“The Farce That Is Darrell Issa”: Just Another Symbol Of Today’s GOP
The only thing that makes Rep. Darrell Issa remotely qualified to chair the House Oversight Committee is his personal familiarity with the investigative process – on the receiving end. The man Republican House Speaker John Boehner put in charge of investigating government wrongdoing was himself indicted for stealing a car, accused of stealing at least one other car, arrested for carrying a concealed weapon, and twice suspected of insurance fraud – and once extensively investigated by authorities for arson, because his former business associates accused him, on the record, of burning down a building to collect the insurance payout.
Democrats love to hate the silly, camera-chasing Issa, who came to power in 2011 promising to put the White House under generalized investigation. But now even some Republicans are happy to criticize Issa too. It’s easy for them to denounce his calling Jay Carney a “paid liar,” as well as his evidence-free claim that the IRS mess was directed from Washington, D.C., while they continue to participate in smearing the White House with non-scandals themselves, nonetheless.
Issa’s extremist idiocy lets “reasonable” Republicans denounce him and/or his rhetoric, while they continue their own ethically, intellectually and politically blinkered crusades against President Obama. Sure, Sen. John McCain says it was wrong to call Carney a “paid liar” – but also on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” he compared the IRS mess to Ronald Reagan’s deadly Iran-Contra scandal. Um, no.
Scandal-drunk Sen. Lindsey Graham says Issa went too far when he said the IRS agents who keyword-targeted Tea Party groups “were directly being ordered from Washington.” But he continued to hype the IRS story. “At the end of the day, the IRS scandal really is scary,” he told Fox’s Brian Kilmeade. “How would you like your own government to turn on you?” Is that really what happened, Lindsey Graham? And if so, it happened most brutally to a Democratic group, Emerge America, which had its tax-exempt status revoked.
Of course, McCain and Graham are also the guys who brought us the ultimate non-scandal: Benghazi. Issa’s idiocy lets them retain their role as “statesmen,” gets them invited back on the Sunday shows, and gives the media an excuse to consider them arbiters of what’s politically acceptable – while they’re themselves on the right fringe. Of course it’s guys like Issa who constantly move that standard of what’s politically acceptable to the right.
Honestly, when David Plouffe started raising Issa’s past on ABC’s “This Week,” and then on Twitter, part of me winced. But that’s because I didn’t completely remember Ryan Lizza’s amazing Issa profile in the New Yorker – which was respectful while also documenting Issa’s troubling history with law enforcement – as well as my own life in California during the surreal 2003 recall of Gray Davis (another example of GOP nullification of election results, by any means necessary, usually big money).
Issa financed the recall, and hoped to run for governor himself, but then the Los Angeles Times and other California papers began reporting on his earlier legal troubles. There was particular attention to his indictment for grand theft when he reported his Mercedes stolen after his brother William sold it; William had earlier obtained the right to do so from his brother. The two men had different stories for a while, and authorities believed they’d conspired to sell the car, report a “theft” and collect insurance on it.
(I personally think the arson investigation was even more damning: An Issa colleague gave investigators vivid detail that indicated his car-alarm factory had been intentionally torched, after Issa increased his insurance from $100,000 to $462,000. “Quite frankly,” Joey Adkins told authorities, “I feel the man set the fire.” But the local fire marshal never determined the fire’s cause.)
In the end, the scrutiny doomed Issa’s chance to run for governor – but his wealth funded the successful recall of Davis. Sure, Issa could continue to hold his House seat in his conservative San Diego district, but a guy as ethically compromised (and as blinkered ideologically) as Issa could never win a statewide election in California – let alone a national one. So he tearfully stepped aside for Arnold Schwarzenegger.
So that’s the guy who’s heading up the House GOP’s investigation into alleged Obama White House “scandals.”
Sen. Chuck Schumer got a lot of attention Monday for telling “Meet the Press’s” David Gregory that Issa’s overreach is setting up a GOP loss in 2014 – just like the impeachment witch hunt against President Clinton set up his party’s historic gain of seats in the 1998 midterms. I hope Schumer’s right. But I find myself taking little comfort even in that uncertain outcome.
Democrats, including myself, like to declare that impeachment didn’t resonate with the American people, who gave Clinton ever-higher approval ratings as the witch hunt continued. And yes, Clinton’s party won seats in the ’98 midterm. But impeachment, and the myriad baseless investigations that preceded it, from Whitewater to Travelgate to alleged Chinese fundraising scandals, preoccupied both the White House and the media, to the detriment of Clinton’s agenda, particularly in his second term. They certainly didn’t help Vice President Al Gore in his campaign to win the presidency.
While I’ve always rejected the claims of some anti-Clinton centrist Democrats that Clinton’s philandering cost Gore the election, there was at least some polling that suggested it hurt Gore with suburban women. Certainly the cloud of scandal – and the stalling of the Clinton-Gore agenda – couldn’t have helped Gore, who won the popular vote and by reliable accounts the electoral vote in a race that shouldn’t have even been as close as it was, given the strength of the economy and the deficits of George W. Bush. I would argue that Clinton’s experience proves GOP scandal-mongering works – and once again, the media let the party get away with it.
I’m happy even some mainstream media pundits are warning that Issa’s overreach could hurt the GOP in 2014. And yet that new rhetorical twist puts the focus on horse race politics, where all of journalism appears most comfortable today. Issa’s extremism may or may not hurt his party at the polls. All I know is it should be hurting him, and the GOP, more with the American people, when they think about what they want in their leaders.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, June 4, 2013
“All They Have Is Their Anger”: Why Republicans Can’t Destroy President Obama
Over the past few years, liberals like me have pointed out countless times that the Republican party was being (or would be soon, as the case might have been) terribly damaged by the ideological extremism and general nuttiness of the faction that took over the party between 2009 and 2010. But we have to be honest and acknowledge that it didn’t always work out that way. They were able to win a number of tangible victories despite the fact that the public doesn’t look favorably on the things they wanted to do. In many cases, an extremist Republican ousted a perfectly conservative Republican in a primary, and now the extremist Republican is in possession of a safe seat. And of course, they won a huge victory in the 2010 elections. For all the fun we’ve had at the expense of people like Michele Bachmann, the damage they did to the GOP wasn’t always as serious as we thought it would be.
But I think we’re seeing the limits that the House Republicans’ extremism imposes on their ability to accomplish a practical political task. The task in question is taking full advantage of an administration scandal or two in order to do maximum damage to the President. And they can’t seem to manage it.
Let’s look, for instance, at the point man on all these questions, Darrell Issa, who runs the House Oversight Committee. On Sunday, in an impolitic moment, Issa called White House spokesman Jay Carney Obama’s “paid liar,” making him seem not like a sober-minded investigator looking for the truth, but an angry partisan. Sensing an opening, David Plouffe tweeted, “Strong words from Mr Grand Theft Auto and suspected arsonist/insurance swindler. And loose ethically today.” Plouffe was referring to some rather colorful episodes from Issa’s pre-politics career (details here); though he was never convicted of anything, there were credible charges on both counts. In any case, it makes him something of an imperfect messenger for suggestions of administration wrongdoing.
But more importantly, Issa just doesn’t seem to be all that effective at this role. You might say that even if the Republicans had a real ace in that chairmanship it wouldn’t much matter, because the facts of the mini-scandals just don’t leave them much to work with. On the ultimate questions, like “Can they impeach the President over this?” that’s probably true, but along the way they might be having more of an impact.
And Issa isn’t the only one making himself look a little foolish. You’ve got all kinds of Republican members of Congress, including quite influential ones, talking about a fictional White House “enemies list” and making one baseless accusation after another which fall apart under even cursory scrutiny. As Steve Benen says, “Initially, GOP leaders saw value in avoiding cheap shots—they knew that if the story became a partisan food fight, it wouldn’t be taken seriously, and the political costs to President Obama would be limited. But as is usually the case, the overreach instinct among Republican partisans is simply uncontrollable.”
I think these kinds of outbursts happen because hatred today’s Republicans have for Barack Obama is completely genuine. If you compare it to how Newt Gingrich felt about Bill Clinton, it has a much harder edge. Yes, Gingrich wanted to destroy Clinton (and his rank-and-file despised Clinton), but he was driven more than anything else by his own grandiosity. He made plenty of strategic miscalculations, but it wasn’t because his rage got the better of him.
Anger can be useful. It motivates your supporters to work, organize, and vote. But eventually it can be your undoing if what the moment requires is something more careful and methodical. And there isn’t even anyone leading and coordinating this effort. It isn’t Issa, who’s blundering about. It isn’t John Boehner, who can barely hang on to his job (read this story, which contains the interesting news that a group of House Republicans were about to oust Boehner until God told them to back off for a while). Nobody’s in charge. All they know is that they hate Barack Obama, but that isn’t nearly enough.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, June 5, 2013
“Raiders Of The Lost Retirement Account”: Wall Street’s Deceptive Retirement Account Fees Hurt Savers
Worried about your ability to set money aside for retirement? You should also worry about what happens to the money you do manage to put away. According to a report from Demos, the typical two-earner family with an employer-sponsored account will end up paying some 30 percent of its retirement nest egg – a total of $155,000 – to Wall Street money managers in 401(k) fees and charges.
How can this be? The financial services industry, in addition to its talent for developing different kinds of fees, has been adept at coming up with ways of concealing them. To start with, many of the fees and costs that Wall Street collects for trading securities are typically omitted from the top-line “expense ratio” reported to savers. That’s a pretty huge omission, since trading fees account for half the fees charged to an average investor, according to Demos.
The industry also makes its fees look small by typically reporting them as a percentage of total savings, avoiding any mention of the far higher proportion they make up of your total investment return. For example, a total fee that adds up to 2 percent of managed assets may seem small – but if your typical return is 7 percent, the fee represents almost 30 percent of total returns.
One of the biggest advantages enjoyed by industry lies in the nature of the professional advice available to investors seeking to understand such questions. Astoundingly, the broker who sells you a retirement product often has no obligation to serve your best interests, or even to provide you with reliable counsel. Instead, the law often gives brokers a green light to promote products that generate higher fees for them, regardless of the impact on you.
The non-partisan Government Accountability Office has documented numerous instances of such conflicts of interest. The GAO not only found investment managers cross-selling products to 401(k) clients that enriched the manager at the investor’s expense, but also brokers being rewarded for steering investors into high-fee products. One report found that almost a quarter of telephone representatives and half of web sites incorrectly informed investors that no fees would be levied for managing their retirement money if they transferred it into an individual retirement account. In fact, fees are charged on these products, but are usually buried deep in the fine print of the IRA documents.
The good news is that these problems have found a place on the agenda of Washington regulators. The bad news is that the necessary remedies face tremendous opposition. In fact, the way things are going, it will take a mighty effort to keep industry lobbyists from winning the fight to keep investors in the dark.
The Department of Labor has taken up the task of updating the legal protections covering 401(k)s and other employment-based retirement accounts. Certain forms of retirement savings (especially those managed directly by your employer) are already protected by a strong fiduciary duty – that is, a legal requirement for the investment manager to put your best interests first. But the fiduciary-duty rules are outmoded, and exclude much of the current retirement-fund market.
These fiduciary rules were last updated in 1975 – a time when over 90 percent of retirement plans were controlled directly by employers. That’s very different from today’s individualized accounts like 401(k)s and IRAs. As a result, employees have no legal protection when engaged in many transactions, including the critical one of “rolling over” a 401-K into an IRA. In order for the new rules to be effective, the Department of Labor will have to impose a clear ban on inappropriate steering of clients, including strict limitations on broker-payment arrangements that create conflicts of interest, along with much better disclosure.
And it will have to do so in the face of fierce resistance from the financial industry. The Department of Labor recently had to retreat on one proposal to improve fiduciary rules in a debate dominated by insider interests such as brokers and investment managers who benefit from the current high fees and lack of obligations to clients. Now the department is preparing to propose reforms again, and the same interests will try to defeat them again. The public needs regulators and legislators to stand up for better protections for our savings, and prevent the process from being dominated by financial insiders.
The Dodd-Frank financial reform law also handed an important responsibility to the Securities and Exchange Commission – the task of developing new rules to increase fiduciary protections for advice given by securities brokers. Right now, while investment advisors have a duty to put your best interests first, securities brokers don’t. In practice, the distinction between the two types of investment professionals is blurred and unclear to most investors. The Dodd-Frank law called for securities-broker fiduciary duties to be made stronger, clearer and more like those of true investment advisors.
Unfortunately, this is another area where heavy industry lobbying has greatly delayed and weakened action. Preliminary indications suggest that the SEC’s approach could end up being far weaker than is needed to protect investors.
The issues in retirement savings are broad, and new fiduciary rules won’t take care of all of them. But a strong legal obligation for all investment advisors to avoid deceptive and abusive practices would be a common-sense start. And that can only happen if investors and employees stand up for the principle that when financial professionals give advice, they must put the best interests of their clients first.
By: Marcus Stanley, U. S. News and World Report, June 4, 2013
“Bob Woodward’s Credibility Is In Tatters”: From Impartial Reporter To Conservative Pundit
On Fox News Monday night, famed Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward and host Bill O’Reilly zeroed in on the latest twist in Washington scandalmania — why the White House is refusing to answer questions about the 157 times former IRS commission Doug Schulman allegedly visited the White House, a closeness that raises questions about presidential involvement in the agency’s controversial targeting of Tea Party tax-exempt groups.
“This fiction that somehow [the IRS is] totally an independent agency is absurd,” Woodward, who broke the Watergate scandal, said. “You say they aren’t answering this question about the 157 visits by the IRS commissioner. They should.”
“President Obama could easily come out through his spokesperson and say this is where Mr. Schulman was. And here are the dates. Here is who he met with,” O’Reilly said. “The fact that the President doesn’t do it, should raise the curiosity of every reporter, Mr. Woodward, every reporter. Yet, as I said, the major network news on television ignored the story last week in its totality. It’s amazing.”
This forces us to ask the uncomfortable question of whether O’Reilly and Woodward have access to Google. Because if they did, they would have the answers to all of these questions, and they may even find a statement from the president’s spokesperson that he is supposedly refusing to give.
“The IRS commissioner, in carrying out his duties, would of course have many reasons to have an appointment to visit the White House,” White House spokesperson Eric Schultz said.
That’s a bit vaguer than what O’Reilly and Woodward are looking for, but the White House doesn’t really have to say any more, considering that all the specifics are already online, available to anyone who looks for them.
The story of the 157 visits originated with the Daily Caller, based on a (sloppy) inspection of White House visitor logs. But as the Atlantic’s Garance Franke-Ruta reported, parsing those very same visitor logs a bit more closely, it turns out that while Schulman — a Bush appointee — was cleared to visit the White House 157 times, he appears to have actually visited only 11 times.
The vast majority of the cleared visits were related to the implementation of Obamacare, in which the IRS plays a key role, and include regularly scheduled weekly meetings with administration officials on the ongoing work. Meanwhile, many people seem to be conflating the presidential mansion itself with other executive office buildings that are organizationally under the “Executive Office of the President ” — all colloquially referred to as “The White House.” They’re all included in the Secret Services’ visitors logs, but it turns out Schulman was rarely cleared to visit the actual White House, more often having permission to go to the Executive Office Building.
Some Googling might also reveal a Politico story, which also cast doubt on the Daily Caller’s scoop, or plenty of others.
You can see where Schulman went, whom he met with and when — all of these mysterious questions the White House refuses to answer — here.
We expect it from O’Reilly, but it’s a bit disappointing from Woodward, who should know better. Still, he’s seemingly been making a subtle drift from impartial reporter to conservative pundit in recent years.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, June 4, 2013
“In The GOP, Every Day Is A Bank Holiday”: The Republican College Loan Plan Would Help Banks, Hurt Families
Big banks are doing better than ever. Sunday, New York Times financial columnist Gretchen Morgenson wrote that 2013 has been a very good year for the financial industry. The KWB Bank Index which tracks the stock prices of 24 leading banks has risen 30 percent this year and it’s at its highest level since 2008.
With the banks doing so well, why are House Republicans pushing so hard to make banks even more money on the backs of kids from working families who want to attend college? The answer is that every day in the Republican Party is a bank holiday.
House Republicans took a step last week to boost the fortunes of their banker backers even higher. The GOP House majority proposed changes for the college student loan program which is scheduled to expire July 1. The Republicans would allow the interest on student loans to double. This will mean even higher profits for the GOP’s banker backers. But it will end the hopes and dreams that thousands of young Americans and their families have for their future in the cut throat world economic competition.
President Obama made his case to stop the interest rate increases in a speech last Friday. The president supports a Senate Democratic plan that would freeze interest rates for 79 million students at 3.4 percent for 2 years. Congressional Republicans want to tie the interest rate to the cost of a 10 year Treasury note. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the House Republican plan would push interest rates to 5.0 percent next year and to 7.7 percent by 2018.
If Republicans get their way, increased interest rates for 79 million college students will mean a big payday for the financial industry next year and a another step down for middle income families. Millions of college grads are already up to their armpits in debt. The Republican plan would make it even harder for young college graduates to get up from under the crushing debt that they already face.
Chinese president Xi Jinping will be in the U.S. this week. His visit should focus the United States on what it needs to do to compete economically with the emerging industrial tiger.
The United States has fallen to 10th in the world in the percentage of people with a college degree. That may be why it’s much easier for people to advance economically in Western Europe than it is in the U.S. The Republican plan will push us down even further on the education ladder and give our economic competitors in the world a leg up. If we want to compete effectively internationally, we should do everything we can to get more young people into college instead of making it more difficult for them to attend college. College is the ticket young Americans need to punch to get the training they need to compete with China and other engines of international economic growth.
The U.S. should build on its strengths. We still have the best higher education system in the world. Hundreds of thousands of international students are currently enrolled in American colleges and universities to get the best college education in the world. We would be a lot better off if American students could afford to attend them too.
The GOP plan to boost banks at the expense of kids in working families mirrors the trends in the American economy at large. The Dow Jones Index, which measures the fortunes of corporate America on Wall Street, has hit record highs several times this year. While profits for corporate America have mushroomed, real income for middle class families has been stagnant. The Republican student loan program will accelerate an unfortunate trend that has enriched Wall St. and improvised middle class families who are working overtime just to meet ends meet.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, June 4, 2013
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