A very strange conversation between four Brookings senior fellows, alluded to yesterday. Jonathan Rauch starts with the observation that despite ideological calcification, the country's problems are too big for one party to handle alone, and thus what President Obama really needs is "Speaker Boehner." In response, Thomas Mann and Henry Aaron politely note that this is a pretty crazy point of view, rewarding Republicans for their single-minded pursuit of dealing Democrats policy defeat, particularly on the country's biggest problems, which was of course the reason Rauch gave in the first place for pursuing divided government. Then Isabel V. Sawhill comes along and judges the previous arguments to be all well and good, but the only way to fix Washington is to wait for "a leader who is able to articulate the need for more sensible and pragmatic solutions. Such a leader would start a movement of like-minded citizens that eventually culminates in a third party win of the presidency." It would seem that contrarian ideas are now indistinguishable from the conventional wisdom.
If you had suggested back in, say, August 2009 that Republicans leaders should "calm their followers" I would have agreed with you. But While Republicans should be doing the same thing today, is there any reason to believe it would be effective? Besides, wouldn't this just be viewed as Republicans conceding to the notion that the tea partiers are a bunch of unhinged right-wing extremists? Wouldn't those turncoat RINOs suddenly face a backlash from their own followers? No, I think it's safe to assume Republican leaders will continue to condemn violence and push the Cantor-Gingrichline that Democrats need to take "moral responsibility" for angering the public. They were just asking for it.
As I was saying yesterday, the reason I believe the right-wing criticism of Barack Obama's foreign policy is based more on fatal misunderstanding rather than outright deception is because of the ridiculous premises they bring to their critiques. For instance, here's National Review editor Kathryn Jean Lopezendorsing a suggestion from Rush Limbaugh that "Israel should just change its name to Iran." Matt Yglesias sees this as evidence of the dimwittedness of Lopez and Limbaugh, but what's happening here is that Limbaugh is making a dog-whistle joke that assumes the listener buys into the premise that Obama is appeasing Iran and abandoning Israel. Without buying that (obviously incorrect) premise, the joke makes no sense and it looks like the mental exercise of someone who lacks a functioning brain.
Remainders: Nobody could have predicted that the tea partiers hold utterly incoherent opinions about government socialism; the delay in implementing health-care reform, as Krugman reminds us, was to sate Congress' love of large, arbitrary numbers; state-level carbon pricing has thus far not led to the destruction of capitalism or America; the White House is aware of all internet traditions; and I wish I could get a $5 million advance to transcribe political gossip.
The Hill reports that in response to a probing letter sent from the ranking Republican on the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet Cliff Stearns, the head of the FCC, Julius Genachowski revealed that the flawed National Broadband Plan he recently delivered to Congress cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million to produce. That, frankly, is a considerable sum for a government report like this.
Some $4 million of that went to pay 78 temporary staffers, some who worked for the full eight months that the 360-page report took to produce, and others who only served at the commission for part of that time. Genachowski described that cadre of temporary feds as drawing its numbers from the ranks of "consulting firms, law firms, investment firms and operating businesses, as well as non-profits and other organizations." Reading the report, one suspects that it's not accidental that Genachowksi listed consultants first. But that's neither here nor there at the moment.
What is more relevant is that $20 million is a substantial amount of money to spend on a report that dances at the margins of the essential dynamic of America's communications infrastructure: The scene is monopolized by a handful of immensely powerful corporations, government hasn't proven itself an effective check, citizens end up with very expensive broadband that runs slowly, where it's available at all.
Figuring out how to change that dynamic would have been worth $20 million.
But we don't really know much more about how use the leverage of government to have telecom work better for citizens than we did eight months and several million dollars ago.
The problem is that this is standard operating procedure when in comes to the politics of communications. Comm policy is one area where the political cost of poor policymaking is low for politicians because just about everyone of their colleagues is equally bad. It's painful to watch because there's a real opportunity for the Democratic Party to become the party of connectivity, of opportunity through innovation. But when they spend $20 million without offering a challenge to the existing imbalance and don't get whacked on the back of the hand for it, what's the incentive for Democrats to get better on this stuff?
Few presidents get a second honeymoon of their own making. Barack Obama’s victory on health-care reform has breathed new life into his administration, recharged the Democratic base, and given the rest of America a sense of someone who fights for average working people.
The question now is: What does he do with his second honeymoon?
Some say it should be used to enact financial reform. Most Americans despise Wall Street and want to be assured there’s no repeat of the grotesque sequence of river-boat gambling with the economy followed by a taxpayer bailout followed by seven-and eight-figure bonuses. Democratic strategists would love to let Republicans hoist themselves on their own petard by defending Wall Street.
Financial reform surely needs bucking up. The bill passed by the House last year was riddled with loopholes, delays, and cop-outs for the Street. The one that’s emerging from the Senate Banking Committee is only slightly better. It still allows a world of unregulated derivative trading and hands the ball over to the same regulators that punted last time. It doesn’t even include Paul Volcker’s watered-down remake of the Glass-Steagall Act. And the Senate bill is likely to get even worse as Harry Reid and Chris Dodd troll for Republican support. In an election year when Wall Street money is flowing freely to both parties, watch your wallets.
Notwithstanding all this, the biggest Next Big Thing ought to be jobs.
Justin Charity talks to Joan Fitzgerald about making cities more sustainable:
The stimulus package passed by Congress last year included $43 billion in sustainable-energy investments, and a bill meant to reduce the country's contribution to climate change now waits in the Senate. But is national policy keeping pace with the strides many cities are taking toward sustainable development?
A January 2007 Prospect special report explored contemporary efforts in sustainable urban development throughout the U.S. One of the report's contributing writers, Joan Fitzgerald, is also the author of Emerald Cities: Urban Sustainability and Economic Development, which borrows its title from the report. TAP asked Fitzgerald, a public-policy program director at Northeastern University and professor of urban economic development, about what an emerald city looks like and what we need to do on a national level to help cities get there.
Today, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi turns 70. Liberal supporters sent thousands of roses to her office to celebrate her birthday. The speaker split the roses between the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and hill staffers to "thank them for all their hard work on the health reform legislation."
The blogosphere has been abuzz with the strange case of David Frum, who just got canned from his cozy sinecure at the American Enterprise Institute, probably the second-most-important think tank on the right (after the Heritage Foundation).
Frum has an excellent conservative pedigree. He was a speechwriter for George W. Bush, among other things, and he remains extremely conservative today. However, over the last year or so he has been making a name for himself as a reasonable conservative, one willing to call out the Republican Party when he thinks it's making a mistake. And that, apparently, is the problem. The last straw for AEI was apparently this post on Frum's blog, where he said, "Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s," and went on to lay the blame at the all-or-nothing strategy employed by the GOP leadership.
Frum's crime was not an ideological one but a partisan one. Apparently, not only is it forbidden to question GOP strategy when it's still being executed, it's even forbidden to question it after it has already failed.
What this demonstrates is that the GOP's greatest strength can also become a serious weakness. They're incredibly good at creating and enforcing unity -- far better than Democrats ever have been or ever could be. This manifests itself in many ways. The most obvious is legislative: They managed to keep every single one of their members from voting for this health-care plan, in both houses of Congress, as they have in other situations. Individual members were called upon to denounce things they had embraced in the past (like an individual mandate) in the most venomous of terms, which they dutifully did. Even those alleged moderates like Olympia Snowe got pulled into line when the vote came.
Republicans also show extraordinary rhetorical unity: Once they decide on a name for something (e.g. renaming the estate tax "the death tax"), every single one of them gets with the program. They have an enforcement system for those who consider straying from the course, which can include things like Rush Limbaugh going after you, which will immediately result in a flood of angry calls to your office.
This means that the Republican message is almost always clear and unambiguous, while the Democratic message is often muddled by internal disagreement. And just try to get Democrats to all repeat the same talking points -- it can't be done. Meanwhile, their colleagues from across the aisle can be counted on to say the same things over and over and over.
The down side of this skill at keeping the troops in line is that it doesn't allow much room for introspection. You'd think that right now, Republicans would be taking a good hard look at the strategy they decided upon when dealing with the Obama administration -- outright, complete, and total opposition -- and having a debate about whether it was a mistake. Throughout the course of this debate, you saw the difference between adherence to progressive ideology and adherence to Democratic partisanship every day. There were disputes over the public option, for instance, and endless complaints about the strategy the White House was employing.
But I can't recall any conservatives yelling that their leadership was screwing things up -- even though they were employing an extremely high-risk strategy, one that turned out to be a disaster. Mitch McConnell has argued that by keeping a united front, they reduced public support for the bill, which therefore increases their chances of winning seats in November. But on the substantive question, they still lost, which if you're not just a Republican but an actual conservative, ought to be the most important thing. But I guess not.
I hear GOP folks and Tea Partiers bemoaning the fact that media and Democrats are using the extremes of their movement for ratings and to score points. This is like Drew Brees complaining that Dwight Freeney keeps trying to sack him. If that were Martin Luther King's response to media coverage, the South might still be segregated. I exaggerate, but my point is that the whining reflects a basic misunderstanding of the rules of protest. When you lead a protest you lead it, you own it, and your opponents, and the media, will hold you responsible for whatever happens in the course of that protest. This isn't left-wing bias, it's the nature of the threat.
Nonviolence was a necessary political strategy because black people were not seen as American citizens entitled to the full protections of the law. The practiced, careful decorum of black protesters predates the 1960s -- think the silent protest in Harlem in 1919. The widespread belief that black people weren't people the way that white people were people informed the decisions of civil-rights leaders to choose nonviolence as a political strategy, in part because force could not possibly have worked. And as TNC points out earlier in the post, that conscious understanding that, as a black person, your public actions at protest reflect on black people as a whole, has not really changed.
The Tea Parties, by contrast, are a phenomenon of right-wing revanchism that sees itself as "taking back" a country that has been "stolen" from them. Their sense of entitlement changes the protest calculus. They simply can't imagine that any means they might use to "get their country back" would be seen as illegitimate. It was "theirs" to begin with. The social and political others they protest against are illegitimate for not recognizing their fundamental right to steer the ship of state, regardless of what elections say.
If you're walking into a protest with that in your head, you're not only going to not care about whether or not you're being rowdy, you're not going to understand why anyone else would object. It would be like someone telling you not to object to a stranger breaking into your room and ransacking your house.
-- A. Serwer
Bart Stupakis among the Democratic representatives who are reportedly receiving threats in the wake of the health-care bill's passage, some from anti-abortion groups he says he believes are from outside his district.
Stupak says his offices have been overwhelmed by phone calls, most of them from outside his congressional district, and some of them distinctly nasty in tone.
This is one of the calls: "You are ---- punk, Stupak. That's what you are. You and your family are scum. You oughta fill your pockets with lead and jump in the Potomac. Punk."
Congressman Stupak says, because of the threats, he's asked for additional security around his offices in Michigan and in Washington D.C.
The only surprise in the threats is that Republicans leaders are surprised, or at least feign surprise. Their violent rhetoric stirred up violence. And if Stupak is shocked that anti-abortion groups now equate his vote with baby-killing, he shouldn't be. He's the one who associated the health-care bill with abortion in the first place, though the rules preventing federal dollars from being spent on abortion were in place without his amendment.
Gabriel Arana on how the climate for immigration reform has changed since 2006:
Last Sunday, 200,000 immigrant-rights protesters shared the National Mall with a tea-party crowd that shouted racial epithets and spat at members of Congress. Unsurprisingly, the media focused on the histrionics of the tea partiers, but Sunday's immigration demonstration was an important manifestation of the movement's building impatience. In its enthusiasm and optics -- legal and undocumented immigrants chanting "Sí se puede," singing folk songs, and waving both American and Mexican flags -- the demonstration was reminiscent of the immigration protests in 2006.
Then, as now, immigration-rights advocates were banking on a president's campaign promise to reform the broken immigration system. But the parallel largely ends there. Without wanting to paint too rosy a picture of how the immigration-reform fight played out in 2006, at the very least it featured Republicans and Democrats coming together on legislation. The almost comical juxtaposition of the tea partiers and immigrant-rights demonstrations underscores a basic difference between 2006 and now: America has become a more hostile place for immigrants.
Greg Sargent has obtained a detailed chart from the Justice Department detailing the hundreds of terrorism-related convictions in civilian court, going back to the Bush administration when the practice was uncontroversial. The chart includes names, dates, the crimes they were charged with and the charges they were ultimately convicted of/pleaded guilty to.
The names are shifted into two categories: Category I, which includes "violations of federal statutes that are directly related to international terrorism and that are utilized regularly in international terrorism matters," and Category II, which includes "defendants charged with violating a variety of other statutes where the investigation involved an identified link to international terrorism." There are 403 names on the list, dating back to 2001.
The chart offers the strongest empirical rebuttal yet from the Justice Department regarding its continuation of the Bush-era multiple venue policy for dealing with terrorism cases. The problem for the Obama administration though, is the narrative. Having run against Bush-era national-security policies as a candidate, Obama has opted for continuity rather than change by keeping the military commissions. While the strongest counterargument to conservative hysteria on national security is that they're doing the same things Bush did, only better, it would undermine the administration's rhetoric about restoring the rule of law. So they're stuck trying to push two rather contradictory notions at the same time.
-- A. Serwer
After enduring months of criticism, the Obama administration has rolled out major changes to its flagging anti-foreclosure program. (Foreclosures rose at the end of last year, with some 1.6 million households in default.) Most notably, to help keep people in their homes, the program will force banks to severely reduce or eliminate mortgage payments from unemployed homeowners. Calculated Risk breaks down the provisions here.
At first glance, the changes seem like an important corrective to a troubled program, especially the new focus on allowing principal write-downs, which just shows that the Treasury folks have been reading TAP. A key concern, though, is that the program still relies on incentives that encourage lenders to make changes in loans -- including increasing payments for getting rid of a second lien -- which hasn't proved to be the most effective policy tool ever. On a conference call today, administration officials said they were confident in their judgment that the program would assist more troubled borrowers, but emphasized that it is targeted at a limited universe of foreclosures and that further data would be needed to see if their projections pan out.
“The enhancements announced today will be helpful to unemployed borrowers and some homeowners who find themselves underwater," John Taylor, the head of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, said today. "But I’m not optimistic that the incentives will be enough to entice servicers and investors to reduce loan principals. Will they help 7 million people who are at risk of foreclosure? I will be pleasantly shocked if investors step up for half a million borrowers. The real acceleration in the number of foreclosures prevented will come with mandatory principal write-downs.”
Over at Wonkroom, Andrew Jakabovicscalls the program "a modern version of the New Deal’s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation," noting the increasing popularity of principal reduction and concluding "insofar as the FHA refi program can largely sidestep the issue of servicer capacity, it has significant potential to alleviate the foreclosure crisis."
Shane Harris has some of the text of State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh's speech to the American Society of International Law last night defending the Obama administration's use of drone attacks as legal. Philip Alston, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions, has suggested in the past that the attacks might not be.
Koh argued that the U.S.' use of drones takes into account principles of "distinction" -- namely that the attacks are aimed at lawful enemy targets and not civilians -- and "proportionality," which "prohibits attacks that may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, that would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated."
Koh said that "great care is taken to adhere to these principles in both planning and execution, to ensure that only legitimate objectives are targeted and that collateral damage is kept to a minimum" and added that the "procedures and practices for identifying lawful targets are extremely robust."
As for the question of whether or not the drone attacks constitute unlawful extrajudicial executions, Koh said this:
A state that is engaged in armed conflict or in legitimate self-defense is not required to provide targets with legal process before the state may use lethal force. ... Thus, in this ongoing armed conflict, the United States has the authority under international law, and the responsibility to its citizens, to use force, including lethal force, to defend itself, including by targeting persons such as high-level al-Qaeda leaders who are planning attacks.
As to whether the strikes violate domestic laws against assassination:
Under domestic law, the use of lawful weapons systems -- consistent with the applicable laws of wear -- for precision targeting of specific high-level belligerent leaders when acting in self-defense or during an armed conflict is not unlawful, and hence does not constitute "assassination.”
There can be a case made that the second principle Koh cites, "proportionality," might be violated by the drone attacks. A study by Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann of the New America Foundation found that one-third of those killed by drones were civilians. As this map shows, the drone strikes often take place in Pakistan, which is technically outside the Afghan theater of war. The other question is whether or not the strikes themselves are counterproductive from a strategic standpoint, which some counterinsurgency types have argued.
At any rate, the ACLU wants a closer look at the legal process by which targets are determined and proportionality is assessed, and they've filed a FOIA lawsuit to that effect.
Brief flashback: Remember when the right was accusing Koh of believing Sharia law could apply in U.S. courts? Now he's providing the administration's legal justification for the killing of high level al-Qaeda targets. It's almost as if the accusations against him were baseless partisan smears from the same kind of people who are now attacking attorneys who defended detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
Gershom Gorenbergon Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's disastrous visit to Washington:
Mr. Netanyahu wanted badly to go to Washington. He wanted to warm himself in the worship of thousands of delegates at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's annual convention, far from the cacophony of his unruly ruling coalition. He knew that if he didn't get White House time during his visit, the media back home would report, chorally, that he'd caused a rift in relations with Israel's essential ally. To end the spat with the administration over Israeli construction in East Jerusalem, he made some half-publicized promises to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and got his invite to meet President Barack Obama.
And perhaps during this meeting he learned (if Benjamin Netanyahu ever learns) that you should be terribly careful what you wish for.
Deficit hawks are always on the hunt for excuses to fret over the budget, and The Wall Street Journal eggs them on by noting that rates rose a little bit on some Treasury bonds.
While this could be just “noise” in the markets, “I think it involves a greater, long-term concern about deficits in the U.S., about Social Security being in a deficit,” said Brian Fabbri, chief economist North America at BNP Paribas. “And all of the concerns about the U.S. have been heightened by concerns about Greece.”
Hmm. So it could just be market volatility, except for the Social Security deficit. Unless, and I'm going out on a limb here, what if Social Security is not in a deficit -- what if it is in fact in a surplus? That Center on Budget and Policy Priorities study might lead you to conclude that this is just noise, unless you're someone who is "bedeviled by the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be getting social insurance."
More broadly, this is what happens when you try to determine public policy from market movements: You get someone talking about a nonexistent program deficit. It's the same story with the so-called bond vigilantes, those mysterious figures who will ramp up interest rates when a Democratic administration runs a deficit but disappears into the bond-vigilante cave when Republicans do the same. The politics strike me as being more important than the economics. You may remember that the WSJ was warning of the return of bond vigilantes last spring, and we all know how that worked out: Yields and interest rates have remained stable.
Over the weekend, the angry crowds that Republicans had so effectively leveraged against the Democrats during the health-care debate crossed the line from asset to liability when the protesters began screaming slurs and, in one case, spitting in a lawmaker's face. There have also been acts of vandalism, and in one particularly frightening example, the gas line to the home of Virginia Rep. Tom Perriello's brother was cut after a Tea Party activist posted his address, thinking it belonged to the congressman. Jim Clyburn and Bart Stupak have had nooses faxed to their offices. Law enforcement held a briefing with Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday about how to deal with security threats.
Democrats have been quick to hold Republicans responsible for this behavior, accusing them of fanning the flames by portraying the Affordable Care Act as tyranny.
Yesterday, Minority Whip Eric Cantor sought to reverse the narrative, saying that he had also been threatened and someone had shot a bullet through the window of his campaign office in Richmond. He also said that it was Democrats, not Republicans, who were actually responsible for "fanning the flames" by ... pointing out the incidents:
"Any suggestion that a leader in this body would incite threats or acts against other members is akin to saying that I would endanger myself, my wife or my children," Cantor said. "It is reckless to use these incidents as media vehicles for political gain."
It turns out, though, that the Richmond police said the bullet was "randomly fired":
Richmond police say the bullet that hit a window of Republican Virginia Congressman Eric Cantor's office had been randomly fired skyward.
So in the midst of accusing Democrats of "using these incidents as media vehicles for political gain," Cantor misrepresented a random incident as an act of political intimidation or harassment, which it does not appear to have been.
There are always going to be crazy people doing crazy things, particularly at moments of political significance, and if nasty phone calls and juvenile threats are all that happens from now on, well, it's not really a big deal. This stuff happens. Democrats have been a bit precious in their response to these threats in order to make Republicans look bad. But it's also true that the GOP has spent the last year firing up its base with hyperbole about totalitarianism, and now that some small elements of that fired up base are starting to make the GOP look bad because they've taken these outsize complaints at face value. You can't complain about people using these incidents for "political gain" when you've spent the last year portraying every right-wing outburst as evidence of justifiable civil unrest in the face of impending tyranny.
From a profile of Bob Bauer, the recently appointed White House counsel who replaced Greg Craig in the position:
The office Bauer inhabits, while coveted, has become a career graveyard in recent years, bogging down a string of lawyers as they tried to square controversial administration ideas with the law and political reality. When Craig was pushed out of the counsel's office last fall, it was, in part, because critics had concluded that the Guantanamo order was ill-advised and lacked political support. More dramatically, Alberto Gonzales was lashed for his role in the George W. Bush administration's policies on torture, detention and secrecy, and is now, despite his stature as a former attorney general, teaching a single class on politics at Texas Tech University. Harriet Miers, who succeeded Gonzales as White House counsel, left the year after her 2006 nomination to the Supreme Court collapsed.
One of these things is not like the others! Which is to say, there is some qualitative difference between Craig, who chose to depart after pushing a principled but politically challenging policy, and Gonzales, who created the entire mess of illegal torture that Craig was trying to repair. (Miers just inspires pity; she was harshly rejected by the very conservative establishment she served throughout her life.)
Catching Craig in the broad brush stroke of "career graveyard" is especially strange considering that his career situation is pretty good: Two of the most important law firms in the country fought to hire him when he departed the White House, and now he's starting a surely lucrative new practice here in Washington. Could it be Karma?
The census Web site has long been dreadful, a circa-1995 dump of a place. Which is a pity, because they have some of the richest data in the world, yet to get at it you have to go through layers and layers of menus until you reach ... a downloadable excel file. If they had the will (and the time, and the money), they could make their site a cornucopia of informative, accessible, and interactive infographics. But they don't.
So it's nice to see that at least for the 2010 version of the census, the agency is doing some good stuff. The 2010 census site is all Obama-fied, with soothing blue tones, a blog, and friendly videos. There's even an interactive map, which allows you to see how your state, county, city, or even census tract is doing on returning its census forms. Here, for instance, is a zip code I chose at random (12345, which happens to be Schenectady, New York). You can see how they're doing compared to the country and their state, and how they did in 2000.
Although there's every reason to be skeptical, I suspect that Chris Dodd's statement that some members of the Republican congressional caucus are tiring of the "Party of No" strategy is probably correct. Particularly with newer members like Bob Corker, you have ask why these guys got into politics, and it's hard to make the case that it was simply to "toe the party line." The thing is, the incentive to provide a unified obstruction to the Democrats' agenda only made sense when that strategy had some purchase. Now that that strategy has failed to stop health-care reform, the Bob Corkers of the world are going to be more interested in putting their stamp on future legislation, assuming the impulse extends beyond Corker himself. Besides, it only takes one senator to bring the Senate's business to a halt.
Daniel Larison, in his ongoing examination of the absurdity of Barack Obama's foreign-policy critics, suggests that they are so invested in their caricature of the president as "the embodiment of everything they fear and hate" that it's simply too late to admit error and acknowledge that Obama is a "typical, boring center-left Democratic politician." While I can't read the mind of the critic in question, Victor Davis Hanson, I would gather from the tenor of his writing on the subject that he actually believes, like the rest of the gang at National Review, that the Obama presidency is destroying American exceptionalism and spearheading nothing less than a domestic insurrection of radical, foreign ideas. If that is true, then the bulk of the American Right, at least concerning foreign policy, is unbelievably stupid or insane. It's less disturbing to conclude that they are simply partisan hacks.
Our friend John Avlon (see here and here), author of such thought-provoking titles as Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America and Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics, has an item in The Daily Beast discussing a poll I alluded to a few days ago. The poll provides shocking evidence that large numbers of self-identified Republicans hold outrageous beliefs about President Obama. So what's the problem? The poll in question is worthless because it is methodologically unsound. For all we know, the poll could reflect reality, but we have no way of verifying that, and Avlon doesn't bother to inform his readers about such details; he's just looking for evidence to corroborate his thesis, regardless of its validity.
Remainders: Today's lesson in false choices is brought to you by Max Boot; Meg Whitman wants to be California's CEO pretty badly for someone who didn't even bother registering to vote until eight years ago; I'm having trouble believing that a "very interesting conversation" could be had between Jonah Goldberg and Glenn Reynolds on our political zeitgeist; we have a few new additions to the "Obama needs a Republican Congress" fan club; Judd Gregg is a national treasure; and David Frum, apostate of the conservative think-tank circuit, frees fellow apostate Bruce Bartlett to comment on the closing of the conservative mind.
Above, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona is one of many Democratic lawmakers who have reported receiving threats since the House passed the health-care reform bill Sunday. Some top Republicans, like minority leader John Boehnerhave condemned it, but today Minority Whip Eric Cantor today accused Democrats of trying to exploit the issue for political gain.
(Flickr/The Udall Legacy Bus Tour: Views from the Road)
A few weeks ago, I noted that the Defense Department had offered its support for consumer financial protection; here is a copy of the letter [PDF] that DOD sent to Treasury. Today, Secretary Tim Geithner followed up by meeting with David Julian, the director of the DoD's Office of Personal Finance, and a number of other advocates for military families and consumers. Military families have experienced serious problems with consumer finance, particularly around predatory auto lending, that are indicative of broader problems in the system.
"[Consumer financial protection] is not just about making sure that American taxpayers don’t have to see their money used to bail out large financial institutions in the future," Geithner said. "It’s about providing basic protections for consumers across the country from the kind of predation, abuse that was the center of this financial crisis. A basic responsibility of government is to provide that kind of protection."
Julian was more emphatic about the importance of the agency. "DOD firmly believes that the financial readiness of their troops and families equates to mission readiness and anything that we can do to help our families be financially ready, we will support the family and the mission," he said.
This is first time that Treasury has promoted a consumer-finance meeting to the media; it's clear they see the burgeoning alliance between the military and consumer advocates as a useful avenue to pursue the creation of a strong consumer regulator. Will Republicans oppose protections that will help keep military families from being the victims of predatory lending now that a vote against consumer protection is a vote against mission readiness?
Gabriel Aranasays opponents of gay rights have long relied on disgust to justify discrimination, but recent legal gains suggest this argument is losing its potency.
The most incendiary evidence presented in court last January in the effort to overturn California's Proposition 8 -- the ban on same-sex unions adopted by the state's voters in 2008 -- dealt with whether prejudice had motivated the ban's advocates. Video footage and documents from the "Yes on 8" campaign showed its organizers claiming, for example, that gays are 12 times more likely than straight people to molest children and that the "homosexual agenda" includes legalizing pedophilia. If gay marriage were allowed to continue in California, one "Yes on 8" organizer wrote, "every child, when growing up, would fantasize [about] marrying someone of the same sex." And if the measure did not pass, he warned, the states would fall "one by one into the hands of Satan." In a simulcast rally, campaigners compared gay marriage to September 11.
To many Americans, it seems bizarre to think of gay marriage as a threat comparable to terrorism. Those who have gay friends see them pursuing fulfillment in familiar ways: raising healthy children, working, and living beside us. Nonetheless, Proposition 8's campaigners seem to have tapped into a feeling shared by enough California voters to get the measure passed. In her new book, From Disgust to Humanity, University of Chicago philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that visceral appeals to disgust -- as opposed to rational principles -- lie at the heart of contemporary laws targeting gay people, particularly gay men. Some philosophers and ethicists have defended the use of disgust as a moral barometer, but Nussbaum contends that such an approach is incompatible with the goals of a fair and equitable society.
What may be surprising to some is that laws targeting gays and lesbians are, in historical terms, fairly recent. Although Anglo-American legal tradition has long included laws against sodomy, these prohibitions were part of general bans on non-procreative sexual activity; it was only in the late 19th century that specific laws were enacted targeting "homosexual acts." Nussbaum hazards that the shift is related to Victorian morality, but a more compelling explanation is that laws targeting gays and lesbians came about simultaneously with the emergence of the homosexual as a social identity in the 19th century. A distinct identity and targeted repression came together.
Every Republican in the Senate has written President Obama warning him not to appoint Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board:
"We are writing to urge you to not act in contravention of the bipartisan Senate vote against the nomination of Craig Becker to be a Member of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) through a recess appointment," the senators said. "To do so would disregard the Senate's constitutional responsibility of advice and consent."
Aside from the fact that even Obama's nemesis Chief Justice John Roberts is urging him to man up and make some recess appointments, Republicans have already acknowledged that their strategy is universal opposition to anything the administration wants to do, making the threat meaningless. Republicans have already killed all the hostages, and now they're demanding a chopper and a billion dollars transferred to a Swiss bank account. What's the point?
While Republicans were uniformly mobilized against health-care reform, labor pulled out all the stops to help the administration get the votes it needed to pass the bill. Punishing your friends and rewarding your enemies isn't good politics. Obama should give Becker a recess appointment, and while he's at it, he should appoint Dawn Johnsen to head the Office of Legal Counsel and end the more than yearlong farce surrounding her appointment. If Republicans don't like it, they can start actually offering something in exchange rather than just making demands.
-- A. Serwer
A week or so ago, when labor dropped its complaints about the health-care bill -- the lack of a public option, the excise tax's effect on union-negotiated health-care plans -- and threw its full weight behind the bill, a union correspondent e-mailed this note: "Unions: The Folks who do Social Solidarity for a Living." Indeed, even though Democrats were generally unresponsive to labor concerns -- and millions of other Americans would be, typically, free-riding on union efforts to get the bill over the line -- the big union coalitions did their part to get the needed votes.
Stephen Greenhouse, the Times' excellent labor reporter, looks into labor's work on the next big issue, financial reform. Labor has been there since even before the crisis, nurturing experts like the AFL-CIO's Damon Silvers, who now serves on the Congressional Oversight Panel, and acting as the central and most critical force behind Americans for Financial Reform. Now, they're leveraging their complex relationship with the financial sector -- as populist critics, as employees, as investors, and, occasionally, as allies -- to support reforms to limit risk and prevent future crises.
It's often been noted that there is no natural constituency for financial reform, aside from everyone outside of the banking industry, which is a tough group to organize. Labor, a relatively small chunk of the political world, has thrown resources into the fray on behalf of its members, and everybody else. While it's certainly true that labor has been leveraging its work to improve its contract negotiations and organizing, and occasionally painting with too broad a brush, just as with health care, they're shouldering a heavy burden on behalf of a lot of working people who aren't even involved in unions. Would it be so bad to make organizing more democratic?
I'll admit to being surprised at the warm reception that greeted the National Broadband Plan's arrival. There are grumblings that the Federal Communications Commission kinda snookered the press reaction by releasing an executive summary that seemed ambitious and provocative, coloring initial reactions to the report itself. But once you dig into the policy details of the report, it becomes clear that what the authors delivered to Congress doesn't have the comprehensiveness or ambition to really give America the broadband boost it badly needs. Check out this chart, for example, showing how the U.S.' new target for universal availability of broadband by 2020 compares around the world:
The report praises a 4Mbps download goal as "aggressive" and "one of the highest universalization targets of any country in the world." But a couple things complicate matters. First, and this one's a biggie, is that if you check the date column of the chart you'll notice that the U.S. goal is for a decade from now. South Korea's, for example, is for two years ago. It was a goal set years before that. The monstrous footnote that the FCC included along with that chart actually reveals that South Korea's new target is for 95 percent of households to have 50Mbps links by 2013. More than 10 times faster, and five years earlier. The National Broadband Plan puts the U.S. in good stead to compete with the UK in 2020, just as long as Britain remains in suspended animation until then.
But the problem isn't even the goals. The problems run throughout the report. The big, big missing element is competition, which is hardly mentioned in the report. If this was the Bush FCC, that would have been expected. But from the Obama FCC, it's disappointing. The lack of competition in the American broadband market makes broadband both slower and more expensive. And yet, as one person deeply involved in the field said with a bit of snark, "We have a National Broadband Plan that never even uses the words 'monopoly' or 'duopoly.'"
I'm loathe to disparage the hard work of the people behind the report, but Congress gave the FCC a mandate to drool over. They asked them to come up with a comprehensive, ambitious vision for connecting America for years to come. What came back to them reads like a consultant's 300-page collection of best practices everyone agrees on, a sprinkling of good ideas, and a bunch of catchphrases like "100 Squared" (100 Mbps in 100 million homes) that come across as if they were snuck in at the last minute to spice things up and give the press something to write about. There have been high hopes for this FCC because of chair Julius Genachowski's work as the Obama campaign's tech guru. But this is an incredibly politically safe document, designed to offend no one. Except maybe me.
The National Broadband Plan was a missed opportunity. I still don't know why we don't hear more people saying it.
I teach a class at a local university, and in preparing for this week's session on health communication campaigns, I came across this bizarre public service announcement from Canada from the 1980s, which appears not to be a parody. The refrain of the song goes, "Drugs, drugs, drugs. Which are good, which are bad? Drugs, drugs drugs. Ask your mom or ask your dad!" The somewhat mixed message is that there are some drugs we get from the doctor, which are good and help us feel better when we're sick. Then there are other drugs which are bad, because they might get you in trouble with the law -- as evidenced by the world's friendliest cops, who apparently will punish you if they catch you with any by dancing around with you. If your mom or dad aren't around to tell you the difference, you can identify the bad drugs, because they'll be in black and white.
We learned yesterday that the California initiative to legalize marijuana for recreational use in the state has qualified for November's ballot. So the Golden State's voters will have the chance to move that drug from the "bad" column to the "good" column. According to the Los Angeles Times, the pro side hopes to raise $20 million, from such big time donors as George Soros (a longtime advocate of decriminalization) and George Zimmer, the Men's Wearhouse guy (who knew?). But what about the opposition? According to various news reports, associations of law-enforcement officers are organizing it. Which is a little curious, since I can't imagine cops really like spending all their time arresting people for possession. Polls have shown Californians favoring legalization, but by fairly slim margins. So this promises to be a very close vote.
It's just shocking that it's happening so soon. Sen. Chuck Grassleyis sending e-mails trumpeting a component of the health-care reform bill he ultimately voted against.
'The health-care legislation signed into law yesterday includes provisions Grassley co-authored to impose standards for the tax exemption of charitable hospitals for the first time,' he said. 'The provisions enacted in the new health-care law are the result of Grassley's leadership on tax-exempt organizations' accountability and transparency, including hospitals.'
Yes, that's Grassley taking credit for the health-care bill. The same bill that some of his Republican colleagues say they want to repeal. The same bill that 13 Republican attorneys general say is unconstitutional.
So, while Sen. John Ensign is busy showing cartoons of Trojan horses on the Senate floor during the vote-o-rama on the health-care bill's fixes, the rest are secretly gearing up to take credit for the reform they know will ultimately be popular. The annoying part is the extent to which angry voters scared of change believe the nonsense.
In today's New York Times, Brendan Nyhancautions Democrats not to convince themselves that now that health-care reform has passed, people will stop believing in death panels and socialist takeovers. "While some of the more outlandish rumors may dissipate, it is likely that misperceptions will linger for years, hindering substantive debate over the merits of the country's new health care system. The reasons are rooted in human psychology."
He points to some compelling research that he has performed, indicating that people continue to believe untrue things even in the face of correction. And sometimes, telling them the truth actually increases their certainty about the false thing they believe (e.g. that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, or that Bush's tax cuts decreased the deficit). The most plausible explanation is that, faced with a refutation that undermines a belief in which they're ideologically invested, people exert cognitive effort to argue against it and convince themselves even more strongly.
Near the end of the piece, Nyhan says, "Even after the insurance expansion is complete, it’s not clear that direct contact will correct the public's mistaken beliefs — remember the town hall participant who told a Republican congressman last summer to "keep your government hands off my Medicare?" This is a valid argument -- but only to a point. Let's keep in mind that the subjects on which Nyhan has tested this effect are remote. The deficit may be a real thing, but to an individual it's an abstract calculation. Saddam's phantom weapons existed half a world away and we never saw them in the first place. So it can be easy to convince ourselves they were there all along, but were spirited away to Syria (the Hannity explanation).
Health care, on the other hand, is something we actually experience. Nyhan correctly points out that many of the provisions of reform won't take effect for years, but once they do, people will have direct, personal experience with them. It will be awfully hard to tell people that, for instance, the insurance exchanges represent an assault on their freedom if they've actually visited their state's exchange and liked what they found. You can tell people that if a reform passes, a government bureaucrat will be getting between them and their doctor, but it's much harder to tell them that a government bureaucrat is currently getting between them and their doctor if things between them and their doctor seem to be going just fine.
There are certainly opinions that won't be dented by the success of reform. But let's think again about that senior citizen telling government to keep its hands off his Medicare. He may be more distrustful of government than progressives would like. But one thing you can say about him is this: He loves his Medicare. Republicans know that, which is why they pretend they favored Medicare all along. If the same ends up being true of the system this reform puts in place, then that will be more than enough to celebrate.
Until Congress can pass a full repeal, this is pretty good news:
The changes raise the level of officer authorized to initiate a fact-finding inquiry into a case, the level of officer who can conduct an inquiry and of the one that can authorize a dismissal.
To discourage the use of overheard statements or hearsay, from now on any evidence given in third-party outings must be given under oath, Mr. Gates said. Cases of third-party outings also have included instances in which male troops have turned in women who rejected their romantic advances or jilted partners in relationship have turned in a former lover.
Some kinds of confidential information also will no longer be allowed, including statements gays make to their lawyers, clergy, psychotherapists or medical professionals in the pursuit of health care.
Obviously full repeal is necessary. But what this new policy effectively does is put the burden on the outer, forcing them to commit to a substantial effort to get someone discharged. It's one thing to whisper in someone's ear, or tell people what "you've heard." It's another to put your own butt on the line under oath in support of a frivolous accusation. That's a pretty strong disincentive. I wouldn't be surprised if DADT discharges slowed to a trickle because of the new guidelines.
All pundits -- even those of us who foresaw that the strength of the Obama administration would be its capacity for patience -- should be hesitant about predictions after the latest round of sharp turns in American politics. But it seems likely that Republicans will have a bit of a scramble over the next few months in deciding what their stance toward the health-reform law should be. “Repeal and Replace” seemed to be the slogan of choice on Sunday night, but by Monday, a proclamation from Eric Erickson of RedState.com warned that "any Republican who says we will repeal and replace will themselves be replaced. We want repeal, period." On Tuesday, William Kristol, in a “Special Editorial” in the Weekly Standard, tried to split the difference: "The message will have to be not just repeal but also replace -- replace Obamacare with sensible reforms. … But the details of the replacing and reforming are secondary. Repeal is the heart of the matter.” (He also usefully modified the Republican prediction that health reform would be Obama's "Waterloo." It is actually his "Borodino," we're now told. Whatever...)
Wednesday’s Financial Timesquotes former Rep. Vin Weber, a key ally of Newt Gingrich in the 1990s: “I would expect that by September the Republicans will have come up with some constructive ideas for office. The Republican line should be ‘repeal, reform and replace’. Not just ‘repeal’.”
This will not be an easy choice. “Repeal,” without qualification, energizes the base (Erickson’s readers), but involves giving up the more popular benefits of the legislation, which also take effect earlier, such as coverage of pre-existing conditions. “Replace” calls on Republicans to be at least a little specific about what they would replace it with, and after a while, repeating the phrase “our market-based solutions” won’t cut it. “Reform” seems like soft soap, and Weber’s suggestion that “by September the Republicans will have come up with some constructive ideas” begs the question of what they were doing for the last 15 months, when the issue was live.
It’s easy to see something like the Republican reaction to TARP before the 2008 election, in which their rather transparent scramble to find the politically winning approach was more damaging than any single strategy would have been.
But there remains one wild card -- process. Republicans succeeded in turning public opinion against the bill only by creating the perception that the process was corrupt, or at least messy, exacerbating the natural anxiety about change in health care. Concerns about process can be expected to fade quickly, just as they did with the Medicare Part D Act -- a genuinely corrupt vote, with monetary bribes on the floor of the House -- in 2005. But process sometimes has power -- the 1994 Contract With America, it’s often forgotten, was as much about process reforms as substance, reinforced by some late Democratic corruption stories and the messy (again, thanks only to Republican mischief-making) final passage of that year’s crime bill. If events later this year reinforce the sense that there is a continuous pattern of congressional corruption, with Democrats at least as much to blame as Republicans, it could be possible to reignite discomfort with the health-reform bill in the electoral context.
So it’s time for the administration and congressional Democrats to reclaim the upper hand on issues of process. It's more than regulations on lobbyists. It's campaign finance reform, congressional ethics, earmarks reform (not fiscally significant, but symbolic). Don't create an opening to revisit what originally made the public hesitant about health reform.
For the first time since the Public Policy Institute of California started keeping track, a majority (50 percent) of Californians favor allowing same-sex marriage. In their statistical samples, the number had never risen above 45 percent. This is consistent with Nate Silver's statistical prediction showing California would "turn" in 2010 -- and also good news for those currently collecting signatures to put a Prop. 8 repeal on the ballot this year. Love, Honor, Cherish has gone ahead with the repeal effort in spite of opposition from Equality California, the group that spearheaded the "No on 8" campaign, which is shooting for 2012. However, the groups did collaborate on the initiative's proposed language:
Marriage is between only two persons and shall not be restricted on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, gender, sexual orientation, or religion.
The sooner Prop. 8 is repealed -- or overturned by a court -- the better, but I must admit that I am hesitant to push for 2010 at the risk of another demoralizing defeat.
Three years after serving a bid for robbery, Glenn Martin tried to register to vote in his state. In New York, formerly incarcerated people are allowed to vote once they complete parole. A few weeks later, the Bronx Board of Elections sent him a letter telling him he wasn't eligible.
"After getting out and finding a job and working my way up the career ladder, I purchased property, I was paying property taxes, income taxes, child support, all the things everyone else pays," Martin says. "I wanted to be engaged in the process."
It turned out the Bronx Board of Elections was mistaken, and Martin was eventually able to register. At the time, Martin was working as a policy analyst for a legal advocacy group, and he knew the board had made a mistake, so he was able to correct it.
Republican Congressional Candidate Corey Poitier, who is running for Kendrick Meek's seat in Florida, is working hard for some angry white votes:
From WPLG in Miami: "Corey Poitier, who is running for U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek's seat, delivered a passionate speech against the health care reform bill Monday night to Broward County Republicans. During the speech, Poitier addressed the President by saying 'Listen up, Buckwheat…'
"I wasn't meaning him any harm. Maybe it was a little insensitive," Poitier said. "It's a term that my brother and I use. It was kind of a way of saying, 'dummy,' like when I say to my brother, 'Hey, Buckwheat, cut that out.' That's what it was."
Look, this explanation wouldn't be plausible if it were a white person saying it, and it's laughable with a black person saying it. Poitier is offering to act as an alibi for his audience's racial hostility toward Obama by putting the president in his place with the use of an old-school racial slur. It's a testament to the ongoing power of conservative white guilt that some Republicans feel uncomfortable expressing racial hostility directly but are perfectly comfortable allowing a black person to do so on their behalf, because they think that protects them from a charge of racism.
But the phenomenon itself undermines the illusion. Regardless of the actual individual opinions of the Broward County Republicans, it's clear that Poitier thought he could win some points with them by referring to Obama as "Buckwheat." That not only says something about what Poitier thinks of the people whose support he's after, it says something about the Republican Party in general that their black candidates see a path to power in expressing right-wing racial animus.
As for Poitier, this hustle is as old as Booker T. Washingtontelling white folks "niggahs" didn't have enough sense not to steal chickens. Except circumstances being what they were back in the day, it was hard to knock Washington's hustle, especially since Washington had a bigger goal in mind. Poitier just wants a seat in Congress.
Yesterday, Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin did something that's not often done in Washington: Invited to give a speech at the Chamber of Commerce, he went, and called them liars.
It is so puzzling that, despite the urgent and undeniable need for reform, the Chamber of Commerce has launched a $3 million advertising campaign against it. That campaign is not designed to improve the House and Senate bills. It is designed to defeat them. It is designed to delay reform until the memory of the crisis fades and the political will for change dies out.
... The Chamber has every right to oppose those policies with which its members disagree. But as a leading, respected institution, the Chamber also has an obligation to be honest – with you, its members, and with the American people.
...This Center – the Chamber of Commerce Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness – sponsors a website, Stop the CFPA .com. In answer to the question, "what is the CFPA?" that website says the following:
It says the House has passed a bill that would "go so far as to dictate and require `plain vanilla' products, assuming federal bureaucrats know what is best for consumers." That is false. The bill creates no such authority. Neither does the Senate bill.
As the tea-party folks might say, "read the bill."
It goes on in that vein for a bit, and it is worth reading. The scene was, apparently, deliciously awkward. Of course, calling out the chamber now is a bit late in coming; their strategy was clear in September if not before.
Equally exciting is that the Democrats may finally be willing to test the GOP's threats to filibuster a financial reform bill on the floor -- abouttime. At a meeting yesterday between Sen. Chris Dodd, Rep. Barney Frank, and President Barack Obama, the legislators were urged not to give up too much ground in search of Republican votes; later on, even Sen. Bob Corker admitted he thought it would be hard to maintain his caucus' unity in opposing even a vote on this bill. He went so far as to recognize that Republicans should have begun working with Democrats earlier on in the process rather than delaying.
As nice as it is to see the gears turning and the president's focus reorienting toward financial reform, the Dodd bill as it stands should not be passed by a partisan vote. If Dems want to go it alone, they should pass a strong financial reform bill that represents the greater clarity of Dodd's original vision from November and includes a real consumer financial protection agency, tighter derivatives reform, and more clarity on leverage and capital requirements, not a bill that contains awkward compromises but gains no political support by them.
Like I was saying the other day, the main force driving the hatred of health-care reform seems to be the fear that there's a shift afoot which will make the rich slightly less rich, and the poor slightly less impoverished. David Leonhardt gets at this in his great article on wealth inequality in today's Times, and observes that the Affordable Care Act is the first serious effort to reverse the Dickensian course America undertook beginning with Ronald Reagan. This is why wonkish conservatives like Paul Ryan are suddenly talking about first principles instead of public policy: The public doesn't want government policy that says if bad luck befalls you, tough shit -- you're on your own.
As Tea Party thugs go on a rampage around the country threatening, targeting (literally), and vandalizing Democrats, this is a good time to ask, once again, who these people are and what they want. Quinnipiac has the unsurprising polling results: white and Republican. More interesting is the evidence that the organizers behind the most activist Tea Party groups are veterans of past conservative mobilization efforts, mostly to the benefit of the Republican Party. It remains to be seen whether this will have an impact on the November elections, although I still think it adds a variable of uncertainty, particularly in contested Republican primaries.
After teetering on the brink of irrelevance for years, the Republican Party (1860-2010) finally ceased to exist late Tuesday, leaving its former members to aimlessly shuffle about the Capitol, incoherently mumbling about socialism and procedural rules. It isn't clear yet whether the elected officials, once members of an alleged "Grand Old Party," were aware that they no longer knew how to govern. Retired members of the former GOP went on record to promise that their currently unnamed political coalition, should it win majorities in the November elections, would use that victory to shut down the federal government. A particularly dazed-looking Mitch McConnell, formerly the minority leader of the extinct political party, was last seen wandering the Hart Senate Office Building, complaining when reached for comment about working past 2 PM.
It is ironic that the real insight of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism is not the book's porous thesis but rather its power of foretelling the devolution of "conservative" thought into mindless diatribes about our impending totalitarian nightmare. Here's the latest contribution to that devolution, which the editors of National Review presumably fully endorse: "I expect that the Battle of the Electorate is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of a nonsocialist America. Upon it depends our own American way of life and the long continuity of our institutions and our history." That's what I call a very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care.
Remainders: This business of conservative hero Scott Brown thinking that Rachel Maddow will challenge him for re-election because of a tweet from a state Democratic Party chairman is a reminder that the belief that elections can be won through technology holds a great deal of sway in the Republican Party; Lindsey Graham remains an enigma; and Chuck Grassley is a national treasure.
Christiane Amanpour at Davos in 2009. Amanpour was picked to head This Week on ABC, infuriatingTom Shales at The Washington Post who, in turn, infuriated everyone else.
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