“The Anti-Establishment Establishment”: In The GOP, The “Kids” Have Stopped Listening And The “Adults” Are No Longer In Control
To those of us who are perpetually skeptical of the alleged power of the incredibly “adult” and deeply “responsible” Republican Establishment to keep the “constitutional conservatives” in line, a Timothy Carney piece in the Washington Examiner earlier this week was especially interesting. It argued that the ability of said Establishment to kick ass and take names in Congress was being sharply eroded by the loss of a monopoly over money and jobs in Washington:
Cold cash, together with control of institutions, is what makes the Establishment the Establishment. But in the current Republican civil war, the insurgents have secured their own money pipelines, and they control their own institutions – which means the GOP leadership and its allies in the business lobby have a hard fight in front of them.
The firing and hiring of conservative staffer Paul Teller makes it clear that the anti-establishment has built its own establishment.
Teller was a House staffer for more than a decade, and was longtime executive director of the conservative Republican Study Committee. The RSC always exerted a rightward pull on party leadership, but it is nonetheless a subsidiary of the party.
After the 2012 election, the Republican Establishment captured the RSC, in effect, by getting Congressman Steve Scalise elected chairman. Scalise is a conservative, but he is also a close ally of the party leadership – much more so than his predecessors Jim Jordan and Tom Price. Scalise immediately swept out most of the RSC staff.
Last month, Teller was accused of working with outside groups such as Heritage Action to whip RSC members – and Scalise showed Teller the door.
In the old days, this might have been a disaster for Teller. He had lost his job and landed on the wrong side of the party leadership. Anyone who picked up Teller would be spitting in the eye of the Establishment. But this week, Sen. Ted Cruz announced he had hired Teller as deputy chief of staff.
Carney goes on to discuss the rapid rise of alternative sources for campaign money like the Club for Growth and Super-PACs, and the conquest of one important Beltway institution, the Heritage Foundation, by people openly hostile to The Establishment.
Now when you add in the already virtually complete control by hard-core conservatives of basic formulations of GOP ideology and messaging (the best example remains Jim DeMint’s Cut, Cap and Balance Pledge, an insanely radical piece of fiscal flimflammery that a long line of Republicans, from Mitt Romney on down, lined up to sign in 2011 and 2012) and the disproportionate strength of conservative activists in the presidential nominating process, it’s increasingly clear the “adults” are not necessarily in control. Indeed, like parents who try to behave like a kid to maintain some influence with their kids, Establishment folk are forever conceding territory to the “activists” they privately call crazy people. And the loss of its monopoly over jobs and money is like a parent’s loss of a teenager’s car keys and allowance. At some point, “the kids” just stop listening.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, January 16, 2014
“Unto The Breach”: For Credit Card Data Breaches, There Really Hasn’t Been Any Business Consequences
On Wednesday, a letter landed in my email inbox from Gregg Steinhafel, the chief executive of Target. He wanted me to know that there was a decent likelihood that some of my personal information had been stolen by criminals who had “forced their way into our systems,” as Steinhafel put it, and pulled off one of the biggest data breaches in history.
I’m not a regular Target shopper, so I had to think about this for a minute. Then I remembered: In mid-December, while marooned in Houston after missing a connecting flight to Rio de Janeiro, I went to a Target store to buy some clean clothes. I paid with my debit card, which I swiped through the little “point of sale” machine, and then entered my passcode — something I probably do a dozen times a day. The very ordinariness of the transaction is partly why it hadn’t stood out in my memory.
Since receiving Steinhafel’s letter, however, I’ve been brushing up on data breaches, and I’m here to say it is going to be a while before I’m sanguine when I make that little swiping motion with my debit card. In the battle between hackers and retailers, it sure looks as though the hackers are winning.
If you have read anything about the Target data breach, you know that from Nov. 27 to mid-December, hackers siphoned off the credit card information of 40 million Target shoppers, including card numbers, passcodes and the three-digit security code on the back. They also took names and email addresses of tens of millions of other Target customers.
Target acknowledged the breach on Dec. 19, but only after a reporter named Brian Krebs had broken the news on his authoritative blog, Krebs on Security.
When I talked to Krebs, he told me that while Target was “hardly a poster boy for how to secure data,” the company probably wasn’t all that much worse than most other retailers. Its digital system undoubtedly had all the current antivirus software, none of which had detected the malicious software — “malware,” as it’s called — that had infected it. Krebs was pretty convinced that the hackers were Russians. It was obvious that they were extremely sophisticated in how they went about stealing credit card data.
After burrowing into a Target server, he explained on his blog, the malware would then grab data from Target’s point-of-sale terminals all across the country shortly after customers swiped their cards. At that moment, a moment of maximum vulnerability since all the data was unencrypted at that point, the magnetic stripe would yield all the information the hacker needed.
Another security expert, Gerhard Eschelbeck, the chief technology officer at Sophos, wrote in a recent report that “one trend that stands out is the growing ability of malware authors to camouflage their attacks.” Eschelbeck described attacks by modern hacks as “innovative and diverse.”
Virtually every security expert I spoke to said it is likely that a lot more retail companies have been breached than has been acknowledged. Indeed, last week, Neiman Marcus admitted that its systems had been breached. And just the other day, the Department of Homeland Security sent a report to retailers and banks warning about point-of-sale malware, which it suspects has infected more systems than just Target’s.
So why don’t retailers do more to stop such attacks? Part of the reason is that nobody is forcing them to. It costs a lot of money to completely revamp their systems in ways that would make them harder to breach. However disruptive to customers, there really hadn’t been any business consequences, not until the Target breach, anyway. (Target saw its Christmas sales decline after the breach was announced.)
The simplest thing we could do to diminish data breaches would be to move away from magnetic stripes, which are relatively easy to copy, and go to a system in which credit and debit cards are embedded with chips. In widespread use in Europe and elsewhere, such cards are practically nonexistent in the United States (though a rollout is supposed to begin in the fall of 2015). In 2009, a payment company called Heartland suffered a breach that was even larger than Target’s. You would think that would have been a wake-up call, but apparently it wasn’t.
The most galling part of Steinhafel’s letter is its advice to consumers. “Never share information with anyone,” he writes. “Be wary of emails that ask for money.” None of this advice, of course, would have helped anyone who had the misfortune to shop at Target during the three weeks the malware was doing its devious work. The fault was not ours, Mr. Steinhafel; it was yours.
As for me, it turns out that the Russian hackers won’t be able to use my debit card information after all. I had to get a new card — after I was hacked in Brazil.
By: Joe Nocera, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, January 17, 2014
“The Psyche Of An Uninformed Conservative”: Rand Paul Needs To Stop Writing A Revisionist History Of Civil Rights
I understand that a revisionist history of the civil rights movement is of great psychological importance to some conservatives. We’ll probably hear a lot more of it on Monday in conjunction with a MLK Holiday many of their forebears opposed.
But Rand Paul’s forays into this area are just plain ill-advised. Last April he gave a speech at Howard University that pursued the ridiculous theory that the New Deal was essentially a complement to Jim Crow in its “enslavement” of African-Americans to the terrible indignity of material living assistance. And now we have this, via WaPo’s Aaron Blake:
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), in an interview Thursday, likened President Obama’s governing philosophy to the kind of “majority rule” that led to Jim Crow laws and Japanese internment camps.
Speaking on Fox News, Paul reacted to Obama’s repeated assertions that Republicans should win elections if they want to control the agenda in Washington. Obama has also suggested in recent days that he might pursue more executive actions — changes made without Congress.
“The danger to majority rule — to him sort of thinking, well, the majority voted for me, now I’m the majority, I can do whatever I want, and that there are no rules that restrain me — that’s what gave us Jim Crow,” Paul said. “That’s what gave us the internment of the Japanese — that the majority said you don’t have individual rights, and individual rights don’t come from your creator, and they’re not guaranteed by the Constitution. It’s just whatever the majority wants.”
Paul added: “There’s a real danger to that viewpoint, but it’s consistent with the progressive viewpoint. … Progressives believe in majority rule, not constitutional rule.”
Don’t be confused with the conflation of the Japanese interment outrage—a temporary product of wartime hysteria which no one at the time regarded as “progressive”—with Jim Crow. The original Constitution which Paul and his followers worship certainly didn’t concern itself with the rights of racial minorities. It took the most egregious exercise of “majority rule” in U.S. history—the Civil War—to abolish slavery. Only a majority given extraordinary power by the self-exclusion of southerners was in a position to pass the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, the most important efforts taken until 1964 to vindicate the rights of racial minorities. It was a failure of will by the majority that led to the abandonment of Reconstruction and the establishment of the Jim Crow regime. And it was the power of the minority in the Senate (and by the 1930s or so, the minority in the Democratic Party) to thwart majority rule via the filibuster that kept Jim Crow in place for so very long.
And BTW, it’s conservatives, far more than progressives, who perpetually chafe at judicial enforcement of individual rights, unless it happens to coincide with their own policy goals. But in any event, Paul and others like him really need to stop trying to invoke the legacy of the Civil Rights movement to attack “majority rule” on behalf of a “constitutional conservatism” aimed at creating a oligarchical or even theocratic dictatorship of absolute private property rights and puny government. The “minorities” they want to protect are snowy white and very privileged.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, January 17, 2014
“The Only Card They Have To Play”: What Can Republicans Do If Obamacare Isn’t A Disaster?
As the 2014 midterms draw nearer, the Republican Party has developed a simple, Costanza-esque plan for the election season: Nothing.
The theory, which is reportedly being pushed by House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) over the objections of some House members, goes as follows: As the rollout of the Affordable Care Act continues, Republicans should fade to the background and watch it “collapse under its own weight,” as Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is prone to saying. That will allow Republicans to eliminate any distractions as they relentlessly hammer Democrats over the law’s failures, on the way to maintaining their House majority and winning the net six seats needed to take control of the Senate.
The Republican strategy makes some sense on its face — after all, no issue fires up Republican loyalists quite like the Affordable Care Act, and there’s no question that the law’s troubled rollout has been a massive political headache for Democrats.
But there’s a question that should keep every Republican strategist up at night: What happens if health care reform isn’t the electoral albatross that Republicans assume?
It’s not an unrealistic proposition. After all, despite the massively publicized problems with the launch of the law, the percentage of Americans who want it scaled back or repealed has hardly changed over the past two years. There are more reasons to be optimistic that the law will work as intended than there have been at any point since its rollout. Americans still have no faith in the Republican Party to create a constructive alternative. And, crucially, at least one poll suggests that the public is more concerned with job creation, gun reform, and immigration reform — bread-and-butter issues for Democrats — than with reducing the deficit or repealing Obamacare (the central tenets of the GOP platform, such as it exists).
In fact, according to the final Democracy Corps battleground survey of 2013, Republicans may actually pay a political price for their unyielding attacks on the health care reform law. As pollster Erica Seifert put it, “battling on Obamacare is [Republicans’] weakest case for re-election. In fact, it undermines it.”
So if the Affordable Care Act doesn’t crash and burn, destroying the Democratic Party with it, what is the Republican Party’s plan B?
It appears that their guess is as good as yours.
Speaker Boehner has reportedly been trumpeting the results of a recent survey finding that the public now primarily blames President Obama for the nation’s economic problems, rather than the policies of his predecessor.
“Since he can’t blame George W. Bush anymore, the president has chosen to talk about rising income inequality, unemployment, and the need to extend emergency unemployment benefits,” Boehner told House Republicans, according to The Hill. “After five years in office, Barack Obama still doesn’t have an answer to the question: Where are the jobs?”
The problem for Boehner is twofold: First, Americans very clearly want to have the conversation that President Obama has begun. Second, if Republicans have an answer to the “where are the jobs?” question, they are keeping it awfully close to the vest.
The Republican Party’s official “Plan for Economic Growth & Jobs” is incredibly thin on details. In fact, with the exception of repealing Obamacare — and replacing it with yet-undefined “patient-centered reforms” — it does not offer a single specific policy prescription. (By contrast, the White House jobs page leads directly to a description of the American Jobs Act, which, regardless of what one thinks of its merits, is undisputably an actual plan.)
The GOP has similar problems discussing other top issues of the day. Tacit in Boehner’s barb about President Obama “distracting” Americans with a discussion of inequality is the fact that Republicans have few productive ideas to add to the conversation. Immigration reform is similarly treacherous territory for the party. As is any conversation on “reforming” Social Security or Medicare.
It’s not as though Republicans aren’t aware of the issue; after the 2012 presidential election, the Republican National Committee made a concerted effort to change its image from that of a party that’s only “talking to itself” (it has not been going well, by the way).
Perhaps in an attempt to fill out its pitch to voters, on Thursday the Republican National Committee tweeted a link to a “campaign strategy survey,” urging its followers to “tell us your top issues” so the party can “win big in 2014.”
In a reflection of the party’s priorities, however, question one — “Which of the following should be the top priority for the Republican Party in the next 18 months?” — offers a choice between “Elect principled conservatives to the U.S. House and U.S. Senate,” “Rally a grassroots movement,” “Stop the liberal agenda by defeating Democrats,” and “Unite the party.” In other words, the “strategy” isn’t exactly technocratic.
It’s entirely possible that Republican predictions are right, and merely opposing Democrats — with a specific focus on their health care reforms — will be enough to carry them through the midterm elections. After all, the map and the electorate (which history suggests will be smaller, older, and whiter than 2012) favor the GOP. But if they’re wrong, and Obamacare does not ruin the Democrats, then Republicans could be in serious trouble. Because unless they have a major surprise up their sleeves, this is the only card they have to play.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, January 17, 2014
“There Are Definitely People Jumping Ship”: The Republican Party Poobahs Are On The Brink Of Panic
Gov. Chris Christie (R) is scheduled to attend some political events in Florida over the weekend, where he’ll connect with Gov. Rick Scott (R). (The two will not appear in public with one another, raising questions as to which one might be more embarrassed by the other.)
The New Jersey governor will not necessarily receive a warm welcome from every Republican in the Sunshine State. Brian Ballard, Mitt Romney’s Florida finance chairman in 2012 and a major Rick Scott fundraiser, told the Wall Street Journal he sees Christie as a “colossal ego” and a “maniacal bully,” traits he said would make Christie “too dangerous to be our nominee.”
And in response, the governor’s aides sent theWall Street Journal a 5,600-word collection of positive remarks from Republicans and conservative commentators – evidence, a spokesman said, “of an outpouring of support across the country.”
So, who’s right? Is Brian Ballard’s criticism an aberration against the backdrop of a party that broadly supports Christie or are those negative sentiments more widely held? McKay Coppins has an interesting report suggesting, at a minimum, GOP trepidation. Indeed, Coppins talked with “a dozen party officials, fundraisers, and strategists,” and found “party poobahs … on the brink of panic.”
“My sense is they’re hoping against hope there aren’t more shoes to drop,” said Keith Appell, a Republican strategist with ties to the tea party who has been critical of Christie’s moderate streak. “They really want to support him … but they can’t control anything if another shoe drops.”
A Republican operative at a large super PAC used the same metaphor – a favorite among political observers at the moment – to describe the unease in the party.
“Everyone thinks there’s probably a 60% chance the other shoe will drop,” said the operative, who like many of the people quoted in this story, requested anonymity to speak freely about a situation that is still evolving. “When I saw the press conference, I said, I don’t think he’s lying… But for the deputy chief of staff to do something like that requires a culture in the office that he would have set, and it probably requires other examples that would have made her feel like that was acceptable to do.” He added, “My gut is that they’ll probably find something else.”
Coppins talked to one Republican fundraising operative who has met with Christie who said of donors, “There are definitely people jumping ship.”
This afternoon’s news probably won’t help matters.
Because today, some subpoenas landed in some interesting hands.
The state Assembly committee investigating the George Washington Bridge scandal released a partial list of names of the 17 high-level Port Authority and Christie administration officials who received subpoenas within the last 24 hours.
The subpoenas request documents concerning: “All aspects of the finances, operations and management of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey , including but not limited to, the reassignment of access lanes in Fort Lee, N.J. to the George Washington Bridge, and any other matter raising concerns about of abuse of power.”
Among those subpoenaed? The Office of the Governor, in addition to Christie’s spokesperson, communications director, incoming chief of staff, and former chief of staff (who now also happens to be the governor’s nominee for state attorney general).
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 17, 2014
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