“When Will You Stop Beating Your Ally?”: Ted Cruz On Protecting And Promoting Israel’s Tourism Industry
I really thought the peculiar use of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a political weapon against Barack Obama had reached its point of diminishing returns back in the 2012 presidential cycle, when the entire field (with the exception, obviously, of Ron Paul) competed to express how abjectly each as president would defer to Israel’s wishes in using American resources and commitments, in sharp contrast to the faithless Muslim-lover in the White House. I mean, seriously, wouldn’t the tribunes of American Exceptionalism eventually see something wrong with their political representatives demanding that the U.S. outsource its foreign policy to another country?
Leave it to Ted Cruz to take it all to another level, accusing the administration of telling the FAA to ban flights into Tel Aviv as part of a pro-Hamas conspiracy:
“Given that some 2,000 rockets have been fired into Israel over the last six weeks, many of them at Tel Aviv, it seems curious to choose yesterday at noon to announce a flight ban, especially as the Obama Administration had to be aware of the punitive nature of this action.
“Tourism is an $11 billion industry for Israel, which is in the middle of a summer high season already seriously diminished by the conflict initiated by Hamas. Group tours have been cancelling at a 30% rate. This FAA flight ban may well represent a crippling blow to a key economic sector through both security concerns and worries that additional bans will down more flights and strand more passengers. It hardly matters if or when the ban is lifted. At this point, the damage may already be done….
Secretary of State John Kerry issued a veiled threat last February when he encouraged boycotts of Israel [sic] and said that absent serious Israeli concessions at the negotiating table, Israel’s economic prosperity was ‘not sustainable’ and ‘illusory.’ Secretary Kerry unfortunately reprised this theme just this April, when he threatened that Israel risked becoming an ‘apartheid state’ if Israel did not submit to his chosen solution to the Israel-Palestinian crisis.
“Taken in the context of Secretary Kerry’s comments, yesterday’s action by the FAA raises some serious questions.
So apparently the United States has an obligation, at the potential expense of the safety of its own citizens, to promote the security claims of another country in order to protect said country’s tourism industry. Anything less than that is to side with Israel’s enemies, whose bloody hands Obama is already shaking by continuing humanitarian assistance to Gaza.
How much further can Republicans move the goal posts here? Should we become more militantly pro-Israel than the Israelis themselves?
I know this is a sweet spot for conservatives because it pleases a certain type of evangelical Christian activist and projects bloody-minded “strength” without risking a commitment of U.S. troops, since the Israelis really can take care of themselves from a military point of view. And the Palestinians, of course, are the overseas equivalent of those people here, somehow still held to be responsible for 9/11. But if there is a Republican president any time soon, the GOP isn’t doing him or her any favors by mortgaging half its foreign policy to the interests of a single foreign state, however admirable.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, July 24, 2014
“The Koch-Tested, Koch-Approved Version”: Paul Ryan’s Faux Populism Isn’t Going To End Poverty Or Reduce Inequality
Paul Ryan’s fellow Republicans are quick to dismiss Elizabeth Warren as too radical, too progressive, too populist.
But Ryan is trying—a bit clumsily, but trying all the same—to borrow a page from the Massachusetts senator as he seeks to remake himself in anticipation of a potential 2016 run for the Republican presidential nomination. He’s talking about poverty, about inequality, about shifting the focus away from meeting the demands of corporations and toward meeting the needs of Americans.
Mitt Romney’s running mate is abandoning Romneyism for populism—or what former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has referred to as “Paul Ryan’s Faux Populism.”
Instead of repeating the Mittnomers of 2012—“Corporations are people, my friend”—Ryan is suddenly informing fellow conservatives, “There’s another fallacy popular among our ranks. Just as some think anything government does is wrong, others think anything business does is right. But in fact they’re two sides of the same coin. Both big government and big business like to stack the deck in their favor. And though they are sometimes adversaries, they are far too often allies.”
It is hard to argue with Ryan’s reasoning. Populists and progressives have warned for more than a century that corporations are “boldly marching, not for economic conquests only, but for political power.” The author of those words, former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Edward Ryan , asked in 1873: “Which shall rule—wealth or man; which shall lead—money or intellect; who shall fill public stations—educated and patriotic free men, or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?” Elizabeth Warren confirmed Ryan’s worst fears when she addressed Netroots Nation last week and declared, “The game is rigged and the rich and the powerful have lobbyists and lawyers and plenty of friends in Congress. Everybody else, not so much.”
And now, Paul Ryan is on-message, announcing as only a career politician can, that “our country has had enough of politics.” He’s proposing to “reconceive the federal government’s role in the fight against poverty.” And he is even ripping corporations, decrying the way in which big government has become “a willing accomplice” of big business.
Ryan explained last week at Hillsdale College’s Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship session that “crony capitalism isn’t a side effect; it’s a direct result of big government.”
Grab the pitchforks!
But don’t look for Paul Ryan on the front lines of actual fights to reduce inequality or address injustice.
The House Budget Committee chairman, who on Thursday released an “anti-poverty proposal” that rehashed decades-old schemes to scale back anti-poverty initiatives and regulatory protections for low-income Americans, offers scant evidence of a serious determination to solve the problems that have got Americans up in arms. If Ryan was serious, he wouldn’t be proposing, as his “Opportunity Grant” plan does, to “consolidate” existing federal programs to aid the poor into block grants to the states—an approach that would allow Republican governors who have already shown a penchant for undermining healthcare, food-stamp and education initiatives the “flexibility” to do even more harm.
Congressman Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat who serves with Ryan on the Budget Committee, nails it when he warns about a proposal that “uses the sunny language of ‘reform’ as a guise to cut vital safety-net programs.”
So if the congressman is not worried about developing a serious response to the problem of inequality, what is on his mind?
Ryan is worried about solving his own problem: an association in the public’s mind with the failed messages of the 2012 Romney-Ryan campaign.
Last week’s populist speech at the Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship and this week’s poverty speech at the American Enterprise Institute begin the roll-out of Paul Ryan Version 2.0. Next comes the August publication of Ryan’s 2016 campaign book, The Way Forward: Renewing the American Idea, complete with its epic cover shot of Americans reaching out to touch a triumphal Ryan. Then there’s the bus tour.
Yes, the bus tour.
So Ryan is campaigning. To the extent that it is possible he will do so in populist style and with populist rhetoric about crony capitalism and fighting poverty.
But don’t be confused.
This is still the same Paul Ryan who went to the floor of the House in 2008 and rallied Republicans to support the Wall Street bailout. This is still the same Paul Ryan who opposed regulation of the big banks. This is still the same Paul Ryan who supported and continues to support) the free trade deals demanded by multinational corporations. This is still the same Paul Ryan who has peddled Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare “reforms” that would turn sound programs into vehicles for steering federal funds into the accounts of Wall Street speculators and health-insurance corporations.
This is still the same Paul Ryan who during the current election cycle has padded his campaign committee and “leadership PAC” accounts with almost $9 million in donations—with Wall Street securities and investment interests and the health-insurance industry giving most generously. And this is the same Paul Ryan who, when Congress took its August break in 2013 jetted home to Wisconsin via Arizona—where he was a featured speaker at the annual retreat for billionaire donors organized by the Koch brothers.
The other featured speaker was then–House majority leader Eric Cantor, for whom the ensuing months did not go well. Cantor’s Republican primary defeat—at the hands of a critic of “crony capitalism”—provided an indication that the American people are increasingly agitated. And increasingly disinclined toward the sort of insider politics practiced by career politicians such as Ryan.
Ryan got the signal.
He is rebranding himself.
He has downloaded some populist rhetoric to go with his “kinder, gentler” talk about poverty.
But Paul Ryan’s populism is not the real thing. It’s the Koch-tested, Koch-approved version.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, July 24, 2014
“A Conservative Judiciary Run Amok”: Using Judicial Sophistry As An Instrument Of Anti-Democratic Sabotage
Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens captured our ideal when he wrote of the judge as “an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”
By effectively gutting the Affordable Care Act on Tuesday, two members of a three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals showed how far right-leaning jurists have strayed from such impartiality. We are confronted with a conservative judiciary that will use any argument it can muster to win ideological victories that elude their side in the elected branches of our government.
Fortunately, the D.C. Circuit ruling is unlikely to stand. On the same day the D.C. panel issued its opinion, a three-judge panel from the 4th Circuit ruled unanimously the other way, upholding the law.
There is a good chance that the 11-judge D.C. Circuit will take the decision away from its panel — something it is usually reluctant to do — and rule as a full court to affirm the ACA as commonly understood. It is virtually certain that a majority of the court’s members disagrees with the panel’s convoluted reading of the law and wants to avoid creating a needless conflict in jurisprudence with the 4th Circuit.
When Congress wrote the health law, it envisioned that the states would set up the insurance exchanges where individuals could purchase coverage. But knowing that some states might not want to set up these marketplaces themselves, it also created a federal exchange for those that bowed out. There are 36 states under the federal exchange.
The law includes a mandate requiring Americans to buy health insurance and subsidizes those who need help to pay their premiums. The law falls apart without the subsidies, which go to its central purpose: providing insurance for those who cannot afford it.
But the law was not particularly well-drafted. It’s not uniquely flawed in this respect. As Judge Andre M. Davis wrote in a concurrence to the 4th Circuit ruling: “Neither the canons of construction nor any empirical analysis suggests that congressional drafting is a perfectly harmonious, symmetrical and elegant endeavor. . . . Sausage-makers are indeed offended when their craft is linked to legislating.”
Here’s what the two Republican-appointed judges on the D.C. panel did to make the sausage disappear entirely: Because the subsidies are established in a part of the law referring to state exchanges, the D.C. Circuit ruled that no one on the federal exchange is eligible for them.
Poof! There goes the health law in most of the country.
Never mind that many other parts of the law clearly assume that the subsidies apply to people on both the state and federal exchanges. And never mind that during the very long debate over the ACA, no one ever said otherwise.
In ruling to kill the subsidies for an estimated 5 million people on the federal exchange, Judge Thomas B. Griffith invents the idea that Congress may have intended to deny subsidies to people in states that didn’t set up their own exchanges as an incentive for those states to do so. But as Judge Harry T. Edwards writes in his dissent, the “incentive story is a fiction, a post hoc narrative” to justify the idea that “Congress would have wanted insurance markets to collapse in states that elected not to create their own exchanges.”
The extreme judicial activism here is obvious when you consider, as the 4th Circuit did, that even if you accept that there is ambiguity in the law, the Supreme Court’s 30-year-old precedent in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council held that in instances of uncertainty, the court defers to federal agencies rather than concocting textual clarity when it doesn’t exist.
Griffith has to pretend that his cramped reading of the written text — again, a reading utterly disconnected from the reality of the law’s history — is the only one possible. From there, he goes on to force the government and those losing their subsidies to live with a patently absurd result.
Edwards’s logic is compelling: The Griffith decision “defies the will of Congress” and goes along with a “not-so-veiled attempt to gut the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.”
As the 4th Circuit’s Davis put it, the law’s opponents are trying “to deny to millions of Americans desperately needed health insurance through a tortured, nonsensical construction” of the law.
We cannot use judicial sophistry as an instrument of anti-democratic sabotage.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 23, 2014
“A Stroll Down Memory Lane”: Sometimes, ‘What Would Reagan Do?’ Is The Wrong Question
After the public learned last week that Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 had been shot down, killing all 298 people on board, it wasn’t long before an obvious comparison came to mind: in September 1983, a Russian fighter jet shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007. The attack left 269 passengers and crew dead, 62 of whom were American, including a member of Congress.
Olivia Kittel noted that for many Republicans, President Obama should not only follow Ronald Reagan’s example from 31 years ago, but also that Obama is already falling short of the Reagan example.
In the wake of a Malaysia Airlines jetliner crash, Fox News has rushed to conveniently rewrite history to disparage President Obama by drawing false comparisons to former President Ronald Reagan’s response to a 1983 attack on a Korean airliner.
After Fox News said Obama wasn’t Reagan-esque enough, plenty of other conservatives soon followed.
Let’s take a brief stroll down memory lane in case some have forgotten what actually happened in 1983.
After the Soviet pilot killed 269 people on a civilian airliner, Reagan’s aides didn’t bother to wake him up to tell him what happened. When the president was eventually briefed on developments, Reagan, who was on vacation in California at the time, announced he did not intend to cut his trip short. (Reagan’s aides later convinced him to return to the White House.)
Last week, Obama delivered a public address on the Malaysia Airlines plane about 24 hours after it was shot down, calling the incident an “outrage of unspeakable proportions.” Reagan also delivered stern words, but in contrast, he waited four days to deliver public remarks.
So what is Fox talking about?
More from Kittel’s report:
On the July 17 edition of Fox News’ The Kelly File, host Megyn Kelly connected the July 17 tragedy to the 1983 Korean airliner crash, highlighting Reagan’s speech in response and noting in comparison that Obama has “been accused of ‘leading from behind.’ ” Fox contributor Chris Stirewalt compared Reagan’s response to Obama’s, saying Reagan’s response made Americans feel “reassured and resolute,” and Kelly echoed that Obama’s response “makes him look unconnected and makes a lot of Americans feel unrepresented.” […]
Such comparisons applauding Reagan’s 1983 response to attack Obama have reverberated throughout Fox News. Andrew Napolitano invoked Reagan’s response to insist Obama should “get on national television and call Vladimir Putin a killer.” Fox correspondent Peter Johnson Jr. said of Obama, “I think the president needs to take a page out of Ronald Reagan,” while Fox strategic analyst Ralph Peters suggested Obama’s strategy should reflect “clear speech, a la Ronald Reagan, backed up by firm action and with follow-through.”
This over-the-top Reagan worship isn’t just wrong; it’s ironic. In 1983, some of the prominent conservative media voices of the day actually complained bitterly that Reagan’s response was wholly inadequate.
George Will – yes, that George Will – called the Reagan White House’s arguments “pathetic” at the time, insisting, “It’s time for [Reagan] to act.”
The president responded publicly with rhetoric that made the president sound rather helpless. “Short of going to war, what would they have us do?” Reagan said. “I know that some of our critics have sounded off that somehow we haven’t exacted enough vengeance. Well, vengeance isn’t the name of the game in this.”
One wonders what the reaction would have been from the right and the Beltway media if Obama responded with similar rhetoric to a comparable situation.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 21, 2014
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