Wednesday, May 30, 2012 5:31:44 AM
Romney Hopes to Bork the Courts
Presumptive GOP nominee signs up Nixon's hatchet man to help pack the courts with Federalist Society extremists for a generation...
By Ernest A. Canning on 4/27/2012 12:58pm
"If we play Russian Roulette with the Supreme Court," Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) said [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=8035 ] during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, "if we confirm a nominee who has not demonstrated a commitment to core constitutional values, we jeopardize our rights as individuals and the future of our nation."
"We cannot undo such a mistake at the next election or even in the next generation," he warned. Too bad more of his Democratic colleagues failed to listen.
With four of the nine Supreme Court Justices now in their seventies, and the GOP Senate minority having bottled-up [ http://www.acslaw.org/acsblog/all/judicial-vacancies ] the Obama administration's nominations to the federal trial and intermediate appellate courts, the decision [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/10/16/robert-bork-on-romney-obama-and-biden.html ] by the presumptive Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, to select Robert Bork (see video below), founder of the ultra-radical, right-wing billionaire-funded Federalist Society [ http://www.democracynow.org/2005/7/26/the_federalist_society_papers_john_roberts ] as his chief legal adviser has turned the 2012 Presidential election into a new, and far more serious game of "Russian Roulette" --- one that would give the same forces that were behind the Bush v. Gore judicial coup [ http://news.lawreader.com/?p=1411 ] and the infamous Citizens United decision [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7709 ] a super majority on the Supreme Court.
The harm to the rule of law that would accompany the expansion from four Supreme Court radicals in robes [ http://www.amazon.com/Radicals-Robes-Extreme-Right-Wing-America/dp/0465083269 ] to seven could not be remedied, as Kennedy warned, by "the next election or even in the next generation"...
Robert Bork & the ultra-radical Federalist Society
"If Hillary Clinton had wanted to put some meat on her charge of a 'vast right-wing conspiracy,' she should have had a list of Federalist Society members and she could have spun a more convincing story." - Grover Norquist [ http://www.pfaw.org/media-center/publications/the-federalist-society-from-obscurity-to-power/from-network-to-policy ]
For many Americans Robert Bork first became a household name during an event known as "the Saturday night massacre [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_Night_Massacre ]."
At the height of the Watergate scandal, a Democratic-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee insisted that Richard Nixon’s choice for Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, agree to name a special prosecutor to investigate issues pertaining to Watergate. Richardson appointed Archibald Cox, a former U.S. Solicitor General. Cox’s aim was true. He went after the tapes of Oval Office conversations --- the very tapes that ultimately led to the "smoking gun" revelations that supported Articles of Impeachment and culminated in Nixon’s resignation.
When Nixon tried to stonewall, Cox obtained a federal court order for their release. Nixon ordered Cox to stop pursuing the tapes. Cox not only refused but told Nixon he would seek a court order holding him in contempt. In succession, Attorney General Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus chose honor over personal loyalty, resigning rather than carrying out the order to fire Cox. Nixon then turned to Solicitor General Robert Bork, who apparently had no ethical qualms about sacking Cox.
Bork's and the Federalist Society's reactionary goals were best summarized by Senator Edward ("Ted") Kennedy's remarks [ http://www.nytimes.com/1987/10/22/us/excerpts-from-debate-in-senate-over-bork-nomination-to-the-high-court.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm ] during the floor debate over Bork's unsuccessful 1987 nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan:
This debate has been a timely lesson in this bicentennial year of the Constitution of our commitment to the rule of law, to the principle of equal justice for all Americans and to the fundamental role of the Supreme Court in protecting the basic rights of every citizen.
In choosing Robert Bork, President Reagan has selected a nominee who is unique in fulminating opposition to fundamental constitutional principles as they are broadly understood in our society.
He has expressed opposition time and again, in a long line of attacks on landmark Supreme Court decisions protecting civil rights, the rights of women, the right to privacy and other individual rights and liberties. Judge Bork may be President Reagan’s ideal ideological choice…but that choice is not acceptable to Congress and the country, and it is not acceptable in a Justice of the nation’s highest court.
Unlike after his warnings about Thomas' nomination, Kennedy's colleagues --- both Democratic and Republicans --- heeded his warnings and Bork was rejected and forced to withdraw from his nomination.
Nonetheless, in announcing Bork's inclusion in his campaign, Romney has said that he "wish[ed] he was already on the Supreme Court."
Bork's views, as radical as they are, are hardly unique. They are the views held by Federalist Society-funding billionaire oligarchs, like the Koch brothers, who would mask their authoritarian corporate capitalism under an Orwellian concept of "liberty", defined as a two-tiered system of "justice" [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=8935 ] assuring elite impunity by a "bought-and-paid-for" judiciary.
Opportunity to end right-wing domination of the court
Those familiar with this writer's body of work need only to turn to the sub-section, "Litany of Betrayal," in "A Thoughtful Response to Robert Gibbs from the 'Educated Left [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7985 ]" to appreciate just how critical the author has been of our incumbent President.
But, that "litany of betrayal" does not extend to Obama's nominations to the federal bench, including Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elana Kagan.
Sotomayor, the President's first Supreme Court nominee, not only dissented in Citizens United, but was the only current member of the Supreme Court to openly question [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=8312 ] the validity of the concept of "corporate personhood" during oral arguments.
While some commentators have questioned whether Kagan, if she had then been a member of the Court, would have sided with the dissenters, Yale Law Prof. Bruce Ackerman expresses no doubt [ http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/05/citizens_united_was_a_shot_acr.html ] that she would do so. While a forceful case can be made that every one of the Federalist Society Supreme Court Justices fits Law Prof. Cass Sunstein's definition of a "radical in a robe," Ackerman describes Kagan's legal philosophy as "mainstream." Kagan, Ackerman insists, subscribes to "real-world constitutionalism."
As The BRAD BLOG reported [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9255 ] in the wake of the Vermont Senate vote to end "corporate personhood," the Supreme Court will have the unique opportunity to revisit its infamous Citizens United ruling. A "real-world constitutional jurist" would likely be receptive to the pronouncement by Justices Ginsberg and Breyer that the Court should re-examine the validity of Citizens United "in light of the huge sums of money deployed to buy candidates." A "real-world constitutional jurist" can be expected to give serious consideration both to the arguments presented by the Montana Supreme Court [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9040 ] majority as to the corrupting influence of corporate campaign contributions and the blistering assault leveled by Montana Supreme Court Justice James C. Nelson in his dissenting opinion against the concept of "corporate personhood." A "real world constitutional jurist" would not be unmindful of the growing calls for a Constitutional Amendment to overturn Citizens United, if the Court fails to do so, or the fact that 83% of Americans oppose the Court's infamous, democracy-destroying decision.
A radical ideologue committed to the Federalist Society agenda cannot be expected to impartially rule simply because they don a judicial robe. Indeed, the history of the past 30 years reveals that Senators who voted to confirm the likes of the ethically-challenged Clarence Thomas [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=8603 ] simply deluded themselves into believing that the man would rise to the level of trust and impartiality that should accompany an appointment to our nation's highest court.
The flip side of the irreparable harm to the rule of law that could accompany the election of Mitt Romney, an Obama re-election could produce an end the control of what Jim Hightower described as "a Corporatist Supreme Court Cabal [ http://www.alternet.org/media/151889/how_a_corporatist_supreme_court_cabal_joined_forces_with_right_wing_and_kochs_to_quietly_sell_out_our_democracy?page=3 ]."
Something to think about while attempting to tune-out the endless stream of corporate-purchased, political campaign propaganda that will pass for discourse during the upcoming Presidential campaign.
*
Video 'Don't Let Romney Bork America' [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEEbL8CFZnU ] follows...
© 2012 Ernest A. Canning
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9263 [with comments]
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Things That Really Matter
By CHARLES M. BLOW
May 2, 2012, 8:55 pm
Another week of presidential politics, another outbreak of faux outrage and media manipulation.
President Obama’s campaign released an ad trumpeting Obama’s decision to conduct the military raid that ended in the killing of Osama bin Laden. Republicans — and some liberals with too much time and too-short memories — hit the roof. How dare he? How tacky. Below the office and out of bounds.
Oh please. Are they really that desperate? Do they really have election amnesia?
Television time and newsprint inches first created and then chronicled the incessant bickering about it, while another week passed with voters distracted from the issues that matter most.
This is what passes for news now: suckling the masses to sleep on the teat of triviality.
Issues are dry. Outrage is juicy. Screen viewers and page views. Bread and circuses. Whip the horses until the chariot runs off the cliff of the inconsequential and plummets into a valley of cash and ratings — the higher calling of the fourth estate be damned. It’s all just a game. Hyperventilation is a high-paying job.
Well, I’m tired of it. I won’t play along. It’s not a game, particularly if you are one of the millions of Americans stretching your body and mind to their limits to make the ends meet. It’s not a game if you don’t make money from outrage, but are outraged by how little money you have. It’s not a game if you fear, rightfully, that your “unalienable rights” to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are being treated as an alien concept — threatened or denied altogether.
So before I start hyperventilating myself, I’m going to throw up my hands and throw down a gauntlet. I’m going to give you meat. You can get your cake elsewhere.
Let’s talk about the importance of the president in determining the composition of the Supreme Court and the critical role the court is playing in our lives.
Nominating Supreme Court justices is one of the most profound and enduring legacies of any presidency, and yet the subject gets so little airtime that Americans display a staggering degree of misunderstanding of the court and dissatisfaction with it.
According to a Pew Research Center poll [ http://www.people-press.org/2012/05/01/supreme-court-favorability-reaches-new-low/ ] released Tuesday, the favorability rating of the Supreme Court has reached a new low. Interesting. But that may be in part because the percentage of respondents with “no opinion” has reached a new high: it has more than doubled since 1985, moving from 8 percent to 19 percent.
In a November Pew Center News IQ survey, just under half of all respondents (47 percent) correctly identified Chief Justice John G. Roberts as a conservative. And that lack of understanding wasn’t isolated to the less educated. Only 60 percent of those with a college degree got it right.
Maybe that helps explain why an October Gallup poll [ http://www.gallup.com/poll/149906/Supreme-Court-Approval-Rating-Dips.aspx ] found that the percentage of people who thought that the court was too liberal was higher than those who thought that it was too conservative by nearly half (31 percent to 21 percent). Yes, you read that right: the Roberts court, which gave us Citizens United, was too liberal.
For the record, as The Times’s Adam Liptak pointed out [ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/us/25roberts.html ] in 2010 after the completion of the Roberts court’s fifth term:
In those five years, the court not only moved to the right but also became the most conservative one in living memory, based on an analysis of four sets of political science data.
There was even a nifty, if frightening, chart [ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/07/25/us/20100725-roberts-graphic.html ] with the article that illustrated this rightward turn.
An Associated Press/National Constitution Center poll [ https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:sUvTNNVMKgkJ:surveys.ap.org/data%255CGfK%255CAP-GfK%2520Poll%2520Aug%25202011%2520FINAL%2520Topline_NCC_1st%2520story.pdf+ap+constitution+center+poll&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESjd1fLyiKCuiL0OixkfFjhWLgIoZR2adclxbUazB93mJWDJCoc-taZ0ec4Z4JkBxEStgVNNiUzMB5MmW3cDohuo0DXm-ZAI3sDP8DDdJhAQwuqfw5sIBRZClKEKtwgMOw5-VY84&sig=AHIEtbRzppWneYlp-7u4FdLc9Fnd289L0Q ] in August found that more than a quarter of Americans think that the decisions of the Supreme Court don’t really affect their lives.
How can this be? Where did we go wrong? Part of the problem is the deplorable state of civic education in this country.
A recent report by the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools [ http://www.civicmissionofschools.org/the-campaign/guardian-of-democracy-report ] was utterly distressing on this front.
According to the report:
A majority of America’s schools either neglect civic learning or teach it in a minimal or superficial way (too often as an elective). The consequences of this neglect are staggering, but unsurprising. On a recent national assessment in civics, two-thirds of all American students scored below proficient.
As for knowledge of the court in particular, the report found that “almost a third mistakenly believed that a U.S. Supreme Court ruling could be appealed” and that:
when the Supreme Court divides 5-4, roughly one in four (23 percent) believed the decision was referred to Congress for resolution; 16 percent thought it needed to be sent back to the lower courts.
Not all the blame rests there, though. We in the media share it. Sex scandals are always big news. Oral arguments rarely are. The prurient trumps the truly important.
Now we have a Democratic president and a Republican candidate who have dramatically different visions of the court, one of whom is likely to nominate a replacement for one or more of the current justices.
From left, Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press
As the Times pointed out in October [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/29/opinion/the-supreme-court-and-the-next-president.html ], “Justice Scalia is now 75, as is Anthony Kennedy” and “Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 78. Since 80 is the average retirement age of justices over the past generation, whoever is elected president could shape the court for the next generation.”
In his first term, Obama has appointed Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, two relatively liberal justices. Not only has Mitt Romney chosen Robert Bork, a rejected Supreme Court nominee, as one of the chairmen of his Justice Advisory Committee, he has made it clear that he will choose extremely conservative justices:
I would have favored justices like Roberts and Alito, Scalia and Thomas. I like justices that follow the Constitution, do not make law from the bench. I would have much rather had a justice of that nature.
There is little ambiguity here. Which of these two men will pick the next justice is of grave significance. This — like budgetary priorities and economic stewardship, concern for the earth and the air, and a candidate’s penchants for war and appetite for peace — should be on the lips of every pundit and in the minds of every concerned citizen.
We don’t get a do-over.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/02/things-that-really-matter/ [with comments]
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Anti-abortion extremists terrorize doctors in Georgia
The Rachel Maddow Show
May 25, 2012
Kathy Spillar, executive editor of Ms. Magazine and executive vice president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, talks with Rachel Maddow about the threats, burglaries, intimidation and violence by anti-abortion extremists, particularly in Georgia.
© 2012 msnbc.com
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/vp/47572951#47572951
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Mitt: The real European
A young Romney rides a bicycle in France.
(Credit: André Salarnier)
Romney bashes Obama for "making us like Europe." But he's the one pushing failed European austerity measures
By Andrew Leonard
Friday, Apr 27, 2012 07:00 AM CDT
An odd thing happened during Mitt Romney’s victory-lap speech [ http://www.mittromney.com/news/press/2012/04/mitt-romney-delivers-remarks-manchester-nh ] after Tuesday’s Republican primaries: He didn’t once mention the word “Europe.”
The absence was jarring, because Romney’s claim that President Obama is dragging the United States toward a loathsome European-style “social welfare” future has been a staple of the former Massachusetts governor’s shtick ever since he started campaigning in earnest.
It’s always been an easy line for him: Europe, Romney’s audience understands, is the land of the not-free. The continent gave birth to Karl Marx, for crying out loud! Every now and then, socialist political parties actually take power!
But there is a big problem with Romney’s formulation. For the last year or two, Europe has been implementing, in real time, exactly the policies that Romney and congressional Republicans fervently believe are the best strategy for boosting economic growth. It’s called “austerity,” and it means cutting deficits, slashing spending, and chipping away at all those goodies the social welfare state provides.
And guess what? It’s not working. Compared with the United States, Europe is in shambles. Unemployment is rising across the continent. Just this week, the United Kingdom, which has pursued an austerity regime so severe that it makes House Republicans drool with lust, slipped back into recession. In France, the socialist candidate for president (and likely winner), François Hollande, has been campaigning against austerity [ http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/23/us-france-election-populists-idUSBRE83M0ZI20120423 ]. Italy’s prime minister, Mario Monti, is expressing qualms. The latest news out of Brussels, according to the Daily Telegraph [ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/9226543/Brussels-to-relax-3pc-fiscal-targets-as-revolt-spreads.html ], suggests “a major shift in economic strategy” as fears spread “that excessive fiscal tightening will inflict unnecessary damage on a string of eurozone countries.”
The evidence keeps amassing. Maybe, just maybe, John Maynard Keynes was right [ http://www.businessinsider.com/its-official-keynes-was-right-2012-4 ]: Cutting government spending in the face of a weak economy is a recipe for further decline [ http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2012/03/delong-and-summers-fiscal-policy-in-a-depressed-economy-conference-draft.html ]. In a startling turnabout, political leaders all over Europe are questioning the merits of austerity and calling for more stimulative policies.
You can see the problem Romney faces, and why he might suddenly be reluctant to utter the word “Europe.” The facts are uncomfortable: Under Obama, the United States has recovered more quickly from the Great Recession than has Europe. Economic growth is steadier, and unemployment is falling faster. But if Romney wins the White House, bringing along with him Republican majorities in both the Senate and the House, he will have the power to do exactly what he says he wants to do: slash government spending and cut the deficit.
It’s a plan that runs the very real risk of sabotaging the economic recovery. It’s a plan, in other words, that would make the U.S. just like Europe.
Romney’s efforts to tar Obama as a fifth columnist for French-accented Really Big Government have been unrelenting. In December, he told voters in Iowa [ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/12/30/romney-warns-obamas-policies-making-us-like-europe/ ] that Obama’s polices “were making us like Europe,” and “I don’t want Europe here.” In January, after winning the New Hampshire primary, he lambasted Obama [ http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/united-states/120111/mitt-romney-new-hampshire-primary-victory-speech ] for wanting “to turn America into a European-style entitlement society.” Just a few days ago, he explained to Fox News [ http://www.nasdaq.com/video/video.aspx?vid=Romney-Obama-Turning-America-Into-A-European-Social-Welfare-State-517331122 ] that the conservative base would rally behind his candidacy, because “President Obama has taken America in such a different course than we have ever gone as a nation before. We are becoming far more like a European social-welfare state, and people don’t want to see that.”
Never mind that by historical standards Obama’s efforts to strengthen the American safety net do not come close to the transformational efforts of presidents like Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, making Romney’s assertion that Obama is taking America on “such a different course than we have ever gone as a nation before” transparently ridiculous. If anyone running for president this year in the United States is a pioneer in European-style liberalism, it’s got to be Romney, the first governor to preside over the creation of a statewide universal healthcare plan. (And for a guy who seems to despise Europe so much, Romney sure seems to enjoy vacationing in France [ http://www.mediaite.com/tv/missionary-re-position-mitt-romney-looks-forward-to-occasional-vacations-in-france/ ].)
But whatever. Romney’s Europe-bashing rhetoric serves multiple purposes. It labels Obama as something different, a “foreigner,” un-American. It also directly appeals to conservative concerns that the social welfare state is unaffordable. In this vein, unless governments everywhere tighten their belts, balance their budgets and get their ships in order, we’re all headed down the hopeless path of Greece, doomed to bankruptcy and social chaos.
Most importantly, Romney’s opposition to European-style Big Government stakes an implicit position on the great economic debate of our time: How best to spur economic growth?
The stances of the two main camps have been clear for years and endlessly debated by economists and pundits. The pro-stimulus, Keynesian argument holds that the problem afflicting stagnant economies all over the world is a lack of demand. When everyone is worried about their economic future, everyone simultaneously tightens their belt, and the capitalist machine stops in its tracks. Since no one is willing to buy anything, companies can’t sell their goods and services and respond by laying off their employees, and that further exacerbates the overall problem. Under such constraints, only the government has the power to step in and stimulate demand. Once the economy is growing strongly and consistently, only then do you look for ways to balance the budget — a task that becomes much easier when tax revenues are booming again.
The opposing camp, now commonly referred to as “Austerians,” believes the problem isn’t a lack of demand, but a lack of confidence. People are afraid to invest and buy and take risks because they’re worried that high deficits inevitably lead to high taxes, or high interest rates, or general fiscal chaos (or all of the above). And they’re going to hunker down until they’re sure that governments intend to act responsibly, and live within their means.
The Austerian camp’s stance translated into one of the most delightfully mindbendingly oxymoronic proposals to enter the economic policy parlance in years: “expansionary fiscal contraction.” Cutting government spending will boost confidence, which will lead to growth! To get big, one must first get small.
It was all the rage two years ago. Today, not so much. The problem with expansionary fiscal contraction is that when you try it at a time when the economy is stagnant or recessionary, you run a real risk of exacerbating the problem you are trying to cure. Slashing government spending subtracts demand from the economy. Growth slows, tax revenues fall, and suddenly the government has even less to spend, which subtracts even more demand from the economy.
And that’s exactly what appears to be happening in Europe — in countries such as Greece, Italy, Spain and France, and perhaps most intriguingly, in the United Kingdom, where David Cameron’s new conservative government pursued austerity with a vengeance. From the outset, a clamor of voices warned [ http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_reckoning/2012/04/25/cameron_s_trail_blazing_road_to_ruin.html ] that the risks were huge, and so far, their worries have been validated [ http://www.epi.org/blog/austerity-uk-losing-argument-economy/ ]. On Monday, the U.K. registered its second quarter of economic contraction, the rule-of-thumb definition for a recession.
It’s very rare that one gets a real-time demonstration of how two different economic policies compare, but the numbers are hard to argue with [ http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/04/people-are-finally-figuring-out-austerity-is-stupid/ ]: In the “euro area,” where austerity has reigned, GDP growth has declined for each of the last four quarters. In the U.S. it has risen. In the euro area, unemployment has been rising for a year. In the U.S. , it’s been falling. As Felix Salmon observes [ http://felixsalmon.tumblr.com/post/21792411729/looks-like-the-tougher-and-more-credible-the ], when one compares the United States, the U.K and the euro area, “the tougher and more credible the austerity, the worse the GDP performance.”
The trend lines are far too obvious to ignore, and they have sparked a political counter-reaction that appears to have reached critical mass this week [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/24/world/europe/call-for-growth-puts-pressure-on-german-led-austerity.html ]. In Italy, France, Spain and the Netherlands, austerity is suddenly out of favor.
Meanwhile, the United States, despite the best efforts of Republicans, never pursued austerity as devoutly as Europe. Which is not to say the U.S. hasn’t tightened its belt at all. Perhaps the most stunning counter-argument to Romney’s accusation that Obama is pushing for a government-centered European-style government can be seen in the decline in the size of the public sector [ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/25/american-austerity/ ] under Obama: During his presidency, employment in the public sector — local, state and federal government — has fallen by almost 600,000 jobs. In comparison, Bill Clinton added over 600,000 and George Bush added 800,000. As Paul Krugman points out, if Obama’s administration had added public sector jobs at the same rate as George Bush, unemployment would currently stand around 7 percent.
But even with those headwinds blowing against it, the U.S. has done surprisingly well. The first guess at GDP growth for the second quarter of 2012, due out Friday morning, is likely to peg growth at around 3 percent. (UPDATE: A disappointing surprise: 2.2 percent.) Meanwhile, the most recently available statistics for the euro area show it contracting [ http://www.straitstimes.com/BreakingNews/Money/Story/STIStory_774384.html ].
Which leads us back to the all-important question: What happens if Romney wins the election? The chances are good that if he is victorious, he will bring in Republican control of Congress along with him. Anything budget-related can be passed using the congressional technique known as “reconciliation,” which means Senate Democrats won’t be able to filibuster. He’ll be able to do what he wants.
Once upon a time, Mitt Romney supported stimulus spending to boost the economy [ http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/226567/republican-stimulus-plan/mitt-romney ]. But now he sings a different tune. He has endorsed Paul Ryan’s budget [ http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2012/03/29/149564923/romneys-support-for-ryan-budget-has-democrats-crying-foul ], — “It’s an excellent piece of work, and very much needed” — which would combine huge cuts to social welfare programs [ http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3712 ] with dramatic tax cuts for the wealthy — an austerity program directly targeted at the poor. Romney’s speeches are generally devoid of specific policy proposals, but he’s fond of encapsulating his overall economic strategy with the three Tea Party-friendly words “cut,” “cap” and “balance” — the simplest definition of austerity one could ask for. And as he said in Philadelphia on April 12 [ http://www.nj.com/gloucester-county/index.ssf/2012/04/mitt_romney_rocks_philadelphia.html ], “The economy is struggling because government is too big, and we have to bring it down to size.”
All together, everything points to a plan for turbo-boosted austerity. That’s exactly the model that Europe has tried and is now finding wanting. And it’s exactly the wrong medicine for a country in which economic growth is still very vulnerable and unemployment is still high.
Wanna be like Europe? Elect Romney.
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.salon.com/2012/04/27/mitt_the_real_european/singleton/ [with comments]
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After lawsuits and arson, judge's ruling derails plans for Tennessee mosque
By Lateef Mungin, CNN
updated 3:48 AM EDT, Wed May 30, 2012
(CNN) -- The long-running battle between a Tennessee Muslim community and a group of critics over a new mosque took a dramatic turn Tuesday when a judge ruled that construction had to halt.
"Everyone is really shocked, many people are crying about this," Imam Osama Bahloul, leader of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, said early Wednesday morning. "We did exactly what other churches in the county did. We followed the same process that other churches did. Why did this happen? Some people feel like it is discrimination."
The judge, Chancellor Robert Corlew, ruled that plans for the new mosque that had previously been approved by a local planning commission were now "void and of no effect," CNN affiliate WTVF reported.
He said the planning commission violated state law by not providing proper public notice.
During the trial, attorneys for the plaintiffs argued that the county failed to alert the public about meetings before the mosque was approved, WFTV reported.
Rutherford County attorneys said the meetings were announced in the local free newspaper and on the paper's website and that clearly complied with Tennessee law.
The judge's ruling said the announcements in a local paper were "in relatively small type near the bottom of a page which contained a number of advertisements and legal notices, most of which were provided by the city of Murfreesboro."
The ruling continues the contentious battle that was featured in a documentary called, "Unwelcome: The Muslims Next Door," which aired on CNN last year.
The Islamic Center of Murfreesboro has existed for more than a decade.
The fight started on May 24, 2010, when planning commissioners approved the center's plans to build a 52,960-square foot building for a new mosque on Veals Road.
Backlash followed, including lawsuits and an August 2010 fire that destroyed construction equipment and damaged vehicles at the construction site for the mosque. Police said it was arson.
A sign announcing the mosque was spray-painted with the words "Not Welcome."
For months, mosque leaders searched for contractors willing and able to do the job. Because of the opposition and threats the project has provoked, the construction job has gotten more complicated. The work now requires more layers of security, including cameras.
Some contractors weren't willing to take the job. Mosque leaders said contractors told them it had become too much of a hot-button issue and presented too much of a risk to their business and equipment. Several contractors began the bidding process but never finished.
Mosque officials said a contractor told them that he needed the work but that the leaders of his own church were against the new Islamic center.
In September, Corlew, the Rutherford County judge, ruled that the Muslim group had a right to build the larger facility.
In the opinion, Corlew said organizations must be treated equally under current land-use ordinances, but added that some of the county's land use laws are "in dire need of revision."
Corlew also wrote that the plaintiffs suing Rutherford County's planning commission can challenge whether the mosque's approval violated open meeting laws.
That led to the lawsuit and trial that was decided this week.
Opponents of the mosque have also argued that Islam is not a real religion deserving of First Amendment protections and claimed that the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro had links to terrorism, WFTV reported
The judge dismissed those allegations, the affiliate reported.
The new mosque was supposed to be completed in July, Bahloul said. The congregation has outgrown its old facility and now worshipers have to pray outside the crowded mosque.
He says he is unclear exactly what he will do next. But he plans to keep fighting.
"I am confident that American values will prevail in this," the imam said. "What makes America so special is how it handles freedom. This decision does not seem like it reflects American values."
© 2012 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/30/us/tennessee-mosque-controversy/index.html [with comment]
===
We Are Not Stupid
By CHARLES M. BLOW
April 25, 2012, 9:41 pm
After his primary wins on Tuesday, Mitt Romney delivered a nice speech with some punchy lines, and the pundits jumped and flipped like a troupe from Cirque du Soleil.
But it was all about framing an argument. It was tactical.
I don’t give two cents about tactics at the moment. I prefer to keep my eyes squarely trained on the issues and where the parties and their candidates have either demonstrated or indicated that they plan to take the country.
That reveals their values. That reveals a contrast so stark that no theatrical triumph or failure can disguise or ameliorate it.
Romney is still Romney and he’s still running as the head of a party that has spent the last few years pursuing a profoundly regressive agenda.
Romney tried Tuesday night to frame the debate largely around economic issues, but as the 2010 midterm elections showed, economic issues are something of a Trojan horse for the right.
Let’s just get this out of the way: Times are tough. But most people are smart enough to know that these tough times were long in the making and will be long in the fixing. There are no magic words or silver bullets or emerging bubbles that will quickly and easily return us to a pre-recession, pre-collapse sense of prosperity.
That is because we were all complicit in a lie. The government spent too much (on tax cuts and wars), many banks gambled too much and many people borrowed too much. That was the economy. All that money swirling around lulled us into a false sense of security.
When it all fell apart, an overextended government had to help overextended banks and overextended borrowers. The money stopped swirling. Jobs that flourished during the boom became scarce.
The debt grew and the economy shrank.
The government underestimated the crisis and underfinanced the stimulus package aimed at fixing it. So things got worse before they slowly began to get better. And structural economic issues, like the deflation in the housing market, remain.
In an oversimplified nutshell, that is what happened: a complex mix of poor choices and inadequate responses. Now we have to ask ourselves if things have fundamentally changed forever.
The president tried to help fix a mess that he didn’t make, but the fixing has come slowly. Is that failure? Romney and the Republicans say yes.
Mitt Romney and his wife, Ann, at a primary night rally in Manchester, N.H., on Tuesday.
Dominick Reuter/Reuters
And, if they can keep framing it as a failure, they can push for, and maybe even push through, their brutal budgets, which cut programs that help the poor and struggling and benefit the rich.
And while they push their budgets, they make savage attacks on a broad range of issues: voting rights, women’s rights, gay rights, immigration, etc.
This is the trick: Run on fiscal conservatism; bring social conservatism along for the ride. The Trojan horse platform.
Mitt Romney has made clear during this primary season that he was willing to be neither moderate nor independent — but rather “severely conservative” — in seeking the Republican nomination. He was willing to court the far-right wing of his party and advance its agenda — a frightening fiscal agenda and an even more frightening social agenda.
Yes, this election is about the economy. Every election is to some degree. But it is also about priorities and values and the social direction of this country. This is about the uniquely different visions of our country as presented by Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, and about which man is most likely to be effective and fair.
No number of tactical speeches will make us forget that. We are not stupid.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/25/we-are-not-stupid/ [with comments]
===
(linked in):
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=73857069 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=74072106 and preceding and following
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Presumptive GOP nominee signs up Nixon's hatchet man to help pack the courts with Federalist Society extremists for a generation...
By Ernest A. Canning on 4/27/2012 12:58pm
"If we play Russian Roulette with the Supreme Court," Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) said [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=8035 ] during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, "if we confirm a nominee who has not demonstrated a commitment to core constitutional values, we jeopardize our rights as individuals and the future of our nation."
"We cannot undo such a mistake at the next election or even in the next generation," he warned. Too bad more of his Democratic colleagues failed to listen.
With four of the nine Supreme Court Justices now in their seventies, and the GOP Senate minority having bottled-up [ http://www.acslaw.org/acsblog/all/judicial-vacancies ] the Obama administration's nominations to the federal trial and intermediate appellate courts, the decision [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/10/16/robert-bork-on-romney-obama-and-biden.html ] by the presumptive Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, to select Robert Bork (see video below), founder of the ultra-radical, right-wing billionaire-funded Federalist Society [ http://www.democracynow.org/2005/7/26/the_federalist_society_papers_john_roberts ] as his chief legal adviser has turned the 2012 Presidential election into a new, and far more serious game of "Russian Roulette" --- one that would give the same forces that were behind the Bush v. Gore judicial coup [ http://news.lawreader.com/?p=1411 ] and the infamous Citizens United decision [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7709 ] a super majority on the Supreme Court.
The harm to the rule of law that would accompany the expansion from four Supreme Court radicals in robes [ http://www.amazon.com/Radicals-Robes-Extreme-Right-Wing-America/dp/0465083269 ] to seven could not be remedied, as Kennedy warned, by "the next election or even in the next generation"...
Robert Bork & the ultra-radical Federalist Society
"If Hillary Clinton had wanted to put some meat on her charge of a 'vast right-wing conspiracy,' she should have had a list of Federalist Society members and she could have spun a more convincing story." - Grover Norquist [ http://www.pfaw.org/media-center/publications/the-federalist-society-from-obscurity-to-power/from-network-to-policy ]
For many Americans Robert Bork first became a household name during an event known as "the Saturday night massacre [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_Night_Massacre ]."
At the height of the Watergate scandal, a Democratic-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee insisted that Richard Nixon’s choice for Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, agree to name a special prosecutor to investigate issues pertaining to Watergate. Richardson appointed Archibald Cox, a former U.S. Solicitor General. Cox’s aim was true. He went after the tapes of Oval Office conversations --- the very tapes that ultimately led to the "smoking gun" revelations that supported Articles of Impeachment and culminated in Nixon’s resignation.
When Nixon tried to stonewall, Cox obtained a federal court order for their release. Nixon ordered Cox to stop pursuing the tapes. Cox not only refused but told Nixon he would seek a court order holding him in contempt. In succession, Attorney General Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus chose honor over personal loyalty, resigning rather than carrying out the order to fire Cox. Nixon then turned to Solicitor General Robert Bork, who apparently had no ethical qualms about sacking Cox.
Bork's and the Federalist Society's reactionary goals were best summarized by Senator Edward ("Ted") Kennedy's remarks [ http://www.nytimes.com/1987/10/22/us/excerpts-from-debate-in-senate-over-bork-nomination-to-the-high-court.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm ] during the floor debate over Bork's unsuccessful 1987 nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan:
This debate has been a timely lesson in this bicentennial year of the Constitution of our commitment to the rule of law, to the principle of equal justice for all Americans and to the fundamental role of the Supreme Court in protecting the basic rights of every citizen.
In choosing Robert Bork, President Reagan has selected a nominee who is unique in fulminating opposition to fundamental constitutional principles as they are broadly understood in our society.
He has expressed opposition time and again, in a long line of attacks on landmark Supreme Court decisions protecting civil rights, the rights of women, the right to privacy and other individual rights and liberties. Judge Bork may be President Reagan’s ideal ideological choice…but that choice is not acceptable to Congress and the country, and it is not acceptable in a Justice of the nation’s highest court.
Unlike after his warnings about Thomas' nomination, Kennedy's colleagues --- both Democratic and Republicans --- heeded his warnings and Bork was rejected and forced to withdraw from his nomination.
Nonetheless, in announcing Bork's inclusion in his campaign, Romney has said that he "wish[ed] he was already on the Supreme Court."
Bork's views, as radical as they are, are hardly unique. They are the views held by Federalist Society-funding billionaire oligarchs, like the Koch brothers, who would mask their authoritarian corporate capitalism under an Orwellian concept of "liberty", defined as a two-tiered system of "justice" [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=8935 ] assuring elite impunity by a "bought-and-paid-for" judiciary.
Opportunity to end right-wing domination of the court
Those familiar with this writer's body of work need only to turn to the sub-section, "Litany of Betrayal," in "A Thoughtful Response to Robert Gibbs from the 'Educated Left [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7985 ]" to appreciate just how critical the author has been of our incumbent President.
But, that "litany of betrayal" does not extend to Obama's nominations to the federal bench, including Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elana Kagan.
Sotomayor, the President's first Supreme Court nominee, not only dissented in Citizens United, but was the only current member of the Supreme Court to openly question [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=8312 ] the validity of the concept of "corporate personhood" during oral arguments.
While some commentators have questioned whether Kagan, if she had then been a member of the Court, would have sided with the dissenters, Yale Law Prof. Bruce Ackerman expresses no doubt [ http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/05/citizens_united_was_a_shot_acr.html ] that she would do so. While a forceful case can be made that every one of the Federalist Society Supreme Court Justices fits Law Prof. Cass Sunstein's definition of a "radical in a robe," Ackerman describes Kagan's legal philosophy as "mainstream." Kagan, Ackerman insists, subscribes to "real-world constitutionalism."
As The BRAD BLOG reported [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9255 ] in the wake of the Vermont Senate vote to end "corporate personhood," the Supreme Court will have the unique opportunity to revisit its infamous Citizens United ruling. A "real-world constitutional jurist" would likely be receptive to the pronouncement by Justices Ginsberg and Breyer that the Court should re-examine the validity of Citizens United "in light of the huge sums of money deployed to buy candidates." A "real-world constitutional jurist" can be expected to give serious consideration both to the arguments presented by the Montana Supreme Court [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9040 ] majority as to the corrupting influence of corporate campaign contributions and the blistering assault leveled by Montana Supreme Court Justice James C. Nelson in his dissenting opinion against the concept of "corporate personhood." A "real world constitutional jurist" would not be unmindful of the growing calls for a Constitutional Amendment to overturn Citizens United, if the Court fails to do so, or the fact that 83% of Americans oppose the Court's infamous, democracy-destroying decision.
A radical ideologue committed to the Federalist Society agenda cannot be expected to impartially rule simply because they don a judicial robe. Indeed, the history of the past 30 years reveals that Senators who voted to confirm the likes of the ethically-challenged Clarence Thomas [ http://www.bradblog.com/?p=8603 ] simply deluded themselves into believing that the man would rise to the level of trust and impartiality that should accompany an appointment to our nation's highest court.
The flip side of the irreparable harm to the rule of law that could accompany the election of Mitt Romney, an Obama re-election could produce an end the control of what Jim Hightower described as "a Corporatist Supreme Court Cabal [ http://www.alternet.org/media/151889/how_a_corporatist_supreme_court_cabal_joined_forces_with_right_wing_and_kochs_to_quietly_sell_out_our_democracy?page=3 ]."
Something to think about while attempting to tune-out the endless stream of corporate-purchased, political campaign propaganda that will pass for discourse during the upcoming Presidential campaign.
*
Video 'Don't Let Romney Bork America' [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEEbL8CFZnU ] follows...
Ernest A. Canning has been an active member of the California state bar since 1977. Mr. Canning has received both undergraduate and graduate degrees in political science as well as a juris doctor. He is also a Vietnam vet (4th Infantry, Central Highlands 1968).
© 2012 Ernest A. Canning
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9263 [with comments]
===
Things That Really Matter
By CHARLES M. BLOW
May 2, 2012, 8:55 pm
Another week of presidential politics, another outbreak of faux outrage and media manipulation.
President Obama’s campaign released an ad trumpeting Obama’s decision to conduct the military raid that ended in the killing of Osama bin Laden. Republicans — and some liberals with too much time and too-short memories — hit the roof. How dare he? How tacky. Below the office and out of bounds.
Oh please. Are they really that desperate? Do they really have election amnesia?
Television time and newsprint inches first created and then chronicled the incessant bickering about it, while another week passed with voters distracted from the issues that matter most.
This is what passes for news now: suckling the masses to sleep on the teat of triviality.
Issues are dry. Outrage is juicy. Screen viewers and page views. Bread and circuses. Whip the horses until the chariot runs off the cliff of the inconsequential and plummets into a valley of cash and ratings — the higher calling of the fourth estate be damned. It’s all just a game. Hyperventilation is a high-paying job.
Well, I’m tired of it. I won’t play along. It’s not a game, particularly if you are one of the millions of Americans stretching your body and mind to their limits to make the ends meet. It’s not a game if you don’t make money from outrage, but are outraged by how little money you have. It’s not a game if you fear, rightfully, that your “unalienable rights” to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are being treated as an alien concept — threatened or denied altogether.
So before I start hyperventilating myself, I’m going to throw up my hands and throw down a gauntlet. I’m going to give you meat. You can get your cake elsewhere.
Let’s talk about the importance of the president in determining the composition of the Supreme Court and the critical role the court is playing in our lives.
Nominating Supreme Court justices is one of the most profound and enduring legacies of any presidency, and yet the subject gets so little airtime that Americans display a staggering degree of misunderstanding of the court and dissatisfaction with it.
According to a Pew Research Center poll [ http://www.people-press.org/2012/05/01/supreme-court-favorability-reaches-new-low/ ] released Tuesday, the favorability rating of the Supreme Court has reached a new low. Interesting. But that may be in part because the percentage of respondents with “no opinion” has reached a new high: it has more than doubled since 1985, moving from 8 percent to 19 percent.
In a November Pew Center News IQ survey, just under half of all respondents (47 percent) correctly identified Chief Justice John G. Roberts as a conservative. And that lack of understanding wasn’t isolated to the less educated. Only 60 percent of those with a college degree got it right.
Maybe that helps explain why an October Gallup poll [ http://www.gallup.com/poll/149906/Supreme-Court-Approval-Rating-Dips.aspx ] found that the percentage of people who thought that the court was too liberal was higher than those who thought that it was too conservative by nearly half (31 percent to 21 percent). Yes, you read that right: the Roberts court, which gave us Citizens United, was too liberal.
For the record, as The Times’s Adam Liptak pointed out [ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/us/25roberts.html ] in 2010 after the completion of the Roberts court’s fifth term:
In those five years, the court not only moved to the right but also became the most conservative one in living memory, based on an analysis of four sets of political science data.
There was even a nifty, if frightening, chart [ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/07/25/us/20100725-roberts-graphic.html ] with the article that illustrated this rightward turn.
An Associated Press/National Constitution Center poll [ https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:sUvTNNVMKgkJ:surveys.ap.org/data%255CGfK%255CAP-GfK%2520Poll%2520Aug%25202011%2520FINAL%2520Topline_NCC_1st%2520story.pdf+ap+constitution+center+poll&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESjd1fLyiKCuiL0OixkfFjhWLgIoZR2adclxbUazB93mJWDJCoc-taZ0ec4Z4JkBxEStgVNNiUzMB5MmW3cDohuo0DXm-ZAI3sDP8DDdJhAQwuqfw5sIBRZClKEKtwgMOw5-VY84&sig=AHIEtbRzppWneYlp-7u4FdLc9Fnd289L0Q ] in August found that more than a quarter of Americans think that the decisions of the Supreme Court don’t really affect their lives.
How can this be? Where did we go wrong? Part of the problem is the deplorable state of civic education in this country.
A recent report by the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools [ http://www.civicmissionofschools.org/the-campaign/guardian-of-democracy-report ] was utterly distressing on this front.
According to the report:
A majority of America’s schools either neglect civic learning or teach it in a minimal or superficial way (too often as an elective). The consequences of this neglect are staggering, but unsurprising. On a recent national assessment in civics, two-thirds of all American students scored below proficient.
As for knowledge of the court in particular, the report found that “almost a third mistakenly believed that a U.S. Supreme Court ruling could be appealed” and that:
when the Supreme Court divides 5-4, roughly one in four (23 percent) believed the decision was referred to Congress for resolution; 16 percent thought it needed to be sent back to the lower courts.
Not all the blame rests there, though. We in the media share it. Sex scandals are always big news. Oral arguments rarely are. The prurient trumps the truly important.
Now we have a Democratic president and a Republican candidate who have dramatically different visions of the court, one of whom is likely to nominate a replacement for one or more of the current justices.
From left, Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press
As the Times pointed out in October [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/29/opinion/the-supreme-court-and-the-next-president.html ], “Justice Scalia is now 75, as is Anthony Kennedy” and “Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 78. Since 80 is the average retirement age of justices over the past generation, whoever is elected president could shape the court for the next generation.”
In his first term, Obama has appointed Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, two relatively liberal justices. Not only has Mitt Romney chosen Robert Bork, a rejected Supreme Court nominee, as one of the chairmen of his Justice Advisory Committee, he has made it clear that he will choose extremely conservative justices:
I would have favored justices like Roberts and Alito, Scalia and Thomas. I like justices that follow the Constitution, do not make law from the bench. I would have much rather had a justice of that nature.
There is little ambiguity here. Which of these two men will pick the next justice is of grave significance. This — like budgetary priorities and economic stewardship, concern for the earth and the air, and a candidate’s penchants for war and appetite for peace — should be on the lips of every pundit and in the minds of every concerned citizen.
We don’t get a do-over.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/02/things-that-really-matter/ [with comments]
===
Anti-abortion extremists terrorize doctors in Georgia
The Rachel Maddow Show
May 25, 2012
Kathy Spillar, executive editor of Ms. Magazine and executive vice president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, talks with Rachel Maddow about the threats, burglaries, intimidation and violence by anti-abortion extremists, particularly in Georgia.
© 2012 msnbc.com
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/vp/47572951#47572951
===
Mitt: The real European
A young Romney rides a bicycle in France.
(Credit: André Salarnier)
Romney bashes Obama for "making us like Europe." But he's the one pushing failed European austerity measures
By Andrew Leonard
Friday, Apr 27, 2012 07:00 AM CDT
An odd thing happened during Mitt Romney’s victory-lap speech [ http://www.mittromney.com/news/press/2012/04/mitt-romney-delivers-remarks-manchester-nh ] after Tuesday’s Republican primaries: He didn’t once mention the word “Europe.”
The absence was jarring, because Romney’s claim that President Obama is dragging the United States toward a loathsome European-style “social welfare” future has been a staple of the former Massachusetts governor’s shtick ever since he started campaigning in earnest.
It’s always been an easy line for him: Europe, Romney’s audience understands, is the land of the not-free. The continent gave birth to Karl Marx, for crying out loud! Every now and then, socialist political parties actually take power!
But there is a big problem with Romney’s formulation. For the last year or two, Europe has been implementing, in real time, exactly the policies that Romney and congressional Republicans fervently believe are the best strategy for boosting economic growth. It’s called “austerity,” and it means cutting deficits, slashing spending, and chipping away at all those goodies the social welfare state provides.
And guess what? It’s not working. Compared with the United States, Europe is in shambles. Unemployment is rising across the continent. Just this week, the United Kingdom, which has pursued an austerity regime so severe that it makes House Republicans drool with lust, slipped back into recession. In France, the socialist candidate for president (and likely winner), François Hollande, has been campaigning against austerity [ http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/23/us-france-election-populists-idUSBRE83M0ZI20120423 ]. Italy’s prime minister, Mario Monti, is expressing qualms. The latest news out of Brussels, according to the Daily Telegraph [ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/9226543/Brussels-to-relax-3pc-fiscal-targets-as-revolt-spreads.html ], suggests “a major shift in economic strategy” as fears spread “that excessive fiscal tightening will inflict unnecessary damage on a string of eurozone countries.”
The evidence keeps amassing. Maybe, just maybe, John Maynard Keynes was right [ http://www.businessinsider.com/its-official-keynes-was-right-2012-4 ]: Cutting government spending in the face of a weak economy is a recipe for further decline [ http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2012/03/delong-and-summers-fiscal-policy-in-a-depressed-economy-conference-draft.html ]. In a startling turnabout, political leaders all over Europe are questioning the merits of austerity and calling for more stimulative policies.
You can see the problem Romney faces, and why he might suddenly be reluctant to utter the word “Europe.” The facts are uncomfortable: Under Obama, the United States has recovered more quickly from the Great Recession than has Europe. Economic growth is steadier, and unemployment is falling faster. But if Romney wins the White House, bringing along with him Republican majorities in both the Senate and the House, he will have the power to do exactly what he says he wants to do: slash government spending and cut the deficit.
It’s a plan that runs the very real risk of sabotaging the economic recovery. It’s a plan, in other words, that would make the U.S. just like Europe.
Romney’s efforts to tar Obama as a fifth columnist for French-accented Really Big Government have been unrelenting. In December, he told voters in Iowa [ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/12/30/romney-warns-obamas-policies-making-us-like-europe/ ] that Obama’s polices “were making us like Europe,” and “I don’t want Europe here.” In January, after winning the New Hampshire primary, he lambasted Obama [ http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/united-states/120111/mitt-romney-new-hampshire-primary-victory-speech ] for wanting “to turn America into a European-style entitlement society.” Just a few days ago, he explained to Fox News [ http://www.nasdaq.com/video/video.aspx?vid=Romney-Obama-Turning-America-Into-A-European-Social-Welfare-State-517331122 ] that the conservative base would rally behind his candidacy, because “President Obama has taken America in such a different course than we have ever gone as a nation before. We are becoming far more like a European social-welfare state, and people don’t want to see that.”
Never mind that by historical standards Obama’s efforts to strengthen the American safety net do not come close to the transformational efforts of presidents like Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, making Romney’s assertion that Obama is taking America on “such a different course than we have ever gone as a nation before” transparently ridiculous. If anyone running for president this year in the United States is a pioneer in European-style liberalism, it’s got to be Romney, the first governor to preside over the creation of a statewide universal healthcare plan. (And for a guy who seems to despise Europe so much, Romney sure seems to enjoy vacationing in France [ http://www.mediaite.com/tv/missionary-re-position-mitt-romney-looks-forward-to-occasional-vacations-in-france/ ].)
But whatever. Romney’s Europe-bashing rhetoric serves multiple purposes. It labels Obama as something different, a “foreigner,” un-American. It also directly appeals to conservative concerns that the social welfare state is unaffordable. In this vein, unless governments everywhere tighten their belts, balance their budgets and get their ships in order, we’re all headed down the hopeless path of Greece, doomed to bankruptcy and social chaos.
Most importantly, Romney’s opposition to European-style Big Government stakes an implicit position on the great economic debate of our time: How best to spur economic growth?
The stances of the two main camps have been clear for years and endlessly debated by economists and pundits. The pro-stimulus, Keynesian argument holds that the problem afflicting stagnant economies all over the world is a lack of demand. When everyone is worried about their economic future, everyone simultaneously tightens their belt, and the capitalist machine stops in its tracks. Since no one is willing to buy anything, companies can’t sell their goods and services and respond by laying off their employees, and that further exacerbates the overall problem. Under such constraints, only the government has the power to step in and stimulate demand. Once the economy is growing strongly and consistently, only then do you look for ways to balance the budget — a task that becomes much easier when tax revenues are booming again.
The opposing camp, now commonly referred to as “Austerians,” believes the problem isn’t a lack of demand, but a lack of confidence. People are afraid to invest and buy and take risks because they’re worried that high deficits inevitably lead to high taxes, or high interest rates, or general fiscal chaos (or all of the above). And they’re going to hunker down until they’re sure that governments intend to act responsibly, and live within their means.
The Austerian camp’s stance translated into one of the most delightfully mindbendingly oxymoronic proposals to enter the economic policy parlance in years: “expansionary fiscal contraction.” Cutting government spending will boost confidence, which will lead to growth! To get big, one must first get small.
It was all the rage two years ago. Today, not so much. The problem with expansionary fiscal contraction is that when you try it at a time when the economy is stagnant or recessionary, you run a real risk of exacerbating the problem you are trying to cure. Slashing government spending subtracts demand from the economy. Growth slows, tax revenues fall, and suddenly the government has even less to spend, which subtracts even more demand from the economy.
And that’s exactly what appears to be happening in Europe — in countries such as Greece, Italy, Spain and France, and perhaps most intriguingly, in the United Kingdom, where David Cameron’s new conservative government pursued austerity with a vengeance. From the outset, a clamor of voices warned [ http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_reckoning/2012/04/25/cameron_s_trail_blazing_road_to_ruin.html ] that the risks were huge, and so far, their worries have been validated [ http://www.epi.org/blog/austerity-uk-losing-argument-economy/ ]. On Monday, the U.K. registered its second quarter of economic contraction, the rule-of-thumb definition for a recession.
It’s very rare that one gets a real-time demonstration of how two different economic policies compare, but the numbers are hard to argue with [ http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/04/people-are-finally-figuring-out-austerity-is-stupid/ ]: In the “euro area,” where austerity has reigned, GDP growth has declined for each of the last four quarters. In the U.S. it has risen. In the euro area, unemployment has been rising for a year. In the U.S. , it’s been falling. As Felix Salmon observes [ http://felixsalmon.tumblr.com/post/21792411729/looks-like-the-tougher-and-more-credible-the ], when one compares the United States, the U.K and the euro area, “the tougher and more credible the austerity, the worse the GDP performance.”
The trend lines are far too obvious to ignore, and they have sparked a political counter-reaction that appears to have reached critical mass this week [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/24/world/europe/call-for-growth-puts-pressure-on-german-led-austerity.html ]. In Italy, France, Spain and the Netherlands, austerity is suddenly out of favor.
Meanwhile, the United States, despite the best efforts of Republicans, never pursued austerity as devoutly as Europe. Which is not to say the U.S. hasn’t tightened its belt at all. Perhaps the most stunning counter-argument to Romney’s accusation that Obama is pushing for a government-centered European-style government can be seen in the decline in the size of the public sector [ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/25/american-austerity/ ] under Obama: During his presidency, employment in the public sector — local, state and federal government — has fallen by almost 600,000 jobs. In comparison, Bill Clinton added over 600,000 and George Bush added 800,000. As Paul Krugman points out, if Obama’s administration had added public sector jobs at the same rate as George Bush, unemployment would currently stand around 7 percent.
But even with those headwinds blowing against it, the U.S. has done surprisingly well. The first guess at GDP growth for the second quarter of 2012, due out Friday morning, is likely to peg growth at around 3 percent. (UPDATE: A disappointing surprise: 2.2 percent.) Meanwhile, the most recently available statistics for the euro area show it contracting [ http://www.straitstimes.com/BreakingNews/Money/Story/STIStory_774384.html ].
Which leads us back to the all-important question: What happens if Romney wins the election? The chances are good that if he is victorious, he will bring in Republican control of Congress along with him. Anything budget-related can be passed using the congressional technique known as “reconciliation,” which means Senate Democrats won’t be able to filibuster. He’ll be able to do what he wants.
Once upon a time, Mitt Romney supported stimulus spending to boost the economy [ http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/226567/republican-stimulus-plan/mitt-romney ]. But now he sings a different tune. He has endorsed Paul Ryan’s budget [ http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2012/03/29/149564923/romneys-support-for-ryan-budget-has-democrats-crying-foul ], — “It’s an excellent piece of work, and very much needed” — which would combine huge cuts to social welfare programs [ http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3712 ] with dramatic tax cuts for the wealthy — an austerity program directly targeted at the poor. Romney’s speeches are generally devoid of specific policy proposals, but he’s fond of encapsulating his overall economic strategy with the three Tea Party-friendly words “cut,” “cap” and “balance” — the simplest definition of austerity one could ask for. And as he said in Philadelphia on April 12 [ http://www.nj.com/gloucester-county/index.ssf/2012/04/mitt_romney_rocks_philadelphia.html ], “The economy is struggling because government is too big, and we have to bring it down to size.”
All together, everything points to a plan for turbo-boosted austerity. That’s exactly the model that Europe has tried and is now finding wanting. And it’s exactly the wrong medicine for a country in which economic growth is still very vulnerable and unemployment is still high.
Wanna be like Europe? Elect Romney.
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.salon.com/2012/04/27/mitt_the_real_european/singleton/ [with comments]
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After lawsuits and arson, judge's ruling derails plans for Tennessee mosque
By Lateef Mungin, CNN
updated 3:48 AM EDT, Wed May 30, 2012
(CNN) -- The long-running battle between a Tennessee Muslim community and a group of critics over a new mosque took a dramatic turn Tuesday when a judge ruled that construction had to halt.
"Everyone is really shocked, many people are crying about this," Imam Osama Bahloul, leader of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, said early Wednesday morning. "We did exactly what other churches in the county did. We followed the same process that other churches did. Why did this happen? Some people feel like it is discrimination."
The judge, Chancellor Robert Corlew, ruled that plans for the new mosque that had previously been approved by a local planning commission were now "void and of no effect," CNN affiliate WTVF reported.
He said the planning commission violated state law by not providing proper public notice.
During the trial, attorneys for the plaintiffs argued that the county failed to alert the public about meetings before the mosque was approved, WFTV reported.
Rutherford County attorneys said the meetings were announced in the local free newspaper and on the paper's website and that clearly complied with Tennessee law.
The judge's ruling said the announcements in a local paper were "in relatively small type near the bottom of a page which contained a number of advertisements and legal notices, most of which were provided by the city of Murfreesboro."
The ruling continues the contentious battle that was featured in a documentary called, "Unwelcome: The Muslims Next Door," which aired on CNN last year.
The Islamic Center of Murfreesboro has existed for more than a decade.
The fight started on May 24, 2010, when planning commissioners approved the center's plans to build a 52,960-square foot building for a new mosque on Veals Road.
Backlash followed, including lawsuits and an August 2010 fire that destroyed construction equipment and damaged vehicles at the construction site for the mosque. Police said it was arson.
A sign announcing the mosque was spray-painted with the words "Not Welcome."
For months, mosque leaders searched for contractors willing and able to do the job. Because of the opposition and threats the project has provoked, the construction job has gotten more complicated. The work now requires more layers of security, including cameras.
Some contractors weren't willing to take the job. Mosque leaders said contractors told them it had become too much of a hot-button issue and presented too much of a risk to their business and equipment. Several contractors began the bidding process but never finished.
Mosque officials said a contractor told them that he needed the work but that the leaders of his own church were against the new Islamic center.
In September, Corlew, the Rutherford County judge, ruled that the Muslim group had a right to build the larger facility.
In the opinion, Corlew said organizations must be treated equally under current land-use ordinances, but added that some of the county's land use laws are "in dire need of revision."
Corlew also wrote that the plaintiffs suing Rutherford County's planning commission can challenge whether the mosque's approval violated open meeting laws.
That led to the lawsuit and trial that was decided this week.
Opponents of the mosque have also argued that Islam is not a real religion deserving of First Amendment protections and claimed that the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro had links to terrorism, WFTV reported
The judge dismissed those allegations, the affiliate reported.
The new mosque was supposed to be completed in July, Bahloul said. The congregation has outgrown its old facility and now worshipers have to pray outside the crowded mosque.
He says he is unclear exactly what he will do next. But he plans to keep fighting.
"I am confident that American values will prevail in this," the imam said. "What makes America so special is how it handles freedom. This decision does not seem like it reflects American values."
© 2012 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/30/us/tennessee-mosque-controversy/index.html [with comment]
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We Are Not Stupid
By CHARLES M. BLOW
April 25, 2012, 9:41 pm
After his primary wins on Tuesday, Mitt Romney delivered a nice speech with some punchy lines, and the pundits jumped and flipped like a troupe from Cirque du Soleil.
But it was all about framing an argument. It was tactical.
I don’t give two cents about tactics at the moment. I prefer to keep my eyes squarely trained on the issues and where the parties and their candidates have either demonstrated or indicated that they plan to take the country.
That reveals their values. That reveals a contrast so stark that no theatrical triumph or failure can disguise or ameliorate it.
Romney is still Romney and he’s still running as the head of a party that has spent the last few years pursuing a profoundly regressive agenda.
Romney tried Tuesday night to frame the debate largely around economic issues, but as the 2010 midterm elections showed, economic issues are something of a Trojan horse for the right.
Let’s just get this out of the way: Times are tough. But most people are smart enough to know that these tough times were long in the making and will be long in the fixing. There are no magic words or silver bullets or emerging bubbles that will quickly and easily return us to a pre-recession, pre-collapse sense of prosperity.
That is because we were all complicit in a lie. The government spent too much (on tax cuts and wars), many banks gambled too much and many people borrowed too much. That was the economy. All that money swirling around lulled us into a false sense of security.
When it all fell apart, an overextended government had to help overextended banks and overextended borrowers. The money stopped swirling. Jobs that flourished during the boom became scarce.
The debt grew and the economy shrank.
The government underestimated the crisis and underfinanced the stimulus package aimed at fixing it. So things got worse before they slowly began to get better. And structural economic issues, like the deflation in the housing market, remain.
In an oversimplified nutshell, that is what happened: a complex mix of poor choices and inadequate responses. Now we have to ask ourselves if things have fundamentally changed forever.
The president tried to help fix a mess that he didn’t make, but the fixing has come slowly. Is that failure? Romney and the Republicans say yes.
Mitt Romney and his wife, Ann, at a primary night rally in Manchester, N.H., on Tuesday.
Dominick Reuter/Reuters
And, if they can keep framing it as a failure, they can push for, and maybe even push through, their brutal budgets, which cut programs that help the poor and struggling and benefit the rich.
And while they push their budgets, they make savage attacks on a broad range of issues: voting rights, women’s rights, gay rights, immigration, etc.
This is the trick: Run on fiscal conservatism; bring social conservatism along for the ride. The Trojan horse platform.
Mitt Romney has made clear during this primary season that he was willing to be neither moderate nor independent — but rather “severely conservative” — in seeking the Republican nomination. He was willing to court the far-right wing of his party and advance its agenda — a frightening fiscal agenda and an even more frightening social agenda.
Yes, this election is about the economy. Every election is to some degree. But it is also about priorities and values and the social direction of this country. This is about the uniquely different visions of our country as presented by Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, and about which man is most likely to be effective and fair.
No number of tactical speeches will make us forget that. We are not stupid.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/25/we-are-not-stupid/ [with comments]
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"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
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upon the Right of Election, 1790
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