Matt Taibbi explains why, even if we pass relatively meaningful financial services reform, it’s gutted by the lobbyists before it goes into effect. Read it and weep.
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This pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it?
You’d think someone would have warned these Tories what they were up against with Paul Krugman:
Encouraging news! Now let’s see how this shakes out on appeal. Republicans always put so much effort into coming up with clever new ways to evade the law, but Judge Robert L. Hinkle called them out on it anyway as an unconstitutional burden:
Florida’s GOP war on (minority and Democratic) voters has two parts. First, there is the well-publicized effort to throw tens of thousands of legitimate voters off the rolls in ostensible pursuit of what may be only a handful of noncitizen voters at most.
The second, less-well-known effort, is a new set of Florida state rules that make it very difficult to register new voters, and create severe penalties for anyone who doesn’t precisely comply with them. These rules are so onerous that many groups that formerly routinely ran voter registration drives, like the League of Women Voters, stopped doing it because they found the new rules were impossible to comply with.
Now, thanks to a lawsuit by the League of Women Voters of Florida, Florida Public Interest Research Group Education Fund, and Rock the Vote, a federal judge in Tallahassee, no hotbed of liberalism, has issued a preliminary injunction halting enforcement of key parts of the voter-registration-suppression scheme:
The statute and rule impose a harsh and impractical 48-hour deadline for an organization to deliver applications to a voter registration office and effectively prohibit an organization from mailing applications in. And the statute and rule impose burdensome record-keeping and reporting requirements that serve little if any purpose, thus rendering them unconstitutional even to the extent they do not violate the [National Voting Rights Act].
I’m long past the point where I vote for politicians on the basis of their “character,” because I know that we don’t actually know anything about their characters. All we see is a carefully-designed presentation, and if you think you really know any of them (or their wives), you’re deluded. You’re projecting, and they’d like to keep it that way.
How you can tell something about a politician is where he places his focus. And John Edwards was the only person in the 2007 primary campaign who was talking about the poor. That’s why I supported him.
I always thought the case against Edwards was not only weak, but heavily politicized. (Notice that no one indicted John Ensign. He got his wealthy parents to pay off his mistress and her husband, and the payments were structured to avoid public disclosure. See “IOIYAR”.)
Instead, we had an ambitious Republican prosecutor, a holdover from the Bush administration, who made unprecedented charges against Edwards and pretty much destroyed him. That prosecutor resigned to run for Congress. That heavily-publicized gossip spectacle just ended in Edwards being found innocent on one count, and a mistrial on the rest of the charges.
I still like John Edwards. I don’t especially care that he had an affair (as Amanda notes in this article, you’d empty out every cocktail party in D.C. if you started indicting people for that), because people make mistakes. And I don’t care that he had a couple of $400 haircuts, either. What happened between him and his wife was their business, not mine. But the inspiring words he spoke about lifting up the poorest, about the two Americas? That was our business, and we’re worse off for the silencing of his voice.
It’s become customary in politically obsessed circles for observers to preen about how they knew that Edwards was bad news all along. His lawyerly ways! His sentimental stories about growing up working class! His hair! How could his silly supporters not see him for the philandering phony he so clearly was?
Of course, a quick perusal of the John Edwards of 2007 demonstrates that this sort of hindsight owes more to revisionist wishful thinking than a correct assessment of the evidence at the time. Back then, the other potential Democratic nominees, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, were widely and correctly perceived as timid centrists who had a knee-jerk tendency to run from conflict the second conservatives ruffled their feathers. Edwards, on the other hand, spoke convincingly of how change couldn’t come from “negotiation and compromise,” arguing that the idea that corporate interests would voluntarily give away their power is “a fantasy.” Long before the economic crash and Occupy Wall Street forced major Democratic politicians to address the question of growing inequality, Edwards’s famous “two Americas” rhetoric helped force the issue onto the table. Occupy boiled it down to the 1 Percent vs. the 99 Percent, but back in 2007, Edwards was taking cracks at “the very rich vs. everyone else.”
In the rush of headlines about Edwards’s despicable sexual behavior, what’s forgotten is how much his campaign haunted the primary contest between Clinton and Obama long after he dropped out. An early push in the campaign season from Edwards on healthcare reform set the tone for the rest of the election season on this issue. Edwards put out a plan for healthcare reform before the other candidates, forcing the other candidates to release competing plans that were likelier farther to the left than they were comfortable promising. It’s arguable that without the primary season pressure from the Edwards campaign, the initial gambit of the Democrats in the healthcare reform battle — one that included a public option — wouldn’t have been as strong, which would have meant an even weaker bill than the one that eventually was pushed past conservative Democratic opposition.
From TPM:
… Across the spectrum, experts are imploring political leaders not to be myopic and unyielding: delay the budget cuts until the economic recovery really takes hold, but be ready with a more considered course of deficit reduction when that moment arrives.
Yet Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, and their surrogates on Capitol Hill, are locked in a fight over which candidate and which party will more quickly and effectively reduce the deficit — the opposite of what economists say we need …
Huffington Post:
One of the most vexing elements of the Social Security debate, for both sides, is that so much of it comes down to basic math that it seems like it ought to be an easy thing to solve. We’re not talking about the cost of an MIR here. Yet the two sides can’t agree on much of anything. (Now, HuffPost Hill thinks that’s because the private-equity-funded side is just lying, but whatever.) So Daniel Marans, a young whippersnapper with the liberal Social Security Works, challenged Simpson to debate the program. We called up Simpson, and he quickly agreed. “All they have to do is read the [Bowles-Simpson] report and it tells you exactly what we plan to do with Social Security. It’s very clear. If they’ll read the report, then I’ll talk to them. I want them to read the 67 page report, especially what it says about Social Security and making it solvent for people their age,” he said. “But if they want to know how to save the system so that when they’re 65 they won’t get a check for 25 percent less, yes, I can try to help them.” (Under Simpson’s plan, which would raise the retirement age, they’d actually get zero at 65, but whatever.) Simpson said he worried the debate was “just gonna be a bunch of emotional claptrap,” but he said he was up for it nonetheless. HuffPost is happy to host, but we need a venue. Maybe the American Legion on Capitol Hill? We’re still working out the details, but we’re looking forward to this one.
You wouldn’t think that addressing child poverty would be such a controversial thing, would you?
According to a new report from the Office of Research at the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the U.S. has one of the highest rates of child poverty in the developed world. Of the 35 wealthy countries studied by UNICEF, only Romania has a child poverty rate higher than the 23 percent rate in the U.S.:
[The rate is] based on the definition of relative poverty used by the OECD. Under this definition,a child is deemed to be living in relative poverty if he or she is growing up in a household where disposable income, when adjusted for family size and composition, is less than 50% of the median disposable household income for the country concerned. By this standard, more than 15% of the 200 million children in the 35 countries listed in Figure 1b are seen to be living in relative poverty.
The top five positions in the league table are occupied by Iceland, Finland, Cyprus, the Netherlands and Norway (with Slovenia and Denmark close behind). All of these countries have relative child poverty rates below 7%. Another eight countries including two of the largest — Germany and France– have rates between 7% and 10%. A third group, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, post rates of between 10% and 15%. A further six, including populous Italy and Spain, show rates of between 15% and 20%. In only two countries are more than 20% of children living in relative poverty — Romania and the United States.
Bill Clinton going to Wisconsin…
