skip to main |
skip to sidebar
The right-wing Politico cesspoolPolitico reporter Mike Allen, formerly of The Washington Post and Time, appeared yesterday on the show of right-wing radio host Mike Gallagher. The two of them guffawed together at how absurd are Scott McCellan's claims that the media was "deferential" to the Bush administration and then Allen said this:
ALLEN: And indeed, Scott does adopt the vocabulary, rhetoric of the left wing haters. Can you believe it in here he says the White House press corps was too deferential to the administration?
Think Progress has the audio, which makes even clearer how eager Mike Allen was "to adopt the vocabulary, rhetoric" of the right-wing operatives which Politico exists to serve. Actually, not even Karl Rove -- who gave Allen and comrades their marching orders earlier this week when he said during an interview with Sean Hannity that McClellan "sounds like a left-wing blogger" -- goes so far as to refer to those critical of the media's war coverage as "left wing haters." But Politico "reporter" Mike Allen does.
After hearing his repugnant comments, I e-mailed Allen last night and asked him several questions, including (full email is here): "Is anyone who believes that the media was too deferential to the Bush administration in the run-up to the war a 'left-wing hater?'" and "Can you give a few examples of the 'left-wing haters' you were referencing?" and "Are there 'right-wing haters'? If so, any examples you can provide?" Allen sent me a completely non-responsive reply that had nothing to do with what I asked. When I emailed him again and emphasized that I was particularly interested in his use of the term "left wing haters," this is the reply he sent me, in full:
Ah, gotcha. No, you can call them "critics" or "skeptics" or "opponents" or whatever. My only point was that McClellan has now validated points of view that the administration had in the past pushed back against -- and that, in fact, have been proven empirically in many cases. For instance, the Larry Lindsey $100-200 billion was once considered heresy by Scott and his colleagues. Now, it looks like a lowball...
When he referred to "left wing haters," he just meant "critics" of the administration -- war "skeptics" and Bush "opponents." That's all synonymous in his mind with "left wing haters" -- interchangeable terms. Thus: "you can call them 'critics' or 'skeptics' or 'opponents'" -- or the phrase I used: "left wing haters" -- "or whatever." So according to Politico's chief political correspondent (the former White House Correspondent of Time), administration critics are, by definition, "left wing haters."
Allen shared his complaint about "left wing haters" while chatting agreeably with Mike Gallagher, who previously said this:
I think we should round up all of these folks. Round up Joy Behar. Round up Matt Damon, who last night on MSNBC attacked George Bush and Dick Cheney. Round up Olbermann. Take the whole bunch of them and put them in a detention camp until this war is over because they're a bunch of traitors.
Allen and Gallagher can't stand those left wing haters.
New York Times Perpetuates the Myth that George Bush Won the 2000 ElectionWhy did Ms. Stanley make such an important and fundamental error?
It is not a trivial matter. It is a common piece of misinformation. Many, many people believe it. Now a few more do, as a result of Ms. Stanley's review. It is not a trivial matter. Because that misinformation was created by one of the most bizarre, and still completely unexplained, journalistic events in modern times.
Here's what happened.
George Bush appeared to have won Florida, and therefore the presidency.
The law in Florida was actually quite simple and direct:
ƒ(4) If the returns for any office reflect that a candidate was defeated or eliminated by one-half of a percent or less of the votes cast for such office ... the board responsible for certifying the results of the vote on such race or measure shall order a recount of the votes cast with respect to such office or measure.
That is one of the simplest and most clearly written bits of legislation I've ever seen anywhere. The Florida court thought so too and ordered a recount. Then the United States Supreme Court stepped in and shut the recounts down. Bush was left as the victor and became the president. But, presumably, the whole world wanted to know who actually did get the most votes. It would make a great and important story. But getting the truth was too time-consuming and expensive for any single news organization, so a consortium was formed. It consisted of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Tribune Company, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, the St. Petersburg Times, the Palm Beach Post and CNN. It took almost a year and cost more than a million dollars. All the news organizations had the same information: Al Gore got more legal, countable votes than George Bush. Here are the headlines:
New York Times: "STUDY OF DISPUTED FLORIDA BALLOTS FINDS JUSTICES DID NOT CAST THE DECIDING VOTE"
Wall Street Journal: "IN ELECTION REVIEW, BUSH WINS WITHOUT SUPREME COURT HELP"
Los Angeles Times: "BUSH STILL HAD VOTES TO WIN IN A RECOUNT, STUDY FINDS"
Washington Post: "FLORIDA RECOUNTS WOULD HAVE FAVORED BUSH"
CNN.com: "FLORIDA RECOUNT STUDY: BUSH STILL WINS"
St. Petersburg Times: "RECOUNT: BUSH."
If you were still interested, after the headlines, and bothered to read the stories, it didn't get much better. I read it in the New York Times. Frankly, I missed the key paragraph, until I saw it pointed out in an article by Gore Vidal. I subsequently went back and read all the stories. The Times was the worst in terms of active misdirection. They spent the first three paragraphs supporting the headline, and they explicitly stated that Bush would have won even with a statewide recount. Finally, in the fourth paragraph -- if you got that far -- was the statement quoted above:
"If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards, and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won, by a very narrow margin."
There it was. A very simple statement. Al Gore got more votes in Florida than George Bush. It is also very well buried. It had arcana about chads on both sides of it. Even so, as if in a panic to make sure that nobody might think that it mattered that Al Gore got more votes than George Bush, the Times dismissed what the consortium had spent a million dollars to find out: "While these are fascinating findings, they do not represent a real-world situation. There was no set of circumstances in the fevered days after the election that would have produced a hand recount of all 175,000 overvotes and undervotes." That would seem to be a fairly obvious interpretation of the law, and it is what was found when someone actually did sit down and count the votes.
The Bush Legacy Hushing Up Crisis Of Suicide, Mental ScarsDr. Ira Katz, chief of mental health services for the Department of Veterans Affairs, sent an e-mail to a VA colleague this past February that read:
“Shh! Our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among the veterans we see in our medical facilities. Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before somebody stumbles on it?”
Unfortunately for the government, somebody did “stumble” on it. Dr. Katz lied about the numbers before the House of Representatives Veterans’ Affairs Committee, grossly understating the number of such suicide attempts. He testified that the number for all of 2007 was 790. He also neglected the Army’s own “Suicide Event Report,” which disclosed that 2006 saw the highest rate of military suicides in 26 years!
CBS News did its own extensive research, finding that more than 6,250 American veterans took their own lives in 2005 alone. That comes to slightly more than 17 suicides every day.
Most of the data was obtained by discovery in the case of Veterans for Common Sense v. Peake, now pending in U.S. District Court in California. Veterans for Common Sense has spent years seeking this information under the Freedom of Information Act as well as through discovery ancillary to its lawsuit.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am a member of Veterans for Common Sense, and I have an application pending with the VA for an increase of my disability pension as a Purple Heart combat veteran of World War II.
The litigation against Veterans Affairs Secretary James Peake is uncovering more than the familiar amalgam of government secrecy, cover-up and deception by still another federal agency.
The Department of Veterans Affairs is vital to the protection and support of our troops. This support has carried an implied exception, namely cost-cutting for veterans’ health care after they have served their country.
The Veterans for Common Sense lawsuit has already demonstrated that the VA intentionally misled Congress and the public about the epidemic of veterans’ suicides. Here are the facts squeezed out of the government to date:
* 120 veterans commit suicide every week.
* 1,000 veterans attempt suicide while in VA care every month.
• Nearly one in five service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan (approximately 300,000) have post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms or major depression.
• 19 percent of post-Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have been diagnosed with possible traumatic brain injury, according to a Rand Corp. Study in April.
• A higher percentage of these veterans suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder than from any previous war because of “stop loss” or an involuntary extension of service in the military (58,300), multiple tours, greater prevalence of brain injuries, etc.
The Veterans for Common Sense case has already uncovered widespread breakdown of the VA’s health care for veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. The Rand Corp. study demonstrates that, in addition to the 300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans diagnosed with PTSD, an additional 320,000 have sustained physical brain damage resulting from traumatic brain injury. A majority of these injured GIs are receiving no help from the Defense Department or the VA, which are more concerned with covering up such unpleasant facts than providing care and paying disability pensions.
The Rand Corp. study concludes:
“Individuals afflicted with these conditions face higher risk for other psychological problems and for attempting suicide. They have higher rates of unhealthy behaviors - such as smoking, overeating and unsafe sex - and higher rates of physical health problems and mortality. … These conditions can impair relationships, disrupt marriages, aggravate the difficulties of parenting, and cause problems in children that may extend consequences of combat trauma across generations.”
For His Treatment of Children in the ‘War on Terror,’ Bush Is a War CriminalSurely nothing that President Bush has done in his two wretched terms of office — not the invasion and destruction of Iraq, not the overturning of the five-centuries-old tradition of habeas corpus, not his authorization and encouragement of torture, not his campaign of domestic spying — nothing, can compare in its ugliness as his approval, as commander in chief, of the imprisoning of over 2500 children.
According to the US government’s own figures, that is how many kids 17 years and younger have been held since 2001 as “enemy combatants” — often for over a year, and sometimes for over five years. At least eight of those children, some reportedly as young as 10, were held at Guantanamo. They even had a special camp for them there: Camp Iguana. One of those kids committed suicide at the age of 21, after spending five years in confinement at Guantanamo. (Ironically and tragically, that particular victim of the president’s criminal policy, had been determined by the Pentagon to have been innocent only two weeks before he took his own life, but nobody bothered to tell him he was slated for release and a return home to Afghanistan.)
I say Bush’s behavior is criminal because since 1949, under the Geneva Conventions signed and adopted by the US, and incorporated into US law under the Constitution’s supremacy clause, children under the age of 15 are classed as “protected persons,” and even if captured while fighting against US forces are to be considered victims, not POWs. In 2002, the Bush administration signed an updated version of that treaty, raising the “protected person” age to all those “under 18.”
Treaties don’t mean much to this president, to the vice president, or to the rest of the administration, but they should mean something to the rest of us.
But capturing and imprisoning children isn’t even the worst of this president’s war crimes when it comes to the abuse of the young. Under Bush’s leadership as commander in chief, the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan has been considering any male child in Iraq of age 14 or older to be a potential combatant. They have been treated accordingly — shot by US troops, imprisoned as “enemy combatants,” and subjected to torture.
In the 2004 assault by US Marines on the city of Fallujah, things were even worse. Dexter Filkins, a reporter for the New York Times, reported that before that invasion, some 20,000 Marines encircled the doomed city, which the White House had decided to level because it harbored a bunch of insurgents and had angered the American public by capturing, killing and mutilating the bodies of four mercenaries working for US forces. The residents of the 300,000-population city were warned of the coming all-out attack. Women and children and old people were allowed to flee the city and pass through the cordon of troops. But Filkins reported that males determined to be “of combat age,” which in this case was established as 12 and up, were barred from leaving, and sent back into the city to await their fate. Young boys were ripped from their screaming mothers and sent trudging back to the city to face death.
Low-Income Renters to Pay for Housing BailoutUnfortunately, that is not a joke. This appears to be the latest gem to come from our leaders in Congress.
Just to remind everyone of where things stand, Congress was wrestling with the situation of several million low- and moderate-income families, who are facing foreclosures on their homes. The main problem here is that they were pushed to buy over-priced homes in bubble-inflated markets. Making matters worse, many of these homeowners were also the victims of subprime mortgage scams. They got loans that started with relatively low teaser rates. These rates then reset, typically after two years, to much higher rates that made the mortgages unaffordable.
This is bad news not only for the homeowners facing the loss of their homes, but also for the banks that will take large losses foreclosing on homes that now sell for much less than the money owed on the mortgage. Congress’ answer to this problem is a complex bailout scheme in which it would have the Federal Housing Authority guarantee new lower interest rate mortgages.
The new mortgages would pay off the first mortgages at 85 percent of the appraised value of the house. While the banks will still lose money under this plan, they will almost certainly end up much better off than if the situation was just left to the market. In fact, since the banks decide which loans get into the program, it is virtually guaranteed that they will come out ahead.
Homeowners can benefit also, in that many will be able to stay in their homes with more affordable mortgages. However, in many of the bubble-inflated markets such as San Diego, Los Angeles and Boston, the new mortgages are still likely to cost far more than renting comparable units, draining money away from other necessary expenses, such as health care and child care.
Furthermore, since prices are still falling rapidly in these areas, it is unlikely these homeowners will ever accumulate equity. For homeowners in these bubble-inflated areas, the banks will be the main beneficiaries of this bailout.
It would be possible to prevent this problem by restricting the guarantee prices to some multiple of rents. Rents never got out of line with fundamentals even at the peak of the bubble. For example, if the guarantee price was set at a multiple of 15 times the appraised rent on a property, it would offer greater assurance the homeowner was not paying too much on their mortgage and might also accumulate some equity in their home.
Congress has shown little interest in ensuring the new guarantee prices reflect fundamentals, making it likely many of the people “helped” under the program will end up facing foreclosure a second time. However, to make matters worse, they came up with the idea of financing the plan by taking away a stream of funding that had been dedicated to help low-income renters.
That’s right; Congress wants to take away money from low-income renters to help bankers that made bad loans in the housing bubble. As we all know, when the banks are in trouble, it is not the time to talk about the free market.
The real painful part of this story is it would be very easy to help the real victims in this story: the low- and moderate-income homeowners, who were suckered into buying homes at bubble-inflated prices with bad mortgages. Congress could just temporarily change the rules on foreclosure to allow moderate-income homeowners facing foreclosure the option to stay in their home paying the fair market rent.
McCain's amazing Iraq flip flop By Joe Conason
For a straight-talking maverick, John McCain certainly knows how to parse and pander. During this year's campaign he has already flipped and flopped on such major issues as taxation and immigration to pacify the Republican base -- but now he has executed a stunning reversal of position on Iraq war policy, which he has often touted as the symbol of his political steadfastness.
The man who scorched poor Mitt Romney because he once alluded to a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops promised on Wednesday to bring them home by January 2013, or less than five years from now. We will have "won" by then, so why not?
The Columbus, Ohio, speech into which McCain tucked this convenient guarantee was a happy description of the utopia we will inhabit following his first term as president. Most of these assertions are hardly worth arguing over, since the candidate provided little or no explanation for how he hopes to achieve drastically reduced healthcare costs, vastly improved public education, or any of his other enticing promises.
But Iraq is a different matter, because McCain has attacked both Democrats and Republicans repeatedly for daring to suggest a date for withdrawal. Ever since the last time he discussed how long he expected U.S. troops to remain in Iraq -- when he made the mistake of mentioning a hundred years as a possibility -- his campaign has complained bitterly that his remarks were distorted. To avoid anything like that happening again, here is what he said in Columbus on the subject of Iraq, in full:
"By January 2013, America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom. The Iraq War has been won. Iraq is a functioning democracy, although still suffering from the lingering effects of decades of tyranny and centuries of sectarian tension. Violence still occurs, but it is spasmodic and much reduced. Civil war has been prevented; militias disbanded; the Iraqi Security Force is professional and competent; al-Qaida in Iraq has been defeated; and the Government of Iraq is capable of imposing its authority in every province of Iraq and defending the integrity of its borders. The United States maintains a military presence there, but a much smaller one, and it does not play a direct combat role."
He then went on to predict that the Taliban, too, would be largely defeated in Afghanistan, while we will be mopping up "the remnants of al-Qaida," with the help of the Government of Pakistan, which presumably also helped us to kill or capture Osama bin Laden and deny any safe haven to the terrorists.
What McCain omitted from his uplifting address were any details concerning how he expected to achieve these brilliant results, which sound fantastically remote from the actual facts on the ground at present. In Afghanistan, for instance, the NATO coalition is barely holding the line against the Taliban, as the new government in Pakistan seeks negotiations rather than confrontation with the Islamist militants in its frontier regions. And in Iraq, the notion of a "professional and competent" security force or even a real government remains as distant as when the surge urged by McCain began last year.
John Cusack’s War: The Actor Battles to Un-Embed Hollywood With His New Film, ‘War, Inc.’Cusack, Leyner and Pikser are not predicting the future, they are forcefully–and with dark humor and wit– branding the present for what it is: the Wal-Mart-ization of life (and death) represented in the new US model for waging war. With 630 corporations like Blackwater and Halliburton on the US government payroll in Iraq getting 40% of the more than $2 billion Washington spends every week on the occupation, Cusack’s “futuristic” film is not far from the way things really are. A powerful, for-profit war corporation, run by the former US vice president “owning” the war zone; tanks with NASCAR-like sponsor logos speeding around the streets firing at will; “implanted journalists” watching the war in IMAX theaters in the heavily-fortified “Emerald City” to get “full spectrum sensory reality” while eating popcorn; a secretive “viceroy” running the show from behind a digital curtain are all part of Cusack’s battlefield in the fictitious Turaqistan. But how far are they from the realities of the radically privatized corporate war machine Washington has unleashed on the world?
“War, Inc.” is already an underground cult classic and will likely remain so for years to come. The film is not without its shortcomings–at times it is confusing and drags–but its faults are significantly overshadowed by its many strengths. It also accomplishes the difficult feat of being very entertaining and funny, while delivering a powerful punch of truth. “War, Inc.” is a movie that deserves a much wider viewing than the barons of the film industry are likely to give it. But by filling the theaters in the opening days, people can send a powerful message that there is–and must be–a market for films of conscience.
Schools in the Bogus Age of TerrorMassacre. Suicide-bombing. Mass murder. Conspiracy. WMDs. They love those inflammatory words, don’t they? Not just adolescents, who use the words as adolescents would, without gauging their impact, but also law enforcement types, who should know better. The climate that makes chatter of school shootings so endemic can be attributed to the few deranged souls who think up mayhem fantasies in their miserable little journals and cyber-caves. But they’re not the only ones responsible.
“Massacre” and “conspiracy to commit murder” were the words (and official charges) of choice when three DeLand Middle School seventh-graders were arrested in March after their “plot” to gun down other students and themselves was uncovered. “The investigators determined the students did not appear to have weapons or means to carry out the threats,” a Volusia County Sheriff’s spokesman said soon after their arrest. Nevertheless, word of a massacre averted and severe punishment deserved spread through the community. The three children’s grind through the system is only beginning.
What, so far as we know, had these children done? One of them posted threatening messages and satanic idiocies on his MySpace page, along with the obligatory references to the Columbine school massacre. No matter how baseless, those references have become iconic for anyone angling for his 15 minutes of fearsome fame. Innumerable journal entries by seething adolescents, in print and online, are no doubt filled with Columbine fantasies. They’re ignored, as adolescent scrawls generally (or absent more incriminating evidence) should be regardless of medium. Once in a while they’re “uncovered.” What should be the occasion for a parent-child reality check, a dressing down or at most a trip to the local counselor, is turned over to law enforcement instead. The cycle of public fear and sensationalism kicks in. For the children in question, humiliation and cruelty (what any form of juvenile-criminal proceedings and detention consist of these days) follow.
There’s been a spate of alleged plots in schools lately, locally and elsewhere. Spring is the season of threats. It’s stupid students’ way of commemorating the Columbine and Virginia Tech massacres, which took place April 20, 1999 and April 16, 2007, claiming 47 lives between them (the three gunmen included). Earlier this month two schools in New Smyrna Beach swirled with rumors of an attack. Since April, Malcolm X College and St. Xavier University in Chicago, Oakland University in Auburn Hills, Mich., and three parochial schools in Michigan all closed when threats scribbled their way around each campus. Tales of suspicious backpacks, rumors endowed with the power of errant bullets and bad jokes elevated to threat levels worthy of the Department of Homeland Security’s paranoia locked down or shut down schools in Oveido, Pittsburgh and South Bend.
And police in Chesterfield County, S.C., in what’s becoming a habit of pre-emptive arrests based on private thoughts rather than action, arrested a high school senior who’d been writing threatening messages in his journal for up to a year. He’d referred to an alleged suicide-bombing plot against his own high school as “Columbine III.” The boy’s parents tipped off police in that one. The boy was charged, if you can believe this, with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction.
What almost all these allegations have in common is disproportion — the disproportionate fantasies of the alleged perpetrators, whose frames of reference are cribbed from a culture that blurs the lines between video games, entertainment, celebrity and violence; and the disproportionate response from schools and law enforcement, whose overzealous narratives incite fear by feeding into overheated anxieties. But there’s glamour in the language of violence and humiliation. Witness the Daytona Beach police chief’s fetish for the word “scumbag,” now emblazoned (as “scumbag eradication team”) with an obscene image on shirts for the teenagers in the department’s Police Explorer program. There’s power in the language of violence supposedly averted, even if the upshot of it all is more irrational fear, not more security, and more children slammed into a juvenile-justice system designed to scare and punish, not heal and reintegrate.
Burger King The USSR of Fast FoodTwo weeks ago, I asked a Burger King spokeswoman whether the company had hired a private investigator firm to infiltrate the non-violent Student/Farmworker Alliance (SFA) or Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW). She declined to comment. I asked whether the company was aware of any executives making "libelous" comments against CIW via online posts and e-mails. Again, no comment.
Now we know why.
The Fort Myers News-Press linked Vice President Steve Grover to the anti-CIW posts that he made through "his young daughter's online alias." And in an explosive op-ed in the New York Times last week, investigative journalist and author of Fast Food Nation Eric Schlosser revealed that, in fact, the company used Diplomatic Tactical Services – a private security firm specializing in "covert surveillance" and "covert operations" – to spy on the SFA and CEO John Chidsey knew the firm had been hired to do investigations. Burger King's Senior Analyst of Communications, Denise Wilson, told me that Chidsey "did not know about or authorize the use of Diplomatic Tactical Services to obtain information about the Student/Farmworker Alliance's plans." But when pressed on when he learned about it the company declined to comment. Further, when asked whether Burger King would continue to use Diplomatic Tactical Services or any other investigative firms to track either CIW or the SFA she said, "Burger King Corporation has the right and duty to assess security risks and to protect its employees and assets from potential harm."
That's a good-sized portion of doublespeak from the home of the Double Whopper.
The Biofuels DilemmaWith hungry, angry people taking to the streets in countries on every continent -- from Morocco to Mexico and Pakistan to the Philippines, and at least 20 other nations -- the biofuel debate is clearly moving into new territory.
Arguments for and against using crops to make fuel are no longer focusing on energy ratios or "independence from foreign oil" or feel-good environmentalism. The headlines today are about people needing food to eat -- and right now.
Politicians who once supported biofuel expansion are now backpedaling fast in the face of irate grocery shoppers in this country and an increase in hunger across the planet. Representative James McGovern, D-Mass., was one of the first national lawmakers to raise alarms about the impact of grain-based biofuels on food prices, telling the New York Times last month, "If there was a secret vote [in Congress], there is a pretty large number of people who would like to reassess what we are doing." Now 24 Republican members of Congress, citing high food prices, have come out into the open to urge a retreat from the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which mandates rapid increases in biofuel production.
State officials across the country are also looking to bail out of the biofuel rush. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas has formally requested that the federal government relax biofuel requirements imposed on his state. Also responding to runaway food costs, the Missouri legislature is considering a rollback of its own recently passed law requiring that gasoline must be mixed with a minimum percentage of ethanol.
Filling gas tanks or plates?
The agriculture lobby has legendary clout in Washington, so current biofuel targets, along with heavy subsidies that keep the industry alive, will stay in place for now. The 2008 farm bill, which has entered the homestretch in Congress, cuts the corn-ethanol subsidy by only 6 cents, to 45 cents per gallon, while the subsidy for the "next generation" of ethanol (to be made from grass, straw, and other cellulosic materials) will rise to more than a dollar a gallon. To soften the rapid food-price inflation that's expected to result, the new law will increase food aid to lower-income Americans.
Perhaps the starkest measure of the car culture's energy appetite is the fact that the state of Iowa, the nation's leading corn producer, will soon be importing corn. If a meteorite were to land randomly in Iowa, there's a 35 percent chance it would land in a cornfield; Iowa's corn harvest last year contained more calories than the state's human population would consume in 85 years of eating; yet Iowa will be hauling corn in from other states. The grain will be fed to a multitude of new fuel-ethanol factories, along with the state's existing corn syrup and livestock industries.
When McCain loved Robert Bork
I realize 1987 was a while ago (I was 14 during the Bork hearings), and many may have forgotten the judicial record McCain was defending so enthusiastically.
Back in 2005, Jonathan Chait had an item on Bork that is no longer online.
The funny thing is that the memory of the campaign to demonize Bork as a right-wing nut has grown stronger even as the intervening years have shown quite clearly that Bork is, in fact, a right-wing nut.
The most famous hyperbolic charge against Bork — one which has been invoked far more often against Bork’s accusers than it ever was against Bork — was Sen. Ted Kennedy’s claim that “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters,” etc., etc.
This was far from the sort of fair summation of the totality of Bork’s legal philosophy that you might find at a law school seminar. But it wasn’t exactly false either. Bork had criticized the portion of the Civil Rights Act banning discrimination in public accommodations, argued against extending the equal protection of the 14th Amendment to women, took an extremely restrictive view of free speech, and so on.
InequalitiesDespite the historic magnitude of this shift, inequality has thus far had little traction as a political issue. Many Americans seem to accept the conservative view that escalating inequality reflects “free market” forces immune to amelioration through public policy. As Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson put it, perhaps a bit defensively, the growing income gap “is simply an economic reality, and it is neither fair nor useful to blame any political party.” Paulson’s assertion, however, is strongly contradicted by the historical record. While technology, demographic trends and globalization are clearly important, purely economic accounts ignore what may be the most important influence on changing U.S. income distribution — the contrasting policy choices of Republican and Democratic presidents.
The Census Bureau has tracked the economic fortunes of affluent, middle-class and poor American families for six decades. According to my analysis, these tabulations reveal a wide partisan disparity in income growth. The real incomes of middle-class families grew more than twice as fast under Democratic presidents as they did under Republican presidents. Even more remarkable, the real incomes of working-poor families (at the 20th percentile of the income distribution) grew six times as fast when Democrats held the White House. Only the incomes of affluent families were relatively impervious to partisan politics, growing robustly under Democrats and Republicans alike.
