the GOP.

Reich doesn't seem to have recognized, or maybe he doesn't quite believe them yet, the more recent projections that show a slowing in projected health care inflation. But he's dead right in pointing to the absurdity of the position Obama-Brüning and Pelosi are taking. For the Democrats, becoming the lead advocates for cuts in benefits to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is just lemming instinct. Although as I've said here before, that's unfair to lemmings, because they plunge over the cliff and drown because they are so determined to get to where they're headed. With the Dems it's become more, "Hey, let's drown ourselves so we'll look moderate!" But they might as well adopt this as the official Party anthem:

And Reich adds this killer question: "Paul Ryan's House Republican budget takes on Medicare, but leaves Social Security alone. Why should Democrats lead the charge on either?"

The good news is that Obama-Brüning and Pelosi are still having to advocate for the cuts because they haven't happened yet. For some reason, this comes to mind when I start thinking about how the Dems got here:

Tags: austerity economics, barack obama, comprehensive immigration reform, grand bargain, gun regulation, medicaid, medicare, republican party, social security

Dan Baum on "gun guys": A classic liberal "concern troll" routine

The Oxford American presents an interview with Dan Baum, author of a book called Gun Guys based on a large number of conversations with gun owners and gun fans: Jullianne Ballou, Author Interview: Dan Baum 03/18/2013.

He used some of his research for an article, Happiness Is a Worn Gun: My concealed weapon and me in the August 2010 Harper's.

In the interview and the article, he strikes a liberal concern troll pose on guns, which he frames in Harper's this way:

I got hooked on guns forty-nine years ago as a fat kid at summer camp—the one thing I could do was lie on my belly and shoot a .22 rifle—and I’ve collected, shot, and hunted with guns my entire adult life. But I also grew up into a fairly typical liberal Democrat, with a circle of friends politely appalled at my fixation on firearms. For as long as I’ve been voting, I’ve reflexively supported waiting periods, background checks, the assault-rifle ban, and other gun-control measures. None interfered with my enjoyment of firearms, and none seemed to me the first step toward tyranny. As the concealed-carry laws changed across the land, I naturally sided with those who argued that arming the populace would turn fender benders into gunfights. The prospect of millions more gun-carrying Americans left me reliably horrified.

At the same time, though, I was a little jealous of those getting permits. Taking my guns from the safe was a rare treat; the sensual pleasure of handling guns is a big part of the habit. Elegantly designed and exquisitely manufactured, they are deeply satisfying to manipulate, even without shooting. I normally got to play with mine only a few times a year, during hunting season and on one or two trips to the range. The people with carry permits, though, were handling their guns all the time. They were developing an enviable competence and familiarity with them. They were living the gun life. Finally, last year, under the guise of "wanting to learn what this is all about," but really wanting to live the gun life myself, I began the process of getting a carry permit. All that was required was a background check, fingerprints, and certification that I’d passed an approved handgun class.

He wanted to "live the gun life myself." Why not become a hit man and get paid for it, dude?

I'm guessing that for most people there is a big difference between enjoying hunting or recreational shooting or needing to use a gun for self-defense in a dangerous profession, on the one hand, and a hankering for "living the gun life" on the other. I wonder how many soldiers, cops or security guards, whose profession actually requires them to carry firearms and use them under well-defined circumstances, think of the themselves as "living the gun life"?

Baum doesn't quite define "living the gun life" as seeking a constant testosterone high. But he comes close. He describes two general attitudes toward everyday life, which he calls Condition White and Condition Yellow. In the interview he defines them this way:

Most of us live in Condition White, which is being fairly oblivious to your surroundings. When you put on a gun, you can't be that way. At least I couldn't, and most of the people I talk to who wear guns say the same thing. You're always aware that you're wearing it. The responsibility is so awesome — in the genuine sense of the word—because of how dangerous a gun is. I think that I liked Condition Yellow, to a degree. I never left my credit card on a store counter; I was a better driver. You really don't want to screw up when you're wearing a gun, and not wanting to screw up bleeds into other areas of your life. But I got worn out from constantly watching for crime. Ultimately I realized that I really didn't need to carry the gun, though many gun guys will say you're crazy not to wear a gun. Bad things happen all over the place and you need to be ready. It's almost a chromosomal thing; either you feel safe in the world or you don't.

Strap on a gun and Be All That You Can Be.

He does provide some debunking of standard gun-nut paranoia. Describing gun classes he took in Boulder CO, in Harper's he recalls a policeman describing ways they can get away with breaking the law on gun possession and usage. And he writes:

Both classes were less about self-defense than about recruiting us into a culture animated by fear of violent crime. In the Boulder class, we watched lurid films of men in ski masks breaking into homes occupied by terrified women. We studied color police photos of a man slashed open with a knife. Teachers in both classes directed us to websites dedicated to concealed carry, among them usacarry.org, an online gathering place where the gun-carrying community warns, over and over, that crime is "out of control."

In fact, violent crime has fallen by a third since 1989—one piece of unambiguous good news out of the past two decades. Murder, rape, robbery, assault: all of them are much less common now than they were then. At class, it was hard to discern the line between preparing for something awful to happen and praying for something awful to happen. A desire to carry a gun seemed to precede the fear of crime, the fear serving to justify the carrying. I asked one of the instructors whether carrying a gun didn’t bespeak a needlessly dark view of mankind. "I’m an optimist," he said, "but we live in a world of assholes."

But this pitch is meant to establish his credentials as a moderate, even a "liberal" on gun regulation. He then proceeds to make standard concern-troll arguments, that, gee, gun proliferators have feelings, too. Did you know they don't trust the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence? Those mean libruls just don't understand how down-home folks look at things!

When it comes right down to it, "Condition White" is for pussies, Real Men stay in "Condition Yellow" where they can bond with other Real Men:

Condition White may make us sheep, but it’s also where art happens. It’s where we daydream, reminisce, and hear music in our heads. Hardcore gun carriers want no part of that, and the zeal for getting everybody to carry a gun may be as much an anti–Condition White movement as anything else — resentment toward the airy-fairy elites who can enjoy the luxury of musing, sipping tea, and nibbling biscuits while the good people of the world have to work for a living and keep their guard up. Gun guys never stop building and strengthening this like-minded community. When I mention that I’m carrying, their faces light up. "Good for you!" "Right on!" "God bless you!" The owner of a gun factory in Mesa, Arizona, spotted the gun under my jacket and said, with great solemnity, "You honor me by wearing your gun to my place of business."

It's not until the end of the article that he declares that if lots and lots of people start carrying guns around all the time, "We’ll also be, in our own minds, a little sexier as we make ourselves more dangerous."

This doesn't strike me as the kind of guy I'd want in my place of business. Or anywhere else around me, actually.

With a show of listening to the proverbial both sides, he comes down squarely on the side of the gun proliferators. From Harper's: "An armed civilian might be even more useful during a massacre than a police officer; cops hit the people they’re aiming at less than half the time — in some departments much less. That might be because criminals identify police by their uniforms and so get the first shot off. A civilian might have the element of surprise."

In the interview, he goes all in with the NRA scenario:

You take a situation like a movie theater—like the Aurora shooting. From the gun guy perspective, nothing could possibly be worse than one guy with a gun intent on killing people. When the New York Times sneers at the idea that a licensed gun carrier could have made a difference, the gun guys all say, "What?! We all wish there could have been a cop there. But there's not always going be a cop there. We're not going to put police everywhere." None of us wants to live like that. And frankly, police aren't well trained to shoot anyway. The people who do mass shootings are cowards. They always kill themselves when the police show up. If somebody had been in that Aurora movie theater and had stood up and fired a shot at James Holmes, and he had seen a muzzle flash come at him, well, we don't know exactly what he would have done, but I assure you it would have upset his rhythm. Now, would there have been a gunfight in that theater? Maybe. The gun guys would argue that a gunfight is better than a massacre. And I think the gun guys are kind of correct when they say that it has to really give you the willies to imagine ordinary citizens as empowered as we are not wanting to have armed citizens around when something happens. If you would rather have lunatics killing people totally unopposed than having armed citizens there, you must really want ordinary citizens to be very weak and very disempowered. That must be important to you. The gun guys don't get how that could be. And I don't either, to tell you the truth. All of us who carry guns wish we had been in that theater. [my emphasis]

Or at least all of them nursing adolescent hero fantasies. Good grief!

But they must be Real Men, 'cause that thar sissy New York Times "sneers" at the pore boys who carry guns 'cause that's what Real Men do. Or something.

This is the kind of cowboy fantasy that the NRA and other gun-proliferation organizations promote. To anyone not caught up in comic-book type fantasies, it's pretty obvious that if well-trained police officers miss the person they're aiming for at a 50% rate, untrained civilians are unlikely to do any better.

But since Baum cheerfully refuses to acknowledge that anything about gun proliferation contributes to violent crime in any way - but he's a good Democratic librul, he just happens to agree with the NRA and the gun nuts on this one issue! - he don't know how come them libruls thank the gubment should be sayin' who can carry a gun and where or how:

To the unfamiliar, guns are noisy and intimidating. They represent the supremacy of force over reason, of ferocity over refinement, and probably a whole set of principles that rub some people the wrong way. But a free society doesn't make people give a reason for doing the things they want to do; the burden of proof falls on those who would forbid. I started out thinking widespread concealed-carry was a bad idea. But in the absence of evidence that allowing law-abiding citizens to carry guns is harmful, I come down on the side of letting people do what they want.

In the interview, he makes the liberal concern-troll pitch this way:

The Condition White, Condition Yellow thing gets to the root of the politics around guns. Conservatives tend to focus more on the individual and liberals more on the collective. I'm really no less a Democrat now than I was when I started this project, but I understand now that there's real value in encouraging people to be vigorous individuals within the collective. Just as a machine works better with high-quality parts, the collective works better with high-quality individuals. There are many ways to be a high-quality individual without a gun, but when you're living with guns, and especially when you're carrying guns, you're a pretty high-quality individual to the extent that you're aware and in the moment and observant and correct and polite. You don't mouth off to people; you don't flip the bird to someone who cuts you off on the road—because you never know where confrontation could end.

From the gun guy perspective, liberals have this bizarre desire to have a society of placid, dependent people, people who look to others to protect them. To the gun guys that's irrational, because while the police keep us safer in the aggregate, in the individual moment that something terrible happens to you, the cops won't be there.

A Real Man is just more of a high-quality Real Man when he's carrying a piece. And sexy, too, you know!

Except, you know, to those dadgummed feminists and such. From the interview:

Women really hate it—and they talk about it all the time—that men are making laws about women's reproductive rights. And gun guys really hate it that people like Dianne Feinstein and Charles Schumer are making laws about people's gun rights. Dianne Feinstein and Charles Schumer don't know anything about guns. It's offensive in the exact same way.

Dang hypocritical wimmin! Why don't they just shut up and admire mah gun?

In the interview, Baum also gets around to moaning about the "plight of the middle-aged white man in this society." If you haven't figure out the liberal concern troll routine by now, this whacks you over the head with it.

Do I even need to add than in neither the interview nor the article does Baum talk about the role of white racism in the way his good ole boy white guy gun-proliferation fans talk about guns and how they perceive crime?

And to complete the concern-troll picture, he mentions that he thinks the NRA is "a hideous organization." The printed version doesn't indicate if the interviewer pressed him on what that means, i.e., does he mean he prefers the even more radical Gun Owners of America? But he proceeds to bolster the NRA's loony idea to arm school teachers.

Tags: gun control, gun proliferation, gun regulation

PBS newshour series on gun violence (5)

PBS Newshour recently ran a series of reports focusing on gun violence, collected at their page on The Gun Debate. These are their reports from 02/22/2013, the final day of the consecutive weekday series of reports.

Christina Bellantoni, President's Campaign Arm Making Gun Control Push, of which the latter part deals with issues other than gun violence. It includes a copy of a public-service persuasion spot from a group called Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, titled Moms Demand A Plan:

Jason Kane, Reading, Writing, Therapy, a report on anger management training for school kids.

Elizabeth Shell, What Democrats and the NRA May Have in Common over Gun Policy. Being skeptical of the Democrats' determination on this issue, this headline makes me think, "What do they have in common? Wanting to make the gun regulation issue go away?"

But the article is about support for various gun regulation options among the general public, not among members of Congress. It cites and discusses a report by Colleen Barry et al, After Newtown — Public Opinion on Gun Policy and Mental Illness New England Journal of Medicine 01/28/2013. Their findings seem pretty ambiguous to me. From the New England Journal of Medicine piece:

Findings from these surveys indicate high support among Americans — including gun-owners, in many cases — for a range of policies aimed at reducing gun violence. Gun policies with the highest support included those related to persons with mental illness. The majority of Americans apparently also support increasing government spending on mental health treatment as a strategy for reducing gun violence. Given the data on public attitudes about persons with mental illness, it is worth thinking carefully about how to implement effective gun-violence–prevention measures without exacerbating stigma or discouraging people from seeking treatment.

They were surveying specifically about attitudes about guns and the mentally ill. But spotlighting mental illness was also a key focus in NRA leader Wayne LaPierre's infamous speech of 12/21/2012 after the Sandy Hook school massacre, which predated the survey. So the NRA's position may be muddying their results.

Tags: gun control, gun proliferation, gun regulation

PBS newshour series on gun violence (4)

PBS Newshour recently ran a series of reports focusing on gun violence, collected at their page on The Gun Debate. These are their reports from 02/20/2013:

Simone Pathe's Loaded Words: How Both Sides Are Using Persuasive Rhetoric About Guns is a text-only article:

The traditional "gun control" side has zeroed in on the negative effects of guns, namely violence. Meanwhile, as Republican operative Ron Bonjean points out, the traditional "gun rights" side is talking less about guns and more about how they are misused, shifting the focus to mental health and tougher enforcement of current laws.

While the shift in language on the left has garnered greater attention since the Dec. 14 shooting, it's an evolution 20 years in the making. The Atlantic's Molly Ball traces the concerted efforts behind this shift in messaging in her article titled, "How the Gun-Control Movement Got Smart." Perhaps most illustrative, she recounts how the National Council to Control Handguns rebranded itself as the Brady Campaign and the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

Pathe also quotes linguisht George Lakoff:

The task for liberals, Lakoff explained, has been to find a language that appeals to that overlap -- the liberal hunter, if you will. The language of gun "control" automatically alienates the individual liberty moral system. Gun "safety," however, appeals to the same person's sense of personal responsibility.

Lakoff sees the control frame beginning to recede in favor of the safety frame. In announcing his 23 executive actions on the issue, for example, President Obama did not use the word "control" in his remarks. And in his most impassioned call to action on the gun issue, at the conclusion of his State of the Union address last week, he targeted violence, not guns.

This is fine as far as it goes. But without taking on some of the fanatical rhetoric from the NRA and other gun proliferation groups, it's hard to see how opposition to gun regulation from both Republicans and some Democrats can be overcome to an extent sufficient to ban assault rifles. Which I doubt Obama intends to push seriously, in any case. We'll see how serious he is about other major issues on the gun regulation agenda, like universal background checks.

Miles O'Brien, Sins of the Sons, which discusses the reactions of parents to their children's violent acts in the case of mass shootings. It includes this video with an excerpt of a NOVA documentary, A Conversation with a Rampage Killer:

This is a YouTube video of the full documentary, Mind of a Rampage Killer, which first aired 02/20/2013:

The official video is available online but may be US-only viewing access:

Watch Mind of a Rampage Killer on PBS. See more from NOVA.

Tags: gun control, gun proliferation, gun regulation

PBS newshour series on gun violence (3)

PBS Newshour recently ran a series of reports focusing on gun violence, collected at their page on The Gun Debate. These are their reports from 02/19/2013:

Can Violent Video Games Play a Role in Violent Behavior?

Cassie Chew, Public Opinion May Support Expanded Gun Sale Background Checks, which includes this report, School shooting survivor advocates for expanded background checks on gun sales:

Tom LeGro, The Gun: a Trigger for Art:

Tags: gun control, gun proliferation, gun regulation

PBS newshour series on gun violence (2)

PBS Newshour recently ran a series of reports focusing on gun violence, collected at their page on The Gun Debate. These are their reports from 02/18/2013:

After Newtown, Gun Control Debate Spurs Political Action Across the Nation:

School Shooter: 'My Grand Plan Was Suicide by Cop', which includes several videos related to a particular school shooting in 2001, including "I Couldn't Comprehend the Consequences":

Colorado Communities Grapple With How to Address Gun Violence:

Tags: gun control, gun proliferation, gun regulation

PBS newshour series on gun violence (1)

PBS Newshour recently ran a series of reports focusing on gun violence, collected at their page on The Gun Debate. These are their reports from 02/15/2013:

Coloradans Respond to Gun Violence with article by Mary Jo Brooks:

Video Games: Violent, Yes. But Do They Make Us Violent? with article by Jeffrey Brown:

Arm Teachers or Ban Video Games? Students Debate in Google Hangout:

On violence and video games, check out this Salon piece by Daniel Greenberg, Lay off WoW, GOP! 03/08/2013. Unlike the Republicans, I don't want to ban scientific research on the topic. But I find it very hard to conceive that playing video combat games plays any meaningful role in driving anyone over, say, the age of six to commit real-world acts of violence. It's both factually questionable at the very best, and carries unpleasant ethical and legal calculation. Search for "twinkie defense," for instance. Especially given the antiabortion movements increasingly prominent tendency to try to minimize the serious of rape - also a violent crime - I don't want to see rapists start getting away with it because conservatives all decide that looking at dirty pichers drives the poor guys out of their minds. This isn't a slippery slope. It's an entire swamp of vacuous excuses for criminal acts.

Obama Makes Gun Control Push Personal With Visit to Hometown Chicago:

Tags: gun control, gun proliferation, gun regulation

The Grand Bargain to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is just as bad an idea now as in 2009

Digby has been closely following President Obama-Brüning's effort to strike a Grand Bargain to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (aka, "entitlements") since before his first inauguration in 2009. She's been the best analyst I know of on the whole rotten idea.

In How to succeed as an opposition party without really trying Hullabaloo 03/08/2013, she reminds us again what a bad concept in was for everyone except Republican greedheads like Peter Peterson who have been looking to get their hands on the Social Security cash flow and rake huge investment banking profits off of it:

The original calculation of the Grand Bargain was always daft: deficit reduction in a time of massive unemployment and a moribund economy. And even worse that the Bargain was defined as some sort of amorphous "revenue" from people who won't even feel it in exchange for benefits cuts to some of the neediest people in the country. This is also known as a "balanced approach" (to a problem that doesn't doesn't need fixing.) That we've taken a hatchet to discretionary programs is just frosting on the cake. Well played.

The bottom line is this: I think it would be nice to raise some more "revenue." But it is definitely not worth this price and I doubt very seriously it will last any longer than the Clinton tax hikes lasted --- that is until the Republicans regain the presidency. They are not going to overnight become friendly to the idea of progressive taxation, so whatever tiny little accommodation we get now is it, and it's very temporary. But the people of this country will be suffering for many, many years from the cuts to vital programs that were given up in this Bargain.

In an earlier post, The Village: "very, very privileged people wanting to make sure they cut spending on everybody else?" 03/07/2013, she writes:

... we've had a bipartisan National Security policy for decades, one that has always placed a premium on our continued global military hegemony. There is nothing particularly new about that, as appalling as it is. But a Democratic president leading the way to cutting Social Security and Medicare is something new. There was a time when that would have been unthinkable. I've said it before, but it's more and more obvious to me that if the Democratic Party sells out its constituents on "entitlements" --- which they fought for and defended for over half a century, particularly at a time when their authentic democratic political power is stronger than it's been in over three decades, I'm hard pressed to see what the rationale for their continued existence really is. [my emphasis in bold]

She refers to an article on Social Security by Tom Edsall, who she describes as a "highly respected political reporter Tom Edsall, The War On Entitlements New York Times 03/06/2013.

Whenever referring to Edsall, I feel obligated to include the qualifier that, although he does some solid reporting and has for years, his analysis has an aggravating liberal-concern-troll aspect that has irritated me since I read his Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (1991). He often analyses in terms that broadly agree with conservative talking points of the moment, thought phrased in a way to imply that he's a liberal who views his results sorrowfully. After having seen his arguments so often tending that way, I'm tempted to read that even into his conclusion in this piece:

Elite anxiety over entitlement-driven budget deficits and accumulating national debt has created a powerful class in the nation’s capital. The agenda of this class is in many respects on a collision course with mounting demands for action by those lower down the ladder to address the threat to government social insurance programs. Intransigent opposition by the better off and their representatives to raising the necessary revenue means that not only Social Security and Medicare face a budgetary ax.

Among the additional likely casualties: WIC, which provides free nutrition for women, infants and children; long-term and emergency unemployment compensation benefits; low-income housing vouchers; vaccines for poor children; schooling for children with disabilities; special education; preschool programs; child care for disadvantaged and vulnerable children; after-school programs; treatment of the mentally ill; and meals for sick and homebound seniors.

This conflict could not have come at a more difficult time: the United States is in the midst of a zero sum struggle requiring politicians to pick losers, not winners. The population of those over 65 is set to multiply, with longevity steadily increasing even as median annual household income for the population at large has shrunk to $51,584 in January 2013 from $54,000 in 2008.

In this kind of conflict over limited goods, one of the most valuable resources that can get lost in the fray is the wisdom of the electorate at large. In this case, the electorate is pointing toward progressive tax increases for those closer to the top far more readily than members of the political class, for whom high-earners are a crucial source of campaign contributions.

But however Edsall himself regards the value of that outcome, he is correct in describing the strong pressures to cut benefits on Social Security and Medicare and other programs that benefit others than only the super-rich. Pressures actively encouraged right now by Medicare opponent Barack Obama.

Digby's comment on the effect of the Democrats supporting cuts in benefits to benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, "I'm hard pressed to see what the rationale for their continued existence really is", really resonates with me. Although it's like what I think of a classic Jesuit comment that first makes me think, "Something's not quite right about that." But then I find myself not being able to think about the issue without taking account of that comment.

I have a hard time envisioning what that might mean in practice for the Democrats to lose "the rationale for their continued existence." There's always the standard third-party slogans to apply: there's not a dime's worth of difference between the two parties, if you vote for the lesser of two evils you'll get what you vote for, etc.

But even in a world in which politicians wouldn't even bother to pretend they were anything but corporate whores - how hard many of them are already to that point might be a matter of some discussion - there would still be competition between individuals to be first in line to collect their fees. And as long as elections are happening, there is always some room for people advocating positions not 100% consistent with a state of corporate whoredom to get a hearing, and even occasionally get elected. Even in the one-party segregated South, there were intense contests, including contests around issues, among candidates in the Democratic Party primaries as they competed for a majority of the white vote, nonwhites not normally having a vote to cast.

But I do think a Democratic Party that joins the Republicans, as Medicare opponent Obama-Brüning wants to do, in opposing the most basic social "safety net" programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, will put us into a fundamentally different political era for the Democratic Party.

I'm confident in saying it will not look like the postpartisan, end-of-ideology state on which Obama-Brüning seems to be so fixed. That happy state in which all "ideological" issues are settled: the requirement that rich people pay taxes to support their country, women grousing about how they should be able to control their own ladyparts, minorities complaining about being discriminated against, aspiring mall shooters griping that libruls are trying to limit their access to guns, workers thinking they have a right to join unions, old people expecting some kind of retirement in minimal dignity and with access to health care, all those will be resolved. All that will be left to discuss in politics will be technocratic issues, like which wars we should start this year, how much public land should be handed over to the extractive industries and at how low a price, and which new job-exporting, antilabor international trade agreements should be approved. The annoying public would happily accede to the advice of their betters in the corporate boardrooms, Wall Street casinos, K Street lobbying firms, the Pentagon and the pundits on TV talk-fests. And they will do their civic duty to show up every couple of years to select which corporate whore they think has greater celebrity appeal.

Shakira doesn't necessarily come first to mind when you think "protest song." But her song "Timor" comes to mind in this context:

It's alright, it's alright
The system never fails
The good guys are in power
And the bad guys are in jail

It's alright, it's alright
Just as long as we can vote
We'll have a democracy
And that's what we promote

Isn't it? Isn't it?

That is on her Oral Fixation Vol. 2 album from 2005, when George W. Bush was using "democracy promotion" as a prominent justification for perpetual war.

Tags: austerity economics, barack obama, comprehensive immigration reform, grand bargain, gun regulation, medicaid, medicare, shakira, social security

President Obama-Brüning is in full-tilt push again to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid

The PBS Newshour has the full video of Social Security opponent Barack Obama's press conference of 03/01/2013, President Obama Calls Spending Cuts "Dumb, Arbitrary", in which he was in Heinrich Brüning mode:

That news conference today is a great example of the disparity between the parties right now. The Republicans are proud of causing havoc because that's what their base wants. Our Democratic President, though, brags about fighting for destructive things that his own Party's voters oppose. So do big majorities of the public when it comes to cutting benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, which seems to be Obama's only real goal in this sequester fight. From the WH transcript: "And what I've said very specifically, very detailed is that I'm prepared to take on the problem where it exists -- on entitlements -- and do some things that my own party really doesn't like. ... I am prepared to do hard things and to push my Democratic friends to do hard things."

In the video, you can see that he has to catch himself not to say FOX-style "my Democrat friends" there.

Also: "There are members of my party who violently disagree with the notion that we should do anything on Medicare. And I'm willing to say to them, I disagree with you, because I want to preserve Medicare for the long haul." As I mentioned in a post yesterday, the latter isn't true. Cutting benefits on Medicare is something every Democrat including the Democratic President should be fighting against. But Medicare supporters are stressing that the problem of health-care costs in Medicare is part of the larger growth of health-care costs. There have also been some recent indications that the longer-term trend of rising health-care expense is not so drastic as virtually everyone has been assuming for years.

In any case, Medicare does a better job of controlling health care costs than private insurance or the Great God Free Market does, because of Medicare's lower administrative costs, its bargaining power with suppliers, its evaluations of the effectiveness of treatments, and its coverage of preventive care.

Tags: austerity economics, barack obama, comprehensive immigration reform, grand bargain, gun regulation, medicaid, medicare, social security

President Obama-Brüning squanders his new mandate

President Obama-Brüning is working hard to drown the new mandate he won four months ago in the swamp of austerity economics.

Steve Kornacki breaks down the sad story for us in It's almost like the Tea Party won Salon 03/06/2013: "It's all a long way of saying we’re probably stuck with the sequester for the rest of this fiscal year – and maybe well beyond that. It's an outcome almost no one saw coming a year ago, and one made all the more remarkable by the fact that the most recent election seemed to represent a rebuke of the GOP and its embrace of Tea Party fiscal values."

One Percenter austerity economics (for everyone else!) can dominate in the current situation even when the voters decisively repudiate it, as we did in November 2012, because of the extyreme disparity of the two parties. The Republicans are willing to disrupt the government and tank the national economy in order to discredit Obama and the Democrats. The Democrats, on the other hand, weren't even willing to do something so obvious to limit the minority party's power to obstruct as abolishing the filibuster in the Senate. Nor, when they were in the minority during the Cheney-Bush Administration, were they willing to use the filibuster power against the Republicans on anything remotely approaching the scale the Republicans have used it against them.

Just plain corruption, of both the legal and illegal varieties, certainly play a big role in this. Campaign cash and post-Congressional rewards are more likely to come to Democrats who deliver corporate-friendly and labor-hostile results than to ones who support their consituents.

The current sequester cuts are significant. As the Dow Jones Industrial average hit its highest level ever, cuts affecting ordinary workers are kicking in. Robert Reich advises in Why There’s a Bull Market for Stocks And Bear Market for Workers 03/05/2013:

Some $1.9 billion in low-income rental subsidies are being eliminated, affecting 125,000 people. Cuts to the Department of Agriculture will eliminate rental assistance for another 10,000 low-income rural people. Meanwhile, 100,000 formerly homeless Americans are likely to be removed from their current emergency shelters.

More than 3.8 million Americans receiving long-term unemployment benefits will have their monthly payments reduced by as much as 9.4 percent, and lose an average of $400 in benefits over their period of joblessness.

The Department of Education’s Title I program, which helps schools serving more than a million disadvantaged students, will be cut $715 million, and $400 million will be cut from Head Start, the preschool program for poor children. And major cuts will be made in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, which provides nutrition assistance and education.

Eliot Spitzer talks about the current situation in The downside of the Dow's uptick for average Americans Current TV 04/06/2013:

But Obama-Brüning is particularly crass in his contempt for the very voters who elected and re-elected him. In his March 1 press conference on the sequester, he was bragging about how he supports cuts in benefits on "entitlements" (Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid) that not only Democratic voters but the general public oppose by large margins:

The problem that we have is a long-term problem in terms of our health care costs and programs like Medicare. And what I've said very specifically, very detailed is that I'm prepared to take on the problem where it exists -- on entitlements -- and do some things that my own party really doesn't like -- if it's part of a broader package of sensible deficit reduction. So the deal that I've put forward over the last two years, the deal that I put forward as recently as December is still on the table. I am prepared to do hard things and to push my Democratic friends to do hard things. [my emphasis]

Those deal offers to which he refers have included cuts in Social Security benefits using the "Chained CPI" gimmick and raising the Medicare eligibility age by two years to 67, a huge and very consequential cut to Medicare.

He returned to the theme:

... it's not as if Democrats aren't being asked to do anything, either, to compromise. There are members of my party who violently disagree with the notion that we should do anything on Medicare. And I'm willing to say to them, I disagree with you, because I want to preserve Medicare for the long haul. And we're going to have some tough politics within my party to get this done.

This is not a situation where I'm only asking for concessions from Republicans and asking nothing from Democrats.

His claim "There are members of my party who violently disagree with the notion that we should do anything on Medicare" of course isn't true. Do you know any Democratic elected official saying we should do nothing to control health care cost? Me neither.

Are we really at the point where we have to hope that Republican crazies hold fast against a Democratic President pushing to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid? Part of me still find that hard to process.

Kornacki notes that, despite pre-sequester indications that voters might blame Republicans more than Democrats and Obama-Brüning, "so far, public opinion has actually trended in the GOP's favor. Before sequestration went into effect last Friday, polling indicated that voters would be much more likely to blame Republicans than Obama. But a new CBS survey this week finds the public assigning blame almost evenly."

Reuters in Obama Approval Rating: President's Numbers Drop 7 Points, Poll Shows Huffington Post 03/06/2013 reports:

A Reuters/Ipsos online poll released on Wednesday showed 43 percent of people approve of Obama's handling of his job, down 7 percentage points from Feb. 19.

Most of that steep drop came in the week to Feb. 26 when it was becoming clear that Washington was going to be unable to put aside partisan differences and agree to halt automatic budget cuts which started last Friday.

Confounding the White House's efforts to blame Republicans for the cuts, most respondents in the online survey hold both Democrats and Republicans responsible.

Public opinion can be fickle, so we'll see how this develops.

But it doesn't surprise me. Obama's approval ratings cratered during the debt ceiling negotiations of 2011. And Obama does share a good portion of the blame, starting with not recognizing that the Republican Party is such a wrecker party they so far won't even accept his proposed benefit cuts on Social Security and Medicare. Plus, he looks to be back in his 2011 mode of begging the Reps to accept concessions, having them jack him around some more, then begging them again to accept even more concessions, over and over. And the sequester arrangement was something he willingly agreed to. (See Dean Baker, The Sequester Is President Obama's Fault Huffington Post 03/04/2013) Plus he continues to frame the economic issue in the Reps' preferred terms of The Deficit, The Deficit, The Deficit, and *brags* about wanting to cut benefits on very popular programs like Social Security and Medicare.

Obama-Brüning is squandering his mandate.

But in 2017, he can go on the road with Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson earning huge speaking fees from CEOs and investment bankers who enjoy being entertained with advice about how we have to toss more starving grannies into the street. And the rest of us can enjoy the 1st term of President Jeb Bush. Because we can never get enough of that good Bush family governance.

Or, given the current President's Heinrich Brüning act, maybe I should say that in 2017 we'll be dealing with President Jeb von Papen, after successor.

Tags: austerity economics, barack obama, comprehensive immigration reform, grand bargain, gun regulation, medicaid, medicare, social security