Category Archives: Politics

Polling our ignorance

Humor, Politics, , , , ,

Public Policy Polling had some fun with its first national post-election poll, released today:

As much of an obsession as Bowles/Simpson can be for the DC pundit class, most Americans don’t have an opinion about it. 23% support it, 16% oppose it, and 60% say they don’t have a take one way or the other.

The 39% of Americans with an opinion about Bowles/Simpson is only slightly higher than the 25% with one about Panetta/Burns, a mythical Clinton Chief of Staff/former western Republican Senator combo we conceived of to test how many people would say they had an opinion even about something that doesn’t exist.

Bowles/Simpson does have bipartisan support from the small swath of Americans with an opinion about it. Republicans support it 26/18, Democrats favor it 21/14, and independents are for it by a 24/18 margin. Panetta/Burns doesn’t fare as well with 8% support and 17% opposition.

Some reactions:

[tweet http://twitter.com/daveweigel/status/276084099070951424] [tweet http://twitter.com/Goldfarb/status/276076751036248066]

Why Democrats are so confident about the fiscal cliff

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It’s all about the numbers:

A majority of Americans say that if the country goes over the fiscal cliff on Dec. 31, congressional Republicans should bear the brunt of the blame, according to a new Washington Post-Pew Research Center poll, the latest sign that the GOP faces a perilous path on the issue between now and the end of the year.

While 53 percent of those surveyed say the GOP would (and should) lose the fiscal cliff blame game, just 27 percent say President Obama would be deserving of more of the blame. Roughly one in 10 (12 percent) volunteer that both sides would be equally to blame.

Kevin Drum can’t get over how lopsided these figures are:

The Post site has a tool that lets you look at various demographic subgroups, and it turns out that everyone would blame Republicans. I figured maybe old people would blame Obama instead. Nope. Southerners? Nope. White people? Nope? High-income people? Nope. Literally the only group that didn’t blame Republicans was….Republicans.

Politically speaking, President Obama’s main job is to keep things this way. Republicans pay a price for their anti-tax jihad only if the public blames them for the ensuing catastrophe. But if Obama sticks to reasonable asks—modest tax increases, modest spending cuts, and a debt ceiling increase—and pounds away at Republican intransigence, these numbers aren’t likely to shift much.

Incoming! Elizabeth Warren lands post on Senate Banking Committee

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The Huffington Post has more:

Nearly two years after Wall Street waged a successful campaign to keep consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren from running the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the incoming senator will be tapped to serve on the Banking Committee, according to four sources familiar with the situation. It’s a victory for progressives who battled to win her a seat on the panel that oversees the implementation of Dodd-Frank and other banking regulations.

Warren knocked out Republican Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts in the most expensive Senate contest of 2012, with Wall Street spending heavily to beat Warren, a former Harvard law professor.

Sources also told HuffPost that Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) will be named to the panel.

Warren’s ascension to the panel gives her influence over regulators and the industry that non-panel members don’t enjoy.

As Daily Intel’s Kevin Roose notes, Warren is likelier to take her time building a network of ideological kin than to take a one-woman stab at the financial establishment right off the bat:

After my piece on Wall Street’s worries about Warren ran last week, I got a call from a senior banking industry lobbyist, who contended that Warren herself wasn’t planning to come into the Senate and immediately begin pushing an anti-bank agenda. Her more likely tactic, he said, would be to slow-play the situation, quietly amassing power and influence among fellow senators at first and then going after the banks once a coalition had been established.

“She realizes that if she appears to be a caricature of herself, she won’t be super-relevant in the Senate,” the lobbyist said.

Whatever her strategy, this is good news for progressive observers, who worried that Senate Democrats — always a weak and unreliable bunch — would cave under pressure from their Wall Street backers and keep Warren off the committee.

Irony of the day

Media, Politics, , , , , , , , , ,

Today’s New York Times reports on Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to expand settlements by building 3,000 new housing units in the Palestinian land known as E1 (just east of Jerusalem proper). But the way reporter Isabel Kershner concluded the article suggests a certain wry sensibility about Israel’s endless self-delusion:

But beyond the tit-for-tat measures set off by the United Nations vote, analysts pointed to a trend of deteriorating relations between Israel and Europe in particular.

“That is because the top-level people making decisions here in recent years are completely insular and out of touch with the rest of the world, especially regarding the Palestinians and the settlements,” said Mark Heller, a foreign-policy analyst at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University. “Self-righteousness may be good for domestic politics,” he said, but it is not a policy.”

At the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, 138 nations voted in favor of upgrading the status of the Palestinians and 41 abstained. The nine that voted against it were Israel, the United States, Canada, the Czech Republic, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Panama and Palau.

Yes, Mr. Heller, key decision-makers in the 138 countries that voted in favor of Palestinian observer status at the United Nations are out of touch with the “rest of the world,” by which he means the nine countries that voted no. At this point, Israeli rhetoric has entered a self-parodic stage.

Netanyahu’s free ride

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Gershom Gorenberg urges the United States to take a harsher stance towards Israel’s settlement expansion:

American opposition to settlement would matter only if an Israeli government felt that it was paying a direct cost in support from Washington, or an indirect cost in political support at home. Only rarely, though, has settlement caused enough tension between Washington and Jerusalem to become politically significant in Israel. The clearest example was when the first President Bush linked loan guarantees to a settlement freeze and turned relations with the U.S. into a major campaign issue in Israel’s 1992 election.

As measured by actions, American policy has otherwise been acquiescence. The lesson to Israelis—politicians and voters—is that American objections are not to be taken very seriously…

Whatever administration officials actually intend, this is the way Israeli voters are hearing them: Bibi is still king in Washington, and pays no price for intransigence. Less than two months before the Israeli election, this is indeed counterproductive.

Meanwhile, A.B. Yehoshua argues against labeling Hamas a “terrorist” group:

The time has come to stop calling Hamas a terrorist organization and define it as an enemy. The inflationary use of the term “terror,” of which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is particularly fond, impedes Israel’s ability to reach a long-term agreement with this bitter enemy. Today Hamas controls the territory; it has an army, governmental institutions and broadcasting stations. It is even recognized by many states in the world. An organization that has a state is an enemy, not a terror organization.

Is this just semantics? No, because with an enemy one can talk and reach agreements, whereas with a “terror organization” talking is meaningless and there is no hope for reaching accord. It is therefore urgent to legitimize, in principle, the effort to reach some sort of direct agreement with Hamas. That’s because the Palestinians are our neighbors and will be forever. They are our close neighbors, and if we don’t reach a reasonable separation agreement with them, we will inevitably lead ourselves down the path to a bi-national state, which will be worse and more dangerous for both sides. That’s why an agreement with Hamas is important not only for the sake of bringing quiet to the border with Gaza, but also in order to create the basis for establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

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The war at home

Miscellaneous, Politics, , , , , ,
Courtesy of Reuters.
Courtesy of Reuters.

It’s the one being waged against our own population, via mass incarceration and often inhumane treatment of inmates. From Reuters’ impressive gallery of the year in 95 photos, here’s the story behind this one:

LUCY NICHOLSON, United States

“I arranged to travel on a bus from Los Angeles with children who were visiting their fathers in San Quentin state prison. The prison has the largest death row in the United States, and the only gas chamber and death row for male inmates in California.

The children slept on the bus overnight as it made the nearly 400-mile journey, met with their fathers for a few hours, before returning to LA the same day.

I had arranged to meet reporter Mary Slosson from Sacramento at the prison. We chatted with the families and photographed them for a couple of hours. I wasn’t allowed to photograph one family who was visiting a death row prisoner in a separate locked room, but Mary talked to the press officer and arranged for Reuters to have a prison tour.

We were shown around the exercise yards, some of the cells, and the medical building. A lot of the prisoners wanted to chat to us, and they swarmed around as we walked through the exercise yard.

In the medical building we crossed paths with a death row inmate and other shackled “administrative segregation” prisoners. One inmate was sitting in a cage in an empty room, watching television.

We passed a room of administrative segregation prisoners sitting in cages for a group therapy session. I took four frames before the prisoners started staring and a guard told us to move along.

We should be paying more to watch sports on TV

Politics, Sports, , , , , , , , ,

So says Kevin Drum of Mother Jones. After reading a Los Angeles Times piece stating that sports channels account for almost half of the average cable TV bill, Drum advocates a consumer revolution:

The obvious answer, of course, is to offer channels on an a la carte basis—or perhaps on a semi-a la carte basis—but both the content providers and the cable companies fight this tooth and nail. Here’s the excuse:

National and local sports networks typically require cable and satellite companies to make their channels available to all customers….The idea of offering channels on an “a la carte” basis used to be sacrilege to the industry. Executives argued it would not lower prices because networks would just charge more to make up for the loss of subscribers.

You know what? That’s exactly what would happen. People would start to understand just how much they’re paying for sports programming and they’d be appalled. Many wouldn’t subscribe, and sports fans would be forced to pay the actual cost of their sports programming without being subsidized by the rest of us. This is exactly how it should be. There’s no reason that, for all practical purposes, every single person in the LA area should be forced to pay a tax to the Lakers and Dodgers even if they don’t care about basketball and baseball.

Not that I disagree with him, but it’s funny to what extent his sentiment sounds eerily similar to that of Tea Partiers and their ilk — namely, it’s outrageous that I should pay for them. Of course, the content is quite different — welfare checks would be quite a bit more foundational on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs than, say, the ability to watch the Lakers at home in high definition — but the philosophy is strikingly similar.

In fact, even the apparent gap in importance between these two examples is somewhat irrelevant, since the entire debate on the role of government is centered on what, exactly, is reasonable or necessary. In other words, even for something as seemingly trivial as sports programming, it would be easy to mount a rebuttal of à la carte programming on cultural grounds: sports, it could be said, facilitate a common social experience, a kinship with fellow citizens, and so on, to such an extent that the costs of broadcasting sports matches should be socialized to the broader population, whether they decide to watch or not.

This may sound ridiculous to many of us, but clearly fiscal conservatives feel very similarly in relation to many facets of government spending such as Medicaid, unemployment distributions, and so on. Again, this is not to justify the archetypal fiscal conservative’s point of view, but just to point out that, even for liberals such as Kevin Drum, there is always a line beyond which the people must “revolt” against undue expenditures that subsidize those other people. The only questions are where the line should be drawn, and which group of “other people” to target as benefitting from unfair subsidization.

Socialist America

Politics, , , , , , , ,

John Nichols suggests that all the talk of creeping “socialism” during the Republican primaries and beyond may have actually increased Americans’ positive disposition towards socialism generally:

A new Gallup Poll finds that socialism is now viewed positively by 39 percent of Americans, up from 36 percent in 2010. Among self-described liberals, socialism enjoyed a 62 percent positive rating, while 53 percent of Democrats and independent voters who lean Democratic gave socialism a thumb’s up.

Needless to say, this provoked the predictable fine whine of right-wing media. The conservative Washington Times newspaper declared: “Yes, Democrats, liberals favor socialism.” The Business Insider website announced: “Everything Republicans Fear About Democrats Is True.” William F. Buckley’s old magazine, National Review, allowed as how there is “much that is peculiar, and much that is worrying” about the new polling data.

That reactionary Republicans get a little hysterical at the mention of the word “socialism” is not news. But the reaction to there reaction is. No two groups of Americans talk so much about socialism in so many public settings these days as Republican candidates and conservative commentators. And this appears to be influencing the discourse.

Indeed, it is fair to say that nothing has done more to promote the cause of socialism than the ranting and raving of Sarah Palin, Paul Ryan, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. It’s not just that the right has spread the word about socialism, raising the ideology’s profile to levels rarely experienced in recent decades—if ever—and associating the ideology with Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, President Obama and a lot of other programs and people that Americans actually like. The fact that so many agitated, angry and—at least in some cases—politically toxic characters go apoplectic at the mere mention of the ideology has undoubtedly caused millions of Americans who don’t know much about socialism to say to themselves, “Anything that Paul Ryan does not like must have some merit.”

But I have to agree with the National Review assessment that the Gallup survey information “is worrying”—at least for conservatives. The most significant increases in sympathy for socialism over the past two years—since the last time Gallup polled on economic and ideological terms such as “socialism” and “capitalism”—have been among self-identified “conservatives” and “Republicans.”

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Egypt’s dangerous proposed constitution

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morsi

Egyptian President Muhammad Morsi has scheduled a national referendum for December 15 to vote on the new proposed constitution. Juan Cole is concerned:

The new constitution promises many rights, but also limits them in vague ways that could be opening to abuse.

As a historian, I am fascinated by the parallels of this proposed constitution with the 1906 Iranian constitution. In the latter, a committee of five ayatollahs was given review power to decide if legislation is in accordance with Islam. That provision was never really implemented (in 1979 it was made moot when the clerics just took over altogether). Likewise, the Egyptian constitution gives to the Muslim clerics of Al-Azhar Seminary (the closest thing the Sunni world has to a Vatican) the prerogative of interpreting Islamic law as it pertains to the constitution. Since the constitution puts Muslim Egyptians under Islamic law for personal status purposes, and has other provisions that invoke Islamic law, someone had to decide what Islamic law is. Having al-Azhar make determinations that then feed into constitutional law is a way of ensuring orthodoxy.

The Iraqi Constituent Assembly in 2005 drafted a similar provision, for the Shiite clergy of Najaf to review legislation and interpret Islamic law as it touched the constitution. That article was dropped, however, under severe pressure from the US ambassador of the time, Zalmay Khalilzad, and from other Iraqi groups such as the Kurds.

Putting Muslim Egyptians under Islamic law for matters of personal status is also troubling. Many secularists would not want to have their private lives governed in this way. In cases of intestacy, their daughters would only inherit half what their sons did. There is also a danger that this constitution could normalize the interference of religious groups and authorities in private matters such as marriage.