“Susana Martinez’s Administration Sounds Familiar”: Tone-Deaf, Exclusionary, And Unnecessarily Ruthless
Mother Jones’ Andy Kroll has a delightful look at the office and personality of New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, a popular Republican politician and potential presidential or vice-presidential candidate.
Here’s what we learn: Martinez is, to put it charitably, pretty ill-informed about policy and certain aspects of her job. A cutthroat political consultant named Jay McCleskey seems to have a huge amount of influence in her administration, despite having no official job in the governor’s office. He has also used his connections to enrich himself, through his consulting firm and “affiliated entities.” Martinez has been unduly harsh toward her perceived political enemies, punishing them by endorsing opponents and telling fundraisers not to donate. One New Mexico Republican Party elder referred to her administration as “tone-deaf, exclusionary, and unnecessarily ruthless.”
And recorded conversations reveal that Martinez and her team — most especially McCleskey — are vulgar, condescending and not infrequently offensive when talking among themselves about voters, teachers and other politicians. Kroll compares it, accurately, to HBO’s “Veep.” This, for example, sounds especially “Veep”-esque:
During an October 2010 campaign conference call, Martinez said she’d met a woman who worked for the state’s Commission on the Status of Women, a panel created in 1973 to improve health, pay equity, and safety for women.
“What the hell is that?” she asked.
“I don’t know what the fuck they do,” replied her deputy campaign manager, Matt Kennicott.
“What the hell does a commission on women’s cabinet do all day long?” Martinez asked.
“I think [deputy campaign operations director Matt] Stackpole wants to be the director of that so he can study more women,” Kennicott said.
“Well, we have to do what we have to do,” McCleskey chimed in, as Martinez burst out laughing.
It turns out that a bunch of assholes are running New Mexico. And while assholes who surround themselves with other assholes often do well in American politics, one thing that tends to happen is that they also alienate people who are in a position to hurt them.
I do not mean, in any way, to diminish the reporting of Kroll and Mother Jones, but it seems, from the outside, that this piece happened because someone with access to a lot of documents and recordings decided to send those documents and recordings to a venue that would make sure to post them in the most damaging and complete form possible. (The Times, for example, would’ve produced a similarly comprehensive profile with this material, but it would’ve been headlined something like “Unanswered Questions Linger Over Influence of Adviser to New Mexico Governor.”) That right there is a good indication that something is terribly wrong in the office of the governor of New Mexico: Vindictive behavior leads people to do things like leak all your shit to Mother Jones.
The result is, I think, a really enlightening peek into what this sort of administration actually sounds like on the inside. By “this sort of administration,” I mean one run by a bunch of petty assholes who play-act like politics in a Mamet-scripted masculinity contest. It’s easy to imagine that the governorship of George W. Bush wasn’t entirely dissimilar, with a checked-out executive and a powerful political operative running the show. Other recently released internal communications suggest a similar environment in New Jersey.
Probably a lot of state (and city and county) executive offices sound a lot like this, behind closed doors and in email chains. Not all of them, but probably most of the ones you suspect. And not just those darn Republicans. The only difference, in terms of the political culture, between the Susana Martinez administration and the Andrew Cuomo administration is that the Andrew Cuomo administration doesn’t have someone on staff sending reams of damaging internal communications to hostile members of the press. It may be that Cuomo doesn’t need to outsource the position of petty, vindictive, highly politicized vengeance-seeker to a top aide, as Martinez apparently has, but is being more hands-on in that particular position really a plus?
Susana Martinez seems like a bad governor, and she would be a bad president, for most of the same reasons that George W. Bush was a bad president, but she is just another exemplar of America’s long and proud tradition of elevating assholes to high positions because they seem like they get things done.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, April 16, 2014
“ABC News’ Rightward Lurch”: Scraping The Bottom Of The Right-Wing Pundit Barrel
ABC News recently hired Laura Ingraham to be a regular contributor to their prestigious Sunday morning political talk show, “This Week With George Stephanopoulos.” Why on earth would anyone hire Ingraham, a second-rate right-wing bomb-thrower whose shtick is well past its sell-by date? You could ask ABC News, but they’d presumably answer with boilerplate press release-ese about how they seek out a “diversity of viewpoints” and welcome her “provocative” take on world events. Read Digby for a good rundown of exactly how provocative Ingraham’s hot takes have been — Ingraham’s greatest hits includes writing a book in which a central, reoccurring joke was that Michelle Obama constantly ate or craved ribs — but Ingraham’s not the only sorry character ABC has picked up recently.
Last October, “This Week” hired Bill Kristol, the bumbling neoconservative scion, who is famous for his disastrous predictions and his even more disastrous lobbying for war.
In addition to being morally culpable for the meaningless violent deaths of hundreds of thousands, Kristol is also a terrible pundit. He is not just terrible at predictions, he is also dull. He was too lazy a writer and thinker for the New York Times — a paper that still pays Thomas Friedman handsomely — leading them to decline to renew his contract after one year as a columnist. (He moved, naturally, to the Washington Post.) Only a Sunday show producer (or Washington Post opinion page editor) could imagine that Bill Kristol’s take on the issues of the day would be useful or enlightening or even entertaining to anyone.
More recently, ABC picked up Ray Kelly (as a “consultant,” not a mere contributor). Kelly is the former police commissioner of New York City, best known for his racist policing tactics and his blatantly dishonest defenses of same. In November 2013, New York City voters overwhelmingly voted to elect as mayor a man who made the removal of Kelly, and the complete rejection of Kelly’s entire philosophy of policing, a cornerstone of his campaign. Kelly, whose police department routinely lied to journalists (and beat and arrested a few too), is considered a law enforcement genius, because violent crime in New York, having already plummeted from a historic high years prior to the election of Michael Bloomberg, remained relatively low during Kelly’s tenure as commissioner, probably due to environmental and historical trends. He is also considered a great and important man because he knows how to schmooze with the smart set.
Kelly worked for a Democratic mayor and a centrist independent one. He considered running for office as a Republican, but he is probably more of an authoritarian “centrist” than a movement conservative. Still that’s three hires in six months that ought to disgust any decent person. (Even conservatives, who ought to be embarrassed to be “represented” by Ingraham and Kristol). Whatever does it mean?
Perhaps ABC News is repositioning itself as more conservative. NBC’s “Meet the Press” is struggling. It’s easy to imagine a television professional thinking that NBC’s problem is that viewers think it is too liberal, and that therefore the best way to beat it is to become more conservative. Perhaps they are over-correcting for the fact that “This Week’s” Stephanopoulos is a former Clinton White House operative, although at this point that was a lifetime ago, and George has been studiously centrist ever since.
As has been well-documented, none of the big network Sunday shows are remotely liberal, “This Week” included. According to Media Matters’ research, in 2013, “This Week’s” guests and panel lineups were not appreciably more left-wing than its major competitors. (Fox’s Sunday show was significantly more conservative, but that show isn’t aimed at the same “insider” Acela corridor “centrist” audience that the other three fight for.) All the networks skew white, male and right-wing. If ABC is aiming to win over a more conservative audience, it seems to be scraping the bottom of the right-wing pundit barrel.
But maybe there was no strategic thinking behind these three hires at all. Maybe each one just made sense to whomever was responsible at the time. Maybe three completely odious people who do not in any way deserve such large and well-compensated platforms for their discredited opinions all just got hired by the same network because the news media elite, like the finance and political elite, refuse or are unable to recognize the obvious and total moral bankruptcy of members of their own clan.
Or maybe Bill Kristol just has an amazing agent.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, April 15, 2014
“Somebody’s Got To Sell That Platform”: Wingnuts’ New 2016 Hero? Marsha Blackburn Is Perfect!
Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blackburn is having a moment, of sorts. An anonymous aide told Real Clear Politics last week that she was going to New Hampshire to “test the waters” for a 2016 presidential run. And why not? Blackburn would be the only woman in the race (so far), and she’s no worse than the rest of the oft-mentioned male candidates.
She’s no better, either, despite being floated as someone who might help Republicans with skeptical women voters. Blackburn, you’ll recall, became the public face of the House GOP’s 20-week abortion ban last year when Rep. Trent Franks said the bill didn’t exempt cases of rape because “the incidence of pregnancy from rape is very low.” She had earlier become a GOP hero for insisting on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that women “didn’t want” pay equity laws. “I’ve always said that I didn’t want to be given a job because I was a female, I wanted it because I was the most well-qualified person for the job,” she told David Gregory. “And making certain that companies are going to move forward in that vein, that is what women want.” In fact, women overwhelmingly want pay equity, and they support laws to achieve it, according to public opinion polls.
Now that pay equity is back in the news, thanks to Democrats pushing the Paycheck Fairness Act, Blackburn is in demand again. She told CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday that “we’re all for equal pay.” But the GOP supports neither the Paycheck Fairness Act nor the minimum wage, which would hugely help women, who make up two-thirds of minimum wage workers. “I would love for women to be focused on maximum wage,” Blackburn bizarrely explained. She went on to insist “I have fought to be recognized with equality for a long time. A lot of us get tired of guys condescending to us.”
This is what Republicans hope they can reduce this debate to: complaining about “guys condescending to us,” not guys being paid more, or guys paying less for insurance (as they did before the Affordable Care Act) or guys making laws that tell women what they can do with their bodies.
Appearing at the Freedom Summit in New Hampshire, Blackburn tried out the idea that it’s actually Democrats who are condescending to women.
“Women aren’t a cheap date,” she told conservatives there. “Women want a little bit more out of life than contraceptives.” Describing women as any kind of “date,” whether cheap or expensive, seems condescending to me, but I’m not a Republican woman.
You’ve almost got to feel sorry for Republicans, they seem so clueless about what to do about their problem with female voters. The Associated Press has a story today about a new GOP strategy to court women, which comes down to encouraging male politicians to feature their wives and daughters in campaign ads, and something weirdly called “14 in ’14,” to recruit and train women under 40 to spread the GOP message in the last 14 weeks of the 2014 midterm campaign. That’s not recruiting and training women candidates, mind you, just some young women who will hit the campaign trail in the home stretch on behalf of predominantly male candidates.
It’s worth noting that although Blackburn served in Congress when the GOP held the House, the Senate and the White House, the single piece of legislation I could find that she had signed into law was the Wool Suit Fabric Labeling Fairness and International Standards Conforming Act of 2006. She has also successfully sponsored resolutions renaming various Tennessee Post Office buildings as well as (to her credit) one honoring the late Issac Hayes.
None of that would likely hurt her in the GOP primaries, where Rep. Michele Bachmann and pizza magnate Herman Cain briefly held leads back in 2012.
A Blackburn run isn’t a done deal; a communications staffer denied that she was considering it. “She is running to represent the people of the TN 7th Congressional district,” Darcy Anderson told the Daily Caller. It’s also hard for House members of either party or gender to run for the White House, as they mostly lack a fundraising base and must also run for reelection every two years. Still, I wouldn’t count Blackburn out.
The GOP might be well-served by having a woman at the top of the ticket, at a time when their top priority is a massive transfer of income away from women and back to men, by repealing ACA provisions prohibiting charging women more for insurance. Somebody’s got to sell that platform, and it wouldn’t be the first time a terrible, thankless job got foisted on a woman.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, April 14, 2014
“RNC Unveils Its ‘14 In ‘14’ Plan”: A Stroke of Genius, Include More Women In Campaign Ads
When Democratic policymakers started a fight over the Paycheck Fairness Act, Republicans responded by dismissing it as a hollow, election-year stunt. Sure, it was a substantive policy response to a legitimate issue, but GOP officials said the debate itself was little more than a cheap political exercise – which women voters would see through immediately.
And speaking of cheap political exercises that women voters will see through immediately…
The Republican National Committee plans a new initiative, “14 in ‘14,” to recruit and train women under age 40 to help spread the party’s message in the final 14 weeks of the campaign. […]
They are encouraging candidates to include their wives and daughters in campaign ads, have women at their events and build a Facebook-like internal database of women willing to campaign on their behalf.
I see. If Democrats push the Paycheck Fairness Act, they’re cynically trying to give the appearance of helping women in the workplace. But if Republicans include more women in campaign ads, that’s just quality messaging.
The “14 in ‘14” initiative, it’s worth noting, is actually a fallback plan of sorts. The original strategy was to push “Project GROW,” in which Republicans would recruit more women candidates to run for Congress in 2014. That project failed – there are actually going to be fewer Republican women running for Congress in this cycle than in 2012.
Presumably, “encouraging candidates to include their wives and daughters in campaign ads” is intended to compensate for the misstep, while hoping voters overlook the GOP’s opposition to pay-equity legislation and its preoccupation with issues such as restricting women’s reproductive rights and access to contraception?
Greg Sargent also had a good piece questioning the utility of the “14 in ‘14” plan.
Democrats are actively building their women’s economic agenda around the broader idea that women face unique economic challenges. A recent CNN poll found that 55 percent of Americans, and 59 percent of women, don’t believe the GOP understands the problems women face today. A Republican National Committee spokeswoman recently admitted that Republicans need to do a better job appearing in touch with women.
Republicans oppose a minimum wage hike; oppose Dem proposals to address pay inequity (while admitting it is a legitimate problem); and are telling women that their economic prospects can be improved by repealing Obamacare (and its protections for women). Indeed, they are even telling them that the push for pay equity is nothing but a distraction from the health law. Yes, Republicans could win big this fall with such an agenda. But this could also prove another area where structural factors ensure that Republicans win in 2014 in spite of the failure to address the need — which they themselves have acknowledged — to broaden their appeal to women with an eye towards future national elections.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 14, 2014
“Three Expensive Milliseconds”: Society Is Devoting An Ever-Growing Share Of Its Resources To Financial Wheeling And Dealing
Four years ago Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, abruptly canceled America’s biggest and arguably most important infrastructure project, a desperately needed new rail tunnel under the Hudson River. Count me among those who blame his presidential ambitions, and believe that he was trying to curry favor with the government- and public-transit-hating Republican base.
Even as one tunnel was being canceled, however, another was nearing completion, as Spread Networks finished boring its way through the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania. Spread’s tunnel was not, however, intended to carry passengers, or even freight; it was for a fiber-optic cable that would shave three milliseconds — three-thousandths of a second — off communication time between the futures markets of Chicago and the stock markets of New York. And the fact that this tunnel was built while the rail tunnel wasn’t tells you a lot about what’s wrong with America today.
Who cares about three milliseconds? The answer is, high-frequency traders, who make money by buying or selling stock a tiny fraction of a second faster than other players. Not surprisingly, Michael Lewis starts his best-selling new book “Flash Boys,” a polemic against high-frequency trading, with the story of the Spread Networks tunnel. But the real moral of the tunnel tale is independent of Mr. Lewis’s polemic.
Think about it. You may or may not buy Mr. Lewis’s depiction of the high-frequency types as villains and those trying to thwart them as heroes. (If you ask me, there are no good guys in this story.) But either way, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to save three milliseconds looks like a huge waste. And that’s part of a much broader picture, in which society is devoting an ever-growing share of its resources to financial wheeling and dealing, while getting little or nothing in return.
How much waste are we talking about? A paper by Thomas Philippon of New York University puts it at several hundred billion dollars a year.
Mr. Philippon starts with the familiar observation that finance has grown much faster than the economy as a whole. Specifically, the share of G.D.P. accruing to bankers, traders, and so on has nearly doubled since 1980, when we started dismantling the system of financial regulation created as a response to the Great Depression.
What are we getting in return for all that money? Not much, as far as anyone can tell. Mr. Philippon shows that the financial industry has grown much faster than either the flow of savings it channels or the assets it manages. Defenders of modern finance like to argue that it does the economy a great service by allocating capital to its most productive uses — but that’s a hard argument to sustain after a decade in which Wall Street’s crowning achievement involved directing hundreds of billions of dollars into subprime mortgages.
Wall Street’s friends also used to claim that the proliferation of complex financial instruments was reducing risk and increasing the system’s stability, so that financial crises were a thing of the past. No, really.
But if our supersized financial sector isn’t making us either safer or more productive, what is it doing? One answer is that it’s playing small investors for suckers, causing them to waste huge sums in a vain effort to beat the market. Don’t take my word for it — that’s what the president of the American Finance Association declared in 2008. Another answer is that a lot of money is going to speculative activities that are privately profitable but socially unproductive.
You may object that this can’t be right, that the invisible hand of the market ensures that private returns and social returns coincide. Economists have, however, known for a long time that when it comes to speculation, that proposition just isn’t true. Back in 1815 Baron Rothschild made a killing because he knew the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo a few hours before everyone else; it’s hard to see how that knowledge made Britain as a whole richer. It’s even harder to see how the three-millisecond advantage conveyed by the Spread Networks tunnel makes modern America richer; yet that advantage was clearly worth it to the speculators.
In short, we’re giving huge sums to the financial industry while receiving little or nothing — maybe less than nothing — in return. Mr. Philippon puts the waste at 2 percent of G.D.P. Yet even that figure, I’d argue, understates the true cost of our bloated financial industry. For there is a clear correlation between the rise of modern finance and America’s return to Gilded Age levels of inequality.
So never mind the debate about exactly how much damage high-frequency trading does. It’s the whole financial industry, not just that piece, that’s undermining our economy and our society.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, April 13, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 