You didn't gild that: TPC hands Obama a sword of unvarnished truth to wield against Romney's tax plans

As we await the next jobs day bomb this morning, my anxious and superstitious nature can't help but fear that the Obama campaign is like the Confederate army approaching Gettysburg -- at its high water mark in the wake of a raft of good polls, Romney twisting in the tax return wind, and the Tax Policy Center dissection of his gap-ridden and fraudulent "tax reform" plans.

But with that gesture to ward off nemesis, I can't help but delight, like (I assume) all who have been waiting for team Obama to pivot from Bain attacks to spotlighting tax cut/spending cut plans so extreme Americans don't believe Romney would actually propose them, in the way Obama has taken up the Tax Policy Center's analysis of Romney's tax plans and used it to tear into said plans.  As reported by the Times' Jackie Calmes, this Obama riff in Florida yesterday is scarlet sweetmeat to me:

My land, how Romney whined when caught lying in 2002

By now the story is well known: when Massachusetts Democrats challenged Romney's residency in Massachusetts as he geared up to run for governor in early 2002, Romney first said that he had maintained at least part-time Massachusetts residency during his years in Utah running the Olympics. He retroactively altered his tax returns to reflect that claim. When it came to light that he had gained a $54,000 tax break by claiming his Utah home as his primary residence, he said that that filing was the result of a clerical error. When reporters questioned whether he'd also profited on his income taxes by declaring Utah residency, Romney first said that he would respond to questions posed in writing. When those questions were submitted, 

Romney's spokesman, Eric Fehrnstrom, said that Romney would not be responding because "he values his privacy and his wife's privacy." A few minutes later, pressed on whether he benefited financially in Utah by filing as a resident there and a nonresident in Massachusetts, he said: "That's as far as I'm telling you, that's it. That's the answer I'm going to give you, and that's all I got" (Boston Globe, 6/8/02, "Tax Benefit Unclear and Candidate Mum").

 Of course that pattern of behavior now looks very familiar. Also according to now-familiar type: Romney's response to being subject to scrutiny. During his testimony before the Massachusetts Ballot Commission, his attorney drew the waterworks. The Boston Globe's Stephanie Ebbert reported on June 19, 2002 ("Romney Taxes Show No 'Domicile')":

Where Gore Vidal's ice melted

I knew next to nothing about Gore Vidal's personal life or public persona before I read his Times obit today. One passage in the obit jumped out at me, though, because I'd like to believe it wasn't true -- or at least, was true only in some senses. Here it is:

Television was a natural medium for Mr. Vidal, who in person was often as cool and detached as he was in his prose. “Gore is a man without an unconscious,” his friend the Italian writer Italo Calvino once said. Mr. Vidal said of himself: “I’m exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.”

Quote of the day

“It is not mathematically possible to design a revenue-neutral plan that preserves current incentives for savings and investment and that does not result in a net tax cut for high-income taxpayers and a net tax increase for lower- and/or middle-income taxpayers.” 

-  Brookings/Tax Policy Center study of Mitt Romney's tax reform proposal.

The study, which according to the Washington Post's Lori Montgomery, "seem[s] to bend over backward to be fair to the Republican presidential candidate," finds that Romney's

rate-cutting plan for individuals would reduce tax collections by about $360 billion in 2015, the study says. To avoid increasing deficits — as Romney has pledged — the plan would have to generate an equivalent amount of revenue by slashing tax breaks for mortgage interest, employer-provided health care, education, medical expenses, state and local taxes, and child care — all breaks that benefit the middle class.

Romney's pandering fools no one

Is the post-truth campaign engendering the post-belief vote?

Political scientists Larry Bartels and Lynn Vavrek have put together a fascinating portrait of the small and elusive segment of the electorate that remains undecided.  The majority of them are not independents. Those with party affiliations obviously are not pleased with their party's nominee, and the Democrats among them provide some troubling feedback for Obama, along with some apparent opportunity.  The survey, however, reveals something astonishing about Republican attitudes toward Romney:

GOP leaders: GOP is unfit to govern

Let's step back and let the obvious sink in. Think about this internecine GOP spat for a moment:

BRIAN KILMEADE: Now, Sen. McCain, I want you to hear a sound bite from one of the Sunday shows. Dick Cheney sits down, talks about your selection of vice presidential candidate Governor Palin. Listen.

DICK CHENEY: I like Governor Palin. I’ve met her. I know her. She – attractive candidate. But based on her background, she’d only been governor for, what, two years? I don’t think she passed that test…of being ready to take over. And I think that was a mistake.

BRIAN KILMEADE: You agree? Disagree?

SEN. JOHN McCAIN: Well, I’m always glad to get comments four years later. Look, I respect the vice president. He and I had strong disagreements as to whether we should torture people or not. I don’t think we should have. But the fact is I’m proud of Sarah Palin. I’m proud of the job she did. I’m proud of the job she continues to do. Everybody has their own views and I respect those views. But I’m proud of what we did.

Aspiring Pander in Chief offers Israel carte blanche

Jerusalem, July 29, 2012 -- In a speech near the Old City today, U.S. presidential hopeful Mitt Romney harked back to an historic concept of Israel as a besieged, beleaguered outpost rather than a regional hyperpower and promised the U.S. would stop at nothing to advance Israel's perceived interests. 

Without diverting his stream of unqualified praise and unconditional support for the host country, Romney widened his scope at select moments to advance two extraordinary historical principles:

"There are a lot of smart people out there": Frum gets past Obama's loose pronoun

Kudos to David Frum for taking a dispassionate look at the subtext of Obama's "you didn't build that" riff. To contrast its emotional resonance with the Elizabeth Warren ur-text on which it's based is brilliant. Warren, Frum notes, offset her reminder to business owners that no one succeeds alone with all the usually-obligatory gestures of respect and thanks.  Obama, in an unscripted response to the reflexive deification of "job creators" in our political discourse, momentarily dispensed with those gestures.

In my own post about the speech, which focused on the Romney campaign's explicit embrace of the principle that no degree of distortion of an opponent's words is out of bounds, I drafted a paragraph suggesting that Obama's "you didn't build that" passage did constitute a pander to those of us who don't build businesses or wealth.  I cut that paragraph after I looked again at Obama's words:

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me --  because they want to give something back.  They know they didn’t -- look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.  You didn’t get there on your own.  I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart.  There are a lot of smart people out there.  It must be because I worked harder than everybody else.  Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.  There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.  Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive.  Somebody invested in roads and bridges.  If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that.  Somebody else made that happen.  The Internet didn’t get invented on its own.  Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.  There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own.

I cut my "pander" paragraph because I decided that Obama was reacting to the obscenely over-the-top deification of an undifferentiated class of "job creators" -- a conceptual frame that enables and reflects the massive redistribution of wealth to the very top over the past thirty years. That frame lumps together the genuinely productive with rent-seekers and game-riggers (and those whose success stems from a combination of those sources) and supports the claim that any correction to the massive tax cuts the wealthiest have enjoyed over the last thirty years will kill the golden goose of economic growth. Obama's riff was more debunk than pander.

Frum is often a credible critic of Obama because he can hear both sides of an argument.  He picks up this debunk impulse:

In this particular election cycle, the argument that the successful are almost by definition deserving and that the unsuccessful are correspondingly undeserving has exploded into noisy public controversy. 

The president appears to have heard that argument, and it irks him. And when it came time to reprise Elizabeth Warren, he allowed pieces of his rebuttal to the claim to drift into a speech that was probably meant to adhere to the safer ground that she had previously staked out. 

Yet I think Frum reads his own inferences into Obama's meta-economics:

President Obama's stray sentences however point to a bolder conclusion. If it's not brains or work that account for success, what is it? The answer must be … luck. Not maybe entirely luck, but luck to a great degree. By definition, however, luck is amoral. Nobody can deserve luck, otherwise he wouldn't be lucky. To the extent success is due to luck, success is undeserved—and to the extend that success is undeserved, the successful have no very strong claim to the proceeds of their success. Whereas Warren suggests that the wealthy should be taxed to repay tangible benefits they have personally received, Obama is indicating a possibility that the wealthy should be taxed … because their wealth is to a great extent an accident of fate.

This argument is not developed by the president. Indeed, he quickly drops it. Nor does he build any very radical policy conclusions upon his argument: he's proposing only the restoration of the Clinton tax rates—the tax rates that prevailed during the greatest period of private fortune-building since the 1920s. Yet people who believe in the morality of the market are not wrong to hear in those few stray sentences of the president a more radical critique of their core belief than is usually heard from American politicians.

Who said that the answer to why some succeed and some don't "must be" luck?  Not Obama. It's true that he points out that a lot of smart and hardworking people don't build businesses, and so the question of what causes success is free-floating in this passage ("not developed," as Frum acknowledges). Can our body politic really not handle a brief allusion to the mysteries and complexities of causation in human affairs? Are we so wedded to the Horatio Alger myth that we can't complicate it a bit?

Perhaps Obama's subtext is even more unsettling to the sensitive super-rich than Frum allows. A keynote of Obama's stump speech is that for many millions the American dream is "slipping away." Conditions are ever less conducive to achieving economic security and increased opportunity for one's children. The benefits of economic growth are flowing to the very top.  The playing field is ever less level. Here's how he put it in the "you didn't build that" speech:

Now, the reason that I think so many of us came together in 2008 was because we saw that for a decade that dream was fraying, that it was slipping away; that there were too many people who were working hard but not seeing their incomes or wages go up; that we had taken a surplus and turned it into a deficit -- we were running two wars on a credit card; that job growth was the most sluggish it had been in 50 years.  There was a sense that those who were in charge didn’t feel responsible...

Our goal isn’t just to put people back to work -- although that’s priority number one -- it is to build an economy where that work pays off.  An economy where everyone, whether you are starting a business or punching a clock, can see your hard work and responsibility rewarded.  That’s what this campaign’s about, Roanoke.  And that’s why I’m running for a second term as President of the United States of America.

An economy in which "hard work and responsibility" don't pay off, at its extreme, is one in which luck and privilege and rapacity are the only determinates of success. Obama's talk of an American dream slipping away suggests that the U.S.is trending that way.

But then, that's been his message since 2007 at the latest. Whether the country will again prove receptive to it is itself largely a matter of economic luck.

A little distance on the post-truth campaign

I've been on vacation with my wife in the Finger Lakes and fell off the grid for reasons I won't bore you with -- off completely for one day, near-completely for three. When we get away, usually, I'm eager to dive back into the political/policy news when I can, but this time, my brief forays have felt like dropping into a coal mine.  A bit of distance defamiliarizes our degraded politics and brings home what a high-stakes, dangerous and disgusting contest it is.

Reconnecting for a bit last night, I caught up with this elevated argument from the Romney campaign:

A glimpse of the post-ownership society?

The Wall Street Journal's Jeanette Neumann reports that real estate investment companies that are buying up foreclosed homes and renting them out are seeking to securitize their rental income stream. Perhaps that's more evidence, not only that more Americans are likely to live in rentals, but that our relationship to "home," our concepts of rental and ownership, may take new forms.

If investor-owners can think long-term about rental income, perhaps renters can also take a long-term stance, and enter into contracts more like those of commercial tenants -- say, five or ten-year leases that lock in current prices, or leases that in some way exchange various levels of commitment for price breaks, or ring new variations of rent-to-own or share any increase in home value.

When the Romney campaign perjured Romney (retroactively)

Maybe I buried my lede on July 13, so forgive a restatement:

In her email to the Boston Globe demanding a correction of its report on Romney's tenure at Bain from 1999-2002, Romney's communications director Gail Gitcho either confirmed that Romney perjured himself in his Massachusetts residency hearing in June 2002 or endorsed a false statement by Bain about that tenure.

The Romney campaign's 2011 statement that "Since February 11, 1999, Mr. Romney has not had any active role with any Bain Capital entity and has not been involved in the operations of any Bain Capital entity in any way" does not contradict Romney's assertion, while striving to prove establish his Massachusetts for his gubernatorial run in 2002, that he returned to Massachusetts periodically during his Olympic tenure to attend board meetings for past and present Bain portfolio companies. Those companies are not "Bain Capital entities."

A Bain statement issued on July 12, however, does contradict that assertion: Romney, it says,“has had absolutely no involvement with the management or investment activities of the firm or with any of its portfolio companies since the day of his departure” in 1999" (my emphasis).

Gitcho's email to Globe cites the Bain statement:

A line of attack with legs?

It's a cliche that political attacks work only when they have some demonstrable relationship to reality -- when they touch a chord of genuine perception about a candidate.

By that standard, Obama campaign attack theme spotlighted today by Reuters would seem to have long-term potential:

"Feeding the Democrats' storyline: Romney's refusal to release more than a year or two of his tax returns, questions about whether he is being honest about when he left his job at Bain Capital, and the reams of records that have been kept secret from his years as Massachusetts governor and chief of the Salt Lake City Olympics."

Shucks, is that all? Methinks Reuters' Jeff Mason writes with a keen sense of the reality gap between this gambit and 2008's "who is Barack Obama?":

Romney Rule #13: Any attack on me negates all rules of engagement

 To our past compilation of the Romney Rules of political engagement, the implicit credo of the post-truth campaign, add Romney Rule #13:

Any attack on me frees me from any standard of truth or relevance whatsoever in counterattack. 

Buzzfeed's McKay Coppins gets the formal declaration* of this one from an unnamed Romney campaign adviser:

An overwrought rap on Bain from the Boston Phoenix?

The Boston Phoenix has apparent new grist for the Bain-the-vampire mill: a tale in which Bain portfolio company CRC Health  tries to get a methadone clinic opened in a small town in Maine (Warren, pop. 5000).  Reporter Sydney Leonard lays a prologue for a stark morality tale:

Bain Capital is showing its stripes in a battle in Warren, Maine, that has lasted the past two years, and counting.

Rather than demonstrating Bain building businesses, communities, and society, the story of that battle reveals the strategies, techniques, and tactics Bain uses to force its goals upon unwilling, and sometimes unsuspecting, regular people. And results from similar assaults on other communities demonstrate the profit-at-any-cost mentality that has laid waste to lives and communities — a far cry from Romney's campaign-trail tales of success.

The company's unyielding efforts to open a methadone clinic in Warren have turned the town into a costly battleground, making enemies of friends and neighbors, racking up legal fees, and marking a local businessman as public enemy number one in the community he has always called home.

Leonard's own reporting, however, provides ample grounds to question this editorializing.  He makes it clear, first, that the need for a new methadone clinic in the area was very real:

In which I agree with a Dish reader

I more or less agree with this Dish reader, sloppy writer though he be:

I am a wimp and Romney tries to have everything both ways, and he should have proudly owned the full spectrum of Bain's investments at any given time, including '99-02. But still, the Obama attack path makes me queasy, for two reasons 1) there's nothing really wrong with offshoring (though there is something wrong with loading companies with debt and driving them into the ground while you clean up), and 2) while I could be proved wrong sometime soon, I think the basic Romney/Bain narrative for '99-02 holds together.

The last time Romney stonewalled on taxes

You may wonder why Romney thinks he can shut off demands to release several years' worth of tax returns, as other presidential candidates have done in recent years, like this:

JIM ACOSTA, CNN: When are you going to release more of your taxes and how many years?

ROMNEY: I've indicated that -- well, first of all, we've complied with the law. The law requires us to put out a full financial disclosure. That I've done. And then, in addition to that, I've already put out one year of tax returns. We'll put out the next year of tax returns as soon as the accountants have that ready. And that's what we're going to put out.

I know there will always be calls for more. People always want to get more. And, you know, we're putting out what is required plus more that is not required. And those are the two years that people are going to have. And that's -- that's all that's necessary for people to understand something about my finances. And, look, if people believe this should be a campaign about attacking one another on a personal basis and go back to the kinds of attacks that were suggested in some campaigns in the past, I don't want to go there.

The thing is, he's gotten away with it before. When he came home to Massachusetts swathed in Olympic glory to run for governor in spring 2002, Democrats challenged his residency status.*  They wouldn't have been able to if he had maintained dual residency.  But there was a tax break to be had by declaring his Utah house his primary residence, and Have-it-Both-Ways Romney went for it. The New York Times reported on 6/6/02:

Romney campaign contradicts Romney testimony

Romney is very good at splitting hairs to avoid literally lying, or to hold two almost-contradictory positions at once (Romneycare good! Obamacare bad!  Bailouts bad! Rescue of financial system in crisis good! Managed bankruptcy good! Obama's managed bankruptcies of GM/Chrysler bad!). 

Therefore, I am a little surprised to note that the Romney campaign has slipped up in its characterizations of Romney's leave of absence from Bain when he was running the Olympics in 1999-2002. Yesterday, the campaign contradicted testimony that Romney provided to the Massachusetts Ballot Commission in June 2002 in a way that they had previously avoided.

As I noted yesterday, the Romney campaign's 2011 statement that "Since February 11, 1999, Mr. Romney has not had any active role with any Bain Capital entity and has not been involved in the operations of any Bain Capital entity in any way" does not contradict Romney's assertion, while striving to prove establish his Massachusetts for his gubernatorial run in 2002, that he returned to Massachusetts periodically during his Olympic tenure to attend board meetings for past and present Bain portfolio companies. Those companies are not "Bain Capital entities." 

Some wispy hints that Romney was not 100% hands-off at Bain, 1999-2002

Personally, I think that the charge that Romney as CEO and owner of Bain Capital "shipped jobs overseas" is meaningless, except insofar as it offsets Romney's hypocritical and bogus charge that Obama is substantially responsible for further loss of manufacturing jobs to China and elsewhere. Offshoring is inevitable: to cope, the U.S. must improve its education system and upgrade jobs currently considered low-end, which means strengthening workers' hands relative to management.

Further, Factcheck.org and other truth-squaders have a point in calling out the Obama campaign for claiming that Romney "shipped jobs overseas" when alluding to the activities of Bain portfolio companies that occurred after Romney took over the Winter Olympics in early 1999.  Today's Globe story documenting Romney's maintenance of formal or nominal control during his Olympic years really doesn't affect the argument between the Obama campaign and Factcheck, as Stephanie Cutter's letter to Factcheck, like the Globe article, alluded to numerous Bain SEC filings listing Romney as CEO, President, and owner of various Bain entities, including the parent company. Factcheck retorts that there is no positive evidence that Romney ever took an active role in any Bain decision or action during his Olympic gig. And Fortune's Dan Primack has been supplied with offering documents for funds that Bain started after Romney went to Utah that don't list Romney as a fund manager.

The only adult in the (Heritage Foundation) room

Perhaps Donald Verrilli did not have the smoothest delivery in the Court on March 27, when he defended the constitutionality of the individual mandate.  But in this Heritage Foundation panel discussion, as reported by Josh Gerstein, he seems on a different moral plane entirely from plaintiff's attorney Michael Carvin and libertarian U. of Chicago Professor Richard Epstein:

Romney to pick an UnPalin for Veep

Asked in a Colorado town hall whether he would pick his running mate before the GOP convention, Romney responded:

I can’t give you the timeline for that..that is a decision that we’ll make down the road. Nor can I give you the individual. I can tell you that the person I choose you will look at and say, ‘Well, that’s a person who could be president, if that were necessary, and that, for me, is the most important single criteria.”

Hmm. I guess that rules out all the clowns he ran against for the nomination, with the possible exception of the first dropout, Tim Pawlenty. Sounds like an attempt, too, to undo the Palinization of the GOP.  Too bad he had to Palinize himself to get the nomination -- demonizing a clone of his own healthcare creation, embracing insane tax and spending cuts, criminalizing abortion -- and lying nonstop about his opponent.

Plain sense, and a touch of nonsense, from Obama on taxes

Evoking the harm apparently done to the economy by last year's debt ceiling debacle, Ezra Klein frames Obama's call today for a one-year extension of the Bush tax cuts for the lower 98% -- but not for the top 2% of earners -- as a political gamble.  The looming fiscal cliff, Klein suggests, threatens to damage confidence this fall as the debt cliff did last summer; Republicans in Congress certainly won't accede to Obama's proposal before the election; and any drag on growth right now could un-elect Obama.

I don't really think there's any risk. Or rather, the risk of hurting the economy through continued deadlock on the tax question is the lesser of two risks. The alternative Klein holds out is capitulation -- extending all  the tax cuts for a year. That would not only infuriate the base, reprising the trauma of late 2010; it would reinforce what I believe is the chief rap against Obama among independents or undecideds: weakness and ineffectuality, being unable to put his preferred policies across.  

The method behind Mitt's mendacious madness

A blog is a perennial work in progress. Ideally, its inevitable repetitions embody ongoing development of a working hypothesis or analysis.  I'd like to think that's the case with my close reading of Romney's methodical disinformation campaign -- that is, my attempt to spotlight the method to Mitt's mendacity. A few milestones below.

Romney deems Obama a liar ex post facto (7/7/12)

 The method is to convert hairline distinctions, usually illusory, into Manichean contrasts.

Romney rules, cont. 6/11/12

Rule #11: I may simultaneously level mutually exclusive charges against my opponent. 

Romney Rules (6/7/12)

Rule #1 : Context doesn't matter. Anything you say I may use against you, e.g., by making it sound like you said the opposite.

An upright man who lies nonstop (5/19/12)

What is unfathomable to me is the level of doublethink that will allows an extremely able, intelligent, in many ways generous man who believes that God is watching over him to go out and lie every day, in general concept and in detail,,

Proud owners of the post-truth campaign (3/21/12)

I can think of four occasions since October when Romney or his surrogates admitted more or less outright that Romney's words or deeds are either willfully misleading or purely for show.

The presidential campaign in story and song

Of a certain worthy KNYGHT, the first of Chaucer's pilgrims to get a bio in the prologue to the Canterbury Tales, we are told

At mortal batailles hadde he been fiftene,
And foughten for oure feith at Traniyssene
In lystes thries, and ay slayn his foe. 

In 2007-08, Barack Obama did the knyght a few better, debating Hillary Clinton et al twenty six times, and most definitely slaying McCain thrice in their general election contests.  No wonder he's nostalgic today, with the armies of the unemployed looming on the election horizon, for those mortal batailles of old.

Romney deems Obama a liar ex post facto

I have long marveled at the verbal contortions Romney must go through to a) justify current GOP nonsense positions and b) align his own prior pronouncements and actions with current nonsense.  Often this Operation Twist further involves c) differentiating his past and even sometimes his present position from a functionally similar position of Obama's, with whom the dear departed centrist pragmatist Massachusetts Mitt has often been aligned.

Hence Romney must regularly wax paradoxical, continually compiling new verses to this lover's rune:

I gave my love a cherry that had no stone,
I gave my love a chicken that had no bone,
I gave my love a story that had no end,
I gave my love a baby with no cryin'.

But Romney outdid himself this week when reversing the position taken by his aide Erich Fehrnstrom and his own long-held position that the individual mandate is a penalty, not a tax. Listen carefully:

“While I agreed with the dissent, that’s overtaken by the fact that the majority of the Court said it’s a tax and therefore it is a tax. They have spoken. There’s no way around that,” Romney said. “The American people know that President Obama has broken the pledge he made — said he wouldn’t raise taxes on middle-income Americans.”

Not only does Romney here assert that his own reasoning is negated in some existential sense by the Court's 5-4 ruling, along with the reasoning of the four conservative justices with whom he agreed. He is claiming that Obama's long-held position, which matches his own, retroactively became a lie the moment Roberts read the crux of his decision from the bench.  An ex post facto lie.

Pitch me, Priorities USA

I read with deep distress Robert Draper's Times Mag chronicle of how the Democrats, taking their cue mainly from Obama, unilaterally disarmed in the Super PAC battles in this election cycle and are now staring down the barrel of a billion dollar GOP juggernaut while Priorities USA struggles to raise $100 million tops.

Draper's look back at the relative potency of Democrat-supporting 527s in 2004 and 2006 carried me back to the 2004 campaign, the first in which I used online phone tools for voter outreach. Obama's innovation in 2008 was to center those tools in his own campaign organization; in 2004 I relied on MoveOn and I think ACT, Americans Coming Together, or possibly other outside groups, to set me up. I got their emails and sent them money, sometimes in response to requests to fund a particular ad -- including one of a not-yet-famous Cindy Sheehan weeping into the camera as she made a "Bush-lied-my-son-died" accusation. That one was created by a tiny outside group, but MoveOn briefly took it up and did ad buys for it. 

Thanks, Sarah! Americans believe the ACA has death panels

The Kaiser Family Foundation  has a 10-question online quiz about the ACA. Here are the questions that a majority of respondents answered wrongly:

• Will the health reform law allow a government panel to make decisions about end-of-life care for people on Medicare?  - 45% correct
• Will the health reform law cut benefits that were previously provided to all people on Medicare? - 40% correct
• Will the health reform law require all businesses, even the smallest ones, to provide health insurance for their employees?- 25% correct
• Will the health reform law create a new government run insurance plan to be offered along with private plans? - 27% correct [added in update -- see note at bottom]
• Will the health reform law allow undocumented immigrants to receive financial help from the government to buy health insurance? - 42% correct [also added in update]

A quick question of law

How many of Chief Justice Roberts' brethren signed onto his finding that "the individual mandate is not a valid exercise of Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause"?  None.

Justice Ginsburg, writing for the four liberal justices with regard to the mandate, concurred with Roberts' finding that the mandate was a constitutional exercise of Congress's taxing power, but dissented strongly on the Commerce Clause question. Justices Alito, Kennedy, Scalia and Thomas officially concurred with no part of Roberts' decision, though their reasoning with regard to the Commerce Clause mirrored his.  And of course, the Chief Justice's own finding that the mandate is constitutional rendered his Commerce Clause judgment moot with respect to the fate of the individual mandate.

A question, then, for legal scholars: does the finding that Congress cannot regulate inactivity have any force of law for future cases?

The presidential campaign in story and song

Of a certain worthy KNYGHT, the first of Chaucer's pilgrims to get a bio in the prologue to the Canterbury Tales, we are told

At mortal batailles hadde he been fiftene,
And foughten for oure feith at Traniyssene
In lystes thries, and ay slayn his foe. 

In 2007-08, Barack Obama did the knyght a few better, debating Hillary Clinton et al twenty six times, and most definitely slaying McCain thrice in their general election contests.  No wonder he's nostalgic today, with the armies of the unemployed looming on the election horizon, for those mortal batailles of old.

A pair of July 4 warnings, and one eulogy

If I ever picked up the phone to a pollster, I guess I'd have to say I don't like the country's direction. To celebrate the Fourth, then, I'd like to highlight a trio of warnings/diagnoses published today.

The first is by Kurt Andersen, writing in the Times about The Downside of Liberty. He is not the first to link the sixties mantra "if it feels good, do it," with the '80s' "greed is good," but he does so cogently:

Justice Roberts spares the country's pound of flesh

I had deja vu as I read John Roberts' decision deeming the individual mandate both an impermissible exercise of Congress's Commerce Clause power and a constitutional exercise of its taxing power.  I was taken back to Shakespeare's court of Venice:

PORTIA
A pound of that same merchant's flesh is thine:
The court awards it, and the law doth give it.

SHYLOCK
Most rightful judge!

PORTIA
And you must cut this flesh from off his breast:
The law allows it, and the court awards it.

SHYLOCK
Most learned judge! A sentence! Come, prepare!

PORTIA
Tarry a little; there is something else.
This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood;
The words expressly are 'a pound of flesh:'
Take then thy bond, take thou thy pound of flesh;
But, in the cutting it, if thou dost shed
One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods
Are, by the laws of Venice, confiscate
Unto the state of Venice.

GRATIANO
O upright judge! (Merchant of Venice IV. 1. 298-312).

Broccoli-robbed! The Wall Street Journal's beef with John Roberts

In the wake of Chief Justice John Roberts' division of the mandate baby, the Wall Street Journal editorial board laments:

From now on, Congress can simply regulate interstate commerce by imposing "taxes" whenever someone does or does not do something contrary to its desires.

That's true!  Also on target is the editorialists' complaint against Roberts' sleight-of-hand (which I noted myself on Saturday):

[Roberts] also temporizes that "taxes that seek to influence conduct are nothing new."

True enough, but the punishments in the tax code for inactivity come in the form of not being able to claim benefits that Congress in its graces bestows. Such as: If you don't borrow to buy a home, you don't get a mortgage interest deduction.

Congress has never passed a tax on a lack of gasoline or a tax on a failure to buy gasoline, any more than Congress can regulate inactivity under the Commerce Clause by telling people to buy gasoline or else pay a penalty.

 This reality-based analysis, however, serves a fantasy:

The reality is that Washington would love to regulate the ordinary economic choices that used to be beyond its purview, and now it will be able to abuse the ad hoc "tax" permit that the Chief Justice has given it.

A radical departure? Congress can tax inactivity

There is a mystery to John Roberts' opinion upholding the mandate under Congress's taxing power while ruling it an unconstitutional exercise of Congress's Commerce Clause power.  With regard to the Commerce Clause, Roberts adopted wholesale the plaintiffs' argument that it's a radical and dangerous departure for Congress to "create" commerce or "compel" inactivity.  Yet Roberts finds that Congress does have the power to tax inactivity, notwithstanding that none the precedents he cites as support for upholding the penalty for not buying insurance do tax inactivity. He is up-front about this apparent paradox:

There may, however, be a more fundamental objection to a tax on those who lack health insurance. Even if only a tax, the payment under §5000A(b) remains a burden that the Federal Government imposes for an omission, not an act. If it is troubling to interpret the Commerce Clause as authorizing Congress to regulate those who abstain from commerce, perhaps it should be similarly troubling to permit Congress to impose a tax for not doing something (p. 41).

Conservative justices deny Congress a power that Congress doesn't want

[Reposted, with new post-mortem comments from Randy Barnett, chief architect of the case against the mandate.]

The first really substantive part of the "syllabus" or executive summary of the Supreme Court decision upholding the individual mandate and the ACA looked like Armageddon for the Administration:

2. CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS concluded in Part III–A that the individual mandate is not a valid exercise of Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause. Pp. 16–30....

Construing the Commerce Clause to permit Congress to regulate individuals precisely because they are doing nothing would open a new and potentially vast domain to congressional authority. Congress already possesses expansive power to regulate what people do. Upholding the Affordable Care Act under the Commerce Clausewould give Congress the same license to regulate what people do not do. The Framers knew the difference between doing something and doing nothing. They gave Congress the power to regulate commerce, not to compel it. Ignoring that distinction would undermine the principle that the Federal Government is a government of limited and enumerated powers. The individual mandate thus cannot be sustained under Congress’s power to “regulate Commerce.” Pp. 16–27.

That is a straight exposition of the plaintiffs' core argument.  Congress cannot create commerce; Congress cannot regulate inactivity; Congress cannot compel commerce. It's a miracle that Roberts turned around and upheld the mandate as an exercise of Congress's taxing power.  But hasn't this decision dealt a blow to Congress's power to regulate commerce?  Does it kick off a rollback of the series of decisions in Roosevelt's second term that expanded that power?

Probably not. Congress's right to compel purchases is a conservative worry, not a liberal one. Verrilli's core "limiting principle" was essentially that insurance is unique (because you never know when you'll need the benefits), and health insurance a singularity within that singularity (because if you lack it, your fellow citizens will ultimately foot much of the bill).  And he meant it!

In his reply brief, Verrilli identified democratic accountability as the ultimate limiting principle that would confine the purchase mandate to health insurance:

Scotusblog's finest hour

As a counterpoint to the bumbling of CNN, Fox et al, the probity and precision of Scotusblog's 6/28/12 liveblog is worth savoring. My emphasis below.

10:07

Amy Howe:  We have health care opinion.

10:08

Amy Howe:  Parsing it asap.

10:08

Amy Howe:  The individual mandate survives as a tax.

10:09

Amy Howe:  It's very complicated, so we're still figuring it out.

10:10

Kali:  We are still here. Don't worry.

10:10

Tom:  So the mandate is constitutional. Chief Justice Roberts joins the left of the Court.

 The individual mandate survives as a tax! That was one of the best moments of my life (I know, I know, get a life...).

To what extent did SCOTUS inhibit Congress's power to regulate commerce?

Yesterday, I suggested that the Supreme Court's finding that the individual mandate exceeded Congress's Commerce Clause powers did not in fact crimp Congress's ability to regulate commerce in any significant way, since Congress has no desire to impose any more purchase mandates. Donald Verrilli stressed in his reply brief that health insurance is a unique case, pointing out that states, which have an unquestioned power to impose purchase mandates, don't do it. Justice Ginsburg made the same point in exquisite detail in her dissent with regard to the Commerce Clause.

In today's Times, however, Neal Katyal, who served as acting Solicitor General after Obama appointed Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court and who argued the ACA case at the appellate level, makes a compelling case that the decision did limit the federal government's power and expand the Court's propensity to legislate from the bench in significant ways. Chief among them was in its invalidation of Congress's power to enforce its expanded Medicaid mandate:

"Verrilli, slapped silly, recovers willy-nilly" revisited

On March 28, I wrote in defense of Solicitor General Donald Verrilli's performance in oral argument over the constitutionality of the individual mandate:

To a degree, I suspect that critics are projecting their own discomfort and shock at the apparent intense hostility to the mandate expressed by Scalia, Roberts and Alito at the outset onto Verrilli, concluding that he buckled under the pressure of hostile questioning. Maybe he did look and sound ill at ease -- the play's the thing, not the script. But if  he did not answer this point or that point at the particular moment when one critic or another thought appropriate, it was in large part because he was repeatedly interrupted.  Ironically, some of the interventions by Ginsburg and Breyer may have diverted him an early answer to the core question: what was his "limiting principle, " a line the federal federal government could not cross while exercising its power to regulate interstate commerce.

By my count, Verrilli was interrupted 44 times in 50 pages of testimony.  Plaintiff's counsel Paul Clement, who was more fluent, was interrupted just 12 times in 24 pages. Clement's co-counsel Michael Carvin was interrupted at a rate similar to Verrilli -- 25 times in 27 pages. But the intensity in the two halves of the proceeding was reversed:  the liberal justices got in the groove of defending the mandate near the end of the proceeding, while Verrilli was buzz-sawed most intensely at the outset -- 16 times in the 15 pages following his opening statement. 

It seems I undercounted the interruptions when picking over the transcript. This afternoon, former Office of Legal Counsel head Walter Dellinger argues in Slate:

Footnote to a fact-checked false impression

The Note's Chris Good flags an anti-Obamacare ad aimed at young adults by Crossroads Generation, a younguns' auxilliary of Karl Rove's American Crossroads.  This 1-minute font of information nyaah-nyaahs that while Obamacare enables adults under 26 to remain on their parents' insurance, 

...actually, states already allowed kids to stay on their parents' insurance before Obamacare.

I want to add one key point and one minor to Good's debunk below:

As The American Prospect goes, so goes the American prospect?

Answering The American Prospect's call to readers to help save the magazine from extinction, I donated some money and subscribed.  Honestly, I don't know if I'd ever even seen the print edition before my first issue arrived a couple of days ago. May it not be the last!  It's "The Poverty Issue," taking grim stock five decades after the U.S. declared war on poverty, and it's terrific.

Mark Levinson, writing about measurement of poverty, gives us to understand that by the most credible measures, there are currently between 69 and 100 million poor people in America. Roughly one third to one quarter of the nation is, if no longer ill-housed, ill-clad and ill-nourished, still unable to meet a Basic Needs Budget with any consistency.  Peter Edelman, Bill Clinton's onetime Assistant HHS Secretary who resigned in protest when Clinton signed the Republican welfare reform law (which Edelman reminds us, knocked 10 million people off the welfare rolls), examines why the percentage of Americans in poverty stalled for 30 years after 1970 and backslid in the past decade -- mainly because "well-paying industrial jobs disappeared to other countries  and to automation"  and because we allowed unions' strength to erode rather than to migrate to the kinds of jobs that have filled the void.

Edelman offers various policy prescriptions to rebuild the middle class, and the article headline insists, "..We Can Solve This." While that would doubtless be true for a government with the desire and freedom to act, it's hard to imagine this generation of Americans mustering a fraction of the political will that would be required:

My last best shot in defense of the ACA

[repost] I have a piece up at The Atlantic updating my case that the enemies of the ACA misrepresented the individual mandate in the Supreme Court, that the cadre of oppressed citizens they conjured up is a phantom, and that the law's creators worked under a self-imposed "limiting principle," doing their utmost to minimize the financial burden imposed by the mandate.

Below, a few posts that flesh various parts of the argument compressed in the Atlantic piece.  A full index of my posts on the ACA in the Supreme Court, along with outside sources relevant to my argument, is here.

Misrepresentation of the mandate in the Supreme Court: Why it still matters (5/10)

Three possible surprise rulings on the Affordable Care Act (6/15)
Attention, Justices Kennedy, Roberts et al: Read the young people's brief (5/5)  
The ACA offers catastrophic coverage: the AP notices  (4/10)
Marty Lederman concurs: the individual mandate could be trimmed, not killed (4/5)
Go tell the justices: the ACA has a catastrophic coverage option (3/31, updated 4/2)  

And, for the record, the 3/28 post by a healthcare attorney who picked up the plaintiffs' core card trick more or less in real time during oral argument: Ragbatz on the catastrophic coverage options in the ACA. 

The conservative justices shake the Etch-a-Sketch -- twice

For supporters of the Affordable Care Act, the tea leaves after oral argument in the Supreme Court were bad enough. In recent days, though, worse omens have deepened the gloom, as the conservative justices have shown signs of clearing the conceptual decks  for a strike-down of the individual mandate at least.  Perhaps implicitly acknowledging that recent legal precedents suggest that the mandate is constitutional, they have indicated a new willingness to cast aside the judicial principle of stare decisis -- let the decision stand. In fact, in the past week, two justices have signaled a willingness not to let their own decisions stand.  And both those decisions have a bearing on the mandate's constitutionality.

First up is Scalia, who is soon to release a new book that has been reviewed by the New York Times. TPM's Sahil Kapur highlights the relevant section:

What about state-imposed individual mandates?

If the Supreme Court strikes down the individual mandate but leaves the rest of the ACA intact, one fact to keep in mind is that states maintain the right to impose such a mandate.  Backhandedly, even the plaintiffs acknowledged as much. The state respondents' brief makes much of a distinction between regulating commerce and "creating" it by requiring individuals to purchase something, asserting that Congress does not have the right to "compel individuals to engage in commerce." But the states do have that power:

The power to force individuals to engage in commercial transactions against their will was the kind of they reserved to state governments more directly accountable to the people (p. 17).*

Massachusetts, ICYMI, has exercised that power.  No one has challenged it.  And Mitt Romney has been insisting for two years that each state should have the power to find its own healthcare solution.

Bring it on, Mitt

The Weekly Standard's Frank Cannon and Jeffrey Bell, following an alas-for-the-evil-emperor paean to Obama's tactical brilliance that will take Democrats through the looking glass, call for* a "forward-looking economic debate" between Romney and Obama:

Smart messaging, with a large dollop of denial, from Aetna's Bertolini

The health insurance industry has sensed and seized -- or created -- a PR opportunity amid the mounting tension in the runup to the Supreme Court's decision on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. First, UnitedHealth announced that it would continue to allow parents to cover adult children up to age 26, a requirement of the law, regardless of whether that part of the law was struck, and adhere to other ACA mandates, such as providing preventive services without copay and forgoing lifetime coverage caps. Aetna and others made similar announcements. Mark Bertolini, CEO of Aetna, has been particularly out front, giving interviews to the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post emphasizing Aetna's innovation in improving healthcare delivery and reducing costs.

There's some disingenuity in Bertolini's message as it's evolved over the past two weeks, however. Yesterday he told WonkBlog's Sarah Kliff that the Supreme Court decision doesn't matter, that Aetna and the industry will continue with innovation regardless of the decision, and that a deficit reduction deal is more important than the ACA.  That's backwards. If the ACA's new rules for health insurers and array of cost-cutting incentives for healthcare providers and insurers are left in place, they will likely have a bigger long-term impact on government spending than any tax-and-spending deal the Congress strikes. Bertolini's own boasts about Aetna's recent accomplishments and strategy indicate as much, though he's now working to unmoor their origin and continued impetus from the ACA.  Check out the denial in his exchange with Kliff:

The morality tale that may sink the ACA, cont.

I have a piece up at The Atlantic updating my case that the enemies of the ACA misrepresented the individual mandate in the Supreme Court, that the cadre of oppressed citizens they conjured up is a phantom, and that the law's creators worked under a self-imposed "limiting principle," doing their utmost to minimize the financial burden imposed by the mandate.

Below, a few posts that flesh various parts of the argument compressed in the Atlantic piece.  A full index of my posts on the ACA in the Supreme Court, along with outside sources relevant to my argument, is here.

Misrepresentation of the mandate in the Supreme Court: Why it still matters (5/10)

Three possible surprise rulings on the Affordable Care Act (6/15)
Attention, Justices Kennedy, Roberts et al: Read the young people's brief (5/5)  
The ACA offers catastrophic coverage: the AP notices  (4/10)
Marty Lederman concurs: the individual mandate could be trimmed, not killed (4/5)
Go tell the justices: the ACA has a catastrophic coverage option (3/31, updated 4/2)  

And, for the record, the 3/28 post by a healthcare attorney who picked up the plaintiffs' core card trick more or less in real time during oral argument: Ragbatz on the catastrophic coverage options in the ACA.  

Someone talk me down

I am so freaked out by the weakening global economy, the Republicans' ballyhooed Supreme Court-enabled  3-1 spending advantage, and the pending ACA decision by same Bushified court, I feel like Ingrid Bergman as the Germans march on Paris. Really, it feels as if the forces of reaction are gaining critical mass. They've sandbagged the economy, sabotaged the ACA, packed the court, and won the right to saturate elections with money.

Once again, I am reminded of Francis Fukuyama's demonstration that in other eras, state sovereigns have found means for a few centuries to check the ability of elites to entrench their advantages, only to have the elites eventually find ways to breach the defenses. The question is whether the current disproportionate accretion of wealth and power to the 1% will once again prove cyclical, as in the wake of the 1929 crash, or this time become permanent.

The billionaire barbarians are at the gates.

Customer Relationship Management, Murdoch style

Print publications, as everyone knows, have been hurting for some time, and many resort to revenue boosters as desperate as those of broke cities looking to jack up parking violation revenue.  For years, I've held off from tempting 1-year offers from the Economist because they won't let you pay by check -- they want your credit card for automatic renewal. I can accept a reasonable bump-up when a new subscriber offer expires, but I don't want it to be unilateral.

For arrogance and customer manipulation, though, nothing beats The Wall Street Journal in the Murdoch era. My online subscription just expired, and when I tried to click through to an article I was bumped to a subscribe page offering a decent combined print-and-online rate ($5.99/week). It's a great time for me to renew, I figured, because my credit card expires in August. I filled out my credit card info, but never pulled the trigger. The terms are unacceptable on several counts.

First, the fee is billed weekly, so they'd be coming after me for my new credit card info right away. Worse is what they do with it.  This offer was dangled before me, an existing online customer, as an "introductory" one -- which makes partial sense, as I have not subscribed to the print edition for some time.  At page bottom, however, is this caveat:

Would the ACA reduce the number of Americans on disability insurance?

What do people who have lined up all night (in their cars) for a day of free medical care at a Remote Area Medical clinic in rural Tennessee think of the Affordable Care Act?

Many have never heard of it, reports TNR's Alec MacGillis in Kaiser Health News. But one uninsured patient offered instant economic analysis that the CBO would be well advised to take note of:

..it it was hard to find visitors to the clinic who would not benefit directly from the law. Barbara Hickey, 54, is a diabetic who lost her insurance five years ago when her husband was injured at his job making fiberglass pipes. She gets discounted diabetic medication from a charity, but came to the clinic to ask a doctor about blood in her urine.

Under the law, she would qualify for Medicaid. Her eyebrows shot up as the law was described to her. "If they put that law into effect, a lot of people won't need disability," she said. "A lot of people go onto disability because they can't afford health insurance."

States like Tennessee have kicked a lot of people off Medicaid in recent years -- in Tennessee, you may now be ineligible if you earn as little as $10,000. Conversely, the federal disability rolls have swelled since the financial meltdown and have been rising steadily since the 1990s. Investor's Business Daily reported on April 20 of this year:

In which Timothy Egan completes Tyler Cowen

Methinks that there's a circularity to Tyler Cowen's argument that lack of trust in government would undermine the effectiveness of traditional stimulus measures to boost public employment:

Various policies that are being put on the table, including forms of fiscal and monetary stimulus, try to accelerate this repair process. They would all be likely to underperform, partly because the public, rightly or wrongly, doesn’t see them as ways to rebuild confidence. We have become skeptical of our own macroeconomic authorities and abilities, and that, in turn, makes successful policy harder to pull off. 

For instance, there is a good case to be made for monetary expansion, given the current low rate of inflation and high rate of unemployment. But if fear of inflation puts off the American public, such a policy will again underperform, relative to what we have learned in textbooks. There won’t be a credible commitment to see the monetary stimulus through, as people panic that resulting inflation will be used to redistribute wealth. (Although Sweden and Switzerland have had effective monetary policies recently, both of those countries have especially high rates of trust in government.)

First, lack of trust stems in part from lack of effective government. Timely and sufficient stimulus would (or would have) demonstrably improved the economy and so boosted trust that government can act effectively.

A worrisome microsamplling

My takeaway from several articles published in the wake of Obama's statement of support for gay marriage was that the 'evolution' would not significantly hurt his support in the African American community. Perhaps not. But trolling for voter registrations and supporter signups in a couple of parks in Allentown, PA yesterday, my little group encountered three African Americans who said they would not vote for Obama because of his stand on gay marriage. Can't say how many people, or black people, we spoke to overall.  But those reactions did jolt a bit.

Three possible surprise rulings on the Affordable Care Act

Supporters of the Affordable Care Act would regard a Supreme Court ruling that the individual mandate is unconstitutional as a chaos-inducing disaster; a strike-down of the entire law as a catastrophe; and an unconditional upholding as an unlikely consummation devoutly to be wished.  There are, however, more ambiguous possibilities -- each unlikely in itself, but taken together, representing a reasonable chance of not-entirely-awful surprise.  Here are three.

1. Kick the can.  The first question the justices considered in oral argument is whether the constitutionality of the mandate can be challenged before anyone is subject to the mandate, which won't happen until the exchanges open in 2014. The case that they cannot rests on the Anti-Injunction Act, which bars challenges to a tax until the tax has been assessed. Both the government and the plaintiffs argued that the Anti-Injunction Act does not apply in this case; the Court appointed an outside attorney (Richard Long) to argue that it does. The arguments were arcane -- a plain-English summary is available on Scotusblog --  and most observers did not think that the justices seemed to seriously entertain the notion that the AIA applies in this case.

But a punt remains a legally viable option if five justices can't coalesce in a coherent decision to strike all or part of the law. What if, say, two justices want to strike the whole thing, and three want to strike the mandate alone, or in some way reshape it (see below), and they can't agree on instructions to give Congress if they leave a law on the books while destroying or reshaping a part that affects the whole? Mightn't they decide to defer decision until the mandate (and the exchanges) are actually operating?

Obama contrasts two economic visions -- and fact- vs. fiction-based campaigning

The euphoria will last only until the next batch of crummy economic data -- or until the Supreme Court hands down its decision on the Affordable Care Act.  But having indulged in a mid-afternoon watch of Obama's  major economics speech in Cleveland, I can't help but feel for a moment that he just can't lose. 

The speech's basic structure was admirably simple: a contrast of two diametrically opposed economic prescriptions (I won't say "visions," because I don't believe that Romney believes in the policies he's selling).  That contrast included what I craved: the same kind of detailed dissection of Romney's economic plan that Obama leveled at the Ryan budget in April -- which feels like an age ago. Of course the contrast was wrapped in layers of context  : the Bush-era policies (which Romney wants to reprise) that led to crisis; the unfinished recovery he's led; and, as Obama has sketched out repeatedly since 2007, a contrast between the American tradition as he sees it -- of prudent public investment and shared prosperity -- and the GOP policies that have taken us off that path -- radical tax cuts and deregulation. 

Also key, though, was a second, unstated contrast: between truth-telling and lying.  Obama never called Romney a liar, and he never accused him of not believing in the extremist GOP economic prescriptions that in his narrative led the US to disaster [update: I kind of changed my mind on this as I cut and pasted below...].  But he emphasized the factual basis of his own analysis of the GOP budget -- and set that analysis against the phony tissue of Obama-myths with which Romney & co. are saturating the airwaves.  Watch the way he contrasts his own attack with the attack on him. My emphases, natch.

The day American democracy died?

Here's a news snippet, as excerpted in Mike Allen's Playbook, that perhaps lays bare the arc of U.S. history since 1980. And it doesn't bend toward justice:

NINE-FIGURE DONATION TO ROMNEY? "Adelson's Pro-Romney Donations Will Be 'Limitless,' Could Top $100M," by Forbes' Steven Bertoni : "Sheldon Adelson, along with his wife Miriam, ... donated $10 million to the leading Super PAC supporting ... Mitt Romney-and that's just the tip of the iceberg. A well-placed source in the Adelson camp with direct knowledge of the casino billionaire's thinking says that further donations will be 'limitless.' Adelson, who has built Las Vegas Sands into an global casino empire, will do 'whatever it takes' to defeat Obama, this source says. And given that Adelson is worth $24.9 billion-and told Forbes in a recent rare interview about his political giving that he had been willing to donate as much as $100 million to his initial presidential preference, Newt Gingrich-that 'limitless' description telegraphs potential nine-digit support of Romney." http://onforb.es/KpzkDk

The "arc" has been sculpted by Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices who, beholden to an ideology that admits no distinction between money and speech, have literally sold American democracy down the river to the GOP's corporate and megarich individual backers.

Now cracks a noble heart

...that of our brave blind beagle-mutt, Merlin, who died after a couple of quick cries and tremors yesterday afternoon. He was eleven.

He went quietly. He stopped eating on Saturday and basically slept all the time, just drinking a little if you raised the bowl or even a handful of water to his lips, until his heart (I presume) gave out on Monday. My wife came home came home at about 4:30 in the afternoon, and he managed a few tail thumps. At about a quarter to five, he gave a sharp yelp and the throes began. We were with him, petting him as he gave up the ghost on our kitchen floor.

The kernel of truth in blaming Obama

Greg Sargent and Steve Benen share a tic.  Almost daily, both expose the big lies and small lies on which Romney's economic case is founded.  Almost invariably, after highlighting the falsity in the Romney narrative, they warn: it could work.

One underlying assumption, inculcated by the political scientists, is that voters blame the president for the state of the economy because they don't understand how limited the powers of the presidency are, particularly when the out-party is determined to block all action proposed by the president. Hence Benen today:

Romney Rules, cont.: blame Obama for effects of policies I advocate

I want to add a footnote to Jonathan Bernstein's challenge to the media to spotlight the substance of Obama and Romney's opposing stances regarding public sector layoffs, which Romney publicly advocated  on Friday, claiming the US doesn't need more firemen, police or teachers. Bernstein:

The real problem with Obama's June 8 press conference

I am not going to opine on whether Obama's "the private sector is doing fine" gaffe will hurt him in the long run.  Sullivan assumed yes, and when I read his lament I jumped immediately for comfort to Jonathan Bernstein, who, right on cue, assured that ultimately it will matter not a whit. 

I am distressed, though, by a more conscious word choice of Obama's in that June 8 press conference below, though -- on that recalls the political summer from hell, 2011.  Wanna guess what I'm thinking?  I will refrain from putting the (repeated) keyword in italics:

Last September, I sent Congress a detailed jobs plan full of the kind of bipartisan ideas that would have put more Americans back to work.  It had broad support from the American people.    It was fully paid for.  If Congress had passed it in full, we’d be on track to have a million more Americans working this year.  The unemployment rate would be lower.  Our economy would be stronger.

Reminder: manufacturing jobs were not always 'good' jobs

At a Netroots Nation plenary panel this morning, labor leaders Ai-Jen Poo of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO each made variants of a fundamental point about the current American labor market.

As Trumka put it, manufacturing jobs -- steel jobs, auto industry jobs, etc. -- were not always "good" jobs.  Collective bargaining made them good. In the 1920s and 1930s, the position of factory workers was  analogous to that of service workers today.

Poo added that service jobs and "care" jobs are where the growth is  The demographic shift toward the elderly is as important as shifts in the country's ethnic makeup (and, she might have added, or may have implicitly, growing numbers of relatively young nonwhites are making their living caring for elderly whites.  The status and dignity of those jobs needs to be raised.

Richard Florida does a nice job putting these points in context.  Here's one iteration from a July 2010 op-ed:

The problem is that on average, service workers earn only half of what factory workers make – and only a third of what professional, technical and knowledge workers are paid. The key is to upgrade these jobs and turn them into adequate replacements for the higher-paying blue-collar jobs that have been destroyed.

It has happened before. Yet the blue-collar jobs we pine for were not always good jobs: we made them good jobs. When my father came back from the second world war, his poorly paid factory job had been transformed. He was able to buy a house, put his two sons through college and participate fully in the American dream. Some of this was due to the power of unions. Most of it was because of the enormous improvements in productivity wrought by improved technologies and management techniques.

If service workers are to be well paid, the country has to keep generating wealth by selling goods and services abroad. Seems like we don't have a problem with that; the problem is that our successful companies don't generate as many jobs at home as they used to, and their profits flow mainly to the top.  Can that wealth be shared without killing the golden geese?  That is, can the wealth generated by American companies be better distributed to benefit not only their own workers, but the growing number of service workers we all seem to require?

Crumbling country watch

Browsing a weeks-old National Law Jouirnal, I came across one more sharp snapshot of desperately needed infrastructure upgrades gone a-begging:

Federal court officials in Nashville, Tenn., have waited more than 10 years for their turn to build a new federal courthouse.

Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) has had the courthouse on his agenda since he arrived in Congress in 2002, and he's still stressing patience to the city and judges who are stuck in the current 58-year-old building. "We're near the top of the list, so that day will come," he said.

But it may not be coming any day soon. The budget crunch in Washington means that the Nashville project, and a dozen like it across the country, likely will have to wait years longer.

Romney Rules

Weekly, Steve Benen tallies up the latest instances of Mitt's Mendacity.  At longer intervals, the Dish flags Romney's Big Lies, the core myths of his case against an imaginary Obama. I find the laser focus on lying a little narrow: the modes of Mitt's deception are manifold. As a private equity chief, Romney was a master of playing a rigged game, or of himself rigging games in his firm's favor; he has carried that skill to the political arena.  He would have the election played by Romney Rules, compiled below.

1. Context doesn't matter. Anything you say I may use against you, e.g., by making it sound like you said the opposite.

2. My record shall be judged by different standards from that of my opponent. For example, job losses in my first year in office don't count; in his, they shall define his entire record.

3. What I said 18, 10, 4, or 3 years ago doesn't matter. Erase it from your mind.  I've been as consistent as human beings (all three of me) can be.

Wisconsin shuts barn door after horse bolts

...or rather, after wolf enters and marauds.

Not pretending to any in-depth knowledge of Wisconsin politics, but this strikes me as an important, under-reported part of last night's story. Lee Bergquist of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports:

Democrats appeared to have assumed control of the state Senate with results posted early Wednesday showing former Sen. John Lehman (D-Racine) defeating incumbent Van Wanggaard in a tight race.

What's Obama's peer group job creation ranking? Way better than 47th of 50

Romney's job creation record as governor of Massachusetts bears a striking -- if superficial -- resemblance to Obama's as President: a first year of job losses followed by three years of weak growth (actually, for Romney, a rather strong final year following two near-flat years).

Romney has been attacking Obama's job creation record since...forever.  You know the drill: Obama made the recession worse, Obama isn't working, nearly a million jobs lost on his watch.  This week, as the Obama team turns the tables and broadcasts that Massachusetts ranked 47th out of 50 states in job growth during Romney's tenure, the Romney camp finds an excuse: you can't blame him for first-year job losses. Of course, if you give Obama that pass, the country has gained nearly 4 million jobs on his watch.  Or, as Michael Tomasky calculated: excluding each executive's first year, and through April of their fourth year, Obama has presided over 2.35% job growth, Romney over 1.9%.

Hence, two Obama spox pounced this morning on Twitter:

Jim Messina: Romney economics: Under Romney, MA fell to 47th out of 50 on job creation. Under POTUS, we see 27 months of private-sector job growth.

Stephanie Cutter: Romney campaign undercut its entire strategy by arguing that he inherited bad economy so 1st yr shouldn't be counted.

What's needed to concentrate fire, it seems to me, is an apples-to-apples comparison to Romney's 47/50 ranking, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. In reality, any local economy in any given period is sui generis; Rick Perry is not a "better" job creator than Mitt Romney. But with Romney shamelessly manipulating the stats to attack Obama, it's fair to come up with a "peer group" for the US during Obama's term.  And what could be fairer than the OECD, which includes Korea, unemployment rate 3.7% at present, and Japan, clocking in at  4.5%?  So let's have a look.

Hey, maybe the Budget Control Act was a 60-yard punt for Obama after all...

so I wondered when the supercommittee failed and Obama coolly let it:

If you assume that a) Obama wanted a deal that included at least as much in cut spending as the BCA mandates; b) he is willing to live with the large defense cuts if he can't renegotiate them on his own terms; c) he will finally make a firm stand on the Bush tax cuts in 2012, insisting on either a restoration of the Clinton era top marginal rate or tax reform that provides more revenue than just that sunset would yield; and d) once Boehner backed out of the summer deal, a good outcome was impossible without and until Obama's reelection... then maybe he tacked his way to the lowest risk/highest yield strategy available to him.

Now lo, Republicans are loathe to let the ax they rigged let fall, reports Jonathan Weisman:

Best Bill Clinton story ever?

Gail Collins, after a little inside dope illustrating the shallowness of John Edwards' engagement with policy questions, has this about Bill:

I’ve listened to in-depth policy discussions with a lot of presidential hopefuls. I once rode in a car with Bill Clinton, during which he gave a nonstop disquisition on highway funding that I found a little disjointed until I looked over and noticed that he had actually nodded off and was talking in his sleep.

Ditto for Hillary. When the firestorm broke in May 2008 over her reference to Bobby Kennedy's assassination (as evidence that primary fights should really just be getting going in June), I watched the whole 60 minutes of her interview with the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader in which that gaffe occurred (in the final two minutes). She too looked gaunt, exhausted, ready to fall asleep in mid-sentence. But I wish the tape or transcript were still up and you could hear that woman discourse on Native American policy and the varieties of potential ethanol sources and western water distribution arrangements.

Obama is the same way -- now, if not always in 2007-2008. But then, policy fluency isn't eveything...

Capitulation, revisited

My hope is that today, with its terrible jobs report, is the darkest hour of the Obama reelection campaign.  Or, more realistically, that it's not the start of a lethal slide, for the economy and for the president.  But as Democrats cry sabotage on Twitter, and Michael Cohen, who joins that chorus, then laments that the federal government has done nothing substantial to boost jobs in three years, my mind goes back to the most stinging indictment that Democrats, led by Obama, let that sabotage happen.

That indictment came down on July 31, 2011, as the details of the debt ceiling deal emerged.  The original headline as I recall it, online or in print, was Capitulation.  It lives online now as The President Surrenders:

For the deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.