The whole story in a bomb-shell

It's not the first time, so it's really no surprise.   But wouldn't you think the Republicans would be a little more nuanced, a tad more circumspect, in such a parlous time of budgetary woes?

This is about the defense budget that the House Republican majority passed.  It includes spending some $4 billion more than the White House and Pentagon requested.   All are either for political reasons (to appear tough on defense) or as earmark favors to the defense industry.

Mind you, these extra expenditures are for things the Pentagon says it does not need, like an East Coast missile defense system, certain fighter jets, and putting the brakes on reducing the size of our forces.

At the same time, the same Republican budget makers are slashing domestic funds that are vital to needy people's survival -- like food assistance, Social Security benefits, and Medicare/Medicaid funds.

The election battle lines are being drawn, and I would not want to be on the Republican side.   Look at their priorities -- unnecessary spending to benefit a few who don't need it by cutting government services to those who do.

This should be our bumper stickers for 2012:

Republicans rob the poor to benefit the rich.

That should be the line we hammer and hammer, just the way they would do if things were reversed.

Ralph 

And another big boost !!!

Today, the Board of the NAACP voted 
to endorse marriage equality.

This is a 64 member board (if all voted) and only two opposed it.

This is almost as big as President Obama's endorsement.   It follows in the tradition of the NAACP's standing for equal rights for all people, as in this statement from the group:

"The NAACP Constitution affirmatively states our objective to ensure the 'political, education, social and economic equality' of all people. Therefore, the NAACP has opposed and will continue to oppose any national, state, local policy or legislative initiative that seeks to codify discrimination or hatred into the law or to remove the Constitutional rights of LGBT citizens. We support marriage equality consistent with equal protection under the law provided under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. Further, we strongly affirm the religious freedoms of all people as protected by the First Amendment."

This is particularly significant however because, in the African-Amercan religious communities, opposition to homosexuality is very strong, based on Biblical objections.

Part of the surprising reactions to Obama's endorsement, however, have been a number of the black religious leaders who said they didn't agree but it was not a deal-breaker.  They would still vote for his re-election.

This NAACP endorsement should help shore up that kind of support from this important community.

And it's one more step toward this becoming a non-issue within the next decade.  It might not take that long, especially if the November voters reject candidates from the extreme right.  That's more likely to happen in national elections than local ones, where state laws are made.

But equality will come.  It's a matter of time, and the speed is picking up . . . remarkably.

Ralph

Obama and gay marriage stance

Obama's support for marriage between same-sex partners has been surprisingly momentous.  Surprising because it has long been obvious that his spin about "evolving" has been a thin facade that obviously meant:  "I'm waiting for the right time to announce this."

So it surprised me -- as it did gay, conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan -- how emotionally stirring it was to have the President of the United States give his public endorsement to gay marriage.

Equally surprising has been the relatively mild response from the conservative camp.  Even some Republicans have been jumping on the bandwagon and saying that conservatives should support it too -- as the conservative position (see my May 12 blog, Really Remarkable Republican advice).   Of course, the right fringe and a lot of the preachers are ranting and saying it will rile up their people.

But, all in all, the conservative response has been less than we suspected, especially from politicians other than the most conservative ones.

Today, conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer writes about this -- not to condemn the decision but to say that Obama has boxed himself in.   He goes on to point out that the president made two arguments that are contradictory.

1.  Obama said that he personally supports gay marriage rights but would leave it to the states to make their own decisions for their state.

2.  Krauthammer then points out that Obama also said that marriage equality is a civil right.

So, he asks, how can you reconcile the two?   If it's a civil right, how can you leave it up to the states?

I hate to find myself in agreement with Krauthammer, but this time I do.   I think those are contradictory.  I have never understood why something as basic and ubiquitous as marriage should be subject to individual state decisions, rather than one decision affecting all U. S. citizens alike.

My solution is simple:   make it a national decision;  don't leave it to the states.   I suspect that Obama might also agree with that, but put in the 'states' rights' clause for political purposes.

Given the importance of his statement, I think we can forgive him this bit of continued political expediency.   After all, he's got an election to win so he can continue trying to save us from total Republican rule.

Ralph

The corruption of our political process

Two new pieces of information, and an older outrage:

1.  First, the older.     When the case "Citizens United" reached the Supreme Court of the U. S., it was a narrow argument about a specific case:   whether a private group could air a critical film about Hillary Clinton during the height of the 2008 presidential primary campaign.   Previous law would have restricted such airings in the 30 days prior to the election.

The conservative majority of SCOTUS, in a bit of judicial activism apparently led by the Chief Justice John Roberts himself, expanded the case to a broad, landmark ruling that treated corporations as individual persons with regard to free speech rights.   And now, we're seeing the disasterous results:  the power of SuperPacs that allow wealthy groups, or billionaire individuals, as well as corporations, to wield undue influence in our electoral process.    And we are just beginning to see how bad this can be and what mega-funds are being spent this way.

2.  Second:  Now the New York Times has released information it obtained about the advertising plan that has been devised by a group of "high profile Republican strategists" who are hoping to have it funded by conservastive billionaire, Joe Ricketts, with the explicit purpose of painting Barack Obama as secretly planning to implement the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's "liberation theology" -- which they misinterpret as a hate-white campaign.

The $10 million advertising plan calls for hiring as spokesman in the ads "an extremely literate, conservative African-American who will argue that Obama misled the nation in presenting himself as "a metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln."   The proposal also states that the plan will show how “president’s formative years among left-wing intellectuals has brought our country to its knees.”   This would be a four-hour, multi-media blitz (newspaper, billboard, TVads) during the Democratic convention in Charlotte, when maximum attention would be focused on it.

The Times goes on to say that Mr. Ricketts is considering several proposals and has not yet decided but that he does intend to spend a large sum of money to defeat Obama.   He reportedly believes that John McCain made a mistake in not capitalizing on the Jeremiah Wright connection in 2008.

3.  Third:   Although not directly political, it involves the influence of money in our governmental process and the recent shocking investment loss by JPMorgan Chase bank, which today is being upped to an estimated $3 billion and may go higher.

The news that was shocking, to me, but it's not new to those in the know:   The CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, not only lobbied Washington to weaken regulations, he also sits on the board of the New York Federal Reserve Bank -- and thus is in a high position himself for directly influencing decisions about bank regulations.

How can this not be an outrageous conflict of interest?   The fox guarding the hen house?

The only smidgen of optimism I can see in all this is that Democracy (such as it is in the U. S. in the 21st Century) still must be pretty powerful if it even partially survives in the face of such capitalistic amorality.

Let me say it boldly:   I think Capitalism, in its unadulterated "free market" form that Republicans want, is both unchristian and undemocratic.

That our democracy survives in its attenuated form is a tribute to democracy itself and to its ideals of equality, freedom, and fairness.   Capitalism, when unregulated, works against those ideals.

Ralph

Krugman on JPMorgan and the need for regulation

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is clearly on the more liberal end of economists;  but he makes sense to me, along with Stiglitz and Volkner.   Here's what he writes in his column today about the debacle of JPMorgan Chase bank's loss of $2 billion in some bad investments that involved manipulating debt rather than investing in making useful things.

Krugman begins by talking about JPM's CEO, Jamie Dimon, who in the past was one of the bankers who argued strongly against more bank regulations, saying that bankers know how to run their own banks and don't need the government looking over their shoulders and regulating what they are allowed to do.

So there’s a large heap of poetic justice — and a major policy lesson — in JPMorgan’s shock announcement that it somehow managed to lose $2 billion in a failed bit of financial wheeling-dealing. . . .

[Bank officers] make money-losing mistakes all the time. That in itself is no reason for the government to get involved. But banks are special, because the risks they take are borne, in large part, by taxpayers and the economy as a whole. . . .

So what can be done? In the 1930s, after the mother of all banking panics, we arrived at a workable solution, involving both guarantees and oversight. On one side, the scope for panic was limited via government-backed deposit insurance; on the other, banks were subject to regulations intended to keep them from abusing the privileged status they derived from deposit insurance, which is in effect a government guarantee of their debts. Most notably, banks with government-guaranteed deposits weren’t allowed to engage in the often risky speculation characteristic of investment banks like Lehman Brothers.

This system gave us half a century of relative financial stability. Eventually, however, the lessons of history were forgotten.

Laws governing banking regulations were overturned or weakened, and once again banks were allowed to take on ever-greater risks with their assets.   Newer forms of banking arose that were not covered by government guarantees.  The recession of 2008 convinced many that we needed to restore the controls that had been overturned, those safeguards that protected us from the old vulnerabities.

Because he had steered JPM rather successfully through the recent recession without needing government bailout, CEO Jamie Dimon became an effective spokesman for the banking industry's fight against restoring those regulations, or at least watering them down and creating loopholes.

He has been particularly vocal in his opposition to the so-called Volcker Rule, which would prevent banks with government-guaranteed deposits from engaging in “proprietary trading,” basically speculating with depositors’ money. Just trust us, the JPMorgan chief has in effect been saying; everything’s under control.

But it wasn't.  What JPMorgan did was apparently make a huge, risky bet on the safety of corporate debt.

The key point is not that the bet went bad; it is that institutions playing a key role in the financial system have no business making such bets, least of all when those institutions are backed by taxpayer guarantees. . . . 

But the truth is that we’ve just seen an object demonstration of why Wall Street does, in fact, need to be regulated.

Now will they listen?    Probably the Wall Streeters won't;  they'll just look for better ways to spin such losses and resolve to be more careful next time.    What about the politicians?   There's still too much money flowing into campaign war chests from Wall Street to have much effective reform pass Congress, at least in this election year.

But at least the problem seems to be getting clearer and clearer -- for anyone who will listen to the likes of Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz -- both of whom have won the Nobel Prize in Economics.  We should listen to them.

Ralph

Really remarkable Republican advice

Andrew Sullivan, writing in The Daily Beast, posts a memo from respected Republican pollster Jan van Lohuizen (he polled for George W. Bush in 2004) to Republican insiders on rapidly changing polling data on gay rights.

He warns that Republicans should evolve on gay marriage or else risk becoming irrelevant.  He cites the rapidly changing polling data:  up until 2009, approval of gay marriage increased at about 1% per year.  Starting in 2010, it accelerated to about 5% a year.   Recent polls show that supporters outnumber opponents 49% to 40%.

Support is stronger among Democrats and Independents, but among Republicans it is also growing.  The majority of them now support legal protections of civil rights.

Van Lohuizen then recommends that Republican candidates take a more moderate position, and he has model talking positions for them to use.  The most remarkable being how to address the objection of conservatives:

“As people who promote personal responsibility, family values, commitment and stability, and emphasize freedom and limited government we have to recognize that freedom means freedom for everyone. This includes the freedom to decide how you live and to enter into relationships of your choosing, the freedom to live without excessive interference of the regulatory force of government."

Andrew Sullivan reacted to this as follows:

The last paragraph is, to my mind, the most remarkable. It's advising Republican candidates to emphasize the conservative nature of gay marriage, to say how it encourages personal responsibility, commitment, stability and family values. It uses Dick Cheney's formula (which was for a couple of years, the motto of this blog) that "freedom means freedom for everyone." And it uses David Cameron's argument that you can be for gay marriage because you are a conservative. . . .

And the walls came tumbling down.

 Nobody, including David Brooks himself, seems to want to revisit a column he wrote for the New York Times on November 22, 2003, in which he said the same thing.   But I saved it because it was so remarkable.   Brooks must have gotten a lot of negative feedback from his fellow conservatives at the time, because to my knowledge he has not written about it since.   But here is what Brooks wrote in 2003, which is available in his archive on the internet.

"The conservative course is not to banish gay people from making such commitments. It is to expect that they make such commitments. We shouldn't just allow gay marriage. We should insist on gay marriage. We should regard it as scandalous that two people could claim to love each other and not want to sanctify their love with marriage and fidelity.

When liberals argue for gay marriage, they make it sound like a really good employee benefits plan. Or they frame it as a civil rights issue, like extending the right to vote. Marriage is not voting. It's going to be up to conservatives to make the important, moral case for marriage, including gay marriage. Not making it means drifting further into the culture of contingency, which, when it comes to intimate and sacred relations, is an abomination."

I agree with Andrew Sullivan.    The walls [are about to] come tumbling down.

It's been happening at an increasing pace.   Obama just moved the stone that was holding back the avalanche.   Let's hope it moves so fast that, when the Prop 8 case reaches the U. S. Supreme Court (maybe next year) it will seem that overturning Prop 8 is merely bringing the court in tune with the country, rather than leading it on a social issue, which some justices would be loathe to do, even if they personally think it should be overturned.

Ralph

Questions about Romney's character

Mitt Romney says he doesn't remember the much discussed incident when as a prep-schooler he is said to have led a pack of boys in bullying a non-conforming classmate, including throwing him down and cutting his long hair.

Mitt may not remember it, but several other classmates who participated with him in the incident remember and say they have been haunted by what they did ever since.   So, either Mitt is lying about not remembering -- or it maybe says something even worse:  that he is so insensitive to what he did to violate and humiliate another human being that he doesn't even remember it.

Time Magazine's Joe Klein goes after this as a question of Romney's character.

It’s not the incident itself that troubles me–-though it was, obviously, outrageous and disgraceful–-so much as his current response: He doesn’t remember it. This is patent nonsense. How could he not remember it? Obviously, he remembers it or he wouldn’t have been so quick to issue his blanket apology yesterday for any and all hurt he may have caused at Cranbrook.  And this transparent fudge once again raises questions about his character.

It comes during the same week that he claims credit for saving the auto industry, even though he opposed the bailout that made possible the “structured bankruptcy” he favored. It comes the same week that he expresses his opposition to gay marriage, even though he promised to be a more aggressive proponent of gay rights than Ted Kennedy when he ran for the Senate in 1994–of course, it’s possible that Romney has “evolved” in the opposite direction from President Obama, and most Americans, on this issue, but I doubt it. It seems that a day can’t go by without some Romney embarrassment, or bald-faced reversal of a former position.

I’m still waiting for the moment when Romney actually tells the truth about something difficult.

Me too.   Just look at what he's said this week about his position on gay issues in response to Obama's historic support for gay marriage -- forget for the moment all the other contradictory things Romney has said in the past.   Just this week alone he said he is opposed to same-sex marriage and wants to protect the sanctity of marriage.  He would support a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman.  Yet he would allow states to make their own laws.  But the constitutional amendment would render any state gay rights laws invalid.   He supports certain civil rights for gays and even the right to adopt children ("I'm fine with that.")    Except that he opposes civil unions, and thinks that children deserve to have both a mother and a father.

Can you follow that?   No, of course not.   Don't try.  It's just the Romney merry-go-round.

Back to Klein on Romney about the bullying in prep school and the non-apology:

He could have said, “You know, I’ve been troubled by the Cranbrook episode for most of my life, and I feel relieved, in a way, that it’s come out now. I did a really stupid and terrible thing. . . .  What I most regret  is that I never apologized to John, and won’t be able to now that he’s gone, but let me apologize to his family and friends. Bullying is unacceptable under any circumstances. . . .  If elected President, I will try to atone for my teenage behavior by campaigning against bullying all across this country. What I did back then should be an example of how not to behave. I hope we can all learn from this. I know that I have.”

Instead, Romney has a near-perfect record of cowardice, obfuscation and downright lies. It shows enormous disrespect for the intelligence of the public.

I just don't believe he has it in him to say something that honest and caring.   He says it never entered his mind to think that the boy was gay -- it was just that he wasn't dressing and wearing his hair the way boys at Cranbrook were supposed to look, and Mitt was trying to enforce conformity.

I don't believe for a minute that they didn't think the kid was gay;  others have said that they taunted the boy by calling him "girlie."   But, even on Romney's own terms, it shows a gross intolerance for non-conformity and a willingness to take matters in his own hands and lead a vigilante group to impose his will.   It was, quite simply, atrocious bullying.   It went far beyond Mitt's preferred "teenage hijinks and pranks."

I suggest that this teenage behavior is consistent with Romney's policy decisions about the role of government as it affects the lives of those who are different, less privileged, and need the safety net of the social contract.   Cranbrook was a formative world of privilege and conformity.   Romney learned those lessons well, and he wants to impose them on everyone else.  That may be the only consistent thing that influences his policy decisions.

Ralph