“Meanwhile, Back In The Oval Office”: Why It’s So Idiotic To Complain When The President Takes A Vacation
There are a lot of stupid ways people attack presidents from the other party, but there can’t be that many as stupid as the complaint that he takes too many vacations. Since Obama is now on Martha’s Vineyard, despite the fact that there are things going on in the world, the volume of these complaints has grown, like the inevitable rise of the tide. Conservatives are in full on mockery mode (did you know he plays golf!!!), and the press is getting into the act as well. For instance, the Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank took on the vacation issue in a piece colorfully titled “Obama Vacations As the World Burns,” explaining that “Even presidents need down time, and Obama can handle his commander-in-chief duties wherever he is. But his decision to proceed with his getaway just 36 hours after announcing the military action in Iraq risks fueling the impression that he is detached as the world burns.” That pretty much sums up the problem with how the press discusses this issue. There’s no substantive reason why it’s a problem, it just “risks fueling the impression” that there’s a problem. But nobody’s holding a gun to any reporter’s head demanding that they write not about substance but about which impressions are being fueled. And what really fuels that impression? Why, articles like that one.
As everybody acknowledges, when the president goes on vacation, it’s not like he’s out of touch. He travels with a significant staff, is in communication with the White House constantly, and of course has close access to the nuclear “football,” should it become necessary to end all life on planet earth at a moment’s notice. And when it comes to giving himself vacations, Obama has been rather parsimonious. George W. Bush is the recent record-holder, and it’s not even close. He spent 879 days away from the White House during his eight years in office, including 16 full months at his “ranch” in Crawford, Texas.
At this point we should acknowledge that liberals used to talk plenty about Bush’s vacations when he was president. And it was ridiculous then too, not because we don’t want the president to be devoted to the job, but because of who was making the complaint. None of the things liberals didn’t like about Bush would have been improved had he spent more time toiling away in the White House. Nor would conservatives be happier with the policy choices Barack Obama makes today if he stayed away from Martha’s Vineyard or didn’t play golf as often.
And that’s the real reason the vacation complaint is so absurd. No one—not the opposition party, and not reporters—actually believes that the quality of a presidency has anything to do with how many hours the president logs in the Oval Office. Yes, it now seems weird that with the most important job in the world, Ronald Reagan worked basically 9 to 5 and didn’t come in on weekends. But was the sheer quantity of hours he worked the cause of his disconnection from the details of governing? No, it was just his style. There has never been a president about whom you can honestly say, “If he had pulled a couple of all-nighters, everything would have been different.”
The problem, I think, is that on some level Americans have a presumption that vacation is basically sinful, that the moment you leave work you’re indulging your selfishness and shirking your responsibilities. This assumption can be found throughout American society, but it’s particularly acute in Washington, where people believe that that the amount you accomplish is directly correlated with how late you stay at the office. I’ve encountered this in any number of workplaces, and I’m sure you have too. But there’s almost no reason to think it’s true.
As you may know, Americans take fewer vacation days than anyone else in the developed world, both as a matter of practice and as a matter of law. In pretty much every other advanced country, employers are required to give paid vacation and holidays, in quantities that ensure that their employees have the time to recharge, relax, and have a life. Here’s a graph from the Center for Economic Policy and Research comparing mandated paid vacation and holidays in OECD countries:
That’s us over on the right, at zero. If you lived in Germany, for instance, a country with a high standard of living and extremely productive workers, you’d have 20 days of paid vacation and 10 paid holidays mandated by law. That’s 6 weeks off per year. Paid.
Of course, most Americans get some paid vacation and paid holidays. But it’s entirely up to the generosity of your boss. Incredibly, many workers don’t use the vacation days they have — as much as half of Americans’ vacation time goes unused. And the people who could use it the most—lower-wage, hourly workers—usually get little or no paid vacation or holidays at all. And most workers who do take vacation end up working while they’re vacating, like the president does.
So the next time you see someone criticize the president for taking a vacation — whether it’s a conservative criticizing this president, or a liberal criticizing the next Republican one — the question you have to ask is, “Do you think that if he were back in the Oval Office he’d be making the right decisions, but because he’s away from Washington he’s making the wrong decisions?” When the answer is no, as it inevitably will be, the logical response is: So what the hell are you complaining about?
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 13, 2014
“The Reverse Mortgage Industry Of Politics”: How The Tea Party Became As Corrupt As The Beltway It Loathes
This week, ProPublica released a report on the financial (and moral) corruption of a Tea Party group operating under the name Move America Forward, which was founded by one Sal Russo. Russo also helped start the Our Country Deserves Better PAC, aka the Tea Party Express. Move America Forward has run fake drives to give care packages to troops, stolen images of other charitable campaigns and passed them off as its own, and trumpeted a nonexistent partnership with Walter Reed Hospital — all while funneling very real millions to itself. The group is an industry leader at taking your Tea Party sentiments (if you have them) and turning them into profits.
Unfortunately, the continuing success of Sal Russo and the Tea Party Express is emblematic of a larger failure of the American right — and perhaps the larger project of American self-governance.
Earlier this year, The Daily Caller‘s Alexis Levinson reported that other Tea Party groups that had raised millions spent up to 80 percent of their money on operating expenditures, salaries, consultants, and mailing list companies, which were often owned by the people who ran the groups themselves. The Tea Party is essentially a landlord class; its fiefdom is the truly felt convictions of others.
There is nothing new about this. The Tea Party gained traction in an environment defined by massive resentment and fear directed at the Obama presidency, disgust at the bailouts of the Bush and Obama eras, and the wreckage of a Republican electoral defeat, all of which was especially conducive to the growth of parasite groups like the Tea Party Express.
In February of 2010, I reported a story from a “Tea Party Convention” in Nashville, hosted by the for-profit group Tea Party Nation. Leader Juddson Phillips left his job as a lawyer to draw a salary. Tickets for this grassroots uprising cost more than $500. The great motive behind it was transforming the organizers into richer men and political kingmakers in their state.
This gross profiteering is not unique to right-wingers. Political consultants do hilariously weird things. John Weaver, a consultant who advises prominent Republican candidates to enact his own distaste for conservatives, pulled an all-timer when he convinced his candidate’s campaign to pay him, partly, through a corporation that shared the exact same name as that of another consultant’s business. That helped to hide how well he was doing — until it didn’t.
People who give themselves to full-time political activism deserve some recompense for their work and expertise. And of course, even the most populist of political movements will attract, and even require, professional leadership from without. After all, even punk rock bands require “the suits” to handle business and arrange for the to-be-destroyed hotel room. Even St. Paul demanded payment for his services.
But there was something especially galling about the level of self-dealing enrichment and deception at the head of the Tea Party movement, particularly because the movement started as a disgusted response to the self-dealing enrichment and deception in Washington.
Profiteering has been an acute problem almost right from the beginning for the Tea Party. It is like the reverse mortgage industry of politics: making money by giving an awful deal to an older, whiter customer base, then leaving town just as the fools realize it leaves them with nothing.
It’s easy to write them off as just another bunch of opportunists. But the endemic corruption of this movement should trouble the American right, if not the American conscience. The conservative diagnosis of Washington’s brokenness is that Americans have outsourced the task of self-government to a managerial class in Washington, a corruption that has transformed our nation’s capital into “the Beltway,” a shorthand for D.C.’s toxic culture of cronyism.
The populist right’s instinctive response — the Tea Party — immediately became just another added layer of cronyism. A grassroots corruption. Really, a weed. If the American people have outsourced their self-government to Washington, the conservative movement made another dirty deal, allowing itself to be entertained in outrage carnivals run by for-profit activists. Excepting the exceptions, the populist right’s response to dishonesty and graft was to generate another set of swindlers who wear flag-lapel pins, lie to their faces, and help themselves to the cash.
Yes, we built that. And H.L. Mencken laughs. Self-government is just another product, and no one can be bothered to read the fine print.
By: Michael Brendan Dougherty, Senior Correspondent, The Week, August 8, 2014
“An Amusing Sideshow”: The Never-Ending Ben Carson Silliness
The silliness about a Ben Carson presidential bid just got sillier. With much fanfare, he recently gathered a flock of supposedly well-heeled donors, boosters, and political operatives in Palm Beach, Florida, and announced that he’s formed a PAC with the presumptuous name One Nation to prep for his 2016 White House bid. As in past times, when he’s teased the media and some of the more gullible GOP acolytes into actually thinking that his presidential talk is anything more than an amusing sideshow, it makes good copy. And just as in past times, when he pops off about a White House run, no one ever asks the obvious question: Beyond his endlessly milking of his rags-to-successful-neurosurgeon story and a few inane quips about President Obama and Democrats before packs of ultraconservative fawners and groupies, what makes him real political timber, let alone presidential stuff?
Then again, that’s really not the question anyone who buys into the Carson silliness would ask, since he has about as much of a chance of mounting a serious run for the White House as someone has of winning the Big Prize lottery without buying a ticket. Carson has currency for only one reason: He’s black and can be trotted out to make those ridiculous digs about Obama. He can say what GOP ultraconservatives and unreconstructed bigots want to say about Obama, but it just sounds better coming out of Carson’s mouth. The GOP has turned this tactic into a studied art with black conservatives such as Clarence Thomas. But Carson makes far better copy than Thomas, because, unlike Thomas, Carson actually speaks, and when he does, he’ll say something just ludicrous enough to get attention.
In the Obama era the GOP has worked overtime to tout, cultivate, prop up, and showcase a motley collection of black GOP candidates for a scattering of offices. The aim is two-fold: to find that someone who can have just enough luster and media appeal to be a counterbalance to Obama while at the same time allowing the party to thump its chest and claim it’s not racist.
Carson seemingly fits that double bill — actually, triple bill, because he gets even more attention for the GOP. But, more importantly, the notion of Carson as a presidential candidate touches a deep, dark, and throbbing pulse among legions of ultraconservatives who think that Obama and many Democrats are communists, that gays are immoral, and that the healthcare-reform law is “slavery,” as Carson infamously quipped, meaning a tyrannical intrusion by big government into Americans’ lives. Mainstream GOP leaders can’t utter this idiocy. They must always give the appearance that they are above the dirty, muddy, hate-slinging fray, so they leave it to a well-paid stalking horse like Carson to do their dirty work for them.
But let’s assume, for a moment, that Carson is the real presidential deal. Again, the road to the 2016 GOP presidential nomination will be a knock-down, drag-out, bruising, low-intensity war. The names that have already staked out turf for that battle — Rick Perry, Rand Paul, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie and a cluster of popular GOP governors — are deeply embedded in the GOP political hierarchy. They have money, means, and a dedicated, entrenched following. They have wooed and courted the key state party leaders and potential party delegates who will make or break a candidate in the key party primaries later next year. Their work has been ongoing, and it requires a team of professional, connected, and financially stout party officials to do the hard leg work required.
Then there is the gauntlet of the GOP presidential debates. These are equally vital for a potential candidate to prove that he or she has a firm grasp of the big-ticket policy issues: immigration reform, health care, education, taxation, jobs and the economy, and foreign-policy concerns. Who can forget the moment in the November 2011 GOP debate when Perry put his foot in his mouth when he couldn’t name the three agencies of government that he vowed to eliminate if elected president? His candidacy quickly was yanked off life support. A well-placed sound bite or pithy remark won’t cut it here. There has to be real substance behind the answers that serious presidential candidates must and are expected to give in the heat of a debate, in interviews, and in policy speeches to groups of potential supporters.
Carson’s supposed backers see all of this as a plus. That he is the old self-made, non-politician patriot who simply wants to unite the nation as hard political nostrums won’t fly, in part because of the hard-wired, encrusted, political-insider dominance over the presidential-vetting process, and in bigger part because Carson is nothing more than a curiosity, good for a few more spots on the TV-talk-show circuit. This is just enough to ensure the silliness of Carson will continue.
By: Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Associate Editor of New America Media; The Huffington Post Blog, August 5, 2014
“Helping The Troops?”: Conservative Military Charity Faces Serious Allegations
Any time a charity is accused of fraud, it’s alarming, but especially during a war, there’s something even more outrageous about dubious charities that claim to be helping veterans and active-duty military personnel.
Last year, for example, Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) lieutenant governor, Jennifer Carroll, was forced to abruptly resign over her connections to something called Allied Veterans of the World. The Florida-based non-profit was accused of trying to “defraud the public and governmental agencies by misrepresenting how much of its proceeds were donated to charities affiliated with Veterans Administration.”
This year, a Tea Party affiliated group called Move America Forward, is facing allegations every bit as serious. Kim Barker’s piece in The Daily Beast raises serious questions the charity will have to answer quickly.
Move America Forward calls itself the nation’s “largest grassroots pro-troop organization,” and has recruited a bevy of Republican luminaries, including former Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney, to support its efforts.
Yet an examination of its fundraising appeals, tax records and other documents shows that Move America Forward has repeatedly misled donors and inflated its charitable accomplishments, while funneling millions of dollars in revenue to the men behind the group and their political consulting firms.
Barker’s report raises allegations that, if true, may point to illegalities, including the possible use the charity’s funds to subsidize conservative political action committees.
The driving force behind Move America Forward is Sal Russo, 67, the longtime political consultant who is listed on the 10-year-old charity’s tax returns as chief strategist.
Russo is better known for helping to form the Our Country Deserves Better PAC, also known as the Tea Party Express, one of the largest Tea Party groups in the country. Consultants from his Sacramento-based firm, Russo, Marsh and Associates, also set up two other PACs, the Move America Forward Freedom PAC and the Conservative Campaign Committee, to aid conservative causes and candidates.
According to its tax returns, Move America Forward paid out more than $2.3 million – about 30% of the group’s overall expenditures – to Russo or his firm.
Barker talked to a former Tea Party Express consultant who said, “It was just so shady. With PACs, I know it’s dirty money – it’s politics. But this is a charity that’s supposed to be helping the troops.”
It’s not clear who, if anyone, is handling the day-to-day management of this charity. The organization’s former executive director left in 2012 “and does not seem to have been replaced.”
The same report goes on to detail instances in which Move America Forward falsely claimed to deliver care packages to troops, used photos in fundraising and promotional materials that belonged to other organizations, and even boasted to donors about a partnership with Walter Reed National Military Medical Center that never existed.
And yet, despite all of this, Dave Weigel notes that Move America Forward benefited from testimonials from Dick Cheney, Rick Perry, Rush Limbaugh and other high-profile Republicans.
Obviously, the charges raised in this investigatory piece remain in the realm of unproven allegations. But given the evidence and seriousness of the potential wrongdoing, it’s easy to imagine law enforcement taking a keen interest in Move America Forward’s records, bank accounts, and activities.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 5, 2014
“Sorry, Obamacare Denialists, You’re Insane”: Don’t Want To Be Called Ridiculous And Nutty, Stop Saying Ridiculous, Nutty Things
Conservative writer Philip Klein, who seems very nice, complains that liberals are being far too mean about the latest conservative attempt to gut Obamacare. “Liberal critics of this legal theory have portrayed it as absurd, ridiculous, nutty, stupid, and even criminal,” he writes. “Recently, I’ve been likened to the health policy equivalent of a World Trade Center attack conspiracy theorist merely for sympathetically reporting the legal case of the challengers.”
Not exactly. Klein is conflating two different things here. First, there’s the Halbig lawsuit, which hinges upon a strained, somewhat-exotic reading of the law to argue that the Affordable Care Act fails to create tax credits for people who buy their insurance through a federal exchange. The basis of this lawsuit is that the most explicit reference in the law mentions only state exchanges, and therefore courts ought to ignore all the other, less explicit parts of the law implying the opposite.
This is the case conservatives made for several years — Congress hastily failed to write a clear law, so conservative legal activists can take advantage of the screwup to interpret what (they argue, tendentiously but not insanely) is its literal reading. As the right-wing Investor’s Business Daily, an early booster of this once-long-shot legal challenge, gleefully put it in 2011, “Oops! No Obamacare Tax Credit for You!” I’m sorry, the card says “Moops.” I find this argument highly, highly unpersuasive. It’s been laughed out of court by Democratic-appointed judges, and rejected by at least one Republican judge. I will say this for it — it is at least tenuously connected to reality.
But now conservatives are making a different argument. They’re no longer saying that the lawsuit is exploiting a drafting error. They’re claiming it interprets the law correctly, and that the law actually (or possibly) intended to deny tax credits to people in federal exchanges. They have gone from smugly saying the card says “Moops” to insisting that the people who invaded Spain in the eighth century were actually called “the Moops.”
And yes, that is completely insane. There is a massive trove of evidence here regarding the intent of the law’s drafters. Dylan Scott has the latest chunk today — a deep excavation of the role of the Congressional Budget Office, which was a kind of legislative super-body regarded as authoritative by Congress. The CBO, like everybody involved in the law’s passage, believed the federal exchanges were designed to give health insurance to people in states that did not build their own. They were not designed as a deliberately unworkable punishment.
Yes, some smart people, speaking extemporaneously, were sometimes confused about just how the law worked. (Conservatives have made a great deal about off-the-cuff comments made by Jonathan Cohn before the law was actually finalized.) That doesn’t change the fact that the federal exchanges were obviously designed to give people affordable insurance. It may be mean to point out that those who argue otherwise are completely, manifestly ahistorical, but that’s just reality. If you don’t want to be called ridiculous and nutty, stop saying ridiculous, nutty things.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, August 1, 2014
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