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An out of touch Congress

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

This post ( Why is the Democratic Congress so unpopular?) by Glenn Greenwald hits the nail on the head:

For the past several months, Congress’ approval ratings have been as low as, and often lower than, George Bush’s unprecedentedly low ratings. Various media pundits and right-wing advocates use this fact constantly to insinuate that Bush is not uniquely unpopular and Americans have not really turned against Republicans, but rather, there is just a generic dissatisfaction with our political institutions, or more misleadingly still, that Americans are actually angry at Congress for not “doing enough” (by which it is meant that they are excessively investigating and obstructing and not “cooperating” enough).

But the reason for these low approval ratings is as clear as it is meaningful — the overall ratings for Congress are so low because Democrats disapprove of the Democratic Congress almost as much as Republicans do. There is nothing unusual about how Republicans or independents rate the Democratic Congress; the only aspect of any of this that is unusual is that Democrats rate the Congress so low even though it is controlled by their own party. Virtually every poll demonstrates this.

…

If Democrats approved of their Congress even close to the rate that Republicans approve of Bush, then Congress’ approval ratings would be at a fairly average level, even high. But not only is Congress’ unpopularity due primarily to Democratic anger, the recent drops in Congressional popularity are due almost exclusively to growing Democratic and independent (but not Republican) frustration with the Congress:

The nine-point drop in Congress’ job approval rating from last month to this month has come exclusively from Democrats and independents, with Democrats’ ratings dropping 11 points (from 32% to 21%) and independents’ ratings dropping 13 points (from 30% to 17%). Republicans’ 18% approval rating is unchanged from last month.

Since Democrats took over Congress in January, there have been three major attributes characterizing their conduct: (1) a failure to stop or restrict the war in Iraq; (2) a general failure/unwillingness to stop Bush on much of anything else of significance (FISA, a failure to reverse any of the excesses of the GOP Congress, such as the Military Commissions Act, lack of limits on his ability to attack Iran, etc.); and (3) numerous investigations, sometimes flashly but thus far inconsequential. There is no rational way to argue that the numerous investigations (item (3)) are responsible for Congressional unpopularity given how overwhelmingly Americans want Congressional investigations of the administration.

Generic ratings of Congress don’t mean much for individual Congressional races, but they do say something about the national mood. People tend to exempt their own Congressperson from their overall view of Congress. I proved that myself today when I happened to run into Joe Courtney on the street in Norwich. I immediately began berating him because Congress hadn’t impeached or imprisoned anyone yet, but I also told him he was doing a good job. Which he is, since he doesn’t run the show up there.

In any event, I think Greenwald is right, and something Joe said provided anecdotal confirmation. When I started railing about impeachment he told me I sounded like all the people at the town hall meeting he’d held the night before. We can only hope that Joe’s not the only one hearing from the pissed off majority. Maybe there’ll be some stiffened spines in Washington this September. It’s time for Karl Rove to see the inside of the Washington jail.

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Why Democrats are so pathetic

Monday, August 20, 2007

A couple of articles today, one from the Seminal (mostly quoting Jonathan Alter) and one from Firedoglake, set me to thinking about a critical difference between Democrats and Republicans. Oddly enough, the contrast illustrates how each party is deficient, in contrasting ways.

Alter discusses the cave in by the Democrats on the FISA bill, and reveals that the House Democratic leadership (despite the fact that 80% of the caucus was against this obscene unconstitutional power grab) decided to go on vacation because:

The private excuse was that the liberal base wouldn’t be satisfied no matter what they did, and that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid couldn’t make the more conservative Senate go along anyway.

When they controlled the Congress the Republicans passed bad legislation precisely because the base wanted it; the Democrats pass bad legislation because they assume their base can’t be satisfied. One side panders to the extreme, the other side blows off the folks that put them in the majority.

And why, really, does this happen?

That’s touched on in the Firedoglake article. Our unlamented former Congressman, Rob Simmons, was a member of a potentially powerful group of Congressman. As alleged “moderate” Republicans, they potentially held the balance of power in the Congress. The potential went unrealized. They allowed themselves to be neutered on every major issue, and most if not all of the minor ones. The Democrats have a similar group or groups, known as the Blue Dog Caucus and the New Democrats. Either of these groups hold the balance of power in the Congress, just as (potentially) did Simmons and his ilk. The difference is that these folks exercise that power, effectively handing control of the Congress to the Republicans on a variety of issues. The leadership, which controls the calendar, could prevent the damage on bills like FISA by simply not bringing them to a vote. The FISA bill never even went through hearings so it could easily have been stalled for months by that expedient. Moreover, those hearings could have been used as an opportunity to make Bush put up or shut up by requiring that he come clean about what he’s been doing. Nonetheless, it was the Blue Dogs and the New Democrats that delivered the bill to Bush. The Republicans completely cowed their “moderates”; the Democrats have no control over their conservatives at all.

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No more Friedman Units?

Sunday, August 19, 2007

More than a year ago Atrios coined the term Friedman Unit, which refers to the successive 6 month periods that Tom Friedman announced we should wait before declaring the war in Iraq a failure.

it appears from today’s very silly column that Tom might be covertly declaring that he has, for himself, decided that the last Friedman Unit has run its course.

First, the silliness:

You see, I have a simple view about both Arab-Israeli peace-making and Iraqi surge-making, and it goes like this: Any Arab-Israeli peace overture that requires a Middle East expert to explain to you is not worth considering. It’s going nowhere.

…

Ditto with Iraqi surges. If it takes a Middle East expert to explain to you why it is working, it’s not working. To be sure, it is good news if the number of Iraqis found dead in Baghdad each night is diminishing. Indeed, it is good news if casualties are down everywhere that U.S. troops have made their presence felt. But all that tells me is something that was obvious from the start of the war, which Donald Rumsfeld ignored: where you put in large numbers of U.S. troops you get security, and where you don’t you get insecurity.

This if fairly nonsensical. There are very good reasons why it sometimes does take expertise to explain things. Indeed, Friedman has been making a living pretending to be the expert who could explain to an increasingly restive public why it should allow one more Friedman unit for success. In today’s column he gives a clear statement of the kind of success he apparently expected:

There’s only one thing at this stage that would truly impress me, and it is this: proof that there is an Iraq, proof that there is a coalition of Iraqi Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds who share our vision of a unified, multiparty, power-sharing, democratizing Iraq and who are willing to forge a social contract that will allow them to maintain such an Iraq — without U.S. troops.

How hard could it be? Why won’t those darn Iraqis get past hundreds of years of history and tribal conflict and adopt a governmental system just like the one we pretend to have? Why can’t they all just get along?

But as I say, Friedman is apparently now willing to admit that the Iraqi invasion has been a failure. Not our failure of course, but a failure of the Iraqi people. After all, who could have known that the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds would not immediately form a liberal democratic system as soon as we finished blowing the place to bits?

In any event, the last Friedman Unit appears to be over. At least for Friedman. The concept, unfortunately lives on. (Cue Joe Lieberman)

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Deja vu all over again

Saturday, August 18, 2007

While wandering through the blogosphere I came across this post at Down with Tyranny in which Howie Klein discusses the recent spate of official factfinding visits to Iraq, during which the visitor is squired around the green zone and fed a line of bull by the military. These folks, most of them already war supporters, come back to tell us that things are going swimmingly. Some might say (though no one will) that they can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

As Yogi said, it’s deja vu all over again. Those of us who watched the Vietnam War from start to finish will recall that the same sort of thing happened during Vietnam. George Romney, Mitt’s father, famously complained that he had been brainwashed on one such trip. Things haven’t changed much. Having made the fatal mistake of telling the truth, albeit somewhat awkwardly, his political career was destroyed.

Of course, the brainwashing techniques were cruder then, and far less effective than those used today. Another advantage today’s brainwashers have is that the brains being washed are far smaller and most of them come pre-washed, having already learned to fiercely believe more impossible things than even the Red Queen could manage.

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No good deed goes unpunished

Friday, August 17, 2007

This was the last day of my vacation, and I celebrated in fine fashion.

Often, when I am out bike riding, I come upon a turtle crossing the road, and I alway stop and carry it to the other side, so as to avoid squashed turtle. I have always done this without mishap, but those were Connecticut turtles. Today’s turtle was of a different sort. Connecticut turtles generally wiggle a bit and retreat into their shells. This particular Vermont turtle (8 to 10 inches in diameter) did not take kindly to being saved. I actually got him to the other side of the rode without a problem, but he immediately turned himself around, so I attempted to point him in the general direction of safety.

That turned out to be a mistake. Within a short time he had a goodly piece of what the doctors later called my right forearm. In fact, he had such a good grip that he was hanging in the air from my arm, something like a very large, turtle shaped Christmas ornament hanging off a tree. My wife later said that I should have taken a picture, but oddly enough it never occured to me to do so. I did, however, have the presence of mind to get the turtle detached from my arm.

Prudence dictated that I seek medical help. Emergency rooms are few and far between in Vermont, so it took me several hours to get to Bennington, where I proceeded to wait for several more hours for a tetanus shot and a verdict on whether I needed stitches. As it turned out, the answer was no. I did, however, learn from my fellow patients in the ER that I was lucky not to lose a finger, it was probably a snapping turtle, and they make darned good eating. I also learned several theories about the proper way to carry a turtle or otherwise move one across the road. My technique was to hold the turtle on both sides toward the rear. The fellow next to me said you can grab them by the tail; someone else said there is a particular portion of the shell you can press which temporarily paralyzes them (I’m dubious about that one), others suggested prodding with a stick. Everyone seemed to agree that it was awfully funny that I was there because I was bitten by a turtle.

So, I spent the last day of my vacation in the ER because I tried to help a turtle. All clouds have silver linings-despite the wait I must say the folks in the hospital we’re quite nice. The doctor especially was incredibly friendly, even after he found out I was a lawyer.

Tomorrow it’s back to Connecticut and back to reality. But I will have a permanent souvenier of this year’s vacation on my right forearm.

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The limits of term limits

Thursday, August 16, 2007

In what can only be considered a precursor to an attempt to establish a Castro like dictatorship, Hugo Chavez is moving toward amending Venezuela’s Constitution to remove a term limit restriction which present prevents him from serving as President for life. It appears that the chances are good that he’ll get what he wants. No doubt there will be howls of protests from Republicans here, who will rightfully see it for what it is. Unfortunately, to a large extent, it’s a case of pots and kettles.

In this country we have seen a pattern of deification of Republican presidents by their followers, with talk, while they are in office, or relieving them from the two term limit that the Republicans passed in reaction to Roosevelt. We see the deification in the persistent attempts to add them to Mount Rushmore. There was talk at one point of putting Nixon up there, and persistent talk of adding Reagan. As I recall, that talk was scotched only when someone from the Park Service testified that there was no room for another president. Apparently it didn’t occur to anyone that they could transform say, Jefferson, into Reagan.

There was also talk of lifting the term limit restriction for Reagan, something he supported (allegedly for future presidents only). I invite consideration of an alternate world in which Bush’s unholy foray into Iraq had succeeded. The Republicans so eager to keep their distance now would be beating the drum to allow the man who would be dictator to continue to “serve”. The only thing that has saved us from that sorry fate is Bush’s utter incompetence, something from which Chavez apparently does not suffer. Even as it is, we have the hallmarks of at least a temporary dictatorship in Bush’s recent behavior, e.g., executive privilege for anyone connected with Bush, See, again e.g., the Republican National Committee’s recent refusal to comply with a subpoena from Congress because the White House might make the utterly bogus claim that documents in its possession are subject to executive privilege. That claim, if allowed by our compliant courts, would effectively condone the merger of a political party with the government (good only when the president is Republican), something that Bush has already done in practice. It would also effectively enable a president to immunize anyone and everyone from Congressional scrutiny.

We’ve avoided, so far, Venezuela’s coming fate, but there’s no reason to think we are immune. Bush’s abuses will harden into precedents, ready for re-use by the next Republican president. The two-term limit will be scant protection from the ever encroaching Republican executive. Yet another reason why the Democrats must come up with a way to strike back at Bush while he is still in office. The most effective way would seem to be the use of the inherent contempt power to put Karl and Harriet in jail. They don’t need any Republican help to take that step.

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Were Number 42!

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

In a recent post I passed on the view of the Economist that the United States was ranked number 17 in the standings of Democratic countries. Given the number of countries in the world, that still gave us a chance to make the playoffs, but it is still somewhat dispiriting to know you’re trailing Malta and Spain.

We could take some solace from the fact that any such ranking is necessarily subjective, sort of like the college rankings, which consistently fail to give my own alma mater the number one ranking it deserves.

But today, I must report on a far more objective ranking, which ranks not our freedom, but our longevity. We Americans are living longer, but not as long as folks in 40 other countries. That’s right, we’re number 42 in the rankings. Not only are we low in the standings, we have been plummeting faster than the Red Sox in August. Just 20 years ago, we were in eleventh place.

Countries that surpass the United States include Japan and most of Europe, as well as Jordan, Guam and the Cayman Islands.

All is not lost, we are ahead of a heck of a lot of countries.

The shortest life expectancies were clustered in sub-Saharan Africa, a region that has been hit hard by HIV and AIDS, famine and civil strife. Swaziland has the shortest, at 34.1 years, followed by Zambia, Angola, Liberia and Zimbabwe.

On the other hand, while Americans may not expect to live as long as other people, they are probably number one in the amount of time they can expect to spend working in the time they do have on this earth. Perhaps we should adopt a national motto, something of a melding of that of the State of New Hampshire and the Vulcan greeting: “Work Long and Die”.

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Insuring the rich stay rich

Monday, August 13, 2007

Must reading by Dean Baker at Truthout (Welfare as We Know It Now):

In the days before welfare reform, single mothers could collect five or six hundred dollars a month without working. That was what welfare looked like before 1996. In the Internet Age, welfare is about having the government do everything it can to make the rich absolutely as rich as possible.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald said many years ago, the rich are not like you or me: They need the government’s assistance to get by. There are all sorts of ways in which the government helps those who have the most.

…

At the moment, many of the high-flying hedge fund boys and girls find themselves in trouble because they invested heavily in subprime mortgages and other risky assets. With the housing bubble starting to deflate, some of these assets are nearly worthless and many are worth far less than what the hedge funds paid.

Hedge funds make big returns by making highly leveraged investments, meaning they borrow heavily to multiply their gains. The flip side in this story is that when the hedge funds bet wrong, they can lose much of their capital very quickly.

The hedge fund crew is desperately hoping the Federal Reserve Board will swoop in to save the day. Most immediately, they need lower interest rates. The hedge funds can only hang onto their assets as long as they can pay interest on the money they borrow. If interest rates fall, then an important source of pressure will be relieved.

Next, they need some sucker on whom they can dump their bad mortgages. The best candidates are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These government-backed firms created the secondary market in mortgage debt that allows banks to sell the mortgages they issue. It turns out the hedge funds have been big players in the secondary market, buying up hundreds of billions in mortgage debt that is going bad at a very rapid rate. The hedge fund boys will be lobbying Congress big-time to broaden the role of Fannie and Freddie so they can buy this bad debt and save them from large losses.

 With the Fed lowering interest rates and Fannie and Freddie buying up their junk bonds, the hedge fund managers may be able to make it through the housing market crash relatively unscathed. It might take a lot of help from the government to ensure their fortunes, but the rich are different from you and me.

This, by the way, is not an exclusively Republican response to the pain of the rich. When it comes to insuring that the rich stay rich, the Democrats are almost as zealous as the Republicans

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Nice work if you can get it

Monday, August 13, 2007

I don’t know the precise hole into which Karl Rove will now crawl, but one candidate, at least as a sideline, is the scam in which Linda Chavez, Reagan’s (and Bush’s proposed) Hispanic conservative is currently engaged. According to the Washington Post, she and her equally loathsome husband run three PACs, which have soaked over $24 million dollars from right wing nutjobs while spending approximately 1.5% of that in what could possibly be called political activities. The rest went into salaries for family members and more fundraising. Despite all the evidence, it appears that Chavez is not intentionally working for the Democrats.

“I guess you could call it the family business,” Chavez said in an interview.

And what a business. They needed to do something different, since they couldn’t seem to make honest work pay:

The family took a break from politics when Bill Clinton was elected president, briefly operating a Mexican restaurant in Gaithersburg called the Santa Fe Express, with Chavez taping television interviews on politics during the day and working the cash register at night. The restaurant went broke.

At that point, Chavez’s husband told the Post, they discovered the wonderful world of scamming right wing dupes. Well, he didn’t put it quite that way, but basically that’s what happened.

Considering the small amount of money actually spent productively, you might think that Chavez would at least know where it went, but…not so much:

The Latino Alliance, for instance, “did lots of telephone calls in the 2004 elections,” she said. “I believe we did some radio ads. We did outreach into the Latino communities to try and mobilize more pro-Republican votes.” (Emphasis added)

It would be wonderful if Karl decided to spend the next few years running his very own Chavez style PAC. Given his god like status with the GOP base, he could probably siphon off 10 times what Chavez is able to raise.

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Losing in Afghanistan

Sunday, August 12, 2007

Interesting article in the Times this morning about the failure in Afghanistan (you expected something else from these folks?). It contains the usual litany of failures, incompetence and faith based governance. Nothing new there.

I found two things interesting. One was the fact that almost all of the sources were on the record. Apparently the fear that the Bush machine inspired in the early going has dissipated. Bush may have the Democrats cowed, but no one else seems frightened.

The second thing that struck me was this:

Despite warnings about the Taliban’s resurgence from Mr. Neumann, Mr. Khalilzad and military officials, Ms. Rice said, “there was no doubt that people were surprised that the Taliban was able to regroup and come back in a large, well-organized force.”

Poor Condi has a knack for pleading that the foreseeable is unforseeable. No one could have predicted that people would use planes as weapons, no one had any idea that the Niger weapons claims were overblown, and no one had any idea that the Taliban might regroup. Except the experts, but who listens to them?

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