For those who don’t care, you can argue about TNR‘s observations on “Why There Is Only One African-American in the World Series“…
Anne Laurie has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2009.
Long Read: “The Tea Party Is Going Down, But…”
… We’ll remain infested with Banana Republicans who dream of leveraging their local/state kleptocracies to establish a nationwide kakistocracy. John B. Judis, in The New Republic:
In the Federalist Papers, James Madison promised that a large republic with a representative government would avoid the “instability, injustice and confusion” that had plagued many nations in Europe. In a representative government, he reasoned, disruptive factions would be unable to gain sufficient power to dissolve the social contract. The people’s representatives would not necessarily be paragons of virtue, but they would be less likely to succumb to “local prejudices and schemes of injustice.” In the 225 intervening years, Madison has been proven correct, with two great exceptions. One was the Civil War. The other was the 16-day government shutdown of October 2013.
The shutdown’s precipitating cause—President Barack Obama’s health care reform—was, of course, not as morally consequential as slavery. And yet, the shutdown presented an existential threat to the country—the prospect of a breakdown in the national government, a diminishment in America’s standing in the world, and a global financial disaster…
The same forces hope to create more crises—this winter, when the budget comes up for another vote and when the debt ceiling needs to be raised, and again and again until the administration or the country buckles. “Unfortunately this time the outcome ended with the Ruling Class in D.C. forcing their will on the American people, but this fight is not over,” the Tea Party Patriots declared soon after the impasse was resolved. “We have vowed and stand by our word to leave no stone unturned until we stop the harms from Obamacare and exempt the American people from this ‘train wreck’ legislation.”…
… The Tea Party was assisted by elite conservative organizations in Washington—the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity, and Heritage Action, a branch of the Heritage Foundation—which provided intellectual firepower, Washington experience, and many millions of dollars.
During the Obama years, these Washington organizations adopted an outsider posture toward the Republican establishment, driven by backers alarmed by what Michael Grunwald has called Obama’s “new New Deal.” One of FreedomWorks’ major funders is Richard Stephenson; in the last election cycle, he contributed more than $12 million, which equals about 60 percent of its PAC budget. Stephenson is founder and chairman of the Cancer Treatment Centers of America, which could suffer financially from the ACA. FreedomWorks is fighting against health care reform and supported the shutdown strategy. Americans for Prosperity was founded by the Koch brothers, oil billionaires who have become leading funders of right-wing activism in the Obama era. And the Club for Growth’s board is led by Jackson “Steve” Stephens Jr., who runs a biotech firm and whose uncle founded Stephens, Inc., investment bankers for Walmart.
These backers are far more hard-line than the typical corporate executive. They come from privately owned companies and investor groups and so are invulnerable to shareholder pressure, union retaliation, or public opinion. They want the Republican leadership not merely to block regulations and programs, but to repeal existing ones, an approach that brought their organizations into agreement with the Tea Party…
Long Read: “The Tea Party Is Going Down, <em>But</em>…”Post + Comments (109)
SNAP Cuts (Just in Time for the Holidays, Mr. Scrooge)
This Friday, 48 million people – including 21 million children – will see their food stamp benefits reduced. http://t.co/prq7ZXud2c
— BillMoyers.com (@BillMoyersHQ) October 29, 2013
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From Moyers’ link:
… Tianna Gaines-Turner recently described the impact of cuts like these in written testimony she submitted to Congressman Paul Ryan’s War on Poverty hearing: “Cutting a person’s benefits by $10, or $15, or $20 might not seem like a lot to legislators, but it would cut meals out completely for families like mine.”
Families like hers are families with two working parents earning low wages while trying to support three children. Ms. Gaines-Turner is employed by a childcare provider and her husband works the deli counter at a grocery store.
The SNAP cuts come at a time when 49 million people — about 14.5 percent of all US households — are food insecure. That means they don’t have enough money to meet their basic food needs, and don’t necessarily know where their next meal is coming from. The Institute of Medicine already demonstrated the inadequacies of the SNAP allotment for hungry families even before this cut…
… Food stamps lifted a record 4 million people above the poverty line in 2012, but benefits will be cut on Friday and both the House and Senate are deliberating further cuts in Farm Bill negotiations…
Josh Eidelson, at Salon:
Food stamp recipients face a massive benefit cut set to kick in when stimulus funds expire Friday. The nationwide cut “is equivalent to about 16 meals a month for a family of three,” according to a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis using the USDA’s “Thrifty Food Plan.” CBPP called the roughly $5 billion annual cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program “unprecedented” in “depth and breadth.”
“If you look across the world, riots always begin typically the same way: when people cannot afford to eat food,” Margarette Purvis, the president and CEO of the Food Bank for New York City, told Salon Monday. Purvis said that the looming cut would mean about 76 million meals “that will no longer be on the plates of the poorest families” in NYC alone – a figure that outstrips the total number of meals distributed each year by the Food Bank for New York City, the largest food bank in the country. “There will be an immediate impact,” she said.
“The fact that they’re going to lose what’s basically an entire week’s worth food” each month, said Purvis, “it’s pretty daunting.” She told Salon that while policymakers “are attempting to punish people for being poor,” and “people are comforted by believing that they know that a person has to have done something wrong in order to be poor,” in reality, “I can tell you that more and more folks have more than one job and are still needing help.” (As I reported last week, audio recorded by a McDonald’s worker-activist showed a counselor on an employee hotline encouraging her to sign up for food stamps because it “takes a lot of the pressure off how much money you spend on groceries.”) Purvis added that cutting food stamps was “not even good business sense,” because each dollar of food stamps infuses over $1.70 of spending into the economy….
@NickKristof Pity she's not a middle-class person facing a $90 a month increase in health plan premiums. Maybe CBS would do a story on her.
— billmonster (@billmon1) October 30, 2013
SNAP Cuts (Just in Time for the Holidays, Mr. Scrooge)Post + Comments (106)
Late Night Open Thread: War of the Words
Was going to post this last night, but the blog borked on me. Amusing #slatepitch story from, well, Slate:
Wednesday marks the 75th anniversary of Orson Welles’ electrifying War of the Worlds broadcast, in which the Mercury Theatre on the Air enacted a Martian invasion of Earth. “Upwards of a million people, [were] convinced, if only briefly, that the United States was being laid waste by alien invaders,” narrator Oliver Platt informs us in the new PBS documentary commemorating the program. The panic inspired by Welles made War of the Worlds perhaps the most notorious event in American broadcast history…
There’s only one problem: The supposed panic was so tiny as to be practically immeasurable on the night of the broadcast. Despite repeated assertions to the contrary in the PBS and NPR programs, almost nobody was fooled by Welles’ broadcast.
How did the story of panicked listeners begin? Blame America’s newspapers. Radio had siphoned off advertising revenue from print during the Depression, badly damaging the newspaper industry. So the papers seized the opportunity presented by Welles’ program to discredit radio as a source of news. The newspaper industry sensationalized the panic to prove to advertisers, and regulators, that radio management was irresponsible and not to be trusted. In an editorial titled “Terror by Radio,” the New York Times reproached “radio officials” for approving the interweaving of “blood-curdling fiction” with news flashes “offered in exactly the manner that real news would have been given.” Warned Editor and Publisher, the newspaper industry’s trade journal, “The nation as a whole continues to face the danger of incomplete, misunderstood news over a medium which has yet to prove … that it is competent to perform the news job.”…
Why, yes, that does sound familiar somehow…
Late Night Open Thread: War of the WordsPost + Comments (72)
Reminder: Send Your 2014 Calendar Pet Photos Now!
Deadline for sending your pics to Beth S. at [email protected] is this Thursday, October 31. All profits go to Cole’s chosen rescue group MARC (Marion Animal Resource Connection). Beth’s specifications:
I’m looking for the highest resolution images possible. The photos themselves won’t be that large, but the largest and highest resolution images people can send the better. I have photoshop and can do some remediation on images as necessary.
I haven’t gotten everything downloaded yet but I have about 100 photos (some are of the same animal) so far. Far less than last year but more manageable…
Ask them to please name the file, if they can, with the name(s) of the pet(s) in the photo. If they can’t, like they are sending from their phone, and they are sending multiple photos of multiple pets to give a brief description along with the name in the email like “yellow lab on couch is fido” or “black cat on left is spot and orange cat on right is tiffles.”
Send your pics (don’t be shy, neither your art nor your pet(s) need to be ‘show quality’) to [email protected]. Any problems, you can also send them to me at [email protected] (or click on my name under ‘Contact’ in the right-hand column).
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A further note: We like all kinds of pets — previous calendars have included rabbits, horses, and at least one turtle. Here’s a note from commentor Aji about the photo at the top:
… We have a multitude of rescues (all five of our dogs, all with tearjerker stories), but also horses. One in particular that will have been with us 6 months as of October 17th. He was starved to the point that he was a few days away from dying, was completely dehydrated, had serious health issues, and had been horribly abused and neglected…
Anyway, he has a new life, and a new name, and it turns out the we are now the owners of a full-blooded, registered American Quarter Horse (in addition to our other four horses). But he’ll always just be my miracle horse.
Link to Aji’s full story about Miskwaki (Red Earth) here and here.
Reminder: Send Your 2014 Calendar Pet Photos Now!Post + Comments (57)
Long Read: “Scholars” for Dollars
When it comes to besmirching the honor of honest sex workers and gunsels, count on Wall Street. Lee Fang reports at The Nation:
Professor Todd Zywicki is vying to be the toughest critic of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the new agency set up by the landmark Dodd-Frank financial reform law to monitor predatory lending practices. In research papers and speeches, Zywicki not only routinely slams the CFPB’s attempts to regulate bank overdraft fees and payday lenders; he depicts the agency as a “parochial” bureaucracy that is “guaranteed to run off the rails.” He has also become one of the leading detractors of the CFPB’s primary architect, Elizabeth Warren, questioning her seminal research on medical bankruptcies and slamming her for once claiming Native American heritage to gain “an edge in hiring.”…
What isn’t contained in Zywicki’s university profile, CV, byline or congressional testimony is the law professor’s other job: he is a director of the Global Economics Group, a consulting business that boasts in a brochure that its experts have been hired by industry to influence the CFPB and other regulatory agencies. Nor does Zywicki advertise Global’s client list, which includes some of the biggest names in the financial industry, among them Visa, Bank of America and Citigroup.
Last summer, Zywicki’s firm was retained for $500 an hour on behalf of Morgan Drexen, a debt-relief company accused by the CFPB of deceiving consumers and charging illegal upfront fees. None of these potential conflicts of interest, however, have been disclosed during the course of Zywicki’s anti-CFPB advocacy in the media or in government.
After the financial industry lost the battle to defeat Dodd-Frank, it moved quickly to minimize the law’s impact during the long slog of implementation [see Gary Rivlin, “How Wall Street Defanged Dodd-Frank,” May 20]. Academics like Zywicki have played a key role in this process. As Wall Street firms seek to beat back hundreds of rules still under consideration, sponsored scholars have been at the front lines of obstructing reform…
Several of the anti–Volcker Rule academics providing comments to regulators, such as Harvard Law School professor Hal Scott, have been paid by investment banks seeking to block the rule. A nonprofit financed by Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and other investment banks has paid Scott nearly $1.3 million in compensation since 2007, as Reuters reported in 2010. Separately, Scott has received more than $1.7 million in cash and stock from Lazard since 2006, when he was elected to the company’s board. Scott’s submissions to regulators neglect to mention these payments and other consulting jobs, including one for State Street Corporation, that may color the professor’s outlook.
“If someone is commenting on a regulation,” says the Sunlight Foundation’s Bill Allison, “there’s no requirement for disclosure.”
The same problem exists with congressional testimony thanks to an ethics procedure change by House Republicans in 2011, which removed a requirement that those giving expert testimony reveal their private sector ties. So-called “Truth in Testimony” forms now ask only if an expert witness has received earmarks or government grants, allowing many Wall Street–sponsored professors to assume the guise of academic neutrality. Jeff Connaughton, who worked on financial reform as the chief of staff to then-Senator Ted Kaufman, says that professors receiving undisclosed payments has become a significant issue. “Academics are hired guns like anyone else,” he says….
Tuesday Evening Open Thread: WIN the Mindshare!!!
Why I {heart} Alex Pareene:
Monday was an exciting day for professional haters of Politico, the famous website and newspaper. There is a new memo! Politico memos are their own little literary genre. Usually composed by Politico’s co-founding editors, John Harris and Jim VandeHei, these internal (but always leaked) communications are heavy on obnoxious management buzzwords, ridiculously unjustified boasting, and occasional slightly psychotic-sounding exhortations to WIN. They are generally light on self-awareness, and directives to produce quality journalism…
This new memo is from Jim VandeHei, formerly the executive editor and now the CEO of the entire company. It is about “the culture of Politico,” and in it VandeHei attempts to explain what makes Politico great and instruct his employees on how to make it even better. Nothing in VandeHei’s memo speaks to the actual work Politico is supposedly engaged in, which is reporting. It could be a memo from the CEO of a company that makes iPhone games, or complex financial products. “We work for a hot brand doing important work with some of the smartest people in the world.” “People who thrive here are highly talented, self-motivated doers who are brimming with passion and a desire to win.”…
While he will remain a grossly overpaid fount of meaningless clichés, and indeed he will likely now be an even more overpaid one, VandeHei’s abandoning the editorial side to take charge of the business side is, in a way, good news. It is perhaps bad news for people who actually have to work at Politico, what with the enforced relentless positivity and constant “blunt,” “candid” written and in-person reviews, but it could be good news for the country, because it is VandeHei’s editorial sensibilities that have led to much of what is broadly “wrong” with Politico…
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Apart from pondering the perils of ‘mindshare’, what’s on the agenda for the evening?
Tuesday Evening Open Thread: WIN the Mindshare!!!Post + Comments (64)