The Planet Wreckers

Climate-Change Deniers Are On the Ropes -- But So Is the Planet

By Bill McKibben, cross-posted from TomDispatch

It’s been a tough few weeks for the forces of climate-change denial.

First came the giant billboard with Unabomber Ted Kacynzki’s face plastered across it: “I Still Believe in Global Warming. Do You?” Sponsored by the Heartland Institute, the nerve-center of climate-change denial, it was supposed to draw attention to the fact that “the most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.” Instead it drew attention to the fact that these guys had over-reached, and with predictable consequences.

A hard-hitting campaign from a new group called Forecast the Facts persuaded many of the corporations backing Heartland to withdraw $825,000 in funding; an entire wing of the Institute, devoted to helping the insurance industry, calved off to form its own nonprofit. Normally friendly politicians like Wisconsin Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner announced that they would boycott the group’s annual conference unless the billboard campaign was ended.

Which it was, before the billboards with Charles Manson and Osama bin Laden could be unveiled, but not before the damage was done: Sensenbrenner spoke at last month’s conclave, but attendance was way down at the annual gathering, and Heartland leaders announced that there were no plans for another of the yearly fests. Heartland’s head, Joe Bast, complained that his side had been subjected to the most “uncivil name-calling and disparagement you can possibly imagine from climate alarmists,” which was both a little rich -- after all, he was the guy with the mass-murderer billboards -- but also a little pathetic.  A whimper had replaced the characteristically confident snarl of the American right.

That pugnaciousness may return: Mr. Bast said last week that he was finding new corporate sponsors, that he was building a new small-donor base that was “Greenpeace-proof,” and that in any event the billboard had been a fine idea anyway because it had “generated more than $5 million in earned media so far.” (That’s a bit like saying that for a successful White House bid John Edwards should have had more mistresses and babies because look at all the publicity!) Whatever the final outcome, it’s worth noting that, in a larger sense, Bast is correct: this tiny collection of deniers has actually been incredibly effective over the past years.

The best of them -- and that would be Marc Morano, proprietor of the website Climate Depot, and Anthony Watts, of the website Watts Up With That -- have fought with remarkable tenacity to stall and delay the inevitable recognition that we’re in serious trouble. They’ve never had much to work with.  Only one even remotely serious scientist remains in the denialist camp.  That’s MIT’s Richard Lindzen, who has been arguing for years that while global warming is real it won’t be as severe as almost all his colleagues believe. But as a long article in the New York Times detailed last month, the credibility of that sole dissenter is basically shot.  Even the peer reviewers he approved for his last paper told the National Academy of Sciences that it didn’t merit publication. (It ended up in a “little-known Korean journal.”)

Deprived of actual publishing scientists to work with, they’ve relied on a small troupe of vaudeville performers, featuring them endlessly on their websites. Lord Christopher Monckton, for instance, an English peer (who has been officially warned by the House of Lords to stop saying he’s a member) began his speech at Heartland’s annual conference by boasting that he had “no scientific qualification” to challenge the science of climate change.


He’s proved the truth of that claim many times, beginning in his pre-climate-change career when he explained to readers of the American Spectator that "there is only one way to stop AIDS. That is to screen the entire population regularly and to quarantine all carriers of the disease for life.” His personal contribution to the genre of climate-change mass-murderer analogies has been to explain that a group of young climate-change activists who tried to take over a stage where he was speaking were “Hitler Youth.”

Or consider Lubos Motl, a Czech theoretical physicist who has never published on climate change but nonetheless keeps up a steady stream of web assaults on scientists he calls “fringe kibitzers who want to become universal dictators” who should “be thinking how to undo your inexcusable behavior so that you will spend as little time in prison as possible.” On the crazed killer front, Motl said that, while he supported many of Norwegian gunman Anders Breivik’s ideas, it was hard to justify gunning down all those children -- still, it did demonstrate that “right-wing people... may even be more efficient while killing -- and the probable reason is that Breivik may have a higher IQ than your garden variety left-wing or Islamic terrorist.”

If your urge is to laugh at this kind of clown show, the joke’s on you -- because it’s worked. I mean, James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who has emerged victorious in every Senate fight on climate change, cites Motl regularly; Monckton has testified four times before the U.S. Congress.
Morano, one of the most skilled political operatives of the age -- he “broke the story” that became the Swiftboat attack on John Kerry -- plays rough: he regularly publishes the email addresses of those he pillories, for instance, so his readers can pile on the abuse. But he plays smart, too. He’s a favorite of Fox News and of Rush Limbaugh, and he and his colleagues have used those platforms to make it anathema for any Republican politician to publicly express a belief in the reality of climate change.

Take Newt Gingrich, for instance.  Only four years ago he was willing to sit on a love seat with Nancy Pelosi and film a commercial for a campaign headed by Al Gore.  In it he explained that he agreed with the California Congresswoman and then-Speaker of the House that the time had come for action on climate. This fall, hounded by Morano, he was forced to recant again and again.  His dalliance with the truth about carbon dioxide hurt him more among the Republican faithful than any other single “failing.”  Even Mitt Romney, who as governor of Massachusetts actually took some action on global warming, has now been reduced to claiming that scientists may tell us “in fifty years” if we have anything to fear.

In other words, a small cadre of fervent climate-change deniers took control of the Republican party on the issue.  This, in turn, has meant control of Congress, and since the president can’t sign a treaty by himself, it’s effectively meant stifling any significant international progress on global warming.  Put another way, the various right wing billionaires and energy companies who have bankrolled this stuff have gotten their money’s worth many times over.

One reason the denialists’ campaign has been so successful, of course, is that they’ve also managed to intimidate the other side. There aren’t many senators who rise with the passion or frequency of James Inhofe but to warn of the dangers of ignoring what’s really happening on our embattled planet.
It’s a striking barometer of intimidation that Barack Obama, who has a clear enough understanding of climate change and its dangers, has barely mentioned the subject for four years.  He did show a little leg to his liberal base in Rolling Stone earlier this spring by hinting that climate change could become a campaign issue.  Last week, however, he passed on his best chance to make good on that promise when he gave a long speech on energy at an Iowa wind turbine factory without even mentioning global warming. Because the GOP has been so unreasonable, the President clearly feels he can take the environmental vote by staying silent, which means the odds that he’ll do anything dramatic in the next four years grow steadily smaller.

On the brighter side, not everyone has been intimidated.  In fact, a spirited counter-movement has arisen in recent years.  The very same weekend that Heartland tried to put the Unabomber’s face on global warming, 350.org conducted thousands of rallies around the globe to show who climate change really affects. In a year of mobilization, we also managed to block -- at least temporarily -- the Keystone pipeline that would have brought the dirtiest of dirty energy, tar-sands oil, from the Canadian province of Alberta to the Gulf Coast.  In the meantime, our Canadian allies are fighting hard to block a similar pipeline that would bring those tar sands to the Pacific for export.

Similarly, in just the last few weeks, hundreds of thousands have signed on to demand an end to fossil-fuel subsidies. And new polling data already show more Americans worried about our changing climate, because they’ve noticed the freakish weather of the last few years and drawn the obvious conclusion.

But damn, it’s a hard fight, up against a ton of money and a ton of inertia. Eventually, climate denial will “lose,” because physics and chemistry are not intimidated even by Lord Monckton. But timing is everything -- if he and his ilk, a crew of certified planet wreckers, delay action past the point where it can do much good, they’ll be able to claim one of the epic victories in political history -- one that will last for geological epochs.

Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, founder of the global climate campaign 350.org, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

What The Bain Debate Is Really About

By Terrance Heath, cross-posted from Campaign for America's Future

DonkeyHotey

The 2012 presidential election may go down as one of the strangest political seasons in recent memory, for the simple reason that the influence of the financial sector in politics, policy and the economy has caused Republicans to sound like Democrats and Democrat to sound like Republicans — usually with confounding results.

When Republicans sound like Democrats, like Newt Gingrich attacking Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital, they tend to start arguments they can't win. When Democrats start sounding like Republicans, like Cory Booker defending Bain Capital, they tend forfeit arguments they could win. That's because, in both cases, the politicians are arguing about the wrong things, in order to avoid the real argument  — the one America needs to have, and Americans need to win; the argument over what kind of economy we will have going forward.

Gingrich's attack on Romney's record confused many conservatives, who equated it with an attack on capitalism itself. Newark Mayor Cory Booker echoed the concerns of confused conservatives when he called the Obama campaigns ads attacking Romney's record at Bain Capital a "nauseating" attack on private equity, labeling them a distraction. "It's either going to be a small campaign about this crap or it's going to be a big campaign, in my opinion, about the issues that the American public cares about," Booker said.

What Booker, Democrats like him, and conservatives now lauding his diatribe ignore or don't realize is that the issues affecting voters don't come much bigger and don't get much more real than the kind of capitalism Bain represents.

Bain Capitalism

As Digby said, if Romney is going to run on his Bain Capital record and tout his private equity background as his main qualification for the presidency, then his track record at Bain is fair game. I summed up that track record in my original post about his brand of "vulture capitalism."

A former managing partner at Bain, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, made it clear that job creation was never the point at Bain.

Bain managers said their mission was clear. "I never thought of what I do for a living as job creation," said Marc B. Walpow, a former managing partner at Bain who worked closely with Romney for nine years before forming his own firm. "The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for your investors."

Under Romney's leadership, Bain certainly created wealth for its investors, no matter what happened to the companies it acquired or the the people worked for them. The Wall Street Journal's revealing look at Romney's time at Bain shows that 22% of the companies Bain invested on under Romney's watch either filed for bankruptcy, reorganized, or closed their doors — sometimes with substantial job losses. As Pat Garofalo pointed out, that's nearly one fourth of the companies Bain invested in.



Some failed so badly that Bain lost its investments. That didn't put a damper in returns, though. Bain produced about $2.5 billion in returns for its shareholders, out of just $1.1 billion invested. (Romney did alright, too. His campaign estimates his take during his term at Bain as anywhere from $190 million to $250 million. That's enough for a lot of $10,000 bets.)

The LA Times piece makes it clear that Bain and its investors profited, no matter what happened to the companies in its portfolio. According to the Wall Street Journal, 70% of Bain's returns came from just 10 deals. The LA Times article notes that "Four of the 10 companies Bain acquired declared bankruptcy within a few years, shedding thousands of jobs." Still, Bain profited in eight of those ten deals, including three of the four that went bankrupt.

That's the way "vulture capitalism" (as I like to call it) works. Bain and its shareholders profited in the end, no matter what else happened.

That's the part of the story that the Gingrich movie seems to tell: what else happened. We know what happened on Wall Street when Mitt Romney came to town. A few people — Mitt Romney included — made a lot of money. Now we know what else happened on Main Street when Mitt Romney came to town.

What happened to those companies and the people who worked for them begins to read like a casualty list: 1,700 jobs lost at Dade International, more than 700 jobs lost at GS Industries, 200 jobs lost at American Pad and Paper (Apmad). After a while, it's easy to forget that these numbers represent the lives of real people, whose job loss sent shock waves through their families and communities; people like Donny Box and Randy Johnson.

It's also easy to miss the point that this is just how the brand of "head I win, tails you lose" capitalism Bain practiced under Romney's leadership is suppose to work; as the Obama campaign illustrates in a new video and slideshow about how Bain made $100 million on its $5 million investment in Ampad, even while sending the company into bankruptcy and its 1,500 employees to the unemployment line. Bain Capital made profits no matter what happened the companies in its portfolio. Nearly one fourth of the companies Bain invested in during Romney's tenure either went bankrupt, reorganized, or simply shut down — often with significant layoffs. Seventy percent of Bain's profits came from just 10 deals, four of which resulted in bankruptcy.

"Extracting Value"

Romney's factually challenged, incredible shrinking claims of being a "job creator" at Bain notwithstanding, his former Bain colleague got it exactly right. Bain wasn't in the business of creating jobs, and Romney wasn't in the business of creating jobs. Bain's mission, and Romney's job as its chief, was simply to "create wealth" for its investors. Period.

Bain Capital and Mitt Romney were in the business of creating even more wealth for its already-wealthy investors. They were apparently very good at it, too. But the kind of wealth Bain and Romney worked to create isn't the kind of wealth that leads to more widely shared prosperity. It's not the kind of wealth that grows the economy, according to the CBO. Nor is it the kind of wealth that leads to job creation, according to Moody's Analytics, because it doesn't get put back into the economy to support existing jobs or spur job creation by boosting demand. The wealthy don't spend their tax cut windfalls, but save them and invest them in the stock market instead; putting their money to work making money, rather than putting their money to work keeping people working and putting people to work.

The success or failure of the companies in its portfolio were beside the point. When he's not claiming the mantle of "job creator," Romney casts himself and Bain as "fixers" who acquired "broken" companies and made them better —more efficient, and more profitable. But that wasn't the point at Bain. To some extent, Bain and Romney profited from practices that were more about extracting value from its acquisitions than "fixing" them. (The language about "extracting value" is even repeated in some of Bain's own material.)

That's what Bain Capitalism is about: "extracting value" with no investment in the fate of the companies in its portfolio, the people who work from them, or the communities that rely on them.

 "What This Job Is All About"

Cory Booker called the debate over Bain Capital a "distraction" that threatened to make the election a "small campaign" about small ideas, instead of a "big campaign" about "the issues the American public cares about." In his remarks at yesterday's NATO summit, President Obama made the case for why Romney's record at Bain Capital is relevant to a "big campaign" about "issues the American public cares about." (And he managed it without even calling Booker a "jackass.")

… [T]he reason this is relevant to the campaign is because my opponent, Governor Romney, his main calling card for why he thinks he should be President is his business expertise. He is not going out there touting his experience in Massachusetts. He is saying, I’m a business guy and I know how to fix it, and this is his business.

And when you’re President, as opposed to the head of a private equity firm, then your job is not simply to maximize profits. Your job is to figure out how everybody in the country has a fair shot. Your job is to think about those workers who got laid off and how are we paying for their retraining. Your job is to think about how those communities can start creating new clusters so that they can attract new businesses. Your job as President is to think about how do we set up a equitable tax system so that everybody is paying their fair share that allows us then to invest in science and technology and infrastructure, all of which are going to help us grow.

And so, if your main argument for how to grow the economy is I knew how to make a lot of money for investors, then you’re missing what this job is about. It doesn’t mean you weren’t good at private equity, but that’s not what my job is as President. My job is to take into account everybody, not just some. My job is to make sure that the country is growing not just now, but 10 years from now and 20 years from now.

So to repeat, this is not a distraction. This is what this campaign is going to be about -- is what is a strategy for us to move this country forward in a way where everybody can succeed? And that means I’ve got to think about those workers in that video just as much as I’m thinking about folks who have been much more successful.

The president is off to a good start on taking the debate where it needs to from here; from the particulars of Romney's record at Bain Capital to what it represents, and the economic choices facing America. But, as I pointed out before, the business practices of companies like Bain mean profit for the investor class, and pain for the 99%. Now, president Obama needs to make it personal.

This is pretty good, but I think it's going to have to get a lot more forceful. Obama has this habit, which you learn as a writer over time is really unconvincing. He very often makes an assertion without illustrating it, without saying why. It leaves listeners confused because he hasn't really put meat behind the assertion.

But he is on the right track here. I don't think this is such a difficult needle to thread. In fact he could get a lot more emotional mileage out of this sort of thing. Like how? Like so:

"The people who lost their jobs because of Mitt Romney's creative destruction, those are precisely the people the president has to think about most. Those are the people who write the letters that I read every night before I go to bed. Those are the people who need my help the most of all. Mitt Romney and his fellow investors will mostly be just fine. I think about the other people. Governor Romney says, explicitly, has said many times, of lost jobs, that's capitalism, that's just the way it goes. Do you want a president who watches an American factory shut down and says, 'Well, that's capitalism?'"

Choosing Capitalism

"Do you want a president who watches an American factory shut down and says, 'Well, that's capitalism?'"

It recasts Romney's answer to questions about bankruptcies, shutdowns, and layoffs Bain left in its wake as a Rumsfeldian "stuff happens" response to the economic consequences of Bain's practices. Stuff doesn't just happen. Stuff happens because other stuff happens. The debate is basically about whether we should regulate some stuff in order to keep it from happening, and what we should do about the stuff that happens as a result.

We are, as E.J. Dionne writes, not in the middle of a national argument about capitalism versus "socialism," but a much needed discussion about what kind of capitalism we want.

The Bain conversation has already been instructive. Romney’s friends no less than his foes have had to face the fact that Bain’s purpose was never about job-creation. Its goal was to generate large returns to Bain’s partners and investors. It did that, which is why Romney is rich.

Romney wants to focus on the positive side of his business dealings that did create jobs. He wants to brag about the companies Bain helped bring to life, among them Staples, Sports Authority and Domino’s.

That’s fair enough. But having made an issue of Bain on the plus side, he also has to answer for the pain and suffering — or, as defenders of capitalism like to call it, the “creative destruction” — that some of Bain’s deals left in their wake.
This leads naturally to the question of how creative the destruction wrought by our current brand of capitalism actually is. Since the dawn of the leveraged buyout era three decades ago, many friends of capitalism have questioned whether loading companies with debt as part of these deals is good for companies and for the economy as a whole.

What's the alternative to the "vulture capitalism" practiced by firms like Bain Capital? What it's called varies, I've heard it called "Inclusive Capitalism" and "the New Economy movement." It's components are just beginning to take shape, as more people envision a capitalism that better spreads the benefits of the "productivity revolution," that regulates the worst of capitalism's "creative destruction," and incorporates a safety net to catch those left behind by the market.
This may be another debate in which President Obama could benefit from following Vice President Biden's lead.

Vice President Biden’s speech last week in Youngstown, Ohio, drew wide attention for its criticism of Romney as someone who just doesn’t “get it.” But when Biden moved beyond Romney, he offered an energetic broadside against the new world of finance, and he picked the right venue to make his case: a noble blue-collar town that has been battered by the winds of globalization and economic change.

“You know the difference between having an economy that makes things that the rest of the world wants, and having an economy that is based on financialization of every product,” Biden told his listeners. “You know the difference between an economy . . . that’s built on making things rather than on collateralized debt, creative credit-default swaps, financial instruments like subprime mortgages. That’s not how you build an economy.”

This campaign isn't just about Bain, or Mitt Romney's past. It's about our future. It's about the kind of new economy we want to build.

12 Republican Myths That Are Killing Us

GOP Clown College

 Alan Grayson was a U.S. Representative for Florida's 8th Congressional District from 2009-2011.  He was defeated for re-election, but while in the Congress was one of the few progressive voices who spoke out forcefully against the right.  Most notably, during the health care debates he had the audacity to describe the Republican health care plan as "'Don't get sick, and if you do get sick, die quickly."  He is running for Congress again, and it would be great to have him back.  (Click here to help.)  Here's a taste of his wit and wisdom.  -- Lovechilde

By Alan Grayson, cross-posted from Reader Supported News

As the Republican demolition derby rolls on, I continue to be amused by how each remaining contender tries to assume the "small government" mantle.

Mitt Romney wants a government so small that it provides universal health care.

Newt Gingrich wants a government so small that it will establish a permanent base on the moon.

Rick Santorum wants a government so small that it will fit inside a woman's uterus.

The only real remaining advocate of small government is Ron Paul. Dr. Paul appears to be disqualified from the Republican presidential primary, however, because he is unwilling to drench himself with the blood of our imagined enemies, like Gerard Butler in the movie "300."

But what about that Jon Huntsman guy? This week three different people told me, quite independently of each other, how sorry they were that Governor Huntsman never gained any traction in the Republican presidential primary.

I told them that they should get over it. Huntsman wasn't any better.

It somehow counts as an act of courage for Huntsman to have tweeted: "I believe in evolution." Of course, it would have been more courageous if Huntsman had said that to a Tea Party audience, and then they tore him limb from limb, thereby disproving the theory of evolution right before our eyes.

And evolution is not something that you "believe" or "disbelieve." Evolution is like gravity; it's not like Santa Claus or the Abominable Snowman. (Question: Why do they both live at the North Pole?)

Be that as it may, neither Huntsman nor any other Republican presidential candidate has been willing to take on the hard myths. The myths that are killing us. Here are a dirty dozen, right off the top of my head:

1. The government can't create jobs. (Tell that to FDR, who created four million jobs in three months.)


2. Tax cuts reduce the deficit. (Doesn't it bother them that a man named "Laffer" came up with this one?)


3. A fetus is a baby.


4. The poor have too much money.


5. Cutting the federal deficit will end the recession.


6. The rich are incentivized by tax cuts, while the poor are incentivized by lower wages, no benefits, an end to the minimum wage, and unemployment.


7. An unwanted child is God's will.


8. Everyone who wants health insurance has it.


9. The problem with education is the teachers.


10. The "free market" satisfies every human need.


11. There is no discrimination in America anymore.


12. The distribution of wealth and income are irrelevant.

I don't remember Jon Huntsman disputing any of these myths. And these are the ones that do the real damage. Show me a candidate who is willing to take on these myths, and I'll pay more attention.

Courage,  Alan Grayson

Republican Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry

Being self reflective, expressing remorse, apologizing for causing harm.  These are characteristics of an evolved, mature person.  Right?  We certainly would want our political leaders to have the strength and confidence to be able to admit their own and the nation's mistakes, shoulder blame when warranted, and change course when necessary.  Wouldn't we?  Unfortunately, these qualities are not a part of the Republican DNA.  For them they are signs of weakness, hewing too close to what Jeanne Kirkpatrick criticized as the unforgivable sin of "blaming America first."

The last Republican Administration lied and manipulated us into a war based on grounds that proved illusory, approved torture and other human rights abuses, unnecessarily cost our country billions of dollars, caused untold numbers of casualties, and undermined their own avowed goal of thwarting the terrorist group responsible for the 9/11 attacks.  Did they ever admit their mistakes much less apologize for their monumentally destructive conduct?

On the contrary, since leaving office Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice have bragged and boasted about their policies, and have tried to take credit for whatever success President Obama has had.  And when they were still in power we were treated to this, um, awkward moment:



It doesn't get any better with the current crop of Republican leaders.  Mitt Romney's book is actually called "No Apology," in which he falsely accuses President Obama of going around the world apologizing for America, a dubious claim he repeats often on the campaign trail.  ("Never before in American history has its president gone before so many foreign audiences to apologize for so many American misdeeds, both real and imagined.")

President Obama did apologize for the burning of copies of the Koran by American personnel at a NATO military base in Afghanistan.  In the wake of increasing violence over the incident, Obama  expressed "deep regret," extended his "sincere apologies" to Hamid Karzai and the Afghan people, and promised "to take the appropriate steps to avoid any recurrence, to include holding accountable those responsible."

This was too much for the GOP. 

Newt Gingrich is not one to apologize for anything.  (Recall his rationalization for an extra-marital affair -- that it was due to his excessive patriotism.)  He said Obama's apology was an “outrage,” and  later gave this advice to the Afghans, “You know, you’re going to have to figure out how to live your own miserable life… Because you clearly don’t want to learn from me how to be unmiserable."

Mitt Romney was also troubled, saying that for many people the apology "sticks in their throat."  According to Romney, since we have done so much for the Afghan people in helping them "achieve freedom," to "apologize at a time like this is something which is very difficult for the American people to countenance."

And then there was Rick Santorum, spewing his typically illogical and sanctimonious claptrap

I don’t think the president should apologize for something that was clearly inadvertent. What you should lay out is the president saying this was inadvertent. This was a mistake and there was no deliberate act, there was no meant to disrespect. This was something that, that occurred that, that should not have occurred, but it was an accident and leave it at that. I think you highlight it when you, when you apologize for it. You, you make it sound like it was something that you should apologize for. And there is not—there was no act that needed an apology. It was an inadvertent act and it should be left at that and I think the response has—needs to be apologized for by, by Karzai and the Afghan people of, of attacking and killing our men and women in uniform and, and overreacting to this, to this inadvertent mistake. That, that is, that is the real crime here, not what our soldiers did.

I'll leave it to Amy Davidson to expound:

Maybe Santorum and his fellow-candidates have been trapped in the kindergarten-delinquent classroom of the Republican primaries for so long that they think the same rules, and illogic, that help decide who the not-Romney of the week is apply everywhere. But Afghanistan is a real and dangerous place; more than two dozen people have died in the violence, including two Americans, who were assassinated in the Interior Ministry. (The Afghan government reportedly did apologize for that.) The senselessness of the response does not take away from the necessity of an apology, or from its grace.

U.S. Commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen, stated what should be obvious:  "We admit our mistake, we ask for forgiveness, we seek to move on."  And, as Amy Davidson concludes:  

In apologizing, we remind ourselves who we are. We also learn more about where we are, who we are talking to, and our circumstances. Having done so—done the right thing—we may reasonably conclude that we can make our apologies, and leave.

The Republican Myth Of Obama's "Entitlement Society"

By Robert Reich, cross-posted from his website

One of the few things Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich agree on is that President Obama is turning America into “European-style welfare culture.”

In his standard stump speech Romney charges Obama with creating a nation of dependents. “Over the past three years Barack Obama has been replacing our merit-based society with an entitlement society.”

Gingrich calls Obama “the best food-stamp president in American history.”

What’s their evidence? Both rely on federal budget data showing direct payments to individuals shot up by almost $600 billion, a 32 percent increase, since the start of 2009.

They also point to Census data showing that 49 percent of Americans now live in homes where at least one person is collecting a federal benefit – Social Security, food stamps, unemployment insurance, worker’s compensation, or subsidized housing. That’s up from 44 percent in 2008.

Finally, they trumpet Social Security Administration figures showing that the number of people on Social Security disability jumped 10 percent in Obama’s first two years in office.
They argue our economic problems stem from this sharp rise in “dependency.” Get rid of these benefits and people will work harder.

But they have cause and effect backwards. The reason for the rise in food stamps, unemployment insurance, and other safety-net programs is Americans got clobbered in 2008 with the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression. They and their families have needed whatever helping hands they could get.

If anything, America’s safety nets have been too small and shot through with holes. That’s why the number and percentage of Americans in poverty has increased dramatically over the past three years. According to a study by Northeastern University,  a third of families with young children are now in poverty.

This is the real scandal. For example, only 40 percent of the unemployed qualify for unemployment benefits because they weren’t working full time or long enough on a single job before they were canned. The unemployment system doesn’t take account of the fact that a large portion of the workforce typically works part time on several jobs, and moves from job to job.

Republicans also object to Obama’s health care law, which covers 30 million more Americans than were covered before. That law still leaves over 20 million without health insurance. They’ll get emergency care when they’re in dire straights — hospitals won’t refuse them — but we all end up paying indirectly.

Regressive Republicans pretend they’re about opportunity. In reality they’re back at what they’ve been doing for years — promoting Social Darwinism.

 Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.  He writes a blog at www.robertreich.org.  His most recent book is Aftershock.

It's Their Party . . .

As Meteor Blades writes today at Daily Kos, while many disenchanted Republicans cling to the hope that a credible candidate will step in to save the GOP from the current field of presidential candidates, time has essentially run out:  "The Republicans came to the dance with the wrong partners. And now they're going to have to go home with one of them."

Tom Tomorrow, capturing the essence of the two top contenders, shows us why the Republicans should be worried.  As he says, Newt Gingrich "could not be any more repellant if he were literally exposed as an oozing reptillian creature bent on global domination."  And then there's Mitt Romney, "who could not be any less convincing as an 'ordinary guy' if he literally wore a top hat and monocle."  (Click on the Read Tom Tomorrow badge on the right of the blog for a link to the whole comic.) 

Newt's Sugar Daddy

How is it possible that such an unethical, nasty, sleazy, mean-spirited, polarizing, egotistical, hypocritical jerk can be winning primaries and surging in the polls?  One reason, of course, is that his remaining competition consists of a liar, a creep and a full bore crank.  And not to be underestimated is the power of the Occupy movement, which has dramatically changed the national conversation so that Romney's efficient and ruthless behavior at his equity firm, his refusal to disclose his tax returns and his "corporations are people" rhetoric make him the perfect symbol for the despised 1%.  Third, the Republican base can't resist a fire-breathing blowhard with the shamelessness to relentlessly attack and demonize our Kenyan-Muslim-Socialist President.

But Newt, not known for his organizational or fund-raising skills, has emerged as a threat to Mitt Romney's ascendancy to the GOP nomination thanks in large part to the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision and the Super PACs the ruling has spawned.  It has allowed one couple, the Adelsons, to give $10 million to Gingrich's "independent" Destroying Winning Our Future Super PAC, and thereby completely upend the political process.

Sheldon Adelson, a "casino and hotel magnate," gave the first $5 million, which was used to launch the negative ads against Mitt Romney in South Carolina that were pivotal to Gingrich's primary victory there.  Now, as the New York Times reports, Sheldon's wife Miriam is giving the Super PAC another $5 million to help with the upcoming Florida primary.  And thus, as the Times noted:

The wealth of a single couple has now leveled the playing field in two critical primary states for Mr. Gingrich, a candidate who ended September more than $1 million in debt, finished out of the running in Iowa and New Hampshire and, unlike Mr. Romney, has yet to attract the broad network of hard-money donors and bundlers that traditionally propel presidential campaigns.

According to Wikipedia, Sheldon Adelson is the eighth richest American, with a net worth of over $ 23 billion.  Our post-Citizens United campaign finance laws are allowing him to the opportunity to buy the Republican nomination for President.  What will he want in return?  

Could There Still Be A Race For The Republican Nomination?

DonkeyHotey

by Fuzzyone

I have thought for a long time that there was little chance that anyone but Romney could capture the Republican nomination. He has the money and organization that all but Ron Paul lack, and Paul just can't appeal to enough Republicans. But now Public Policy Polling has a poll out showing Gingrich with a six point lead over Romney in South Carolina:

Newt Gingrich ................................................. 34%
Mitt Romney..................................................... 28%
Ron Paul ........................................................... 15%
Rick Santorum................................................... 14%
Rick Perry .......................................................... 5%
Buddy Roemer.................................................... 3%
Someone else/Not sure ...................................... 2%

Even more interesting, or at least entertaining, is that if Stephen Colbert is included he gets 8%, taking a bit from everyone. Colbert's Super PAC, now run by Jon Stewart (which lovechilde wrote about the other day) is running ads urging people to vote for Herman Cain, who has dropped out but whose name still appears on the ballot, but it is hard to know how that will impact things.

What is likely to have an impact is Perry's announcement that he is dropping out and endorsing Gingrich.  That leaves only Gingrich and Santorum fighting for the non Romney, non Paul vote.  The problem they both have is lack of organization and money. But a strong showing in South Carolina could bring in the money and after Florida on January 31 there are not any really big events until March 6, Super Tuesday.

I still doubt anyone can beat Romney, at least anyone who is in the race, and tonight's ABC interview with Newt's second wife does not seem likely to help him. Still, this might be a more interesting race than I would have expected a few weeks ago.