Dear Conservatives: Drop The Charade On Israel
As a liberal American Jew, I get treated to the predictable mock-outrage from conservatives every time a Democrat says something about Israel. In this case, it was President Obama’s remarks on Israel in his speech today. Sure, there was the usual routine of conservatives ignoring the basic facts of the matter (saying Obama called for Israel to accept the unacceptable pre-1967 border, when he actually said that the border should be BASED on the pre-1967 line), but I can’t even get mad at that anymore.
What’s got me upset, and has made me upset for a while, is American conservatives acting as though they (and only they) are capable of speaking for Israel. Michelle Bachmann already called Obama’s words “a betrayal” and Mitt Romney said that Obama “threw Israel under the bus”. Who made these schmucks experts on Israeli policy? What gives them the right to treat our spiritual homeland like it’s something only they can understand?
They DON’T understand Israel. Israel, the Middle East, and the world at large won’t be served by a refusal to negotiate and a refusal to make mutual concessions. All that does is create more resentment, more frustration, more anger…that’s not what we need. In the past twenty years, all they’ve done is give Israel money and weapons. They haven’t made any genuine effort to bring about peace. If you’re going to criticize one approach to the peace process, you have to present an alternative. Otherwise, it just seems disingenuous.
I have a friend, a guy I’ve known almost since birth, who put off law school for a few years to join the Israeli military. This hard-line approach advocated by conservatives just puts him, his fellow soldiers, and civilians in increased danger. It doesn’t solve problems, just amplifies them, and people who truly cared about Israel would realize this. Instead of only paying lip service to Israel, why doesn’t Bachmann, Romney, and the rest of their ilk actually do something constructive?
It’s also very hard to take all the pro-Israel talk seriously when Glenn Beck spews forth nonsense about George Soros and the Holocaust, Palin calls herself the victim of a “blood libel”, Republicans in Texas oppose a Jewish speaker of the state House, Limbaugh equates “banker” with “Jew”, and so on. Given that Israel is a Jewish state, it’s hard to imagine how one can truly support it while harboring a less-than-welcome attitude toward Jews. And while I’m on the subject, stop with the whole idea of promoting “Judeo-Christian values”. It seems that the only Jewish values they like are the very specific values of one Jew from Nazareth…
I’m not sure why American conservatives insist upon playing this game because it’s not going to get Jews to vote for them (Jews have been pretty solidly Democratic since the early 1900s). But that’s besides the point. It doesn’t matter why they do it.
It’s fake.
It’s insulting.
And it needs to stop.
By: Pandaman, Daily Kos, May 19, 2011
Debunking The Right’s Health Waiver Conspiracy
Is House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi helping companies in her district get around new health care rules? Conservatives seem to think so, but their evidence is spotty at best.
Last month, the Obama administration granted a reprieve to 204 businesses and policyholders from new health coverage rules under the Affordable Care Act, bringing the total number of waivers to more than 1370. Many of the waivers are for limited benefit or so called “mini-med” plans—controversial rock-bottom plans that provide a very limited amount of coverage (sometimes as little as $2,000 a year) to beneficiaries that are used heavily in low-wage industries like the restaurant business. New federal rules require such plans to offer a minimum of $750,000 of coverage annually, and the waivers exempt the mini-med plans from such rules on a case-by-case basis.
The Daily Caller reported on Tuesday that businesses in Pelosi’s district received nearly 20 percent of the waivers in April, pointing out that many of them went to high-end restaurants and hotels. Sarah Palin piled on in a subsequent interview with the Caller, calling the discovery “unflippingbelievable!” and “corrupt.”
Pelosi’s communications director, Nadeam Elshami, pushed back against the criticisms in an email to Mother Jones, denying that Pelosi’s district received any special treatment. Her office also denied that it was at all involved in the process of granting waivers for these businesses. “It is pathetic that there are those who would be cheering for Americans to lose their minimum health coverage or see their premiums increase for political purposes,” Elshami wrote Tuesday afternoon, emphasizing that health-care waivers “are reviewed and granted solely by the Administration in an open and transparent process.”
In fact, the recent waiver applications from businesses in Pelosi’s district were not even received by the minority leader’s office. Rather, they were submitted directly to the Obama administration through a third-party company, Flex Plan Services, which provides benefit administration to companies in the Bay Area, Washington state, and elsewhere in the country, according to a statement issued by Richard Solarian, an assistant HHS secretary. On March 23, Flex Plan Services submitted applications for annual limit waivers for their clients’ health plan, including 69 businesses in California, 20 in Washington state, two in Georgia, and one in Alaska, including restaurants, home health care providers, and other service-based companies. On April 4, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services approved the waiver request for all of Flex Plan Services’ clients—not just the ones in Pelosi’s district.
Flex Plan Services never contacted Pelosi’s office about their waiver request, and her office did neither provided any information to the company about the waivers nor helped facilitate the request, according to her spokesperson.
In other words, the reason the waivers were clumped together was because Flex Plan Services—which is in charge of administrating all of these businesses’ health care benefits—had issued a waiver request for the entire group of businesses. Altogether, the Obama administration has granted 1372 waivers and has denied about 100 requests. The mini-med waivers are essentially a stop-gap measure designed to keep employers from dropping health care benefits all together. The White House explains that waivers are granted if conforming to the rules “would disrupt access to existing insurance arrangements or adversely affect premiums, causing people to lose coverage,” acknowledging that the low-benefits plans are sometimes the only option that some employers can offer. The Democrats’ rationale is that the other changes under federal health reform will eventually allow employers to receive better, more affordable coverage under the health insurance exchange, when it begins operating in 2014.
To be sure, it’s worth closely examining which businesses and policyholders have received waivers, as well as which ones have denied them, along with the Obama administration’s rationale for making such decisions. But, as the April waivers reveal, the very fact that reprieves have been granted to businesses residing in democratic districts doesn’t mean the process is unjust. And to assume that the rationale must be political or “corrupt” is to turn a real policy issue into a partisan bludgeon.
By: Suzy Khimm, Mother Jones, May 17, 2011
Even Without Donald Trump, Plenty Of Clowns In The 2012 GOP Field
Farewell Donald Trump. For a brief moment last month, his birther buffoonery powered him to the front of the Republican pack. What a difference a birth certificate, a death announcement, and serious treatment by the press make. Now The Donald has announced that as with his previous presidential flirtations he is not making this race. Suddenly he looks like one of the celebrity has-beens who gets fired on his television show—or worse, like a celebrity has-been who doesn’t actually get onto the show at all.
Trump peaked in mid-April when a survey from the Democratic group Public Policy Polling set him as the frontrunner for the GOP nomination, with 26 percent of the vote. Then reality intruded. The press went from treating him like a celebrity making silly noises about running to treating him like a genuine would-be candidate, checking out who he contributed to and fact-checking his weird claims. Then Obama’s long form birth certificate put an end to birtherism while Osama bin Laden’s violent end reminded us that there are monsters in the real world and that the presidency is for serious people, not reality TV blowhards.
Public Policy Polling’s survey last week had Trump at 8 percent, in a fifth place tie with Ron Paul.
But with Trump-mentum ended, where can we hope to find entertainment value in the GOP primary field? The answer is, where can’t you? Donald Trump, entertainer-turned-pol was never going to be the second coming of Ronald Reagan. But neither will the other maybes and might-want-tos.
Take Newt Gingrich, whose announcement video last week said we should “look reality in the face, [and] tell the truth.” The truth and the reality are that Gingrich is an abrasive bomb thrower who resigned his speakership after his colleagues, and most voters, had enough of him, not the profile swing voters usually latch onto. His disapproval rating when he left office was 70 percent and was still as high as 38 percent as recently as last summer. And Gingrich, a self-styled historian, is fighting history. Only once has a former speaker of the house made the transition to the White House. That, NBC’s Chuck Todd notes, was James Polk in 1844. And not since James Garfield in 1880 has a politician achieved the White House having only served in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Newt is not alone with this problem, of course. Sitting Rep. Michele Bachmann seems happy to conflate her fanatical Tea Party following with actual broad-based support. But again her lack of experience in winning even a statewide office in Minnesota makes one wonder whether she’s drinking tea or Kool-Aid. For sheer “what is he thinking” chutzpah, however, it’s hard to beat Rick Santorum, whose last act in American politics ended when the voters of his home state of Pennsylvania fired him from the U.S. Senate. I can think of one modern politician who won the White House after losing his last previous election, and Richard Nixon is not a figure whose mantel many GOPers lay claim to these days.
Sure Newt, Bachmann, and Santorum are members of the GOP presidential B Team, but is the A Team much more impressive? You could have made an argument for former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, before he announced this weekend that he would not run. The best that can be said of Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota, is that he is inoffensive (read: bland), while the worst that can be said of 2008 vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is that she’s . . . Sarah Palin.
Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels commented last week that “the chances [of his beating Obama] would actually be quite good.” Apparently channeling some Trump-ian bombast, he added that, “The quality and the number of people who have said they’d like to be associated is really quite awesome to me.” Also awesome is the idea of someone running as a gimlet-eyed spending hawk whose previous job before governor was as George W. Bush’s budget chief. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes, “By themselves, in fact, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will account for almost half of the $20 trillion in debt that, under current policies, the nation will owe by 2019.”
Then there’s Mitt Romney, who Thursday made his highest profile attempt to explain why the healthcare law he passed while governor of Massachusetts, with an individual mandate, is good, but the national-level version of it, signed by Barack Obama, is bad. Romney’s dilemma: He can’t embrace the individual mandate because conservatives don’t like it any more at the state level than they do at the federal one. But he also can’t repudiate it lest he feed the political chameleon image that led the Democratic National Committee to tout “Mitt Romney, Version 5.0.”
The most damning illustration of the state of the GOP field may have come in a Politico report noting that virtually the only issue the contenders agree on is that “Sharia law is a continuing threat to the United States.”
One can’t help but look forward to the GOP nominee explaining that urgent threat in a general election debate while standing next to the president who got bin Laden.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, May 16, 2011
Newt Gingrich And “The Food Stamp President”
Newt Gingrich doubled down on his clever new slur against President Obama as “the food stamp president.” He tried the line in a Friday speech to the Georgia Republican convention, and he used it again on “Meet the Press Sunday.” It’s a short hop from Gingrich’s slur to Ronald Reagan’s attacks on “strapping young bucks” buying “T-bone steaks” with food stamps. Blaming our first black president for the sharp rise in food-stamp reliance (which resulted from the economic crash that happened on the watch of our most recent white president) is just the latest version of Rush Limbaugh suggesting that Obama’s social policy amounts to “reparations” for black people.
But when host David Gregory suggested the term had racial overtones, Gingrich replied “That’s bizarre,” and added, “I have never said anything about President Obama which is racist.” That’s not quite as extreme or silly as Donald Trump declaring “I am the least racist person there is,” but it’s up there. He also told Georgia Republicans Friday that 2012 will be the most momentous election “since 1860,” which happens to be the year we elected the anti-slavery Abraham Lincoln president, and he suggested the U.S. bring back a “voting standard” that requires voters to prove they know American history — which sounds a lot like the “poll tests” outlawed by the Voting Rights Act.
Just last week Gingrich said Obama “knows how to get the whole country to resemble Detroit,” which just happens to be home to many black people. And last year Gingrich accused Obama of “Kenyan anti-colonialist behavior” that made him “outside our comprehension” as Americans, spreading Dinesh D’Souza’s idiocy that Obama inherited angry African anti-colonialism from the Kenyan father he never knew. “This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president,” Gingrich told the National Review Online last year.
All this from the guy who’s supposed to be the “smart” candidate for the GOP nomination?
Republicans have done well with their quest to stigmatize social welfare programs as handouts to the undeserving, and to pretend that most of the undeserving are black people. But it may not be working as well today. Paul Ryan’s class-war budget is going down in flames, largely because seniors are up in arms over Ryan’s attacks on Medicare. Ryan and his GOP allies tried to be clever, making sure his plans to phase out Medicare wouldn’t apply to today’s seniors, who happen to be disproportionately white and disproportionately Republican. But seniors are seeing through the ruse, telling Ryan and the GOP that they want to protect Medicare for their children, too. Even Gingrich is now backing away from the Ryan budget, telling Gregory it’s too “radical” and “too big a jump.” A jump off a political cliff for Republicans, that is.
Let’s hope Gingrich’s attacks on our “food stamp president” backfire, too. I learned about the ex-GOP speaker’s latest use of the term from the group Catholic Democrats, which Tweeted Sunday morning that the twice-divorced Catholic convert ought to have a look at Catholic social teaching if he’s going to call himself a Catholic. The American bishops have lately been trying to remind Americans (and themselves, perhaps) that Catholic social teaching is about more than abortion. The church has long been a force on behalf of the poor and powerless, going back to Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (On the Condition of Labor) at the height of the Gilded Age in 1891, which put the church on the side of labor organizing, through Pope Benedict’s “Caritas in Veritate” (Charity in Truth) of 2009, which restated the church’s commitment to support for workers and the poor worldwide, in the wake of the greed-driven financial crisis of 2008.
House Speaker John Boehner got a taste of the rising Catholic concern for social justice when 83 Catholic scholars wrote to Boehner protesting his attacks on programs for the poor, after Boehner was chosen as Catholic University’s commencement speaker. They didn’t call on the university to cancel Boehner’s address, unlike Catholic conservatives who protested Obama’s commencement address at Notre Dame in 2009). They wrote:
Your voting record is at variance from one of the church’s most ancient moral teachings. From the apostles to the present, the Magisterium of the Church has insisted that those in power are morally obliged to preference the needs of the poor. Your record in support of legislation to address the desperate needs of the poor is among the worst in Congress. This fundamental concern should have great urgency for Catholic policymakers. Yet, even now, you work in opposition to it.
The scholars also noted that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops called Boehner-promoted Ryan budget as “anti-life” for its cuts to programs for pregnant women and children. Boehner’s commencement address went on Saturday with a quiet protest from students who wore green placards reading “Where’s the compassion, Speaker Boehner?” over their graduation gowns. Of course the Catholic Boehner didn’t address the controversy; instead he shed tears remembering how his high school football coach called him the morning he became speaker to tell him “you can do it,” which he considered an answer to his prayers.
Boehner may have been crying about what his support of the Ryan budget is doing to House GOP re-election chances. Gingrich could find that his racially coded attacks on Obama backfire as well. Both the poverty rate and the unemployment rate for white Americans have doubled since the start of this recession. Maybe Republican policies will succeed in uniting Americans across racial lines for a change, as more people see them as favoring one minority — the super-rich — over the rest of us.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, May 15, 2011
John Boehner’s Unreality Check On The Deficit
The news out of House Speaker John Boehner’s speech to the New York Economic Club was his demand for “cuts of trillions, not just billions” before the debt ceiling can be raised. Not just broad deficit-reduction targets, the Ohio Republican insisted, but “actual cuts and program reforms.”
That’s alarming enough. It is all but impossible to get this done in the available time. It certainly can’t be accomplished on Boehner’s unbending, no-new-taxes terms. And if the speaker truly believes that it would be “more irresponsible” to raise the debt ceiling without instituting deficit-reduction measures than not to raise it at all, we’re in a heap of trouble.
Even more alarming, because it has consequences beyond the debt-ceiling debate, is the incoherent, impervious-to-facts economic philosophy undergirding Boehner’s remarks.
Reporters naturally tend to ignore this boilerplate. Journalistically, that makes sense. Boehner’s economic comments were nothing particularly new. Indeed, they reflect what has become the mainstream thinking of the Republican Party. But that’s exactly the point. We become so inured to hearing this thinking that we neglect to point out how wrong it is.
My argument with Boehner is not that he believes in a more limited role for government than I do, not that he is more skeptical of government intervention and regulation, and not that he is more worried about the economically stifling implications of tax increases. Those are legitimate ideological differences. American politics is better off for them.
I’m talking about statements that are simply false.
“The recent stimulus spending binge hurt our economy and hampered private-sector job creation in America.”
Reasonable economists can disagree about the effectiveness of the stimulus spending and whether it was worth the drag of the additional debt, but no reasonable economist argues that it hurt the economy in the short term.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates the stimulus added, on average, about one percentage point annually to economic growth and reduced the unemployment rate by half a point between 2009 and 2011. And that’s the low-end estimate. The high-end numbers show the stimulus spending adding more than 2 percentage points annually to economic growth and cutting the unemployment rate by more than 1 percentage point.
The CBO is not alone. Economists Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi estimated in a July 2010 paper that without the stimulus spending, the unemployment rate would be 1.5 percentage points higher.
“The massive borrowing and spending by the Treasury Department crowded out private investment by American businesses of all sizes.”
Crowding out occurs when government spending drives up interest rates and makes borrowing unattractive to the private sector. As economist Joseph Minarik of the Committee for Economic Development explains, “When interest rates are on the floor, you can’t say federal government borrowing is crowding out business investment.” The lackluster investment climate reflects low consumer demand and underutilized capacity. You can’t be crowded out of a room you’re not trying to enter.
“The truth is we will never balance the budget and rid our children of debt unless we cut spending and have real economic growth. And we will never have real economic growth if we raise taxes on those in America who create jobs.”
Never? Under President Clinton, taxes were raised, primarily on the wealthy. During the eight years of his administration, the economy grew by an average of close to 4 percent.
“I ran for Congress in 1990, the year our nation’s leaders struck a so-called bargain that raised taxes as part of a bipartisan plan to balance the budget. The result of that so-called bargain was the recession of the early 1990s. It wasn’t until the economy picked back up toward the end of that decade that we achieved a balanced budget.”
Boehner blames the budget deal for tanking the economy, but the recession actually started in July 1990, two months before the agreement was reached. And that revived economy? It came despite the supposed dead weight of the Clinton tax increase.
“A tax hike would wreak havoc not only on our economy’s ability to create private-sector jobs, but also on our ability to tackle the national debt.”
During the early 1980s, taxes were cut and public debt ballooned, from 26 percent of GDP in 1980 to 40 percent by 1986. In 1993, taxes were increased (and spending cut); debt as a share of the economy fell, from 49 percent to 33 percent. In 2001 and 2003, taxes were cut. By the time President Obama took office, debt had climbed to 40 percent of GDP.
Listening to Boehner, I began to think the country suffers from two deficits: the gap between spending and revenue, and the one between reality and ideology. The first cannot be solved unless we find some way of at least narrowing the second.
By: Ruth Marcus, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 10, 2011
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 