“About That GOP Clown Car…”: Oh My, Cruz, Carson And Huckabee
Ed Kilgore has been writing lately about the Mitt boomlet and the possibility that the GOP could see yet another clown car field of presidential candidates in 2016. Republican leaders obviously hope otherwise.
But they’re still married to their wackiest base groups, including most prominently the so-called religious right. And that group just made their feelings known:
Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz won the Value Voters Summit presidential straw poll on Saturday. The crowd burst into applause on Saturday, as Family Research Council President Tony Perkins announced that Cruz won 25 percent of votes at the annual Washington conference.The victory is a big victory to the Republican firebrand and Tea Party icon, coming just a day after he drew standing ovations with a religious and emotional speech that blasted ObamaCare, congressional Democrats and called for Republicans to take over the White House in 2016.
Cruz also won the straw poll in 2013. Coming in second was neurosurgeon Ben Carson, a political novice who has a large following in conservative circles but said earlier this week that there is a “strong” likelihood that he would run for president. He won 20 percent of the votes. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) came in third, with 12 percent of the vote.
Cruz, Carson and Huckabee. Oh my. A lineup like that wouldn’t just lose to Hillary Clinton or Elizabeth Warren or Joe Biden. It would lose to almost anyone credible on the Democratic side in 2016.
That doesn’t mean the candidates of the religious right will win the GOP primary. But even if they don’t, they’ll certainly drag the eventual nominee off the cliff during the primary in such a way that they may not be able to make it back to anything approaching center during the general.
By: David Atkins, Washington Monthly Political Animal, September 28, 2014
“Ted Cruz’s A.G. Fight Already Misguided”: More So Than Usual, Cruz Has No Idea Of What He’s Talking About
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) does not believe in wasting time. Less than 24 hours have passed since Attorney General Eric Holder announced he’s stepping down, and at this point, no one seems to have any idea when the White House will announce a successor or who he or she will be.
But for Cruz, that just means now is a good time to start drawing battle lines.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) issued a political call to arms for conservatives, saying that outgoing senators should not vote on the nominee during the post-election lame-duck session. “Allowing Democratic senators, many of whom will likely have just been defeated at the polls, to confirm Holder’s successor would be an abuse of power that should not be countenanced,” Cruz said in a statement.
Perhaps more so than usual, Cruz has no idea what he’s talking about.
As Kevin Drum noted in response, “Unless Cruz is suggesting that they should be banned completely, then of course business should be conducted during lame duck sessions. What else is Congress supposed to do during those few weeks?”
Right. Members of the Senate are elected to serve six-year terms. The Constitution, which Cruz usually loves to talk about, is quite explicit on this point. Article I does not say senators’ terms end after 5 years and 10 months, with the final two months designated as goof-off time.
Indeed, if Cruz is still confused, he can look to very recent history to understand that nominating and confirming cabinet officials during a lame-duck session is the exact opposite of “an abuse of power.”
In November 2006, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced he was stepping down at the Pentagon. Almost immediately thereafter, then-President George W. Bush nominated Robert Gates as Rumsfeld’s successor, and during the lame-duck session, the Senate held confirmation hearings, a committee vote, and a confirmation vote on the Senate floor.
Gates was confirmed, 95 to 2, and he was sworn in the week before Christmas 2006. Some of the senators who voted in support of the nominee, to use Cruz’s language, had “just been defeated at the polls,” but it didn’t make a bit of difference.
Why not? Because they were still senators who had a job to do. Indeed, 2006 was an especially important year: the Republican majority in the Senate had just been voted out in a Democratic wave election, in large part because of the Bush administration’s national-security policy. And yet, the Senate still moved quickly and efficiently to consider and confirm a new Pentagon chief.
This wasn’t an “abuse of power.” It was just the American political process working as it’s designed to work.
The same is true now, whether Cruz understands that or not.
Of course, there’s another scenario the far-right Texan may also want to keep in mind: the longer Cruz and his cohorts delay the process, the longer Eric Holder will remain the Attorney General. Indeed, Holder made it quite clear yesterday that he intends to stay on until his successor is ready to step into the office.
Under the circumstances, and given the right’s uncontrollable hatred for the current A.G., shouldn’t Cruz want the Senate to vote on Holder’s replacement during the lame-duck session? Has he really thought his current posturing through?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 27, 2014
“The Usual Sorry For Your Loss”: Ferguson Police Chief’s Sad Excuse For An Apology
It took four hours for the police in Ferguson, Mo., to remove the body of Michael Brown, the unarmed teenager killed by a police officer, from the street where it lay. It took the police chief nearly seven weeks to issue an apology to Mr. Brown’s family. His videotaped comment was late, oddly staged and very unclear about what exactly he was apologizing for and why (apart from perhaps a desire to keep his job).
The videotape (http://nyti.ms/1BceEnw) by the police chief, Thomas Jackson, was bizarre in many ways. Appearing before an American flag and what looks like a city flag of Ferguson, he was not just in plain clothes instead of his uniform but he was wearing a golf shirt.
He started by talking about how the shooting of Michael Brown had sparked a national “conversation” about race and the role of the police “in that conversation.” Well, no. It sparked angry protests that were met by police armed to the teeth with automatic weapons, armored vehicles and tear gas. It sparked some rioting and looting. And it sparked outrage among African Americans around the country and not just in Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis that is heavily black but has a town government and police force that is almost entirely white.
If that is Mr. Jackson’s idea of a conversation, I’d hate to see his idea of an argument.
Mr. Jackson allowed that Mr. Brown’s death was “the central issue that brought us here today.” And he said to the slain teenager’s family: “I’m truly sorry for the loss of your son. I’m also sorry that it took so long to remove Michael from the street.”
Please note: He’s not apologizing for the actual killing of Mr. Brown. He’s just offering the usual “sorry for your loss” that police offer people whose loved ones are killed – say in an automobile crash. And as for his apology for the four-hour delay in which the boy’s body lay on the street, that seemed pretty conditional too.
“The time that it took involved very important work on the part of investigators who were trying to collect evidence,” he said, adding that the investigators “meant no disrespect” and were “simply trying to do their jobs.”
He then apologized — actually seeming sort of sincere about it — to “peaceful protesters who did not feel I did enough to protect their constitutional right to protest.”
But it was not that you did not do enough to protect that right, Mr. Jackson, but you sent your small-town trained, big-war equipped cops out to deny them that right with the threat of deadly force.
As I said, I’m not sure why Mr. Jackson made this video. But it’s far too late, far too confused and far too self-serving to matter a whole lot.
By: Andrew Rosenthal, Taking Note, The Editorial Page Editors Blog; The New York Times, September 26, 2014
“Paralysis Isn’t Inevitable”: Income Inequality And N.R.A. Dominance May Not Last Forever
One of the hardest things for us to do is to envision a future that is different from the present. For instance, we live in an age of paralyzed politics, so it is hard, in the here and now, to imagine what could change that. A second example: It is difficult to think of a scenario where federal gun legislation could be passed over the objections of the National Rifle Association. And a third: Income inequality has been the trend for some three decades; doesn’t it look as if it will always be that way?
What prompts these thoughts are two papers that landed on my desk recently. Although they tackle very different issues, they have one thing in common: They imagine a future that breaks from the present path.
The first is a draft of a speech given earlier this month at TEDMED by Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research. (TEDMED is associated with TED Talks.) The second is an article in the latest edition of the Harvard Business Review by Roger Martin, the former dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.
Webster’s speech lays out an agenda that he predicts will reduce the murder rate by 30 to 50 percent within 20 years. “I don’t think that our current level of gun violence is here to stay,” he declares in the draft of the speech. Martin’s article is about how the rise of the “talent economy,” as he calls it, has helped further income inequality. But he doesn’t believe a high level of income inequality is an inevitable part of our future.
Let’s tackle Webster first. Politically, he told me, “It’s a loser to call for a gun ban.” Instead, his reforms would make it more difficult for criminals to get their hands on guns. Using background checks, he would keep guns away from people who have a history of violence. He would raise the age of gun ownership to 21. (Webster notes that homicides peak between the ages of 18 and 20.) He would pass laws that make gun dealers more accountable, including “requiring business practices that prevent guns being diverted to criminals.” And he would mandate something called microstamping, “which would make it possible to trace a gun used in a crime to its first purchaser.”
When I asked him why he thought these changes would eventually take place, given the inability of the Senate to pass a background check bill after Newtown, he pointed to polls that show the vast majority of gun owners favor such changes.
“The N.R.A. has been very successful in controlling the conversation and making it about a cultural war,” he told me. “But I believe that narrative won’t persist.” The key, he says, is to change the conversation so that it is about pro- and anti-crime instead of pro- and anti-gun. Once that happens, “gun owners will start to demand changes.” He added, “I think that ultimately that idea will prevail, and it will be a pretty mainstream idea.”
Now to Roger Martin. His essay traces the way “talent” came to replace labor and capital as the most important factor in the economy, so much so that those who were part of the talent economy could become billionaires even as the median income stalled and then slipped back. Chief executives, who have gorged on stock options, are part of the talent economy, and so are hedge fund managers, who charge the infamous “2 and 20” (meaning a 2 percent management fee and 20 percent of the profits), which ensures their wealth no matter how poorly their investors do. The interests of such talent, in his view, simply don’t align with the interests of the rest of us.
Like Webster, Martin also proposed a series of changes to “correct the imbalance,” as he puts it. He suggests that pension funds should see that they are best served when they do not hand capital to hedge funds, for instance. And he wants talent to show “self-restraint.”
When I told him that seemed unlikely, he told me he thought we were approaching a moment like 1935, when, after years of letting labor fend for itself, the government passed laws that protected labor and helped bring about the rise of the labor movement.
If talent doesn’t start taking the rest of the country into account, he said, he feared that the government would once again take significant action to level the playing field.
Given the current political paralysis, I asked, what might bring that about? “Another boom and crash,” he said.
Martin clearly sees his article as a warning to corporate executives and others who are part of the 1 percent. And maybe, just maybe, it will take hold. After all, not long after his article was published, Calpers, the huge California pension fund, announced that it was going to eliminate hedge funds from its portfolio. There’s hope yet.
By: Joe Nocera, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, September 26, 2014
“Corporate Tax Deserters”: Shirking Their Responsibility To Pay For What They Get
Corporations love to wrap themselves in the flag with sun-drenched TV commercials that proclaim a deep devotion to American workers and communities. But when it comes to actually taking responsibility for supporting the workers and communities that create the conditions for corporate profits, a record number of big businesses are deserting America.
Burger King is the latest corporation to announce it is moving to Canada — at least on paper — where it will pay lower taxes. In the past three years alone, at least 21 companies have completed or announced mergers with foreign corporations to avoid taxes in an operation known as “inversion.” That compares with 75 over the past 30 years. These only-on-paper moves will gouge a $20 billion tax loophole over the next decade.
These companies may be moving their taxes overseas, but they’re not ending their reliance on the U.S. government to operate profitably. They are just shirking their responsibility to pay for what they get. The companies still make money in the United States, where they hire workers educated by public schools, ship their goods on public roads, are kept safe by local police officers and firefighters, and protect their patents in America’s courts.
Of course, small businesses and American families can’t play the same traitorous game. We can’t hire lawyers and accountants to pretend to ship our homes and our income overseas. And most of us wouldn’t do that if we could.
We understand that paying taxes is part of our basic obligation as citizens and essential to building strong communities.
What we do resent about taxes is that the current system is upside down — big corporations and the wealthy game the system so they pay a smaller share of their income in taxes than working families and small business. The share of profits corporations spend on taxes stands at a record low. And those profits are reaching record highs.
It’s time to turn the tax system right side up by closing the tax loopholes that allow billionaires and huge corporations to escape paying their fair share to support the country that made them rich.
The Obama administration just took a major step to do that. Tiring of Republican objections to closing the corporate tax deserter loophole, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced he was issuing new regulations aimed at making it much harder for companies to reap tax benefits from an offshore move.
This step may curb some corporate desertion. In the long run, it would be best if Congress took action. Two bills (S2360 and HR4679) would end the current practice of treating corporate deserters as foreign companies when they are still really based right here.
Consumers can play a role too. In August, Walgreens — which bills itself as “America’s drugstore” — abandoned its plan to dodge $4 billion in taxes in the next five years by changing its corporate address to Switzerland. Walgreens reversed course when outraged consumers protested at its stores and on the Internet.
This nation faces huge challenges in building an economy that works for all of us. If we plan to build a better future for our children, we must insist that corporations be held accountable for their responsibilities to our families and communities.
By: Richard Kirsch, Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute; The National Memo, September 26, 2014
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