Look at that, Obama went on FOX News after all, as it was reported he would! I guess I was right, White House denials don't exactly hold a lot of water.
Anyway, on the substance of the interview (almost had to link to FOXNews.com there), there was nothing spectacular except improving FOX's ratings, although there is a nit I want to pick with him and members of Congress over the Stupak and Hyde amendments.
GARRETT: Will you sign legislation on health care that includes the Stupak language?
OBAMA: You know, I think that there is a balance to be achieved that is consistent with the Hyde amendment -- what existed before we reformed health care.
I believe in the basic idea that federal dollars shouldn't pay for abortions. But I also think we shouldn't restrict women's choices, so, I think there's some negotiations going on, not just on the Democratic side, but I think among people of good will on both sides, to see if we can arrive at something that meets that criteria and I'm confident we can do that.
This goal- essentially, we should use Hyde as our baseline and if we get back to that, all is well- was repeated by Sen. Boxer immediately after the Stupak vote:
This amendment is unfair and discriminatory toward women. It singles them out as a group and would deny women access to a legal medical procedure by dictating what a woman can do with her own private funds. We've had a compromise in place for decades that has been fair. Anything that disrupts that compromise is a huge step back for women.
What I question is why that is our goal. I understand that as an organizing mechanism, if I'm trying to defeat Stupak, I should reassure colleagues that the pre-Stupak bill won't change Hyde to get them to vote against Stupak. Fine. But there's a difference between that and endorsing Hyde as a great, sacred compromise in the public realm. Here's what they should be saying instead: "you know, Major, I think the Hyde amendment is a terrible restriction on the rights of women. But the health care reform bill without the Stupak amendment will NOT affect existing Hyde regulations." Period.
This is an opportunity to talk about how restrictive Hyde is, not endorse it, and no one is taking advantage of it- not our national pro-choice organizations, not many of the most pro-choice members of Congress. I'm not saying the votes are there to repeal Hyde. I am saying this is an opportunity to explain to Americans around the country how screwed up women's reproductive health for a huge percentage of the workforce. I didn't even know the entire federal workforce, their families, military personnel, and women in DC are denied coverage under Hyde until this vote happened. It's also an opportunity to educate the views of pro-choice members of Congress, because as Rep. DeGette told Paul Rosenberg, referring to her colleagues, "So they thought, 'Well if this is just Hyde, then no big deal.'" That is crazy that even pro-choice members of Congress would think that.
We have some work to do, and endorsing Hyde as acceptable should not be the goal.
On December 22, 2008, a retaining wall burst at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston coal-fired power plant, releasing more than a billion gallons of coal combustion waste-a volume of ash and water was 100 times greater than the amount of oil spilled in the Exxon Valdez disaster. The water flooded more than 300 acres, and the cleanup cost has been estimated at over a billion dollars.
There are 44 coal combustion waste sites nationwide that EPA has identified as posing a "high hazard", but on Friday, Senator Barbara Boxer said in a press conference that the EPA says the locations cannot be released to the public--although it has notified local officials, including first responders.
EPA's refusal came after consultation with the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Homeland Security. Boxer praised the EPA for it's swift action in collecting the information, but strongly criticized the refusal to make the information public:
However, I am concerned that the EPA, after consulting with the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Homeland Security, has indicated that they cannot make the list of "high hazard" sites public.
We are pursuing whether the handling of these sites is consistent with the handling of other similar facilities, because of the critical importance of the public's right to know about threats in their communities. If these sites are so hazardous and if the neighborhoods nearby could be harmed irreparably, then I believe it is essential to let people know.
In that way, they can press their local authorities who have responsibility for their safety to act now to make the sites safer.
This sort of secrecy was SOP under Bush/Cheney. Is it yet more "change we can believe in"?
This sort of Cheneyesque action has become so routine it's like it's not even eyebrow-raising any more. Of course, there's not just a public right to know issue here. There's also the fact that people alerted to such dangers could help contribute to grassroots opposition to further bogus "clean coal" scams, and the like. So it really raises questions about who's responsible for such decisions, and what sort of corporate or industry connections they might have.
So it's a lazy Sunday, and the Presidential race looks like it'll come down to environmental factors. I put up a post about four months ago (can't find it now) in which I basically echoed the thesis that Obama would win if the economy melted down prior to the election, but would only probably win if it didn't. I'm not good at predicting electoral outcomes, and despite giving out mounds of advice, I don't believe in backseat strategizing. I think you execute based on what you know, and that the Obama team has done. Given the financial crisis, this strategy is doing just fine - the country wants a steady centrist hand on the tiller. And now the 60 vote threshold in the Senate is possible, with Liddy Dole 'certain' to lose according to McCain officials and McConnell getting pounded in the polls.
So what does this mean? Well, I don't really know, but I'm going to assume that the Senate, as the most conservative institution on our Federal level, will be a major breeze to the right in terms of health care, trade agreements, civil liberties, economic justice, etc. Let's then examine the playing field for 2010; the environment for 2010 is unpredictable and probably chaotic, with a sharp recession on its way and a credit crisis here now.
I'm particularly interested in possible primaries to the Democrats, the party that the lobbyists are going to fete repeatedly and intensely in 2009 and 2010, much to our chagrin. I'm sure there will be retirements, but here's the list of Democrats up for reelection.
Senator Daniel Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii, who is the chairman of the defense appropriations subcommittee and a friend of Mr. Stevens, said that "he is innocent until proven guilty." Mr. Inouye said he did not expect that the indictment would interfere with Senator Stevens's ability to work in the Senate.
Other lawmakers, including Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, the chairwoman of the ethics committee, said they needed to know more about the indictment before commenting.
Question: How hard is it to say 'An indictment is a serious matter, though I can't comment specifically because I haven't seen it'? Answer: Not very.
Something serious is rotten in DC.
UPDATE: I'm reading the comments, and people are defending this crap. Have you not been watching war funding, FISA, Lieberman-Warner, Countrywide scandals, the Housing bill, the Wall Street bailout, oil subsidies, the Energy bill, the endorsements of Joe Lieberman in 2006, the Alito confirmation, etc?
The Senate is a damn club. I'm not saying these are bad people, though some of them are, just that they are part of a rotten system that compels them to make immoral choices. They deserve criticism for it, they are the MOST empowered parts of society. The sooner we learn this the sooner we can start to fix it, but if you keep denying that these people are part of a corroded system it won't get better. We're supposed to be smart activists, not blind obedient morons following elitist DC Democrats off a cliff.
Is everyone that comments part of the 9% of the country that approves of Congress? Do you realize how out of touch you are when you defend this kind of behavior? Don't you see that when you cheer the Bush Department of Justice and excuse the enabling Democrats in the Senate you are part of the problem?
Update again: And Inouye held a fundraiser for Stevens earlier this year. Ah, postpartisanship.
Today in Roll Call, I'm reading a funny little exchange about the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act which subsidizes businesses and sort of imposes an economy-wide cap on carbon emissions. The bill is strongly backed by Barbara Boxer and most of the major green groups, with the prominent exception of Friends of the Earth (and a weaker opposition from LCV and the Sierra Club).
"We are about to take up the most important fight of our generation, and we have no strategy, no message and no plan to get out of this," one senior Senate Democratic aide said....
"Boxer is walking us off a cliff," another senior Senate Democratic aide said.
[H]ere's a proposal to inspire a transformational focus by our candidates. On every issue, with every group of activists, politicians who claim to be doing transformational work should be required to prove it. All politicians who seek your support should produce articles, videos, transcripts--anything that demonstrates that they are challenging the conservative assumptions that frame virtually all discussions of public policy among America's elected officials. How do we talk about abortion? As a duel between "prochoice" and "prolife" extremists--or as an issue of basic human freedom for women denied the power to control their own bodies? What do we say about health insurance? That it requires a delicate balance between the free market and socialism--or that it is an essential investment in our most important national resource and a basic right, without which our commitment to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is meaningless.
The key here is to measure a candidate's progressive transformational potential not by his or her voting record on a checklist of policy issues, but to what degree that candidate is willing to challenge conservative frames themselves. I'm not sure if we have such a linguistic wordsmith either in Congress or as a sitting Governor, but I can think of one politician who has consistently pushed the envelope and engaged in actual fights--often successfully--on subjects that no other Democrat would touch. That person is Senator Russ Feingold.
From narrowly winning re-election in 1998 despite rejecting "soft" money from the DCCC and eventually passing campaign finance reform into law, to being the lone vote against the Patriot Act and leading a coalition to block a renewal of the law as is four years later, to becoming the first Senator to propose a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq before such a bill passed the Senate two years later (not to mention for over 60% of the country to come to agree with that position), to offering a censure motion against President Bush, to working with Chris Dodd to block telecom immunity, by personal filibuster if necessary, no other Democrat in the Senate even comes close to Feingold's consistent willingness to pick seemingly unwinnable fights, push the envelope, and eventually turn a minority of one into a majority position nationwide. Simply put, no one else does this. Once and a while Boxer (on election integrity in 2004), Dodd (who seems to be growing in this capacity) or someone else will pick a fight, but truth be told Feingold is a one-person progressive movement and progressive transformation in the U.S. Senate.
Over time, we need to build a bench and a nexus of power around an entire group of transformational progressives in Congress. In the short term, if we want such a figure to become the face of the future Democratic Party once Barack Obama (almost certainly) becomes the Democratic nominee and then (hopefully) the next President, Feingold is arguably the only available option. Chris Dodd, Sherrod Brown, Barbara Boxer... maybe. However, for quite a long time Russ Feingold has been the one and only consistently transformative progressive in the U.S. Senate.
I'd like to hear what other people think about this. Using the criteria presented above, what other Democrats have demonstrated a broader commitment to progressive change through their words and through their fights? Those are the leaders we need to identify and work with, and hopefully one of those leaders will find his or her way into the Democratic ticket this year. We need to go beyond checklists: who has talked the talk, and then walked the walk?
Photo to the right is Boxer's fundraising appeal for Landrieu just after Landrieu provided the 41st vote for Bush against a historic green energy bill. And the Al Wynn primary ripples begin. Donna ran against the energy industry, with ads like this one and this one put up to the tune of a million dollars or so by her campaign and outside groups. And now, one of those outside groups, the Sierra Club, is feeling emboldened to pursue a more aggressive approach on global warming and taking on Barbara Boxer in the process.
Carl Pope, head of the Sierra Club, has come out against Lieberman-Warner, Boxer's baby. Here's how he compares the legislation with the Clean Air Act.
Fast-forward to present day: the carbon industries are lobbying to get a deal done this year that would give away carbon permits free of charge to existing polluters -- bribing the sluggish, and slowing down innovation. And politicians are telling us that while it would be better to auction these permits and make polluters pay for putting carbon dioxide into our atmosphere, creating that market unfortunately gets in the way of the politics.
We are being urged to compromise -- to put a system in place quickly, even if it is the wrong system. Given that we only have one chance to get this right before it's too late, our top priority must be to make sure that we do not settle prematurely and sign a weak bill into law in the name of doing something about global warming. With momentum for strong action and a friendlier Congress and White House building every day, it's no coincidence that some wish to settle their accounts now.
Kicking Wynn off Energy and Commerce immediately makes Congress friendlier, but significantly, it's the huge number of new liberal anti-carbon energy voters out there that are going to allow the public to get a sustainable deal on climate change next Congress. There's some evidence that Obama might make global warming his highest priority, having promised to begin negotiating a new Kyoto-style treaty even before taking office.
All of this is excellent and game-changing news that we've seen happen in the last week or so. As a reminder, here's what Boxer said just two weeks ago about Friends of the Earth, which has waged a campaign called 'Fix it or Ditch it' about the massive Lieberman-Warner bill to subsidize polluting industries.
"They're sort of the defeatist group out there," she said. "They've been defeatists from day one. And it's unfortunate. They're isolated among the environmental groups."
This nasty slur, while not true at the time (Greenpeace was opposing the bill), is now silly. At least one big green group has moved in response to Wynn's loss to get a better deal, and the business right, the coal producers, the nuclear industry, and the oil guys know they will have to deal soon. The Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth have said that we must work on global warming, but that it must be done smart and sustainably.
Good job, Donna. And great job, Sierra Club, for your work putting her into office and making everyone in Congress look over their left shoulder. I think it's pretty clear that primary challenges, while quite expensive upfront, are much more efficient than advocacy alone.
Adam Siegel and Natasha Chart are noting that Markos isn't following the Lieberman-Warner legislation winding its way through the Senate, and wondering why that is. While global warming is a huge issue, it's still an issue. Issues are instruction manuals for what to do with power, not mechanisms for fighting entrenched set of actors who don't want to do what you want them to do.
One key question in politics is coalitions. John Edwards had most 'issues' done correctly in his Presidential race, as did Dennis Kucinich. Yet neither built a coalition to actually wield power, because neither was fundamentally interested in political change. Aside from some small bore work in North Carolina, John Edwards made zero progress on poverty. When he actually had power in the Senate, he was a moderate pro-business Southern Democrat. But when he needed liberal votes, he started waving instruction books around and screaming that his were better. Kucinich is even worse.
People focus on what they are passionate about. If you're interested in science policy or energy stats, it's great that you are researching what needs to happen policy-wise to stave off global collapse. I'm not interested in that so much, though I'm glad you are taking notes and I will hopefully help give you a bit of power to do what needs to happen. I am interested in political power and why Environmental Defense and NRDC are considered anything but corrupt saboteurs, so that your instruction manual gets more play.
But please don't disrespect people who are interested in political power by pretending that everyone has to care about what you care about. Everyone is not you and 'substantive' knowledge about legislation is not necessarily more or less useful than tracking other parts of politics. It's just different.
Environmental Defense has sent out an e-mail to Senate staffs and Senators specifically calling out this blogger for attention and calling for advertising coordination between Senators and Environmental Defense in support of the Lieberman-Warner Coal Subsidy Act (CSA, mistakenly called the Climate Security Act), to respond to advertising, here at DKos and elsewhere, by Friends of the Earth in their Fix or Ditch the Lieberman-Warner Global Warming Bill campaign.
I just got this email from Environmental Defense about their massive clusterfuck coal subsidy bill to 'deal' with global warming. They combine a nice defensive whine from Barbara Boxer and ED's Fred Krupp, as well as a pitch for Senators to buy blogads. I like how the criticism from Friends of the Earth is forcing the other side to actually start organizing. That's kind of neat.
I love it when top down liberals like Barbara Boxer unmask themselves as Beltway village creatures. The global warming issue is pretty simple. There is a level of CO2 that will kill all of us. Lieberman-Warner does not keep us under that level and will probably prevent another bill from passing for many years. Barbara Boxer is pushing to pass Lieberman-Warner because she wants to just 'get something done'.
Friends of the Earth alone among environmental groups pointed this out, and Boxer has swung back hard with every right-wing argument she can, calling them defeatists and unwilling to engage in negotiations.
I'm quite fond of Barbara Boxer. Her ardent, sincere, and repeated failures to move liberal policies in the Senate - most recently the Energy Bill - suggest there was a time when liberals actually had power and could work through the policy process. Mike Lux tells me that was the case once, but it's not within my political experience.
Boxer has served as a symbol for liberals of someone who stands for the correct policies and loses on the broad thrust of public policy, a liberal who believes that Senate work should be more congenial. It's why she stumped for Joe Lieberman in 2006, and it's why she sent out the following fundraising solicitation for Senate Democrats - including Mary Landrieu - who just defeated all of us on the Energy Legislation that is her signature issue.
The email is from her PAC for a Change. And Mary Landrieu is her candidate spotlight on the PAC home page.
The results are surprising. The report concludes that the U.S. can cut its greenhouse emissions in half from projected levels in 2030 at minimal cost. None of the steps would cost more than $50 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions avoided. Plus, 40% of the reductions would actually save money. That puts the overall cost at just a few dollars per ton of carbon dioxide-or in the tens of billions of dollars overall.
Moreover, it doesn't take any breakthroughs in technology. "Eighty percent of the reductions come from technology that exists today at the commercial scale," says Stephenson. And the remaining 20% comes from ideas already well along in development, such as hybrid cars that plug into electrical outlets and have batteries big enough to go 30 or 40 miles on electric power alone and biofuels made from cellulose (such as prairie grass) rather than foodstuffs like corn.
In early December, there will be a slew of global warming and energy activity, including the Energy Bill, the Lieberman-Warner cap and trade bill, and Bali negotiations. So get ready.
A five minute introduction to domestic global warming politics goes like this. Any real global warming legislation will put a tax on the whole economy, and the question is over what to do with the trillions of dollars of revenue that results. The right-wing wants to give it to polluters, progressives want to invest it in infrastructure and clean energy technologies, and denialists are just leverage for the right-wing to increase the share of revenue going to polluters. There are lots of details, but that's basically it.
The tricky part is that the big DC environmental groups are desperate to be crafting legislation, regardless of what it says. Take NRDC, a major group headed by Frances Beinecke that runs Barbara Boxer's environmental shop.
NRDC authored some of the Lieberman-Warner bill granting hundreds of billions of dollars in pollution allowances, signing onto a letter pushing to pass the legislation. The Lieberman-Warner legislation is substantially worse than the plans put forward by Obama, Edwards, and Clinton, none of whom offer polluters revenue. NRDC put Barbara Boxer to the right of all major Democratic Presidential candidates.
But the group wasn't always sold on giving polluters hundreds of billions of dollars. Here's what they wrote last March in response to Boucher-Dingell's plan.
Pollution allowances are a public trust. They represent permission to use the atmosphere, which belongs to all of us, to dispose of global warming pollution. The capacity of the atmosphere to absorb carbon is extremely limited. This limited carrying capacity is not a private resource owned by historical emitters. Private entities should not have a right to dump harmful pollution in the public's atmosphere for free.
Emissions allowances will be worth tens of billions of dollars per year, and their value will increase over the first decades of the program as the pollution cap declines. Providing more than a small fraction of the allowances for free to pollution sources would give their shareholders an enormous and undeserved financial windfall.
I feel badly for someone like Frances Beinecke, who has spent her whole life operating in the environmental movement and getting crushed by large corporate interests and marginalized by decision-makers. It must be difficult to switch from coastal protection to global warming, one of which is a relatively small and strictly environmental issue and the other of which is a complicated global economic and political problem that cannot be solved through traditional environmental politics.
The urge to take any scraps that might exist must be overwhelming, and encourages the kind of dishonesty displayed here. But these groups do what they do, and refuse to consider other methods of operating.
The big greenwashing DC environmental scene is very depressing.
There was big news on the global warming legislative front today. The Lieberman-Warner bill, which is a significant piece of legislation, passed its first markup today. It lost the support of every Republican but John Warner, as well as Bernie Sanders, who doesn't think the bill is strong enough.
This is good. The bill won't pass. Barbara Boxer should know better than to put up a corporate subsidy bill and expect to get anywhere, but apparently, she doesn't.
I'm beginning to tire of the notion that there has been some great pressure brought to bear by the antiwar base of the Democratic Party.
In the Senate, the crucible of the debate, many Republicans have grown increasingly skeptical of the president's policy, though they are unwilling to go as far Democrats. And Democratic leaders, determined to end the war on their terms and under intense pressure from their antiwar base, have refused to yield enough ground to accommodate them.
In reality, the antiwar base has been as meek as lambs to the Democratic Party. First of all, the idea that there is nothing the Democrats can or could have done to stop the war is simply nonsense. The Bush administration admits as much in an article in the Washington Post on dissent around the surge strategy when it was first announced.
"There was a real question about whether we'd be able to do this at all," said a White House aide. Within five weeks, the House had voted to oppose the troop buildup, and Democratic leaders were vowing to tie Bush's hands. Most worrisome was the discontent among Republicans. "It could have potentially strangled this strategy in the crib," Wehner said.
The Democrats could have stopped it. They didn't. Democrats like Joe Biden are saying there's nothing they can do to stop the war, and progressives like Barbara Boxer are echoing his point. The narrative undergirding a lot of the stories here are that Democrats are under pressure from their antiwar base, but are standing up to it. That is a false narrative. Politicians respond to pressure, and that means the backsliding we've seen over the past six months is a result of the Democrats not feeling pressure on Iraq, or more likely, feeling more from elites and the right than from the Democratic base. When you look at the Presidential context, this is basically indisputable. Democratic base voters think that the leading candidates will withdraw all troops from Iraq, which is simply untrue. While the argument that Democrats in Congress are boxed in by procedural contraints holds some water, there is no conceivable reason why Democratic Presidential candidates should support keeping troops in Iraq... unless they really just want to keep troops in Iraq. That this mass deception is allowed to continue suggests that there is very little pressure on Democrats to end the war.
Moveon, for instance, has run one ad against Brian Baird, which was an extremely small purchase. By contrast, the White House approved group Freedom Watch is spending $15 million targeting Republicans, including an incredibly quick response helping Brian Baird. And though I have heard compliments from insiders about going after Baird, the anger at the Bush Dog campaign, which is simply designed to offer criticism, is remarkable. Anonymous Democratic aides are now yelping, 'what in the world are they thinking', as if offering pressure in the form of criticism and primary challenges is completely novel. And in fact, it is. There is still no organized funded campaign to recruit antiwar or progressive primary challengers (paging 'They Work for Us').
But it goes beyond primary challenges. Joe Biden went on Meet the Press yesterday and said there is nothing Democrats can do to end the war, and that he will vote for funding no matter what. He's up for reelection in 2008, and he's running for President. There was not one statement attacking Biden for his hawkish stance. This is consistent. The very liberal George Miller has echoed the line of funding the troops, and only Markos is pushing back on the Presidentials refusing to talk about the next supplemental; funding the troops, which is exactly 100% the wrong frame, is the message of the Democratic Party, and there is zero organized pushback.
If we can't get the Presidential candidates to even have a debate about troop levels in Iraq, don't tell me there's an antiwar movement in this country putting pressure on the Democrats.
Now, what this means is that we do start putting pressure on Democratic leaders, it's going to draw squeals very quickly. There's a lot of upside here. Moreover, the strategy of the antiwar movement has been to pressure the Republicans, assuming good faith behavior by Democratic insiders. That was a strategy that has helped move numbers against Republicans, and it has usefully showed Democratic leaders to be acting in bad faith. Now that the argument has been made, it's incumbent upon all of us to genuinely begin putting pressure on Democratic leaders, especially the Presidential canddiates, as aggressively as possible.
Photo to the right is Boxer's fundraising appeal for Landrieu just after Landrieu provided the 41st vote for Bush against a historic green energy bill.
