• Scott Walker Is Making Shit Up, Just Like His Hero Ronald Reagan


    This morning, once again trying to show that fighting against Wisconsin labor unions is pretty much the same as fighting ISIS or communism, Scott Walker repeated his contention that Ronald Reagan’s early move to fire striking air traffic controllers was more than just an attack on organized labor. It was also a critical foreign policy decision. Here’s what he originally said last month on Morning Joe:

    One of the most powerful foreign policy decisions that I think was made in our lifetime was one that Ronald Reagan made early in his presidency when he fired the air traffic controllers….What it did, it showed our allies around the world that we were serious and more importantly that this man to our adversaries was serious.

    Years later, documents released from the Soviet Union showed that that exactly was the case. The Soviet Union started treating [Reagan] more seriously once he did something like that. Ideas have to have consequences. And I think [President Barack Obama] has failed mainly because he’s made threats and hasn’t followed through on them.

    PolitiFact decided to check up on this:

    Five experts told us they had never heard of such documents. Several were incredulous at the notion.

    [Joseph] McCartin….”I am not aware of any such documents. If they did exist, I would love to see them.”….Svetlana Savranskaya….”There is absolutely no evidence of this.”….James Graham Wilson….Not aware of any Soviet documents showing Moscow’s internal response to the controller firings….Reagan’s own ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack Matlock, told us: “It’s utter nonsense. There is no evidence of that whatever.”

    PolitiFact’s conclusion: “For a statement that is false and ridiculous, our rating is Pants on Fire.” But Walker shouldn’t feel too bad. After all, Reagan was also famous for making up facts and evidence that didn’t exist, so Walker is just taking after his hero. What’s more, Reagan’s fantasies never hurt him much. Maybe they won’t hurt Walker either.

  • Kagan: Netanyahu Speech Is a Blunder


    Even the ever-hawkish Robert Kagan thinks Republicans blew it by inviting Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress:

    Looking back on it from years hence, will the spectacle of an Israeli prime minister coming to Washington to do battle with an American president wear well or poorly?

    ….Is anyone thinking about the future? From now on, whenever the opposition party happens to control Congress — a common enough occurrence — it may call in a foreign leader to speak to a joint meeting of Congress against a president and his policies. Think of how this might have played out in the past. A Democratic-controlled Congress in the 1980s might, for instance, have called the Nobel Prize-winning Costa Rican President Oscar Arias to denounce President Ronald Reagan’s policies in Central America. A Democratic-controlled Congress in 2003 might have called French President Jacques Chirac to oppose President George W. Bush’s impending war in Iraq.

    Does that sound implausible? Yes, it was implausible — until now.

    But President Obama has been poking sticks in Republican eyes ever since November, and Republicans desperately needed to poke back to maintain credibility with their base. Since passing useful legislation was apparently not in the cards, this was all they could come up with. What a debacle.

  • Friday Cat Blogging – 27 February 2015


    My biopsy is scheduled for this morning, so once again you get early cat blogging. Hopper got center stage last week, so this week it’s Hilbert’s turn.

    Speaking of Hopper, though, a few days ago she demonstrated the wonders of the internet to me. That wasn’t her intent, of course. Her intent was to chew through the charging cord of one of my landline phone extensions. This effectively turned the phone into a paperweight—and not even a very good one. But then I looked on the back of the charger and there was a model number etched into the plastic. So I typed it into Google. Despite the fact that this phone is more than a decade old, I was able to order two used replacements for $4 each within five minutes. Truly we live in a miraculous age.

    But I still wish Hopper would stop chewing on every dangling cord in the house. Steps need to be taken, but I’m not quite sure yet what they’ll be.

  • Marco Rubio Has a Peculiar Idea of How to Defeat ISIS


    Steve Benen points me to Marco Rubio today. Here is Rubio explaining how his ISIS strategy would be different from President Obama’s:

    “ISIS is a radical Sunni Islamic group. They need to be defeated on the ground by a Sunni military force with air support from the United States,” Rubio said. “Put together a coalition of armed regional governments to confront [ISIS] on the ground with U.S. special forces support, logistical support, intelligence support and the most devastating air support possible,” he added, “and you will wipe ISIS out.”

    Hmmm. As Benen points out, this sounds awfully similar to what Obama is already doing. Local forces? Check. Coalition of regional governments? Check. Logistical support? Check. Air support? Check.

    But there is one difference. Rubio thinks we need a Sunni military force on the ground to defeat ISIS. The Iraqi army, of course, is mostly Shiite. So apparently Rubio thinks we should ditch the Iraqi military and put together a coalition of ground forces from neighboring countries. But this would be….who? Yemen is out. Syria is out. That leaves Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and Turkey. Does Rubio think these countries are willing to put together a ground force to invade Iraq? Does he think the Iraqi government would allow it?

    It is a mystery. What exactly does Marco Rubio think?

  • Republicans Shoot Selves in Foot, Schedule Second Shooting for March


    Here’s the latest bit of drama in the DHS funding fight:

    The House will vote Friday on a bill funding the Department of Homeland Security for three weeks in an attempt to avert a shutdown slated for Saturday at the massive agency.

    ….Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) announced the new strategy to his rank-and-file members during a closed-door caucus meeting Thursday night. Senior Republicans predicted it would win enough support to clear the lower chamber. “I think we’ve got plentiful support. I was very pleased with the response. I think it’ll be a very strong vote,” House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) told reporters after the meeting.

    This is, literally, the worst possible outcome for Republicans. It means they’ll spend the next three weeks embroiled in this inane battle instead of working to advance their own agenda. It means the tea party ultras will have three more weeks to whip up even more outrage. It means John Boehner will have to fight his own caucus yet again on this same subject in March.

    In the meantime, Democrats are probably cackling with glee. This has got to be one of the most dimwitted legislative own goals of all time.

  • Why Did the Pentagon Announce Its Battle Plan for Mosul Months Ahead of Time?


    Last week, in a briefing to reporters, the Pentagon announced that it planned an offensive against Mosul in late spring. But why? Normally you don’t telegraph military plans months in advance.

    Joshua Rovner and Caitlin Talmadge suggest two related reasons. First, the U.S. might have decided that Iraqi security is so shoddy that surprise was never in the cards. “Given the notoriously poor operational security of the Iraqi Army,” they say, “the chances of keeping secret any Iraqi-led campaign were poor anyway.”

    Beyond that, they speculate that the Pentagon hoped to accomplish something by sending a message:

    The United States may be speaking more to its coalition partners and Iraqi counterparts than to the Islamic State….The United States might be trying to signal its own trustworthiness as a partner, stiffen the backs of unmotivated Iraqi forces, create a fait accompli with regards to campaign planning, or some combination of the above. In short, it may be aiming its communications at targets other than the Islamic State.

    One can also sense a sort of “heads we win, tails you lose” logic to the U.S. public messages about Mosul. If the Islamic State forces uncharacteristically flee without a fight, they will face humiliation and a setback to their claims of control in Iraq. That’s a win, at least operationally, for Washington and Baghdad. Conversely, if the Islamic State decides to stand its ground and starts trying to flow reinforcements to Mosul in preparation for the defense of the city, that could be a good thing operationally, too. These forces will be highly vulnerable to the stepped-up coalition air attacks, which are already seriously threatening the militants’ lifeline between Raqqa and Mosul. Sending reinforcements to Mosul will also draw Islamic State resources away from Syria, where the coalition’s ability to fight is much more constrained, and into Iraq, where that ability is more robust.

    Hmmm. Maybe. After all, we announced the “shock and awe” campaign for weeks prior to the start of the Iraq War in 2003. The hope, presumably, was to scare the Iraqis so badly that they’d essentially give up and flee before the battle even started. It didn’t really work, but no one complained about it at the time.

    There will be no shock and awe this time, though. Just a lot of grubby, house-to-house fighting led by Iraqi Shiite forces that are probably not very motivated to sacrifice their lives in order to return Mosul to Sunni control. Will it work? I can’t say I’m optimistic. But I’ve been wrong before. Maybe I am again.

  • “Republican Stalwart” Chosen to Lead CBO


    The current director of the Congressional Budget Office, Doug Elmendorf, is pretty widely respected on both left and right, and even a lot of Republicans were hoping he’d be reappointed to a new term by the incoming Congress. But despite his sterling credentials, Elmendorf is insufficiently dedicated to the conservative idée fixe of dynamic scoring, which insists that tax cuts will supercharge the economy and thus cost much less than you’d think. So today the CBO got a new director:

    GOP dismisses CBO director, picks Republican stalwart as chief scorekeeper

    Republicans Friday announced they will not keep current chief congressional scorekeeper Douglas Elmendorf and will replace him with Keith Hall, an economist with a long record of service in Washington and deep ties to Republicans.

    ….The CBO celebrated its 40th anniversary earlier this week, where past directors from both parties praised Mr. Elmendorf for his even-handed approach to the job. But Republicans had wanted to push the CBO to go further in the way it evaluates tax cuts by using so-called “dynamic scoring” to take into account the potential economic benefit feedback loop that could stem from Americans paying less to the federal government after a tax cut.

    I’m not sure Hall has taken a public stand on the virtues of dynamic scoring, but it’s probably safe to assume that he’s more sympathetic to it than Elmendorf was. Should make for a fun few years.

  • Killing Obamacare Halfway Is Worse For Republicans Than They Think


    Stuart Butler is probably the country’s single most influential right-wing health care wonk. He opposed Obamacare and has long pushed a different, more conservative vision of national health care policy. But Joshua Green writes today that even Butler is worried about what will happen if the Supreme Court abolishes Obamacare subsidies in the 34 states that don’t run their own exchanges:

    Butler’s worry is grounded in an understanding that voters with skyrocketing premiums may not blame Obama, as Republicans assume. They’ll expect the party hellbent on destroying the law to have a solution—and react badly if none is forthcoming. Because 16 states operate their own exchanges and therefore won’t be affected by the court’s ruling, Butler believes the ACA will stagger on and eventually recover, since voters won’t abide a system wherein some states have affordable, federally subsidized health-care coverage and others do not….“People who believe the ACA instantly goes away are deluding themselves,” he says. “By not doing anything to develop a Republican vision of how to move forward, they could end up with the very nightmare they’re trying to avoid.”

    ….On the business front, the effects would be no less significant….Entire segments of the health system redesigned their business models to take advantage of the ACA’s incentives. Hospitals, for instance, were given a trade-off: They stopped receiving government payments to offset the cost of treating the uninsured, cuts that amount to $269 billion over a decade. In return, they were promised millions of new patients insured through federal subsidies. “All the major hospital systems and big insurers like Kaiser and Geisinger spent a ton of money adapting to the ACA,” says Butler. If subsidies vanish, “suddenly the market is misaligned. If you’ve hired all these new doctors and health-care workers to cover all these new people walking in the door, and they don’t come, what do you do? You lay them off.”

    I agree that a system in which residents of some states get subsidies and others don’t is untenable. I don’t know quite how the politics would play out, but the states with subsidies won’t give them up, and the states without subsidies are likely to face a revolt from residents who suddenly see a benefit taken away. Something will have to give.

    The effect on the medical industry is less clear. Yes, hospitals and insurers spent a lot of money adapting to Obamacare. If it goes away, they’ll have to lay off some of their staff. But how much? Obamacare has reduced the ranks of the uninsured by about 4 percentage points, and roughly half of that is in states that don’t run their own exchanges. So the number of insured would probably fall (very roughly) from about 87 percent to 85 percent. That might be bad news for some small regional outfits, who will see a bigger drop locally than that, but nationally it’s not a death sentence.

    Still, Butler has a good point. The fallout from the Supreme Court halfway killing Obamacare would likely be more serious than conservatives believe. They don’t want to think about this because they’ve been committed for so long to the mantra of simply repealing Obamacare, full stop. But even their own base, which has been told relentlessly that Obamacare represents the end of the America they love, might start to demand a fix once it becomes clear just what they’re missing—and what all those blue states with their own exchanges are getting.

  • Scott Walker Blows It Again: Asked About ISIS, All He Has Is Bluster


    Over at National Review, conservative blogger Jim Geraghty joins the crowd of pundits who are unimpressed with Scott Walker’s recent answers to fairly easy questions:

    Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker received a lot of completely undeserved grief from the national news media in the past weeks. But he may have made a genuine unforced error in one of his remarks today. Asked about ISIS, Walker responded, “If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the globe.”

    That is a terrible response. First, taking on a bunch of protesters is not comparably difficult to taking on a Caliphate with sympathizers and terrorists around the globe, and saying so suggests Walker doesn’t quite understand the complexity of the challenge from ISIS and its allied groups.

    Let’s put aside the question of whether Walker deserves any grief for his weasely comments about evolution and President Obama’s love of country. Fair or not, those actually seem like the kinds of questions presidential candidates get asked all the time. If Walker wants to be taken seriously, he should have better responses than he did.

    But hey—maybe those really were gotcha questions and Walker should get a pass for answering them badly. ISIS, by contrast, certainly isn’t. It’s one of the preeminent policy challenges we face, and if you’re aiming for the Oval Office you’d better have something substantive to say about it. As Geraghty suggests, generic tough-guy posturing does nothing except show that you’re out of your depth.

    At a broader level, the problem is that although Walker’s anti-union victories are a legitimate part of his appeal and a legitimate part of his campaign story, he’s become something of a one-note Johnny about it. His supposed bravery in standing up to union leaders and peaceful middle-class protestors has become his answer to everything. This is going to get old pretty quickly for everyone but a small band of die-hard fans.

    Needless to say, it’s early days, and Walker’s stumbles over the past couple of weeks are unlikely to hurt him much. In fact, it’s better to get this stuff out of the way now. It will give Walker an improved sense of what to expect when the campaign really heats up and his answers matter a lot more than they do now.

    That said, every candidate for president—Democrat and Republican—should be expected to have a pretty good answer to the ISIS question. No empty posturing. No generic bashing of Obama’s policies. No cute evasions. That stuff is all fine as red meat for the campaign trail or as part of a stemwinder at CPAC, but it’s not a substitute for explaining what you’d actually do if you were president. Ground troops? More drones? Getting our allies to contribute more? Whatever it is, let’s hear it.

  • The FCC Did a Lot More Than Just Approve Net Neutrality Today


    The FCC voted today in favor of strong net neutrality rules, but this is something that’s been expected for weeks—and something I’ve written about before at length. So instead of commenting on that yet again, I want to highlight something else that might be nearly as important:

    The Federal Communications Commission will allow some cities and towns to set up and expand municipal Internet services, overruling state laws that had been put in place to block such efforts.

    The commission granted petitions by Chattanooga, Tenn., and Wilson, N.C., to overturn laws that restricted the ability of communities in those states to offer broadband service. In all about 20 states have passed such laws. The vote was 3-2 and along party lines. The decisions don’t affect the other states, but they do set a precedent for consideration of similar petitions in the future.

    This is a step in the direction of creating more competition for broadband internet, which I think is at least as important as net neutrality regulations. So hooray for this ruling, which is a step in the right direction. And while we’re on the subject, it’s also worth noting that the FCC’s net neutrality decision could end up stimulating more broadband competition too. Why? Because net neutrality depends on regulating broadband providers under Title II of the Telecommunications Act, and this means that companies like Google, which are trying to set up their own high-speed networks, will be able to do it more cheaply. This is from a couple of months ago:

    In a letter Tuesday to the FCC, Google’s director of communications law Austin Schlick highlighted a potential positive for the company if Title II kicks in. As a regulated telecom service, Google Fiber would get access to utility poles and other essential infrastructure owned by utilities. The FCC should make sure this happens because it would promote competition and spur more investment and deployment of broadband internet service, Schlick argued.

    Cable and telecom companies, like Comcast and AT&T have long had the right to access utility poles and other important infrastructure, such as ducts, conduits and rights of way, he noted. Google Fiber, which competes against these companies, has not had this right and the service has had trouble getting access to some poles as it builds out its fiber-optic network to homes.

    ….Hooking up homes using poles is about a tenth of the price of digging trenches across streets and sidewalks, according to Reed Hundt, who was FCC chairman in the 1990s. “Pole access is fundamental and Google will never be able to make the case for Google Fiber without pole access,” he said. “If Title II gives Google pole access, then it might really rock the world with broadband access.”

    If Google gains pole access, and cities and towns are free to set up their own high-speed networks, then local cable companies will finally start getting real competition in the high-speed internet market. Net neutrality is a big win for consumers, but real competition might be an even bigger win. This is far from a done deal, but things are starting to head in the right direction.