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Tim Kaine, DNC Chair, carries water for the right

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, who is an alleged Democrat, former long shot candidate for President, and current head of the DNC, just signed a law allowing Virginians to buy “Choose Life” license plates. The proceeds go to fund anti-abortion front groups posing as pregnancy clinics.

Kaine, who is allegedly in favor of a woman’s right to choose, explained that he would be perfectly willing to sign a bill allowing for similar plates for Planned Parenthood, a pledge he will no doubt never have to back up with deeds.

We can assume he was telling the truth about that pledge, but it doesn’t justify the decision. The state has no business raising money for advocacy groups, and it particularly has no business raising money for groups that conduct their business by deception. The whole point of the organizations funded by these groups is to maintain a facade of professionalism while pursuing a religious agenda.

This incident shines yet another light on a certain asymmetry between the way in which Republicans and Democrats operate. Republicans go out of their way to placate their bases (see S.C. Governor Sanford) even when it hurts them with the general public; Democrats go out of their way to outrage their base, even when the general public is with their base, or doesn’t much care. In the end, each approach is self destructive. Though the Republicans may at the moment be inflicting more damage on themselves, the Democratic way is more mystifying. The country is moving left, and the Democrats insist on burnishing their credentials with an ever more irrelevant right.


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Republicans threaten to go nuclear, again

Monday, April 6, 2009

I must admit to being mystified at the workings of the United States Senate, the ways of which passeth all understanding.

Bernie Sanders has put a hold on another terrible Obama financial policy nominee, a fellow named Gary Gensler, who Obama has nominated to a seat on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Gensler is best known for opposing regulations of all of the financial instruments, the unregulated use of which has led to economic disaster. Obama has consistently appointed such foxes to look after all kinds of financial chicken coops, and Sanders isn’t pleased. But check this out:

Last week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) seemed to be pushing the nomination toward a conclusion. A reporter mentioned the hold that Sanders had placed on the nomination and asked if Reid would be moving forward.

“Yes, we will move forward on it,” he responded.

Now, Sanders caucuses with the Democrats, but Reid appears to consider his hold no more than a minor annoyance. Reid, the guy who loudly proclaims his own impotence when it comes to stopping Republican holds and filibusters, apparently gets a Viagra rush when the threat comes from his own side of the aisle.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are trying to blackmail Obama into covering up Bush’s crimes. They are threatening to “go nuclear” if he doesn’t agree to keep the remaining torture legal memos secret. That’s right, the ones that were made public are the milder ones. Maybe the secret ones get into more detail, like specifying precisely how many volts may be applied to which particular part of the genitals.

But, you may say, doesn’t the phrase “go nuclear” refer to a threat by the majority to abolish the filibuster? How would abolishing the filibuster help the Republicans? Well, the phrase once meant just that. Now it means the opposite: a threat to filibuster all Obama Justice Department nominees, particularly those with a record of opposing torture, unless Obama agrees to protect Bush and the rest of the criminal conspiracy.

If the Republicans truly are recycling that phrase, shouldn’t the Democrats be reminding them of its original meaning, and suggesting, and not so gently, that the Democrats may just take a page from the Republican book unless they sit down and shut up. It is, by now, painfully obvious that the Republicans intend to pervert the process until someone stops them. To date, the Republicans have paid no price, and been threatened with no retribution, if they keep this up. At least on this issue, the Obama administration seems to be quaking at the prospect of this threat, and is backing off on releasing the memos. Can they be so thick as to not understand that caving like this merely encourages more bad behavior. It’s time for the Democrats to “go nuclear”, in the 2005 sense of the phrase.

The threat that the Republicans might then use alternative means of slowing down the Senate is a hollow one: they have already reduced the Senate to a legislative laughing stock that can achieve nothing.


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Spring Progress Report

Sunday, April 5, 2009

I can’t really bring myself to think about politics today, so I’m posting a few pictures. One of the nice things about blogging is that ultimately you can put up anything you want.

This year I’m thinking about regularly posting pictures of my wife’s garden. Right now, the only thing growing is the garlic, which is planted in the fall.

The Star Magnolia in our yard is just beginning to bloom. These pictures show the various phases of the budding process.

None so far have fully bloomed. By next week they’ll probably all be out. The Daffodils, by the way, are coming up, though not yet blooming.


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First Gasp for a New Geezer

Sunday, April 5, 2009

I have to pay tribute to a friend of ours, who celebrated his 60th birthday last night with a big bash at the German club in Mystic. Peter and his wife, depicted below, are good Democrats both. He and I were both committed Lamont delegates at the 2006 state convention.

Music was provided by the Rock and Soul Revue, performing some of the best of the music from the sixties. They were great. Some cynics might say that the dance floor was full of nascent geriatrics, desperately trying to re-live their youths. Those cynics would probably be right, but we all had a good time anyway. Besides, we can still lay claim to having been around when the best music ever was being made, and, as the poet said, “to be young was very heaven” (so long as you kept your ass stateside).


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Nationally known

Saturday, April 4, 2009

Atul Shah, who wrote a guest post for this blog recently, has made our chapter of Drinking Liberally nationally famous.

Listen here

The show was in New York, which explains the seemingly gratuitous statement about New York.

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Friday Night Music for Hard Times

Friday, April 3, 2009

This week, rather than searching for a song by a specific artist, I decided to search for the best version(s) of a song. I first heard this song on an album of Stephen Foster’s music sung by Thomas Hampson, a classical music singer. The album is called American Dreamer, and if you think Stephen Foster is just Oh Susanna, you should give the album a listen, though rock and roll it definitely is not. Hampson’s version is on youtube, but with no video.

The song is Hard Times Come Again No More, which seems timely. The prevailing wisdom on youtube is that it is a Civil War era song, but that’s not the case. It dates to 1854, and it clearly references a time of economic hardship in which even our often inadequate social “safety net” didn’t exist.

The song lends itself to all kinds of arrangements. Sticking to my criteria of no lip synching, I’ve chosen two that I think lead the pack. The first is Bob Dylan, singing a hard scrabble version at a Willie Nelson tribute concert.

The second is in an entirely different style, by James Taylor and Yo-Yo Ma, from Ma’s Appalachian Journey album.

Honorable mention to Mavis Staples, who loses out because of the lip synching ban.

UPDATE: In response to popular demand (see comments), I’m putting Mavis Staples up. I’m still not convinced about the lip synching.


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Unintended consequences

Friday, April 3, 2009

Chris Hayes of the Nation, who many of us know from his frequent appearances on Countdown, has uncovered a truly marvelous example of corporate perversion of the tax laws:

Thanks to an obscure tax provision, the United States government stands to pay out as much as $8 billion this year to the ten largest paper companies. And get this: even though the money comes from a transportation bill whose manifest intent was to reduce dependence on fossil fuel, paper mills are adding diesel fuel to a process that requires none in order to qualify for the tax credit. In other words, we are paying the industry–handsomely–to use more fossil fuel. “Which is,” as a Goldman Sachs report archly noted, the “opposite of what lawmakers likely had in mind when the tax credit was established.”

The massive tax subsidy has barely been reported in the press, but it’s caused a stir in the paper industry, which is struggling to stay profitable in the teeth of the recession. “Everybody’s talking about it,” paper industry analyst Brian McClay told me. “In the US and elsewhere in the world–in Canada and Brazil and Chile and Europe.”

Previously, the paper companies got all the energy they needed purely as a by product of the process by which they turned paper into wood. Adding diesel fuel to the process amounts to a gratuitious use of the fuel. As a hedge fund manager (of all things) quoted by Hayes, remarked, “You use the toilet every day, Imagine if you could start pouring a little gasoline into the bowl and get fifty cents a gallon every time you flushed.”

Congress clearly did not intend this. Stay tuned to see if it will be corrected, or whether the paper industry’s lobbyists will convince our representatives that this subsidy and waste is in the national interest. After all, Congress has still not seen its way clear to taxing that hedge fund manager at the same rate as his secretary.


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Courtney does good, Himes not so much

Friday, April 3, 2009

You would think that Congress would be wary of sanctioning more bonuses at bailed out institutions, particularly at AIG, but of course you’d only be partly right. Congress is more than happy to help those bankers, so long as it can do so in a way that, at least at the moment, is totally opaque (that being the opposite of transparent). The House recently considered a bill, co-sponsored among others, by Jim Himes, former Wall Streeter, to restrict bonuses at these government funded institutions.

In its original form, it required all TARP recipients to make all bonuses performance based, and sought to put an end to the $1 billion in retention bonuses still to be paid out in July and September this year by AIG per an agreement they reached with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. In other words, AIG could only pay out bonuses if the company actually did well, and couldn’t be doling them out while the company was losing money and on taxpayer life support.

Quite a hardship, isn’t it? Requiring bonuses to be performance based. Too much of a hardship, apparently, for all but 8 Republicans and 63 (that’s right, 63) Democrats, including, as it turned out, Himes himself.

What to do? How to preserve those bonuses while avoiding political heat?

Well, you amend the bill to exempt any TARP recipient that has started to repay the loans. So, all the bonus deprived crooks that caused this mess have to do to cash in is return a few of our dollars and they are home free. The repayment plan must be approved by the Treasury, but given Geithner’s performance on this, as on so many other issues, don’t expect that he’ll impose onerous terms. In any event, what’s the justification for paying bonuses to people just for remaining on a job that plenty of ex-Wall Streeters would be happy to fill.

The other four Connecticut Congressfolks, including our Joe Courtney, voted against the amendment. Here’s hoping that there’s a political price to pay next year for those who figured they could ignore the public’s feeling about this issue so long as they could do so in a backdoor manner. And here’s hoping beyond hope that Treasury will impose significant payback requirements as a condition of getting the waiver.


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Tit for tat, not for the Democrats

Thursday, April 2, 2009

26 Democrats have gone on record opposed to using the reconciliation process to pass climate change legislation, thus handing the Republicans a victory without cost to them. Most of those Democrats will most likely take the same position on health care, thus dooming the American people to a broken health care system, and thus a broken social system and economy, for the foreseeable future. All this because the Democrats don’t want to be seen as being unfair to the Republicans by using a parliamentary tactic that was used against them, time and again, by the Republicans.

There is an oft misunderstood Biblical injunction that prescribes “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”. In the days when it was written punishments were often meted out that were disproportionate, as they so often are even today. The Biblical injunction was a limitation on the severity of a punishment, a ceiling and not a floor. That formula of equivalent penalty is one the Democrats should keep in mind.

Years ago I read an article in the Scientific American, the burden of which was that the best way to prevent bad behavior, including bad political behavior, is to engage in a tit for tat. That is, if your opponent does something to you, you should do something equivalent to them. No more, but no less. An overreaction causes a spiraling series of provocations; overreaction is therefore “too hot”. Underreaction, or (as the Democrats prefer) no reaction is “too cold”. Equivalent reaction is “just right”. This is the reaction most likely to prevent future tits, so to speak. The Democrats were subjected to numerous tits, and their reluctance to deliver any tats will surely come back to haunt them, when their inability to deliver on their promises puts them back in the minority, as it most surely will, and sooner than you might think. When the Republicans are back in the saddle they will revert to their own ways, all their talk about respect for the rights of the minority forgotten. The Democrats can delay their return to minority status, and prevent those future tits, if they engage in a few tats now. Don’t hold your breath.


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Larry Summers’ past at Harvard

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

It’s been only about 70 days, but already Bush is beginning to seem like a bad memory. Obama has been a breath of fresh air in many ways, but there’s some notable exceptions, made all the more depressing for the very reason that they are so few.

The most notable exception is the quality of his economic team, which is top-heavy with the folks, or the enablers of the folks, who gave us the economic crash. Chief among them is Larry Summers, about whom there is more news today. It seems while he was at Harvard (as its president, not as a student) he was involved in firing a woman who had the temerity to warn him that the Harvard endowment was being invested in derivatives that were not understood by the folks who were doing the investing. The story (via TPM Muckraker) was broken by the Harvard Crimson:

A former quantitative analyst at Harvard Management Company, the university’s once-vaunted endowment manager, tells the Harvard Crimson she was fired for voicing concern to then-university president Larry Summers’ chief of staff about the money manager’s risky use of derivatives the traders didn’t understand.

From the Crimson:

“The group I was working for had no background whatsoever to be working on [derivatives],” Mack says, adding that, to her knowledge, several of her colleagues were not licensed securities traders. “Sometimes the ways they handled even basic Black-Scholes models [widely used to price stock options] were puzzling.”

Back to TPM:

So Mack took inventory of the abuses — high employee turnover, lax risk management practices and a “low level of productivity in the workplace” were among others, and detailed them in an email to Marne Levine, Summers’ chief of staff and a Treasury staffer on the Obama Transition Team. (Summers was the only person to whom Meyers reported, and according to a recent Forbes story he personally ordered the university’s biggest derivatives trade, a purchase of interest rate swaps that cost the university billions this year.)

She was fired quite explicitly for raising these issues, even though she was told that the communications would be kept confidential. Of course, what’s important for us is the fact that this is just another example of Summer’s faith in these financial instruments, which thanks to his genius have caused such losses at Harvard. This is not a man who is capable of perceiving that the economic system needs fundamental restructuring, because for him to perceive that, he would have to admit that he has been consistently wrong for a very long period of time. People with outsize egos can’t do that sort of thing, and from all accounts, Summers has an outsize ego. Rather than creating a new economic order, Summers is invested in re-establishing one in which he believes and with which he is comfortable. That’s very bad news for the rest of us.


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