Kausfiles: A mostly political weblog.

@kausfiles--Does the Right Resent Glenn Beck?

Amplified and edited entries from the kausmickey Twitter feed. ... Just don't call them "curated."

My friends on the Right don't like Glenn Beck either. In private, they say he's a careerist phony. about 15 hours ago

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I don't think the last line of this Andrew Sullivan post will make Bartlett's http://bit.ly/2EtsLJ12:17 AM Sep 11th  

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The 'M' Word! "Did that clerk just call you 'ma'am'?" Subtle anti-Boxer shot in Mitsubishi Lancer ad before KCAL scandal report video? http://bit.ly/hcwa6 1:44 PM Sep 9th  

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Is Tom Wilson--who produced Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone," Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray" et al--wildly undersung or did he just preside and not do that much? 3:52 AM Sep 9th

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Poor L.A., off in its own little corner of Chris Wilson's News Dots news map. http://bit.ly/d2reS That's sure how it feels to us out here! 11:13 AM Sep 8th

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Even Van Jones' friend Arianna says, after talking to him and presumably getting his side of the story, that "it was stupid of Van to put his name on a very stupid '9/11 Truth Statement.' " 1:06 AM Sep 8th     

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Note to Slate ad corps: Wouldn't a 3 sec. ad that made you like H-P be better than a 10-15 sec. screen-hog ad that made you hate H-P? 11:29 PM Sep 7th     

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Got new ish of Automobile. Have a) glossy car mags gotten dull, or b) do opinionated blogs like Truth About Cars just make them seem dull? It's not only (b)! When these magazines get desperate for ad dollars, as they are now, they become scared to exist. ... 10:10 PM Sep 7th

 4:58 P.M.

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Ambinder Now Spinning His Own Spin

The Dreidl Spins, and Having Been Spun, Moves On: Marc Ambinder now says Obama is in good shape on health care because he "survived August" in better shape than Ambinder had expected:

At the beginning of the month, I predicted that August might turn out be a bloodbath for Democrats. At the time, the Democratic self-containment on health care had dissolved, cranks were taking over constituent meetings, and that real anxiety about Obama had found a channel and political opponents of health care had an edge.

Hmm. That's not what I remember Ambinder saying. I remember him saying that health care opponent-cranks were overplaying their hand in a way that would help Democrats. Let's go to the Internets! Here's Ambinder on August 6:

Bottom line: turning h/c town hall meetings into anti-Obama venting sessions won't convince Blue Dog Dems. to vote against h/c. I think

and on the same day

I think GOPers are of 2 minds about these protests. Or, they shld be. Even though this trend favors the left, I don't know if they will... [E.A.]

and finally in an August 11 magnum opus entitled "Conservatives Are Blowing It on Health Care":

... Democrats are beginning to notice that opponents of health care reform have discredited themselves. They ramped up much too quickly. When smaller, conservative groups Astroturfed, they inevitably brought to the meetings the type of Republican activist who was itching for a fight and who would use the format to vent frustrations at President Obama himself.  ...[T]he loudest voices tended to be the craziest, the most extreme, the least sensible, and the most easy to mock.  ... [E.A.]

Is Ambinder being spun so fast he doesn't remember what he himself "predicted" a month ago? Or is he ... spinning his own previous spin (to make his more recent spin seem more plausible). ....

P.S.--Nobody Sucks Up Both Ways Like Andrew Sullivan: Meanwhile, elsewhere in Mr. Bradley's well-padded neighborhood, Andrew Sullivan says, "I agree with most everything David Brooks has written on this subject [of health care]." Then Sullivan declares that the likely Obama compromise plan

will be a huge step forward on the accessibility front, if not on costs. (But we can come back on costs, and must, in a broader context of fundamental fiscal reform)

which is pretty much the exact opposite of what Brooks has written on the subject. Brooks argues that measures to increase accessibility aren't a huge step forward at all, because "they don't reduce costs." He wants Obama to double-down on Orszagist curve-bending now and "fundamentally challenge the fee-for-service system." Easy advice to give if you are Republican pundit who gets to pose as a far-seeing responsible type today and then later dismiss Obama as an incompetent liberal when he takes Brooks' advice and fails. Sullivan was right the second time. ... 2:29 A..M.

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Prediction! kf Throws Caution to the Winds

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Here's a safe political prediction: Despite all the innovative e-mobilization and ad campaigns and town halls and community organizing, the August recess will not produce any effective groundswell of popular support for Obama's health care reform. Why? The "security" message--which might appeal to the vast middle--is not getting through. On Pollster.com, Mark Blumenthal discusses the polling that backs this up. ... Reform advocates have now belatedly realized what the Orszag emphasis on cost-reduction has lost them politically, and have started talking about the "moral dimension" of reform. But even that makes it sound too guilt-trippy and altruistic--'do the right thing, even if it costs you.' The point is that everyone wants health care security. I do. You do. It's not a "moral" fight like the civil rights struggle. Transcendence of self-interest should not be required. Suggesting otherwise probably loses more support than it gains.  ... P.S.: Have Democrats forgotten how to talk about the welfare state? It seemed to me even Walter Mondale** talked about medical security effectively, back when Charles Krauthammer was writing speeches for him. (Mondale had a proven staple anecdote about what it meant to his mother to get her Medicare card). ... Bring back Mondale! There's another thing I thought I'd never say. ...  Update: More on the Gallup numbers that show voters think health care reform is against their own self-interest (in terms of cost and quality of care and access to care). ...

** DeLong: Explain to the juiceboxers who this person was. Thanks! ... 2:41 P.M.

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FYI: MKH PWNS AS FTW! ... FSTFITB!** ..

 ** First Shoot the Fish In the Barrel ... 3.51 P.M.

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Join A Union, Get a Health Care Tax Break!

Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center reports that Sen. Baucus

is floating the following trial balloon: Congress would fund fund part of health reform with a cap on the tax exclusion of employer-sponsored health insurance but only at a level "significantly above" the cost of the standard plan offered to federal employees. The measure would also exclude policies bargained under current union contracts. ... [E.A.]

Why exclude policies negotiated by unions but not policies negotiated by individuals? Politics, I assume. Unions wouldn't stand for anything else. Fine. But here's the thing--the provision appears to be more than a simple "grandfather" clause that protects current union contracts.  A kf source says that the new tax will not take effect until 2013. Does this mean that labor contracts agreed on between now and that date would also be protected? If so, Baucus has just given a big tax incentive for workers--perhaps encouraged by labor signature collectors under a "card check" bill--to form unions and bargain for lavish health benefits that will then be exempted from his tax on lavish benefits. Join a union, get a tax break! (A break the rest of us would have to pay for). ... If Dems start lavishing IRS advantages on union members, maybe organized labor won't even need the "card check" bill to reverse its declining membership numbers. ... 9:53 P.M.

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Mitosis in the Faster Electorate: Conor Friedersdorf notices that the fast twitter-driven news out of Iran has divided his fellow citizens and friends into two groups: 1) Those who keep up to the second with what is happening and how the U.S. should react; and 2) Those who take the weekend off and only know the vaguest details (i.e. " that Ahmadinejad won"). I'd say that Friedersdorf has stumbled upon Jerry Skurnik's "Theory of the Two Electorates"--except it's a peculiarly accelerated version of the Skurnik theory, because Friedersdorf's two groups are both made up of people who would normally be part of the better informed of Skurnik's two electorates:

And those out of the know? They aren't any longer just grandmothers, the apolitical, and the middle manager in Scranton who gets all his news at 11 o'clock after the game. Now people who watch The Daily Show, subscribe to The New Yorker, and read the CNN subtitles as they run on the 24 Hour Fitness treadmill possess radically less information than a self-selecting group of their fellow citizens, granting that they mostly catch up on any given piece of information in a matter of days.

Will this make a difference, Friedersdorf asks?

Are we approaching a point where political information is processed so fast that an event happens, information elites weigh in to shape the discourse surrounding it, the conventional wisdom is communicated to Congress, and elected leaders formulate reactions based on public opinion... all before most of even the formerly plugged in members of the public ever learn what on earth is going on, or have a chance to form an opinion?

I could see Congress, spooked by twitter, overreacting in this fashion--if, say, a draft of Senator Baucus' health care plan comes out that displeases the left, which reacts by shutting down various switchboards before the David Broders of the world can even get to their typewriters keyboards. ... It's hard to believe it will have an effect on official U.S. Iran policy.** (Friedersdorf agrees.)

Of course, to the extent it does empower Friedersdorf's first group, including the fastest bloggers, it would empower Andrew Sullivan-- which (as Obama has learned) is always a dangerous thing. ...

**--That doesn't mean it hasn't had a big effect on the events in Iran itself--the events that the U.S. government must react to--or on the unofficial reaction of American activists to those events. ... 8:53 P.M.

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Alert reader J: "Interesting that the WaPo could write an entire article on the decline of public housing in NYC without ever mentioning the words "ACLU," "liberalism," and "Lindsay." [Link added] ... True! The piece--on Sotomayor's childhood--makes it seem as if the projects were just suddenly swamped by waves of drugs ("Then heroin surged through the projects ... Then came crack ...") as opposed to, say, an increasingly concentrated culture of fatherless dependence in which drug users and dealers and gang members couldn't be evicted because of misguided due process concerns about deprivation of "new property"! ... (I remember an excellent piece by WaPo's Blaine Harden on the difficulty of evicting bad actors from housing projects, but haven't been able to find it.). ... 

P.S.: The Post's Robin Shulman does mention that in 1981 Congress "changed eligibility rules to give preference in public housing to the poorest households," which had the perverse effect of intensifying the culture of poverty by excluding middle class and working class tenants. But Shulman doesn't make that point--instead quoting an expert who simply says the change made public housing the "housing of last resort." And that was a problem because ...? ... 8:21 P.M.

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Matt Cooper calls "the idea that that the Clintons were unwilling to take half-a-loaf" on health care "total revisionism." Hmm. It sure seemed that way at the time! ... P.S.: Unless Cooper's talking about a specific early-on period when the Clinton plan was first being produced--he uses the vague qualifier "back then" .... 7:32 P.M.

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Obama vs. Slate: Obama cites "medical errors that lead to 100,000 lives lost unnecessarily in our hospitals every year." [E.A.] Walter Olson smells BS, and cites a Slate article to back him up. ... 7:25 P.M.

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Andrew Sullivan's Doomsday

Thursday, May 14, 2009 

Old Chinese Proverb: Man who gets overexcited in support of a candidate is likely to get excitably disappointed when candidate fails to live up to overexcited expectations. Andrew Sullivan moves on to the inevitable next stage in the cycle of his hyperbolic judgment. Instapundit rubs it in. ... P.S.: It's actually a powerful post, if characteristically overexcited. Why is Sullivan so annoyed? Haven't gay rights been making huge, startlingly rapid gains recently?  Maybe Obama's just sitting back and letting it happen, worried that if he forces the issue the result will be a backlash. And it turns out Sullivan also has an acute personal motive for wanting to hurry things up:  

Here we are, with marriage rights spreading through the country and world and a president who cannot bring himself even to acknowledge these breakthroughs in civil rights, and having no plan in any distant future to do anything about it at a federal level. Here I am, facing a looming deadline to be forced to leave my American husband for good, and relocate abroad because the HIV travel and immigration ban remains in force and I have slowly run out of options ... [E.A.]

Aha. ... Still, you'd think Obama could at least get away with protecting gay servicemembers with skills--like facility in Arabic--the country badly needs. ... 12:12 A.M.

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Doomsday Reconsidered:  Some entries from that Edwards timeline:

September 2007 – Anonymous tip comes into National Enquirer hot line saying Edwards was having an affair with Hunter.  ...

Late November 2007 – National Enquirer discovers Rielle is living in Chapel Hill and having dinner with Andrew Young and his wife. Sources were saying Rielle was six months pregnant. ...

December 20, 2007 – National Enquirer editor-in-chief David Perel says source for Hunter-Edwards love child story was not a rival political campaign. Calls sources “extraordinarily good” and “beyond reproach.”

Hmm. Who were the Enquirer's sources? Was Perel's source perhaps "not a rival political campaign" because it was ... the Edwards campaign? Maybe the much-disputed  "Doomsday" plan not only existed, but was actually put into effect. ... 12:11 A.M.

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All they had to do was say it was a Star Trek joke. Instead they panicked. ... 12:10 A.M.

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When Hype Congeals: Los Angeles brands Mayor Villaraigosa a "failure." ... 12:09 A.M.

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XX Factor breaks out of the Slate blog ghetto!  ... 12:08 A.M.

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Fix It Again, Treasury!

Saturday, May 2, 2009 

"Kids don't have a union": What it takes to fire a lousy teacher in the Los Angeles public schools--a chart. ... From the LAT's accompanying story:

Jettisoning a teacher solely because he or she can't teach is rare. ...

When teaching is at issue, years of effort -- and thousands of dollars -- sometimes go into rehabilitating the teacher as students suffer. Over the three years before he was fired, one struggling math teacher in Stockton was observed 13 times by school officials, failed three year-end evaluations, was offered a more desirable assignment and joined mentoring programs as most of his ninth-grade students flunked his courses. ...  [snip]

Meanwhile, said Kendra Wallace, principal of Daniel Webster Middle School on Los Angeles' Westside, an ineffective teacher can instruct 125 to 260 students a year -- up to 1,300 in the five years she says it often takes to remove a tenured employee.

It's worth saying again: If the twittish, PC L.A.Times is now going after the teachers' unions, those unions have lost the PR battle in the mainstream press. Does President Obama ("We can afford nothing but the best when it comes to our children's teachers") know this? Do the Republicans who are desperately looking for an issue to use against the Dems? ... [via NewsAlert] 5:57 P.M.

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The Dish is a revenge best served cold: President Obama's reliance on the excitable Andrew Sullivan has predictably led him into embarrassing error. Even NPR felt it necessary to correct Obama. ... Note to NPR's Robert Siegel: In interviewing the Guardian's Ian Cobain about the London Cage interrogation center, you say

President Obama was quoting Britain's wartime prime minister Winston Churchill. Do we know that Churchill, when he made those remarks, knew very well what was going on in the interrogation centers? [E.A.]

Huh? Do we have any evidence that Churchill ever made those remarks? (Obama's version: "And Churchill said, 'We don't torture,' ..."). As far as I can see, the evidence is Sullivan, which is perilously close to no evidence at all. ... P.S.: Sullivan's characteristically vigorous post-error backpedaling and ass-covering focuses on whether Churchill knew about the torture at Britain's interrogation centers. The claim that Churchill not only didn't know about the torture but actually banned it--or that he said (or even thought) anything like "We don't torture"--has seemingly been left by the wayside. ... 3:38 P.M.

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Friday, May 1, 2009 

We'll know the Chrysler bankruptcy is in trouble when the press starts reporting that Steve Rattner really had nothing to do with it. ... 5:40 P.M

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Faced with the prospect that it might have to balance interests and act responsibly as a new owner of Chrysler, the U.A.W.'s Ron Gettelfinger desperately tries to recreate an adversary system. (The UAW's VEBA health care fund is "independent"! Controlled by "outside ... directors"! We can go on strike against them anytime we want, really we can!)  There's something infantile about this, as if a teenager were given the keys to a new car and said, "I'd rather you kept the keys and I'll throw tantrums when I need it." ... If you were a neoliberal from the 1980s you might say the Wagner Act has given them permission to be singleminded, legalistic, and irresponsible--and that's the only role they know. Luckily there are no neoliberals around anymore to make this annoying point. ... 5:38 P.M.

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Despite its CEO's appearance on David Letterman, electric car startup Tesla is looking a little more granfalloonish today than yesterday. ... 5:37 P.M.

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I was waiting for the first undocumented-immigrant-legalization advocate to declare that the Mexico-centered flu epidemic required the immediate passage of "comprehensive immigration reform." I figured Tamar Jacoby would win. I was wrong. The winner appears to be the Southern California Immigration Coalition, which wants President Obama to simply legalize all illegals by executive order:

To deport all these people to Mexico would create an emergency crisis in their own economy. And that's the crisis we would have in Mexico. Coupled with the drug wars that are going on, the problem that we have with the virus, the flu, it would just create great havoc for Mexico in its economy.

 5:33 P.M.

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Is Obama Whistling?

Thursday, April 30, 2009  

Jennifer Rubin worries that we're headed for a "card check lite" compromise--i.e., dropping the most controversial provisions but still giving labor organizers a boost--and that the vaunted business lobby has no weapons on hand to combat it. She suggests some. ...P.S.: Certainly the post-Specter statement of "principles" from AFL-CIO legislative director Bill Samuel was compromise-ready:   

The Employee Free Choice Act is built on three fundamental principles and we believe a bill that stays true to these will become law: Workers need to have a real choice to form a union and bargain for a better life, free from intimidation; We have to stop the endless delays (and) companies can't just stall to stop workers' choice, and; There have to be real penalties for violating the law," Samuel added.
...

Samuel doesn't mention either a) bypassing secret ballot elections or b) compulsory arbitration. ... P.P.S.: Part of the problem, of course, is that some anti-card-checkers (not me!) have pretended they don't oppose greater union power--they just object to eliminating the secret ballot, etc.. But now it's time for a debate on whether more (and more powerful) Wagner Act unions really are a good thing. If business can't yet make the case that they aren't--at a time when the unionized auto industry has collapsed under the weight of its own rules and the unionized urban public schools are flailing to reverse their contract-protected incompetence-- when can they make it? .... 5:14 P.M.

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You are my Journolist! Question of the Day: Is the UAW contract (aside from the already-approved concessions) protected in bankruptcy? Reading today's NYT, it looks like the answer is "no"--meaning Obama is maybe whistling past the graveyard in downplaying the significance of Chapter 11  and suggesting the bankruptcy will necessarily be “quick, official and controlled." From Micheline Maynard's trot:

Contracts covering members of the United Automobile Workers union and other unions will remain in force, until the company asks a judge to void them. U.A.W. members approved changes to their contract on Wednesday that presumably would mean the contract would stay in place.

But if the company asked for contracts to be terminated and replaced with terms it can more readily afford, the union would have a chance to respond in court. Negotiations would take place before any cuts were imposed. This process could take months. [E.A.]

An "administration official" says that "no judge is going to override" the contract, given all the concessions the UAW has made. Really? Concessions that don't involve a decrease in a very high base wage? ... But you tell me. ... Update: IBD suggests the administration's confidence masks at least some nervousness. ... Complication: Once the UAW owns 55% of the company, why would it let the company ask for the contracts to be voided? ... But UAW's president says he doesn't intend to hold that stake for very long. Once he sells ... More useful bankruptcy speculation here. ... In the end, if this whole thing is going to fly, doesn't somebody have to buy Chrysler's cars? Who is that going to be. ...  5:08 P.M.

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I can plug too: So how come Rush gets all the money? ... 5:06 P.M.

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kf hears: Bon Appetit and Gourmet are the next Conde Nast mags slated to die. ... Steve Rattner isn't nearly as key a player in the auto bailout as his media profile would suggest. Ron Bloom is doing the job lots of people think Rattner is doing. That might meant that Rattner--mired in a "pay to play" controversy--will be expendable when the dust settles.  ... 5:05 P.M.

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Scariest thing I've heard about Obama: He reads Andrew Sullivan's blog. ... The Churchill/torture anecdote Obama told last night (from "an article I was reading") apparently came from Sullivan. Not surprisingly, the "facts had altered slightly" by the time they'd made their way through Andrew to Obama. ... Sometimes it's best to stay in the bubble!** ... Update: Relying on Sullivan, Obama left out the London Cage. ("Beatings, sleep deprivation and starvation used on SS and Gestapo men," reported The Guardian in 2005.) Michael Tomasky says "[T]he White House may have to walk that one back a bit ..." [Tks to reader M.] ...

**--Earlier version of this item said "cocoon," not "bubble." But Sullivan arguably is in Obama's cocoon on the issue of torture, no? Not sure about the issue of genital warts! ... Update: "Isn’t that kind of like Zac Efron reading Tiger Beat?" ...  5:04 P.M.

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Special Fratricidal Edition

I apologize for the dropped posts (now back). Slate's new blogging system is cr ... undergoing continuous improvement! Lucky I'm not the type to let that sort of thing drive me crazy ... If anyone notices any other missing posts, please let me know. ... Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan's bellicose and bullying "New Orwell" era archives magically reappear at the very moment they come in handy for him. Funny how that happens!  ... 6:46 P.M.

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You mean "dollar cost averaging" is a bad idea? Experts (not just Suze Orman) have been telling me to do that for decades. Still seems smarter than trying to time the market. ... [via Gawker] 6:35 P.M. 

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Bully Victim

Andrew Sullivan writes:

In 2002, we were told, and many of us rolled over, that we had no choice but to invade Iraq. And that time was of the essence. And that inaction was far more dangerous than action.

Funny, I remember Andrew as the one doing the rolling. .... [2002 Daily Dish archives conveniently inaccessible] ... [Thks to alert kf reader BJH.] ...

Update: Readers are more resourceful than I am. Here, for example, is Andrew "rolling over" in May, 2002:

IS BUSH SURRENDERING? Dreadful news today that the president may be wavering in his intent to destroy the Iraqi regime. If true, then those of us who have supported the war on terror need to revise our assessment of this president. He told the German press yesterday that there is no plan to invade on his desk. He said it almost proudly. His military leaders, in a sign of their determination to risk nothing and achieve nothing, are now leaking to the Washington Post that they have all but scotched a serious military option in Iraq. The arguments they are using sound like they might come from a Gore administration. After all that this president has said, after all that he has asked, a reversal on this central question would be nothing short of a staggering betrayal of trust, a reversal of will and determination. Of course, there should be no peremptory, rushed or botched war. Of course, all options should be examined. But the signs are unmistakable. This president, having begun as an improvement on his father, is showing signs that he could end up as something even worse. It's time he heard from his supporters that this is a critical matter on which there can be no compromise. If he balks, it will be worse than his father's betrayal on taxes. It will be a betrayal of the very security of the American people.

3:39 P.M.

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