“Kerry Teaches Rubio The Basics About The Middle East”: Explaining Current Events To A Student Who Failed To Do His Homework
At the recent CPAC gathering, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a likely Republican presidential candidate, seemed to stumble on one of the basic facts of the Middle East. “The reason Obama hasn’t put in place a military strategy to defeat ISIS is because he doesn’t want to upset Iran,” the Florida Republican said.
The senator seemed confused. In reality, President Obama has put an anti-ISIS military strategy in place, and that’s fine with Iran, since Iran and ISIS are enemies.
I’d hoped that Rubio just misspoke, or had been briefed poorly by an aide, but apparently not – -at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing this afternoon, the far-right Floridian continued to push this strange theory, pressing Secretary of State John Kerry on the point. “I believe that much of our strategy with regards to ISIS is being driven by a desire not to upset Iran so they don’t walk away from the negotiating table on the deal that you’re working on,” Rubio said. “Tell me why I’m wrong.”
And so, Kerry told him why he’s wrong.
For those who can’t watch clips online, here’s the heart of the exchange.
KERRY: What’s important, senator, with respect to your question is to understand this. And I think this has been a misread by a lot of people up here on the Hill, to be honest with you. There is no grand bargain being discussed here with regards to this negotiation, this is about a nuclear weapon potential. That’s it. And the president has made it absolutely clear they will not get a nuclear weapon. Now the presumption by a lot of people up on the Hill here has been that we somehow aren’t aware of that goal even as we negotiate that goal. Our negotiation is calculated to make sure they can’t get a nuclear weapon. It’s really almost insulting that the presumption here is that we’re going to negotiate something that allows them to get a nuclear weapon.
RUBIO: Well I haven’t discussed about the nuclear weapon but I – and I’m not saying there is a grand bargain – what I’m saying is that I believe that our military strategy towards ISIS is influenced by our desire not to cross red lines That the Iranians have –
KERRY: Absolutely not in the least.
Rubio went on to insist that many of our Sunni allies in the region – including Jordan and U.A.E. – feel as if we’ve kept them “in the dark” about the nuclear talks with Iran, reducing our “trust level” in the region.
Again, Kerry had to patiently explained to the Republican, “Senator, that is actually flat wrong.”
Honestly, it was like watching a competent teacher trying to explain the basics of current events to a student who failed to do his homework. Andrea Mitchell said the Secretary of State took Rubio “to school.”
Rubio recently said he’d have an important advantage in the race for the White House because he, unlike the GOP governors, has “a clear view of what’s happening in the world.” The senator added that for governors running for president, international affairs will be “a challenge, at least initially, because they don’t deal with foreign policy on a daily basis.”
That’s not a bad argument, though it’s predicated on the assumption that senators who deal with foreign policy actually have some idea what they’re talking about. This afternoon, Rubio fell far short.
For more on today’s committee hearing, be sure to check out msnbc’s related coverage.
By: Steve Benen, Yhe Maddow Blog, March 11, 2015
“Willful Suspension Of Disbelief”: See No Climate Change, Hear No Climate Change, Speak No Climate Change
We already knew that Republicans like to live in their own alternate version of reality, sanitized of any inconvenient truths that might interfere with their ideology. But Florida (as usual) is pushing even the GOP’s incredible willful suspension of disbelief:
The state of Florida is the region most susceptible to the effects of global warming in this country, according to scientists. Sea-level rise alone threatens 30 percent of the state’s beaches over the next 85 years.
But you would not know that by talking to officials at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the state agency on the front lines of studying and planning for these changes.
DEP officials have been ordered not to use the term “climate change” or “global warming” in any official communications, emails, or reports, according to former DEP employees, consultants, volunteers and records obtained by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting. The policy goes beyond semantics and has affected reports, educational efforts and public policy in a department that has about 3,200 employees and $1.4 billion budget.
“We were told not to use the terms ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming’ or ‘sustainability,’ ” said Christopher Byrd, an attorney with the DEP’s Office of General Counsel in Tallahassee from 2008 to 2013. “That message was communicated to me and my colleagues by our superiors in the Office of General Counsel.”
The creepy Orwellianism on display is exacerbated by the fact that of all places in the U.S., ignoring climate change is particularly suicidal for Florida, a state that will be almost entirely inundated as sea levels rise.
For state officials in Florida to ban the words “climate change” from even being uttered for ideological reasons verges perilously on death cult territory. And for what? So that a few rich extraction-based millionaires can stay just a little richer, just a while longer? So that the people who still buy into objectivist ideas about the economy can live in their delusional bubble for a few more years before drowning in the oncoming tide?
On a smaller scale, this kind of behavior would indicate a need for a social services intervention. At this scale it’s basically a human rights issue, and merits some sort of federal intervention. And possibly some form of libertarian cult deprogramming.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, March 9, 2015
“A Contest Of Anti-Tax Purity”: The Fight For The Soul Of The Republican Party Is Over: The Rich Won Again
It was just eight months ago that a New York Times Magazine profile giddily described the rise of “a small band of reform conservatives, sometimes called reformicons, who believe the health of the G.O.P. hinges on jettisoning its age-old doctrine — orgiastic tax-cutting, the slashing of government programs, the championing of Wall Street — and using an altogether different vocabulary, backed by specific proposals, that will reconnect the party to middle-class and low-income voters.”
After the Republican Party had turned itself into a machine committed relentlessly to the singular goal of cutting taxes for the rich, the reformicons seemed to be poised to take control of the party’s intellectual apparatus.
The reformicons always assumed they could bypass Congress and focus all their attention on developing an innovative platform for a presidential candidate. (This was a shaky plan to begin with, as a prospective Republican president would need to sign something passed by Congress.) But as the Republican candidates have formulated their early platforms, the party’s center of gravity, rather than jettisoning its hoary policy of orgiastic tax-cutting, has instead continued and even deepened its fervor.
The Republican Party’s determination to cut taxes for the rich was never rooted in electoral calculation. (Indeed, this has always been a handicap for the party to overcome.) It arose from the fact that extremely powerful forces within the party, including but not limited to its funders, believed in it as a matter of ideology as well as self-interest. The plutocrats initially held back in the face of the reformicon movement, perhaps unaccustomed to facing any challenge within the party, which for decades has treated their doctrine as holy writ revealed to the world by Reagan himself.
They were never going to yield control of the party without a fight. The disintegration of campaign-finance restrictions has given the funding class greater leverage over the nomination, and as the presidential field has formed its domestic-policy platforms, its influence has been evident. Jeb Bush is wooing the fanatically anti-tax Club for Growth. Scott Walker has firmly allied himself with the party’s most unreconstructed supply-siders. Rand Paul is promising “the largest tax cut in American history.” Ted Cruz is, well, Ted Cruz. The Republican primary has turned into a contest of anti-tax purity. “We’ve got maybe an embarrassment of riches here in that we’ve never been able to support somebody before, and now we may get overwhelmed with people we think are worthy of support,” gloats recently departed Club for Growth president Chris Chocola.
Nowhere is the triumph of the supply-siders more evident than in the progress of Marco Rubio and Mike Lee. Rubio and Lee are the paradigmatic spokesmen for the reformicon platform — Lee as an ideas pitchman, Rubio as a candidate.
Last year, Rubio and Lee unveiled a tax-reform plan that their allies touted as a manifesto of reform conservatism, positioning the Republican Party on the side of hard-press working families rather than the rich. Lee’s plan “actually help[s] middle-class families rather than mostly cut taxes on the investor class,” gushed Ross Douthat, one of the most fervent and optimistic advocates of the reform-conservative faction.
Eventually, the Tax Policy Center crunched the numbers on Lee’s plan and found that it did nothing of the sort. Its provisions to benefit hard-pressed low-income workers turned out to be wildly oversold. Brookings economist Isabel Sawhill concluded, “very few if any low income families with children would benefit from the plan.” And, far from being the “tax reform” it claimed to be, Rubio and Lee had merely constructed a gigantic tax-cut plan that would reduce federal revenue by $2.4 trillion over a decade, a larger tax cut than George W. Bush passed in 2001. What’s more, the Lee-Rubio plan lavished far more benefits on the rich. The average earner in the lowest income quintile would save on average $79 a year, or 0.5 percent of her income, from the plan. An earner in the second-lowest quintile, the heart of the working class, would save $338 a year, or one percent of her income. The top one percent earner would see its income boosted by 2.8 percent on average, or more than $40,000 a year. The plan was simply a reprise of Bush-era debt-financed regressive tax cuts.
Reform conservatives took the setback in stride. Perhaps this was just an oversight or a mild computational error. Douthat hopefully suggested that Rubio and Lee would take a second pass at the issue and rectify the problem:
The liberal response to the Lee plan’s disappointing score, from Chait and others, has been to suggest that it illustrates the continuing unrealism of G.O.P. proposals. But notably, Lee himself didn’t respond by, say, denouncing TPC and insisting that some version of dynamic scoring would make the deficit numbers come out right; he responded by announcing that he was partnering with Marco Rubio (cough, 2016, cough) to develop a revised family-friendly proposal.
And, indeed, Rubio and Lee have come out with a revised version of their plan. But it didn’t get better. It got much, much, much worse. The new Rubio-Lee plan keeps most of its old structure, with its stingy treatment of low-income workers. It layers on top of that two changes: a far more generous treatment of business income, and a complete elimination of all taxes on capital gains and dividends. [Update: The plan would also, unbelievably, completely eliminate the tax on inherited estates, which for a married couple only begins to apply to inheritances above $10 million.] Both of these new features would lavish massive additional tax cuts on the rich, in addition to those already in the original version. The new Rubio-Lee plan would surpass anything George W. Bush or Mitt Romney ever proposed to do in its ambitions to relieve the richest Americans of their tax burdens.
Perhaps the fullest measure of the supply-siders’ triumph can be seen in the acquiescence of many of the reformicons themselves. Ramesh Ponnuru and Yuval Levin, both reform conservatives featured prominently in the Times story, responded to the new Lee-Rubio plan with fawning praise. James Pethokoukis, a reformist conservative, calls the plan “a big step toward persuading middle-income America that Republicans care about more than just the richest 1 percent.” (If this is a big step toward persuading America that Republicans care about more than the rich, what would the next step be? Legalizing servant-flogging?)
Perhaps the reform conservatives have capitulated completely in the name of party unity. Or maybe they were misunderstood from the beginning and never proposed to deviate in any substantive way from the traditional platform of massively regressive, debt-financed tax-cutting. Either way, the movement has, for now, accomplished less than nothing.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, March 5, 2015
“The Historical Trends Could Hardly Be Clearer”: Strong February Job Numbers Underline Obama’s Performance — And GOP Failure
When Republicans complain about economic policy under President Obama – and especially job growth, as Jeb Bush does almost every day – someone might inquire how they think he compares with the last couple of presidents from their party (both of whom happened to bear the surname Bush). Underlined by February’s data released today, Obama’s record is outstanding and continues to smash the idiotic economic predictions promoted by Republicans (and their Fox News echoes) about the stimulus, the deficit, the Affordable Care Act, the auto bailout, the federal budget, and nearly every policy of this administration.
Perhaps someday a television personality on a Sunday chat show will muster the tiny amount of courage needed to pose the question to a guest like Jeb: Why do Democratic administrations result in so many more jobs than Republican administrations? This bold interrogation wouldn’t require much research effort. Helpful information that contrasts the success of recent Democratic presidents — and the abject failure of the GOP presidents who preceded them — may easily be found here, for instance (h/t Eclectablog and our friend @LOLGOP). And many other places, too.
The short version is that under Barack Obama (6.7 million so far) and Bill Clinton (22.6 million), we saw the creation of nearly 30 million net jobs; under George H.W. Bush (2.6 million) and George W. Bush (1.3 million), just short of 4 million net jobs. Even if you award Bush 41 another couple of million jobs for the second term he never won, the essential point should not be lost on even the dimmest voter.
Overall, the historical trends could hardly be clearer. Even Democratic presidents who aren’t named Clinton or Obama tend to score far better than their Republican counterparts, whether named Bush or otherwise – and the consequences can be devastating.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Editor’s Blog; The National Memo, March 6, 2015
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