“Full Time Other, Part-Time American”: McCain Criticized ‘Partisan Sniping’ After Russia’s Invasion Of Georgia In 2008
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has been one of President Obama’s most vocal critics for his handling of the crisis in Ukraine, particularly after Russia’s invasion of Crimea this past weekend. But back in 2008, when Russia went to war with neighboring Georgia and there was a Republican in the White House, McCain criticized “partisan sniping” surrounding the issue and called on the country to be united.
“The fact is, that this is a blatant act on the part of Vladimir Putin and one that must be unacceptable to the world community. It cannot stand,” McCain said this week referring to Russia’s military incursion into Crimea. “Why do we care?” McCain asked, “Because this is ultimate result of a feckless foreign policy where nobody believes in America’s strength anymore.”
Indeed, the Arizona Republican’s attacks on Obama’s foreign policy in recent days has been relentless. “It’s time we woke up about Vladimir Putin. It’s time this administration got real,” McCain said on the Senate floor this week.
“This president does not understand Vladimir Putin. He does not understand his ambitions,” McCain said. “This president has never understood it. This president is the one who ridiculed Mitt Romney when Mitt Romney said the great enemy was Russia and its geopolitical threats.”
In August 2008, after Russian forces invaded the Georgian region of South Ossetia, McCain — who was battling Obama for the White House at the time — was a fierce advocate for the Georgian cause its then-President Mikheil Saakashvili. “We are all Georgians,” McCain famously said in support (in today’s case, “we are all Ukrainians” as well).
But back in 2008, McCain wasn’t pleased with those making the Russo-Georgian war a partisan issue. “This is no time for that,” the GOP presidential nominee said at the time, adding that Americans should be united against Russia. “The time now is for America to — the United States of America to act united on behalf of the people of the country of Georgia, and not do a lot of partisan sniping.”
“This is about hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent people whose lives are even being taken, or they’re rendered homeless, wounded,” McCain said, “Let’s devote all of America and our allies’ energy to helping resolve a situation which is froth with human tragedy.” (HT: Tommy Vietor)
By: Ben Armbruster, Think Progress, March 5, 2014
“Killing Germs, Not Jobs”: A New Report Confirms That Business Fears About Paid Sick Day Laws Are Unfounded
Every time the idea of implementing a paid sick days law – which requires that workers earn paid time off to use when they fall ill – gets floated somewhere, the same thing occurs: Businesses and conservative lawmakers cry bloody murder about the effect the law will supposedly have on small businesses and job creators. Every mom and pop store will have to close, they say! Job creators will flee elsewhere to escape the job-killing mandate! Oh, the humanity! (Check out the Cry Wolf Project for some choice quotes.)
Reality, though, stubbornly refuses to conform to the script. For instance, when San Francisco adopted a paid sick days law in 2007, its job growth actually outperformed surrounding counties that did not have a similar law. (This isn’t to imply that having paid sick leave caused any job growth, just that it didn’t hurt either.) And a new report from the Center on Economic and Policy Research shows that Connecticut experienced much the same thing after becoming the first state to adopt a paid sick days law 18 months ago.
Gathered via both surveys and site visits, the Center’s data show businesses faced extremely modest costs – if any – due to the sick days law. As the Center’s Eileen Appelbaum, Ruth Milkman, Luke Elliott and Teresa Kroeger wrote:
Most employers reported a modest effect or no effect of the law on their costs or business operations; and they typically found that the administrative burden was minimal. … Despite strong business opposition to the law prior to its passage, a year and a half after its implementation, more than three-quarters of surveyed employers expressed support for the earned paid sick leave law.
Not only that, but the data show that “in the period since [Connecticut’s law] took effect, employment levels rose in key sectors covered by the law, such as hospitality and health services, while employment fell in manufacturing, which is exempt from the law.” Some job killer! Business warnings about employees abusing their sick leave also failed to come true.
On an economic level, this actually makes perfect sense. Sick employees coming to work and infecting others reduces productivity, as does the constant turnover if workers have to quit to recover from an illness or are fired for missing time while sick. In addition, most workers already have paid sick leave, so the disruptive power of applying it to the usually low-income, service sector workers who don’t is low. San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Jersey City and Washington, D.C. all have some form of paid sick leave requirement, and all of them continue to have functioning economies. Plus, paid sick day laws have the added benefit of cutting down on the transmission of diseases, including those of the decidedly deadly variety.
This report is actually the second knock this week to the notion that business regulation automatically increases costs and kills jobs. A Bloomberg News report yesterday noted that in the 15 years since Washington state voted to gradually increase its minimum wage, its job growth has outpaced the national average, with jobs even growing in the sectors thought particularly susceptible to a minimum wage hike, such as food services. Even the recent Congressional Budget Office report showing that a national minimum wage increase would cause some workers to drop out of the labor force or reduce their hours showed benefits that vastly outweigh any cost.
The moral of the story is this: The Econ 101 notion of more regulations or higher mandatory wages automatically translating into fewer jobs and higher business costs doesn’t actually hold true out in the real world. Paid sick days laws actually kill germs, not jobs.
By: Pat Garofalo, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, March 6, 2014
“The Misguided War On Envy”: Conservatives Love To Hate The Envy Their Policies Caused
Conservatives have launched a War on Envy. This week, Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute lamented “a national shift toward envy” which, he said, would be “toxic for American culture.” Venture capitalist Tom Perkins recently made the same point in much more inflammatory terms: He equated those who criticize rising inequality with Nazis persecuting Jews, a salvo attack that quickly drew censure from those now running KPCB, the VC powerhouse that he once led.
Both conservatives and progressives agree on basic facts: The percentage of Americans who see this country as a land of opportunity, in which hard work leads reliably to material reward, is falling rapidly. This shift brings envy, resentment, cynicism and despair. And these negative emotions undermine our social structure and bring unhappiness.
But that’s where the agreement ends. Conservatives insist the problem is one of perception. They think that if the media would just stop talking about inequality things would get better. They say that if our leaders (read: President Obama) would simply offer up “an optimistic vision in which anyone can earn his or her success,” the envy would dissipate and everything would be just fine.
That is not going to work.
It won’t work because the sense that the dream is slipping away, the sense of diminished mobility, of a system that’s increasingly rigged, is not a fantasy that can be dispelled with clever rhetoric. It is the everyday, lived experience of millions of Americans. The only consequence of elites refusing to discuss it will be to confirm that those elites are indeed out of touch with ordinary Americans and their problems. That aloofness is reflected in the appallingly low approval ratings of the current Congress.
Brooks and other influential conservatives fail to acknowledge that the envy they lament, and the loss of opportunity that fuels it, results directly from the policies they have championed over the years. Consider higher education, which is acknowledged by both liberals and conservatives as the single most powerful force for economic mobility. Conservatives have succeeded in slashing taxes at all levels of government, and these cuts have gutted state funding of higher education.
Tuitions have spiked as a result. The soaring cost has put college out of reach for many middle-class families and nearly all of the poor and near poor. In 1971 an American family at the median income level had to pay 13 percent of its annual income to send each child to a public four-year university. That’s tough but it’s doable, with considerable sacrifice, savings, loans, a part time job and so on. Now the cost has more than doubled to 29 percent of income. This puts college out of reach for many, and leads to students graduating with staggering debt burdens. To put it mildly, this much debt does not encourage entrepreneurship.
That’s not the only way that conservative policies have limited upward mobility and destroyed confidence in the American Dream. Conservatives have long championed corporate tax policies that accelerate the harsher aspects of globalization, outsourcing and offshoring. As a result, American workers in many industries have seen their wages stagnate even as productivity has gone up, profits have soared and those who hold stock and options have done exceedingly well. Hard work now means breaking even for most Americans, rather than pulling ahead.
Here’s another example: Conservatives have championed individual tax structures that reduce the share of taxes born by the richest and increase the share born by the rest. Tax law changes such as the reduction in top tax brackets, lowering of capital gains rates and elimination of estate taxes confirm many Americans’ suspicion that the deck is indeed stacked against them.
I built and enjoyed a successful career in business before becoming an advocate for a sustainable economy. One of the things I learned in my career was to look for the true root cause of problems and not waste time attacking symptoms. Another thing I learned was that if what you’re doing isn’t working, stop doing it and try something else.
We are not going to bring optimism back to ordinary Americans by belittling those who discuss the real state of our economy. Waging war on envy won’t make people more confident in their job prospects and more entrepreneurial in their careers. Not if the reality of our tax, trade, labor and other policies is to strip away the rewards of working Americans and concentrate more and more wealth at the top.
It’s good that both left and right want to make the American dream credible again for more people. It’s good that both sides see loss of optimism as a problem. But diminished opportunity won’t be solved by refusing to talk honestly about its causes, and envy won’t be eliminated by more of the policies that kindled it in the first place. The success of the American economy and the American political system depends on people having the genuine conviction, based on the reality of their day-to-day experience, that hard work brings upward mobility.
By: David Brodwin, U. S. News and World Report, March 6, 2014
“Christie To CPAC, I’m One Of You”: An Invitation To Mainstream Voters, Forget Everything You Thought You Knew About Me
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s (R) carefully cultivated “brand” includes a few key pillars. The first is that he’s a different kind of politician with no use for “politics as usual.” The second is that he’s a tough leader who won’t back down when conditions heat up. And finally, the blue-state Republican has tried to distance himself from much of the extremism that’s come to define contemporary conservatism.
Christie’s multiple, ongoing scandals have effectively destroyed the first pillar. Christie’s approach to governing has knocked down the second, too.
As for the third, the governor threw it out the window with his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) yesterday.
Before digging in, it’s worth appreciating the context. CPAC is generally considered the premier conservative event in the country held every year, and ambitious Republicans are always eager to curry favor with conference attendees. Last year, Christie wasn’t invited – he was deemed insufficiently conservative.
Yesterday, in his first appearance in the national spotlight since his scandals erupted, the governor did his best to make up for lost time. Benjy Sarlin helped capture Christie’s pitch:
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie may not always get along with the grassroots right, but he hates the press and thinks President Obama is a failure. Isn’t that enough?
When the governor is making the case for his presidential ambitions, he emphasizes how mainstream he is. When Christie is wooing CPAC, where “mainstream” is a basically a dirty word, he effectively tells the far-right activists that he and they are on the same team.
Mitt Romney’s transition from moderate Republican to conservative champion took a few years. Christie’s trying to play both roles at the same time, hoping audiences don’t notice the contradictions.
The governor’s CPAC message was practically an invitation to mainstream voters to forget everything they thought they knew about him. CPAC Christie wants to take away a woman’s right to choose. CPAC Christie hates the media (which, incidentally, has spent years fawning over the governor and giving him a national profile).
CPAC Christie loves the Koch brothers and considers them “great Americans.” CPAC Christie is certain the United States doesn’t have “an income inequality problem.”
CPAC Christie wants conservatives to believe Democrats are “intolerant” people who refuse to let anti-abortion speakers appear at their national convention (a bizarre claim that is plainly untrue). CPAC Christie got huge applause condemning President Obama for refusing to work with Republicans on debt reduction, which was a rather brazen lie given that Obama has made multiple attempts at a compromise, only to be rebuffed by GOP leaders who refuse to make concessions.
CPAC Christie, in other words, bears no meaningful resemblance to New Jersey Christie.
By most accounts, the governor was well received yesterday, which no doubt gave him a morale boost after months of struggling through several scandals. But in electoral terms, it was a Pyrrhic victory – by moving sharply to the right, Christie satisfied far-right activists and alienated everyone else simultaneously.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 7, 2014
“Mad About Vlad!”: The Increasingly Awkward Conservative Crush On Putin
All the way back in 1946, with Nazi Germany defeated and the cold war commencing, George Orwell wrote a brilliant essay on James Burnham. The author of The Managerial Revolution and a leading political philosopher, Burnham was a frequent contributor to the young National Review, and, more broadly, a leading voice of postwar American conservatism.
What Orwell found in his analysis of Burnham was that this ostensible democrat and cold warrior held deep regard for–and even envied–authoritarian or totalitarian powers, including Stalin’s Russia. This is why, Orwell explained, Burnham originally predicted a Nazi victory in World War II. (Britain, typically, was considered “decadent.”) In later years, Orwell continued, Burnham would write about Stalin in “semi-mystical” terms (with a “fascinated admiration”), comparing him to heroes of the past; Burnham didn’t like Stalin’s politics, but he admired his strength. Of Burnham’s odd quasi-regard for Stalinism and its supposedly destined victory over the forces of sickly democratic regimes, Orwell added: “The huge, invincible, everlasting slave empire of which Burnham appears to dream will not be established, or, if established, will not endure, because slavery is no longer a stable basis for human society.”
Orwell, then, was not merely critical of Burnham’s pessimism (Orwell himself could be overly pessimistic.) He also saw this pessimism as reflective of a mindset that prioritized vicious power-wielding and coercion over other things that allowed states to succeed and prosper.
This variety of pessimism did not end with Burnham, unfortunately. During the nearly 50 year Cold War, Americans were informed time and again by rightwingers that the Soviet Union did not allow dissent, and could therefore pursue its desired policies without protest. While the Soviets were single-minded, we were, yes, decadent. Soviet leaders could fight wars as they pleased, but freedom-loving presidents like Ronald Reagan had to put up with what Charles Krauthammer laughably called an “imperial Congress.” (Some of the same type of commentary shows up about today’s China: look how quickly the Chinese can build bridges! And, as Thomas Friedman proves, it isn’t coming solely from the right.) But more unique among conservatives is the desire for a tough leader who will dispense with niceties and embrace power.
The reason for all this ancient history is the situation today in Ukraine, where an autocratic Russian leader who exudes manly vibes has ordered his armed forces into Crimea. It is unclear whether this move on Russia’s part will prove successful, but, amidst uncertaintly among western leaders over what to do, there has arisen a new strain of the Burnham syndrome. Conservatives don’t just see the west and President Obama as weak; they also seem envious of Putin’s bullying. “There is something odd,” Benjamin Wallace-Wells wrote in New York magazine, “about commentators who denounce Putin in the strongest terms and yet pine for a more Putin-like figure in the White House.”
Sarah Palin, for example, said this last night to Sean Hannity:
Well, yes, especially under the commander-in-chief that we have today because Obama’s — the perception of him and his potency across the world is one of such weakness. And you know, look, people are looking at Putin as one who wrestles bears and drills for oil. They look at our president as one who wears mom jeans and equivocates and bloviates. We are not exercising that peace through strength that only can be brought to you courtesy of the red, white and blue, that only a strengthened United States military can do.
Put aside the syntax for a moment and ask: is there not a bit of envy here? Isn’t Palin very clearly desirous of a tough-guy president who wrestles bears and drills for oil? (The swooning over Bush’s landing on that aircraft carrier was a telling sign.) Now read Rush Limbaugh:
In fact, Putin—ready for this?—postponed the Oscar telecast last night. He didn’t want his own population distracted. He wanted his own population knowing full well what he was doing, and he wanted them celebrating him. They weren’t distracted. We were.
If only America wasn’t distracted by silly things like the Oscars, perhaps we would have the strength to stand up to the tough Russia. (On his web page, Limbaugh has a photo of a shirtless Putin.) In case the point isn’t obvious enough, Limbaugh continues:
Well, did you hear that the White House put out a photo of Obama talking on the phone with Vlad, and Obama’s sleeves were rolled up? That was done to make it look like Obama was really working hard—I mean, really taking it seriously. His sleeves were rolled up while on the phone with Putin! Putin probably had his shirt off practicing Tai-Chi while he was talking to Obama.
Limbaugh quite clearly wants this kind of leader.
Also on view over the past few days is the idea that Putin must be smarter and cagier and stronger: “Putin is playing chess and I think we’re playing marbles,” said Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. The Russians are thus necessarily craftier than our weak and vacillating (key word) democratic leader.
The silliness inherent in all this talk is that when American presidents have generally acted above the law, or engaged in stupid and immoral wars, or bullied neighbors, or cracked down on domestic dissent, it has backfired in the worst ways on them and the country. (The examples are too obvious to list.) Moreover, I notice that conservatives seem to view some of Obama’s domestic actions–appointing czars, for example–as being the result of a vindictive, bloodthirsty, and authoritarian mindset. However absurd the particular claims may be (Cass Sunstein as Stalin), it is proof that the people who seem to secretly pine for an American Putin don’t really want one.
Orwell’s response to this sort of thinking was to write, of Burnham, “He ignores the advantages, military as well as social, enjoyed by a democratic country.” Of course this is not a guarantee that this crisis will play itself out in a way that is beneficial to American or Western (or Ukrainian) interests. But the presumption that Russia has just masterly played the Great Game, and that our weakness will doom us, is nearly automatic among large segments of the American right. (Olga Dukhnich, in The New York Times, makes the point that this crisis may backfire just as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan did. Whether correct or not, it is a nice counter to the reigning right-wing ultra-pessimism.)
Orwell closed his essay as follows:
That a man of Burnham’s gifts should have been able for a while to think of Nazism as something rather admirable, something that could and probably would build up a workable and durable social order, shows what damage is done to the sense of reality by the cultivation of what is now called ‘realism’.
It is now Team Obama that styles itself realist, in quite a different way than Orwell was talking about. And large chunks of the American right would now also scorn the term. What they haven’t scorned is the mindset, which is the problem in the first place.
By: Isaac Chotiner, The New Republic, March 4, 2014
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