Month: March 2015

Erick Erickson was fairly succinct when he found out that John Boehner was going to fund the Department of Homeland Security through the end of the fiscal year without having any strings attached to the funding.

I told y’all he was lying when he puffed his chest and said he’d stop the President. He had no intention of doing so. And now Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) will ensure President Obama’s executive amnesty is funded.

He will, like so many other Republican leaders, hide behind a court to fight for him. Coward.

All afternoon I have been trying to find a good analogy for this. My first thought was the Black Knight from Monty Python and The Holy Grail: “Running away, eh? You yellow bastards! Come back here and take what’s coming to ya! I’ll bite your legs off!”

Somehow, this didn’t quite capture the insane futility of Sir Erick and his Round Table of the conservative Freedom Caucus. After all, Erickson isn’t yelling at the Democrats. He’s yelling at Sir John the Not-Quite-So-Brave-As-Sir-Mitch.

Or is it the other way around?

I don’t know. Who can tell with these miscreants?

Maybe the better analogy is the Japanese soldier who, stranded on some remote Pacific island, refuses to believe that the Emperor couldn’t have prevailed if he had just fought on a little longer. Maybe he doesn’t believe that the Emperor has surrendered at all.

No wait, Erickson knows full well that the Republicans surrendered. He predicted it all along.

Where is the analogy I seek?

Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), a close ally of Boehner’s, made the motion Tuesday to use an obscure House rule to bring the Senate-passed funding bill to a House vote…

…Simpson blasted the conservatives’ strategy as a path destined to fail. He pointed out the DHS funding bill doesn’t contain money for processing the executive actions in the first place, since those are funded by fees.

“What it will lead to is a closedown of the Department of Homeland Security. And that is not a victory. That is dangerous,” Simpson said…

Rep. Simpson was perhaps constrained by the rules of the House or he might have said what he actually meant, which was, “You people are out of your goddamned minds!”

Instead, we got this, “I will fight with anyone, and I will stand on their side, as long as they can show me a path to potential victory.”

Simpson is no kamikaze.

There was no path to victory for the Republicans, and every sane person knew this from the moment that the Knights demanded a hostage. But we all had to go through the motions of accommodating the lunatics. We all had to pretend that the votes they forced and the delays they caused were part of a real fight between two parties where the outcome was in some doubt. After all, it was theoretically possible that Mike Tyson could have had a coronary in the 30 seconds it took him to knock out Michael Spinks.

The Knights didn’t even have that kind of chance of winning.

In the end, what can you say about the Republicans’ performance here?

They smelt of elderberries.

Benjamin Netanyahu gave his speech. Now people can analyze what he said and what impact it will have. Personally, I didn’t watch it. Too much crap has gone on in my personal life over the last week, and I didn’t need to add any stress. I’m doing just fine in that department, thank you.

Of course, this means that I don’t have much to say about the particulars of Netanyahu’s performance or the congressional reaction it received.

What I know, I knew before he ever spoke a word. I’ve never seen it so respectable to voice denunciations of Israel on the American left. I’ve never seen an American administration this angry with an Israeli administration.

There is always a danger of lumping. Just like George W. Bush didn’t speak for all Americans, Netanyahu doesn’t speak for all Israelis. And, Netanyahu’s rhetoric notwithstanding, being a Jew is not the same thing as being an Israeli. And, opposing Israel’s policies is not the same thing as opposing or have ill-will towards the Jewish people.

Netanyahu, however, does his best to conflate all of these things so that if you oppose him, you oppose Israel, and if you oppose Israel, you’re an anti-Semite. He makes it harder for people to maintain these barriers between how they feel about each area. So, the result, I think, is that a lot of people respond to Netanyahu by becoming very angry with Israel, and then take his invitation to displace this anger onto all Israelis, and then all Jews.

Now, I’m not Jewish, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t worry about anti-Semitism. Most of my closest friends are at least half-Jewish. And I think they get stressed when they listen to Netanyahu. It’s probably better for people in their situation to talk about how this makes them feel than for me to try to explain it for them. But I sense their discomfort. I know it’s real.

In Ed Kilgore’s piece in the new issue of the Washington Monthly, he comes out of the box making a couple of astute points.

In late January a once-dominant figure in Republican politics suddenly began hinting at a presidential run and got a lot of negative feedback. It had to make Mitt Romney feel better.

Yes, 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin pointedly refused to take herself out of the running for 2016. There were few cheers. And in a first, when Palin subsequently gave a scatterbrained and embarrassingly juvenile speech at Representative Steve King’s Iowa Freedom Summit, conservatives were as scornful as liberals.

In part that’s because the ratio between her brief career of statewide public office in Alaska and her subsequent self-promoting isn’t improving. But in part it’s also because she’s proved to be eminently replaceable in Republican politics.

In Palin’s case, I like using the idea of a ratio between what she has actually accomplished politically and the quantity of exposure to her the American public has endured. It’s true, the ratio gets worse every day, and that does help explain why she gets more ludicrous over time. Thinking about Palin this way is a little deeper than just seeing her as a carnival act whose novelty has worn off.

And that’s important because Ed’s second point is that what was novel about Palin hasn’t gone away. It’s gone mainstream in the Republican Party. And no one demonstrates this better than the formerly happy warrior, Mike Huckabee.

It’s easy to forget the old Mike Huckabee from 2008 whose message Frank Rich called, “simply more uplifting—and, in the ethical rather than theological sense, more Christian—than that of rivals, whose main calling cards of fear, torture and nativism have become more strident with every debate. The fresh-faced politics of joy may be trumping the five-o’clock-shadow of Nixonian gloom and paranoia.”

The author of God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy bears little resemblance to the man who scolded Mitt Romney seven years ago for wanting to punish the children of undocumented workers by denying them in-state tuition in the University of Arkansas system.

Here’s Ed:

While nobody has written a full-fledged manifesto for conservative cultural resentment, Mike Huckabee’s new pre-campaign book is a significant step in the direction of full-spectrum cry for the vindication of Real Americans. It is telling that the politician who was widely admired outside the conservative movement during his 2008 run for being genial, modest, quick-witted, and “a conservative who’s not mad about it” has now released a long litany of fury at supposed liberal-elite condescension toward and malevolent designs against the Christian middle class of the Heartland.

In other words, Huckabee has written a book that could just as easily have written (or, more likely, ghostwritten) by Sarah Palin. He’s in on the grift.

The clever conceit of God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy is that Huckabee is explaining to powerful and arrogant elites of “Bubble-ville”—New York, Washington, and Los Angeles—the sturdy folk virtues and beliefs of “Bubba-ville,” by which he means the rest of the country, though it often sounds like just the Deep South as viewed by its older and more conservative white residents. But the book is clearly meant for “Bubbas,” and it is meant to make them very angry.

The old Huckabee is gone, replaced by this bitter and resentful scam-artist. Now the question is, how much “Palinism-without-Palin” will the 2016 presidential field ultimately produce?

It’s a good question. Check out the piece to see Ed’s answer.

At times like these, I really enjoy perusing Red State. It amuses me that they think that they understand congressional procedure. But it’s pretty much just a right-wing version of Firedoglake.

There’s always a decent audience for the “standing on principles” purity bloggers but their analysis is never worth crap. If they have any real impact, it’s in terrorizing stupid politicians. They actively mis-educate anyone who relies for them for explanations of how a bill can become a law or what might reasonably be expected to be in those laws.

In this case, the analysis gives you a twofer. They don’t understand the procedural steps that they’re talking about and they fault the leaders for not doing things that their members do not support. You can’t just say that it makes no difference if you close down DHS if basically no one agrees with you. Plus, they still can’t explain why the Dems would ever cave to their demands.

It’s just impotent raging about an imagined impotence, when the real impotence is in the force of their argument. Not enough people care about Obama’s executive orders on immigration to make a DHS shutdown a compelling strategy even if it would somehow work.

I’m not much in the mood for blogging today. We finally had to make the difficult call to put our 14 year old Australian Shepherd, Gracie, down. She has cancer and an infection that we’ve exhausted every antibiotic trying to treat. CabinGirl is on the way to the vet now with a very heavy heart.

I call her the Iron Dog because I’ve thought we were going to have to put her down numerous times dating back several years now, but she’s always bounced back. It seemed like she could overcome any health obstacle no matter how grim-seeming at the time.

But she finally reached a point where her toughness wasn’t working in her favor anymore.

It’s always tough to lose a pet, but one that has been with your family for this long is especially painful because she’s tied in with all the memories of raising the older kids, and she’s been here every day of Finn’s young life.

So, we’re officially in mourning here at the cabin. With all the ice and snow, we’ll be looking at her footprints in the yard for quite a while. And then those will melt away, too.

Senator Barbara Mikulski is retiring. Let the scramble for her seat begin.

I once wrote a diary on the The negotiation Process and even considered making it the topic of a putative Phd. research proposal before deciding that the gulf between academia and practice was too large to bridge: there simply wasn’t any good academic literature on the negotiating process that I could find, and no one could be found with the interest and expertise to supervise such a research topic. I raise the topic here because I am fascinated by the negotiating style adopted by Yanis Varoufakis and am still wondering whether he will ultimately be found to have been an effective negotiator on behalf of Greece.

Yanis Varoufakis interview: `Anything’s better than austerity’

When asked whether Greece could have achieved more had it adopted a more conciliatory approach at the euro group, as his counterpart Michael Noonan and other Irish Ministers have suggested, Varoufakis delivers an emphatic “absolutely not”.

While he declined to respond directly to Noonan’s recent comments likening him to a rock star and to academic economists and experts that were very good in theory but not good in practice, he said Greece’s previous experience in Brussels meant a robust approach to negotiations was essential.

“My predecessors in this job went along with the eurogroup’s policies to the full. They bent over backwards to accommodate the memorandum and the policies of internal devaluation and fiscal consolidation, and the so-called reforms that were imposed on Greece.”

And he points to where that has landed Greece. “It has been a complete and utter catastrophe. There’s humanitarian crisis is on the boil because they were so `good in practice’, this is quoting Michael Noonan. And I hope that I’m not so good in practice.”

Regarding Noonan’s other criticism that he was too theoretical, the Greek minister says he understands that “my colleagues in the eurogroup were disconcerted that one of their members insisted on talking macroeconomics”.

“One of the great ironies of the eurogroup is that there is no macroeconomic discussion. It’s all rules-based, as if the rules are God-given and as if the rules can go against the rules of macroeconomics.

“I insisted on talking macroeconomics.”

But Varoufakis said he welcomed Noonan’s comments, made at a conference in London on Wednesday, that he agreed in principle with the idea of swapping Greece’s official debt for growth-linked bonds.

“Michael Noonan is quite right. We need to restructure Greek debt. My proposal for GDP-linked bonds has one purpose: to increase the amount of money we give back to your partners by encouraging them to allow us to grow.”

I want to stress at the outset here that my interest is in the effectiveness of various negotiating styles in progressing a particular party’s interests and not in judging Varoufakis from an economic or ideological perspective. The comments from Irish ministers are apt, because the Greeks have adopted a negotiating style very much at odds with the Irish tradition of negotiation as exemplified in the Peace Process and various EU rounds of negotiation including the seven Irish Presidencies of the EU Council and the more recent post bank bail-out negotiations.

It also matters what your ultimately objectives are: An agreement which is objectively the best possible to further Greek national interests, or a process which shows that the new Syriza Government fought the good fight and did what it could for the Greek people. National morale matters, and had Yanis Varoufakis capitulated, or been seen to capitulate, the gloom, bordering on desperation in Greece would have been very deep indeed.  What can you do when you elect a radically new government, on a radically different platform and nothing really changes?  That sort of setback could have given the fascist right a very big boost indeed.  

So it matters that Yanis Varoufakis is seen to have fought the good fight, and secured at least a partial victory or breathing space, regardless of what you might think of the content of the actual agreement. It probably matters a lot more than maintaining cordial relations with fellow Finance ministers, if the experiences of previous Greek finance ministers is any guide. But has Yanis Varoufakis made enemies unnecessarily, and could he have secured a better deal by adopting a quieter diplomatic behind-the-scenes approach as suggested by Irish Ministers?

First of all, it has to be conceded that the Irish Ministers have an interest in how the Greek negotiations are perceived: The Irish Government has adopted a relatively softly softly behind the scenes approach to its post-bail-out negotiations with what is generally perceived in Ireland as at best limited success.  There is still much bitterness that Irish Taxpayers ended up bailing out bondholders in private banks even where those bondholders were not covered by the infamous bank guarantee proffered by their predecessor Government.

Maturities have been extended, interest rates have reduced, but there has been very little write-down, and no default. The bottom line is that the bank bail-outs have added greatly to the explosion in Irish sovereign indebtedness from 25% of GDP in 2008 to 123% in 2014. The current Government is under a great deal of domestic fire from critics – not only from the left – for not having done a better job of getting the “institutions” to do a greater deal of burden sharing.  If there is one reason why the current government may not be re-elected – apart from the lack of a credible alternative – it is this failure to do a better job of getting the “taxpayer” off the hook of a debt that was never theirs in the first place.

So if the Greeks get a better deal by shouting louder; by threatening Grexit or default, or simply by being more able and robust in the negotiation process, it will reflect very badly on the Irish Government indeed. And the same probably applies in Portugal and Spain as well – looking nervously over their shoulders at the advance of Podemos et al.  So Germany’s apparent hardline stance was not lacking in potential allies, even if no one else was particularly keen to take the lead in beating the Greeks down.

Yanis Varoufakis also makes a fair point when he notes that the supine approach of previous Greek governments has yielded nothing but humiliation and poverty for Greece: a dramatic break or paradigm shift was needed to overcome the widespread belief in EU capitals and markets that after a lot of huffing and puffing the new Syriza Government would back down and break their electoral promises.  Business as usual, in other words, had to be shown to be not an option. A great deal of anger, rupture, and attempted shaming is to be expected when you are trying to change the rules of the game. Yanis Varoufakis may have had no option but to break a few eggs and watch a few heads explode.

It helped that Yanis Varoufakis is actually a distinguished economist who could speak a language few Finance Ministers can actually understand – or rebut – and one which their economic advisers knew to be grounded in a lot of mainstream economics: Hence the anguished cries that the Greeks were speaking economic theory rather than just applying legal rules: oh the horror! Michael Noonan is an able, if aging politician, but his background is as a primary school teacher.  He knows all about enforcing class room rules, but economic theory wouldn’t exactly be his forte. So we had a clash of paradigms -EU norms and rules versus Macro-economic reality as supported by many independent economic authorities.  Yanis Varoufakis got a deal he could live with not because he could shout and pound the table, but because he could explain the economic realities better than anyone else.

It also helped that there was much common ground between the parties – clamping down on tax evasion by the wealthy, and improving administrative efficiencies. The IMF predilection for neo-liberal labour market “reforms” – i.e mass sackings and race to the bottom wages – was somewhat sidelined by refusing to deal with the Troika as such, and negotiating primarily with the Eurogroup – a good piece of advance planning and strategising by the Greek side. Insofar as you can, a successful negotiator has to map out the pitch s/he is prepared to play on, and the people s/he is prepared to play with.  That “the institutions” aka the Troika allowed themselves to be divided and conquered in this way suggest a considerable degree of amateurism on their side.

So was the Greek negotiating style successful, and can we expect them to make further headway in the future in getting out from under the yoke of austerity? A lot will depend on how the process is reflected in the media and amongst the Greek populace: will the Greek economy gradually improve, and will corruption, tax dodging and administrative inefficiencies be seen to decrease?  The major problem here is that the new Greek Government have a great deal to achieve and very little time to achieve it.  Social change is possible if you have time and the resources required to grease the wheels of change.  I can foresee a huge fightback by the Greek economic elite – threatening an investment strike, a removal of all liquid assets to Switzerland and a withdrawal of services to the Greek Government and people unless concessions are made.

It will be a bitter internal class struggle in Greece. Even the Troika couldn’t ensure meaningful reform of the upper civil service, legal and medical professions in Ireland – still the bastions of entrenched privilege, restrictive practices and extremely high earnings by almost any world standards.  But at least there are some signs that Syriza has succeeded in reversing the class struggle, from austerity being an attack on the relatively poor to an attempt at reform of elite structures in Greece.  In this “the institutions” will be uneasy bedfellows, but the dynamics of EZ politics may have changed.  That, more than the immediate outcome of direct negotiations may be the real legacy that Syriza may bestow on Greece and the Eurozone. It is a gift we should all be grateful for. May EZ elites beware.

What do you love about blogs?

What do hate about blogs?

If you were to create your own blog, what kinds of things would you want from a technical or gadget point of view?

Any idea how to make money from your blogging?

If former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley is going to present any kind of challenge to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, he is going to have to get started soon. And he’s going to need to make a very compelling argument for why rank and file Democrats should turn their backs on Clinton for a second time. Perhaps this is O’Malley’s opening salvo:

Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor who is likely to seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2016, took a veiled shot at a potential rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, in a speech in South Carolina on Saturday, criticizing the politics of “triangulation” that have historically been associated with the Clintons.

“The most fundamental power of our party and our country is the power of our moral principles,” Mr. O’Malley said, according to a transcript of his remarks provided by an aide.

In words that echoed those of Senator Barack Obama when he battled Mrs. Clinton in 2007 for the Democratic nomination, Mr. O’Malley added: “Triangulation is not a strategy that will move America forward. History celebrates profiles in courage, not profiles in convenience.”

The problem, as I see it, is that most people have no idea what “triangulation” refers to, and, among those who do, there isn’t a strong consensus on exactly what it means or how it is relevant to our politics today.

As a strategic matter, O’Malley may want to highlight the things about Bill Clinton’s presidency that displeased a lot of Democrats at the time. He may want to point out things that look like missteps in retrospect. By doing so, he can put Hillary in a tough spot, as she wants to take advantage of her husband’s good standing with the party faithful while, at the same time, assure the nation that she’s her own person and not just an extension of Bill. Any time she has to create distance from the 42nd president, she’ll be uncomfortable.

On a substantive level, this can’t be an effort at re-litigating decisions that were made twenty or more years ago. O’Malley can’t score many points by talking about the failure to pass HillaryCare or Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and DOMA. But he can contrast his views on trade and Wall Street regulation with Bill Clinton’s record and invite Hillary to do the same.

To get traction, he’ll have to find some areas where Hillary won’t break from Bill. But even if he can’t mount a credible challenge in terms of winning states and delegates, he can help define where the party stands.

Personally, I associate triangulation with a very specific period in history. It was the the strategy Dick Morris successfully urged on the president after the Republicans took over control of Congress in the 1994 elections. He would pass legislation on the Republicans’ wish list and then take credit for it, robbing them of campaign themes in the 1996 election.

This doesn’t seem pertinent to the 2016 election.

But ‘triangulation’ as a term can stand in for a lot of different ideas, both good and bad. On the good side, it can mean an effort to work with Congress to address problems even when Congress is controlled by the opposite party. On the bad side, it can mean conceding the ideological battlefield to your opponents and putting their legislative priorities above your own.

I’m sure it can mean a lot more than this, too. But talking about triangulation isn’t going to resonate by itself. And, at some point, O’Malley has to run against Hillary, not Bill. She has an extensive record of her own. And it may be, once again, her foreign policy record and positions that are her greatest weaknesses with Iowa caucusgoers.

[Cross-posted at Progress Pond]

Ann Marie Cox will get some attention with her latest piece, which is really a rumination on her anxieties about how people will react to her public profession of belief in Jesus Christ. I think her particular path is unique to her and basically none of our business. Yet, at the same time, she’s inviting us in, trying to start a conversation.

And, she seems to be aware that her piece can be misconstrued as an attention-seeking desire for approval. I don’t think she really wants our reaction to be to her specific circumstances. If I understand her correctly, she’d rather open up a debate about how people are treated when they talk about their faith.

Part of it is that she runs in progressive circles where skepticism runs much, much higher than in the population at-large. Will people she respects think she’s a rube?

Part of it is that there are no shortage of conservatives who are willing to judge her for being insufficiently Christian. Maybe she doesn’t go to church enough, or maybe she hasn’t spent enough time reading the Bible, or maybe her political values are inconsistent with a true Christian life, or…

Depending on where you stand, what interests you about this piece will be different. What I find interesting is that coming out as a Christian can be as stressful as coming out as an atheist. After all, polls have shown that Americans would rather elect gay politicians than politicians who don’t believe in God. “Coming out” as a Christian is kind of a weird concept in a country where you’re expected to be a Christian, or at least a believer in some established religion.

But, conservatives have been so aggressive about grabbing the term “Christian” for themselves that there’s a backlash in progressive circles. It’s easy to see why a progressive might not be satisfied with telling their friends that they’re a Christian without explaining that they’re not an Erick Erickson Christian.

I think this whole social space is a construct of the Terri Schiavoization of our religious politics. Even devout Christians on the left begin to see “Christians” as a shorthand term for those folks who believe in Bill O’Reilly’s War on Christmas. They’ve begun a process of conceding control of the branding of their own religion to wingnut charlatans.

One consequence is that a Christian like Ann Marie Cox feels on some level that her personal faith needs explanation. “No, I’m not secretly playing for the other team.” She thinks she needs to reassure us of this, and maybe she does.

But if you look at the numbers, you’ll realize that the right doesn’t own Christianity and atheists/agnostics have modest cultural power and NO political power.

If you want to see anxiety, go down to Alabama and watch someone explain to their peer groups and family that they think Christianity is a crock of bunk. That’s a difficult conversation, too.