"Conservatives have a deep-seated anger at Holder" and will misrepresent anything he says

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Conservatives Are Furious that Eric Holder Will Make Them Wear Anti-Freedom Jewelry
By Philip Bump, April 10, 2014

It had been a while since we had a new conservative meme, so let's embrace this one: Conservatives are angry that Attorney General Eric Holder plans to make them wear "gun tracking bracelets." Which, as you might expect, he doesn't.

Before a House subcommittee, Holder explained that while the Senate was debating new gun control measures last year, he and the vice president met with people who were working on technological innovations in gun manufacturing. "[W]e talked about how guns can be made more safe," he said, as transcribed by the conservative site Washington Free Beacon. "By making them either through fingerprint identification, the gun talks to a bracelet or something that you might wear, how guns can be used only by the person who is lawfully in possession of the weapon."

Holder was talking about things like the Gun Box, a storage device for firearms that can only be opened when the owner passes a radio frequency ID (RFID) chip over it, the sort of thing in your credit cards that lets you tap instead of swiping. The Gun Box embeds its RFID chip in a bracelet. Need your gun? Wave your hand over your storage box and it opens — but your kids and criminals can't gain access.

That's not the headline the Free Beacon put on its story, as Talking Points Memo noted on Wednesday. Instead, the site went with: "Holder: We Want to Explore Gun Tracking Bracelets." That's the headline that carried over to the conspiracy site InfoWars and to Fox News and to the NRA website. There's no tracking in what Holder referred to, unless you're worried about being tracked by your gun. But if the headline had been "Holder: Let's Make Guns Smarter," all those other sites wouldn't have picked it up.

Team Mitch        ✔ @Team_Mitch

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Eric Holder wants law-abiding Americans to wear 'smart gun' bracelets. RT if you agree that's outrageous! #kysen

3:52 PM - 9 Apr 2014

Over the course of the week, the Holder-wants-to-track-your-guns meme started to take off. The reelection campaign of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tweeted a somewhat awkward image using the "Grumpy Cat" meme — memes on memes on memes. "Eric Holder wants law-abiding Americans to wear 'smart gun' bracelets," it reads. "RT if you agree that's outrageous!" Ten people retweeted it, the low number perhaps the result of people not agreeing that this is what Holder wants to do.

Sarah Palin jumped on Facebook to tell the world about the bracelets she will wear, honoring the military and "independent Americans" and the Bill of Rights. She concludes with a reference to Holder's contentious argument with Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert earlier this week.

Palin's bracelets

Eric, you can replace my identifying bracelets with your government marker when you pry them off my cold, dead wrists.
And, Eric, "You don't want to go there, buddy."

The "your government marker" line there is telling. Conservatives have a deep-seated anger at Holder. In his estimation, as he told an audience on Wednesday night, that stems in part from racial concerns. But more broadly because he is the grinning face of the big, intrusive government seen as hopelessly liberal. Beginning with the botched "Fast and Furious" operation, conservatives have focused on getting Holder out of office. Last year, the House voted to hold him in contempt. So the idea that he might want to track gun owners — to implement some proxy for the dreaded government ID or, from the conspiracy fringes, an implanted microchip — is an encapsulation of a number of fears and irritations on the right.

Which is why the idea that Holder wants to track gun owners probably won't be dislodged any time soon, if ever. It fits so neatly into the conservative narrative that it spurred a conservative website to misunderstand or misrepresent it at the outset. So you might as well go ahead and email this article to your angry uncle in advance. You'll be hearing him make the argument in the future anyway.
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"Republicans believe so deeply in their own victimhood that the world only makes sense in the reflection of a fun house mirror."

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Why are Republicans Playing the Victim on Civil Rights?
By Jason Stanford, April 10, 2014

Republicans used to be the bullies, but now they can’t stop whining about how everyone’s picking on them. They’ve volunteered for the losing side on every single civil rights fight facing America and seem happy to whine about their woeful circumstances. When did the Republicans decide playing the victim was a good idea?

This week three ex-presidents are joining Barack Obama in Austin at the LBJ presidential library to mark the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Beyond focusing on the struggle for racial equality, the Civil Rights Summit featured panels on immigration, gay rights, social justice, and feminism. On all of these issues, Republicans find themselves cast as the bad guys in the ongoing American struggle to form a more perfect union.

“How could they not?” asked former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who spoke in favor of immigration reform at the Civil Rights Summit. “The media’s already said, decided and said, if this [immigration reform] doesn’t pass it’ll be the Republicans’ fault. Most Republicans would not take that point of view, but they think, well, the media wants to blame it on us. What’s new?”

Being on the wrong side of history has created a strange sense of aggrieved victimhood among Republican candidates and rank-and-file voters. The Republican platform has become a symphony of dog whistles, but Republicans think the real problem is the angry snarling of the attack dogs. In his much-discussed New York Magazine cover story, Jonathan Chait wrote, “This is the only context in which they [Republicans] appear able to understand racism.”

Republicans’ vision is so clouded that they can only identify their heroes after they’ve been martyred. Conservatives didn’t make Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson their poster boy until A&E suspended his show when he made anti-gay remarks in GQ. Republican politicians didn’t bring bags of Chick-fil-A to photo ops until until liberals boycotted the restaurant, again over anti-gay remarks.

Not long ago, conservatives were not just offensive but on the offensive. In 1988, Lee Atwater’s Willie Horton’s ad was less a dog whistle than an air raid siren warning white voters that Michael Dukakis was letting black rapists out of prison. In 2004, 11 states passed constitutional amendments banning gay marriage. And as recently as 2011, Alabama passed the toughest anti-immigration bill in the country, cracking down on unauthorized immigrants in schools, the workplace, and in rental housing.

But now conservatives are playing defense. It took years to turn the tide for blacks, women, and Hispanics, but attitudes about gays and lesbians flipped in an instant. In 2010, Congress repealed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. A year ago June, the Supreme Court overturned the Defense of Marriage Act, and now same-sex couples can get married in 17 states. America got religion on gay rights in a hurry, making it unique among the civil rights struggles.

“One of the things that is different is how fast we have moved and how far we have moved so quickly,” said marriage equality attorney David Boies at the Civil Rights Summit, who noted it took a decade after Brown v. Board of Education to pass the Civil Rights Act.

Atwater apologized on his deathbed in 1991 for using racial prejudice to inflame voters, but present-day conservatives make a virtue of finding themselves on the wrong side of history. They flaunt their victimhood to rally their troops to yet another lost cause. These conservatives would sooner cast themselves as heroic victims than apologize for resorting to bigotry.

Republicans believe so deeply in their own victimhood that the world only makes sense in the reflection of a fun house mirror. When Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed anti-gay legislation, Rush Limbaugh said she was “being bullied by the homosexual lobby in Arizona and elsewhere.” When you’re afraid of gay bullies, you’ve already lost.

When LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act, he said that the South was lost to Republicans. The Democrats may have lost the South, but by seeing themselves as the victims of every single civil rights battle the country—and not the last defense of discrimination—the Republican Party has lost its mind. But even bullies need a hug every now and then.
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Claim rated as TRUE: Koch Industries are one of the biggest polluters in the U.S.

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Bob Beckel: Koch brothers are one of the biggest polluters in the country
By Bob Beckel, April 9, 2014

When a billionaire speaks, people listen, especially when that billionaire is Charles Koch. Koch, along with his brother David, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to get the low-tax, low-regulation government he wants. He’s backed the tea party-funded campaign ads to topple Democrats and deployed scores of lobbyists.

Koch’s spirited defense in the Wall Street Journal of himself and Koch Industries was everything the talking heads on Fox News’ The Five could have asked for. The resident Democrat, Bob Beckel, set out to skewer the Koch brothers. The rest of the panel, like Greg Gutfeld and Kimberly Guilfoyle, praised them for their philanthropy and business success.

Beckel was unimpressed.

Beckel: "The Koch brothers are one of the biggest polluters in the country."

Gutfeld: "They pollute us with money." (While this could be taken differently, this was praise.)

Beckel: "They pollute this country."

Guilfoyle: "You don’t have any evidence to substantiate that."

Beckel: "Yes, I do."

We tried to reach Beckel to hear about his evidence, but we got no response. What we found in its place was a report from the left-leaning Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Last year, the institute released two lists of the 100 firms with the most significant emissions in the nation. One list is for air and the other is for water. On the first, Koch Industries ranked 14th. On the second, it ranked 30th. Some of the companies ranking high on both lists include ExxonMobil, BASF, Bayer Group and Dow Chemical.

Behind these rankings is data reported by companies to the Environmental Protection Agency and compiled in something called the Toxics Release Inventory. The Toxics Release Inventory provides the numbers of pounds of waste chemicals released into the environment by each facility. Every facility operates under a permit from the EPA.

The EPA then takes this release information and runs it through a computer model that factors in the toxicity of the chemicals, how they get moved around and how close they are to population centers. What emerges is a score. (The technical name is the Risk Screening Environmental Indicator.)

This score is a measure of risk. It doesn’t mean that a facility actually poses a threat to health, but a score that is 10 times higher than another means the "the potential for risk is 10 times higher," according to the EPA.

This method has been around since 1991 and been reviewed and refined several times since then.

It’s important to remember that this information is just for each particular plant. What the researchers at Amherst do is tie each plant to its corporate owner and come up with a total score for a company.

"The match of facilities to the companies that own them is a substantial effort for us," said Michael Ash, chair of the economics department at UMass-Amherst and head of the project.

To repeat, it’s by this measure that Koch Industries ranks 14th in the country in terms of companies sending emissions into the air and 30th in sending emissions into the water. The top air polluter, according to the analysis, is Precision Castparts. The top water polluter is Ohio Valley Electric.

We wanted to know if there is anything analytically wrong with adding up the scores the way Ash's group does. We found that the business magazine Forbes has reported these results without challenging them. An environmental economist, Nicolaas Bouwes, who helped develop the Risk Screening Environmental Indicator at the EPA, told PunditFact that there is "no problem aggregating the numbers."

"The point of the model was to identify problem actors," Bouwes said. "If you are at #14, there are issues to look into."

Koch Industries did not dispute the findings.

"Koch’s TRI (Toxic Release Inventory) number is what it is because we have a large number of U.S. manufacturing sites and we're a U.S.-based company," said spokesman Rob Tappan.

Tappan is correct that Koch Industries has a large number of plants. It operates over 100 facilities that produce everything from plywood, to asphalt, to jet fuel. One of its companies makes Brawny paper towels. That water you bought at the store might come in a bottle made of plastic from a Koch Industries plant.

The company runs nearly twice as many sites as the corporation with the next-largest number of plants, Honeywell, which has about 60. You would expect that releases would go up with each additional facility.

On the other hand, when we dipped into the EPA’s data (using the database on the Right To Know Network), we found that on average, each Koch plant generated about five times as much as each Honeywell plant. Roughly speaking, the comparison was about 500,000 pounds of chemical releases compared to about 100,000. So the number of plants alone doesn’t explain the Koch brothers’ high numbers.

Tappan underscored that the Political Economy Research Institute (the University of Massachusetts-Amherst group) has "radical" roots. Ash, he noted is a member of the Union for Radical Political Economics. That organization's website proclaims that it "presents a continuing critique of the capitalist system and all forms of exploitation and oppression while helping to construct a progressive social policy and create socialist alternatives."

While that perspective is not mainstream, that by itself does not invalidate the institute’s findings.

Tappan also notes that "our manufacturing emissions meet all EPA standards, and we work hard to exceed them."

However, Koch Industries paid a $30 million civil fine in January 2000 for its role in more than 300 spills from oil pipelines and facilities in six states. At the time, the fine was the largest civil fine levied under any environmental law, according to the EPA. And last month, leaks at a Texas chemical plant cost the company a $350,000 fine with the promise to invest $45 million in equipment upgrades.

Our ruling

Beckel said that the Koch brothers are one of the country’s biggest polluters. In this fact-check, we're talking about the Kochs' company, Koch Industries. Koch Industries operates over 100 plants across the country. According to one ranking, it is not responsible for the most significant releases but it does land within the top 30 on one list and the top 15 on another. Most people would count that as "one of the biggest."

Most of those releases are legal under EPA permits. The EPA does not consider this level of pollution to pose a health risk in and of itself. However, it is still pollution.

We rate the claim True.
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"... what could hurt McAllister is that family values and Christian faith were a large part of his platform." You think?

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Political scientist: Affairs no longer kill careers
By Greg Hilburn, April 9, 2014

Political scientist Joshua Stockley said America has gradually become more tolerant of its politicians’ indiscretions and believes 5th District U.S. Rep. Vance McAllister has a chance to survive his tryst with a former married staffer.

Stockley, a professor of political science at the University of Louisiana at Monroe, spoke to The News-Star’s Editorial Board onWednesday.

“The fact that we haven’t heard any prominent politician or leader call for (McAllister’s) resignation has shown how our culture has changed,” Stockley said. “Today’s indiscretions aren’t automatic career killers.”

He cited former President Bill Clinton and U.S. Sen. David Vitter, R-La., as prominent politicians who have overcome infidelities.

“President Clinton left more popular than when he took office, and Sen. Vitter is considered the front-runner in the next Louisiana governor’s race,” Stockley said.

But Stockley said those who survive like Clinton and Vitter “quickly say they made a big mistake and ask for a second chance. Individuals who fight the allegations tend to end their political careers,” he said.

He said McAllister’s political viability in the future also will depend on whether the scandal ends now, saying if more infidelities surface the congressman could be finished.

Stockley said what could hurt McAllister is that family values and Christian faith were a large part of his platform.

“When you have such a pronounced emphasis on faith and family you set yourself up for a great fall,” he said.

Stockley said McAllister’s scandal will likely create significant competition for the incumbent’s seat during the November election.

“There’s definitely some chatter now with people making calls to donors and supporters,” he said. “Can anybody reasonably generate the money and grassroots support so quickly? It will be a tall task.”
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Hypocrisy much? Koch brothers and other right-wingers take advantage of the Obamacare programs they've been fighting against

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Koch Brothers Received Millions In Obamacare Subsidies
By Igor Volsky, April 9, 2014

Charles and David Koch may have spent millions of dollars opposing President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, but that didn’t stop them from benefiting from the law. The Associated Press reported on Tuesday that Koch Industries received $1.4 million in subsidies from a $5 billion program established by the Affordable Care Act to help employers and states maintain coverage for individuals 55 and older who are not yet eligible for Medicare.

ThinkProgress first noticed that Koch applied for the program in August of 2010, along with other critics of the law, including state-run programs in Texas and more than a dozen members of the board of directors of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has spent millions to support Republican causes.

Ironically, in 2011, House Republicans issued a press release characterizing the early retiree grants as “a $5 billion bailout fund for state governments, Fortune 500 companies, and Hollywood unions.” “Like many provisions and accounting gimmicks in the health care law, it has largely escaped public scrutiny because of the sheer volume of programs and spending crammed into the law without scrutiny or Congressional oversight,” the Republicans on the Energy and Commerce Committee wrote a year after Koch and other prominent funders applied and received grants from the program.

The Early Retiree provision resembles one passed by Republicans in 2003, which gave subsidies to employers who offered drug coverage to their retirees before the Medicare Part D program went into effect in 2006. As the New York Times explained, the goal then was the same as it is today, “to discourage those employers from terminating those programs, which would have saddled the government and seniors with higher costs.”

This isn’t the first time critics of the law have taken advantage of its provisions. Just last week, Republican members of Congress praised the Obama administration for keeping open a call center dedicated to enrolling people into the law after the initial enrollment period, while others have requested grants funded under the ACA. Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) even encouraged some Texans to sign-up for coverage in the federally-run health care exchange in an effort to save the state money.
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GOP, if you want the economy to get better, pass the Paycheck Fairness Act and give families more money to spend!

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The Politics Of Equal Pay: It's More Than A Women's Issue
By Frank James, April 8, 2014

The pay equity issue, which President Obama and Democrats are making a central theme of the 2014 midterm election campaign, is often framed as a women's issue. But Democrats are expecting it will also have crossover appeal to men.

For many men, it's a matter of self-interest: Two-income families are part of a long-term trend, as many families find two paychecks essential to cover the bills in an era of rising prices and stagnant, if not falling, wages.

U.S. Labor Department statistics indicate that in nearly 60 percent of households with children in 2012, both parents worked. In husband-and-wife households without children (the agency's data doesn't account for same-sex families) the percentage of dual-earner households was close to 50 percent.

Meanwhile, nearly a quarter of married women earn more than their husbands, compared to about 6 percent in 1960.

That's why a big part of the Democrats' election year message is that the issue of equal pay goes beyond women or gender justice.

"This is not just an issue of fairness, it's a family issue," said President Obama at a White House event marking Equal Pay Day, the point in 2014 to which the average woman needed to work in order to match the 2013 wages of the average male worker.

"It's also a family issue and economic issue, because women make up about half of our workforce," Obama said. "And they're increasingly the breadwinners for a whole lot of families out there. So when they make less money it means less money for gas, less money for groceries, less money for child care, less money for college tuition."

Obama used the White House event to sign executive orders aimed at reducing pay inequities among federal contractors and urged the Senate to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act.

It's true that focusing on the equal pay issue is straight out of the Democratic playbook, since it aligns nicely with the gender gap advantage that Democrats have had over Republicans with women voters.

But because the role of women in the workforce is at post-World War II historical highs, progressives view the current climate as particularly favorable for an argument aimed at not just women, but men too.

"We've seen men more engaged than ever around this issue — they absolutely understand that when women are paid fairly, the whole family will benefit," said Marcy Stech, national press secretary for EMILY's List, a Democratic group that has coordinated with the Democratic National Committee on some of its Equal Pay Day messaging. "It's not a hard sell — most men want what's best for women, too."

A February poll for EMILY's List and AmericanWomen.org found that 64 percent of men agreed that women should be paid the same as men for equal work. Stech said younger men who support that position exceeded those opposing it by 25 percentage points. Older men favored equal pay by a 20-point margin over those opposed to it.

So while the equal pay issue clearly is clearly aimed at women voters, there's a receptive audience among male voters — presumably larger than ever because of the greater household reliance on women's incomes.

You could hear Obama targeting those men in his remarks at the White House event Tuesday.

"I don't care whether you're a Democrat or a Republican; if you're a voter, if you've got a daughter, you got a sister, you got a mom — I know you got a mom — this is something you should care about."
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"A succession of Congress’ loudest 'family values' lawmakers have become embroiled in sex scandals." Geez, Republicans, keep it in your pants!

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Cuckolded hubby: Hot lips Congressman Vance McAllister ‘most non-religious man I know’
By Joel Connelly, April 8, 2014

The husband of a woman videotaped in a passionate 30-second kiss with “family values” Republican Rep. Vance McAllister of Louisiana is speaking his mind and heading for the divorce court.

“He’s not who people think he is: If people really knew him, he wouldn’t be elected. This religious family man deal — this is completely false. He’s not like that. He’s the most non-religious man I know,” longtime friend Heath Peacock told “Inside Edition.”

McAllister was videotaped on Dec. 23 in a prolonged, passionate embrace with aide Melissa Peacock. A month earleer, running as a Christian and “family man,” he was elected to Congress. Heath Peacock was a generous campaign contributor.

Peacock was howling to reporters on Tuesday, and not heeding McAllister’s statement requesting forgiveness from his constituents.

“I’m just freaking devastated by the whole deal, man,” Peacock told CNN. ”I loved my wife so much. I cannot believe this. I cannot freaking believe it.”

“He has wrecked my life: We are headed for divorce,” he added. The Peacocks have a 6-year-old son.

McAllister tried to convey a Mr. Smith-goes-to-Washington image on arriving in the nation’s capital. He talking about never having been there. He waxed eloquent about having a big Sunday breakfast, before church, with his wife and five little McAllisters.

When the video first ran in The Ouachita Citizen, a local newspaper, McAllister issued a statement, saying in part:

“There’s no doubt I’ve fallen short and I’m asking for forgiveness from my God, my wife, my kids, my staff and my constituents who elected me to serve.”

Heath Peacock isn’t buying it. ”He can apologize all he wants, until he’s blue in the face: It doesn’t change a thing,” he said.

The scandal is reminiscent of the recent Ensign affair, in which Sen. John Ensign, R-Nevada, was found to be sleeping with the wife of his top aide and close friend. After it was revealed that Ensign’s wealth parents arranged payments to the cuckolded husband, he quit Congress.

A succession of Congress’ loudest “family values” lawmakers have become embroiled in sex scandals.

Rep. Robert Bauman, R-Maryland, original sponsor of Congress’ “Family Protection Act,” saw his House career end in scandal, but later toured the country speaking as a gay conservative.

Rep. Arland Stangeland, R-Minnesota, saw his career after it was revealed he had made 341 phonecalls to and from the home of a female lobbyist. “I can say that each and every phonecall was made for business reasons,” said Stangeland, a married father of seven.

Sen. David Vitter, R-Louisiana, apologized profusely to his wife and constituents — and to God — after his name popped up in the address book of the “D.C. Madam.”  Vitter won reelection and is now favored to be the next governor of the Pelican State.

Louisiana is now abuzz over who leaked the McAllister video.
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Are you a woman? Have you voted or do you plan to vote for Republicans? After reading this, the question is WHY? Do you *like* being dissed?

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Republicans Block the Paycheck Fairness Bill in the Senate
By Allie Jones, April 9, 2014

On Wednesday morning, Senate Republicans blocked Democratic Sen. Barbara Mikulski's Paycheck Fairness Act, which aims to reduce workplace discrimination against women. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell argued that the bill has nothing to do with women, and that Democrats are simply making show votes for their "powerful pals on the Left."

Leading up to the Senate debate, both Democrats and Republicans trotted out women to talk about how their political parties help them. The White House is currently under scrutiny for paying female staffers 88 cents on the dollar compared to their male co-workers. (The most widely cited statistic on the matter say that women earn 77 cents for every dollar men make, but that doesn't tell the whole story.) So the GOP has tried to paint the Paycheck Fairness Act as hypocritical. Democrats responded by claiming Republicans don't care about women at all. We will keep hearing this rhetoric all the way to the midterms.

As Alan Fram at the Associated Press notes, this is the third consecutive election year where Democrats have brought up a paycheck fairness bill. And Democrats have certainly made the issue about women this time, claiming that Republicans who oppose the bill oppose equal pay for equal work. In practice, the bill would make it harder for employers to pay women less than men (more regulation) and easier for aggrieved workers to sue.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has promised to bring the bill up for another vote before the midterms. He repeated the party line today, sighing, "For reasons known only to them, Senate Republicans don't seem to be interested in closing wage gaps for working women."
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"Our goal as informed and savvy citizens should be to make sure that our elected officials are spending more of their time crafting public policy for the good of the public rather than playing politics"

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Mike Dingman: Our lawmakers play politics more than they craft policy
By Mike Dingman, April 8, 2014

What on earth are they talking about?

That's all I could think as I watched "Gavel Alaska" -- the caption said the House Rules Committee was discussing Sen. Kevin Meyer's bill, which would save the Council on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault from sunsetting in June; however, I was listening to people testify about approving the appointment of Richard Rabinow to the Alaska Gasline Development Corporation (AGDC).

As we move deeper into April the fools are unquestionably playing politics in Juneau.

House Speaker Mike Chenault tried to amend the bill to allow non-Alaskans to serve on the AGDC. Sen. Meyer was quoted in an April 3 Daily News article saying that Chenault had "hijacked" the bill. The same article also quoted council supporter Peggy Brown comparing the amendment to "tossing a bomb on a moving train."

These types of political shenanigans are fairly common in Juneau; however, to see it blow up in the face of the House Speaker during a committee meeting is rather rare. Usually this type of political maneuvering is more carefully coordinated so as to not cause any embarrassment.

This isn't the only tomfoolery happening in the capital city this week.

The Daily News reported on Tuesday that Senator Lesil McGuire is suggesting the money that was slated for indoor tennis courts in West Anchorage -- which were supported by Mayor Dan Sullivan -- should be used for renovations to the Loussac Library. These improvements were included on the municipal ballot in the form of a bond proposition, but as the city waits for thousands of absentee ballots to be counted, that measure is failing by a small margin.

Oh, by the way -- Mayor Sullivan and Sen. McGuire are both vying for the GOP nomination for lieutenant governor in August.

Meanwhile, as we move towards the end of what Gov. Parnell dubbed the "education session" -- very little discussion of education is actually happening.

In Tuesday's Daily News, Richard Mauer reported that an amendment to HB 278 more than doubles the increase to the base student allocation that Mr. "Education Session" Gov. Parnell included in the operating budget. The amendment passed 27-13. Mauer explained that the amendment continues the BSA increase at $185 for 2015, but after a different budget bill removes one-time funding of $25 million, effectively dropping the BSA increase to $85.

All of these things make three things perfectly clear. There is less than a week left in the legislative session, it's an election year and everybody is scrambling to look as good as possible before they start their summer pitch for your votes.

Republicans are cutting money out of the budget, while pretending that they are presiding over the "education session" and pitching a $1.9 billion capital budget. Democrats are portraying Republicans as haters of public schools who want to gut government as much as possible.

Neither are really doing what they should be doing.

Elected officials are charged with the duty of creating public policy. This involves consulting with constituents, hearing from experts and researching the issues in order to create legislation that would better their community in some way.

In order to get this job, they have to use the art of politics to get elected. The art of politics is creating an image of a desirable public official, crafting a message that the public wants to hear, advertising them and hoping that you can bring out the people who support you on election day.

If there was a way to separate the business of creating public policy from the art of politics, I would completely support it. Unfortunately, both are important processes and help us to live in a democratic society. Our goal as informed and savvy citizens should be to make sure that our elected officials are spending more of their time crafting public policy for the good of the public rather than playing politics.

As Alaskans, we are failing in that respect.

Partly because the political stage is set so far from the population, partly because Alaskans don't pay a state income or sales tax and seemingly have no skin in the game, and partly because we seem content to collect our PFD checks in October and vote for familiar names in November, we allow our elected officials to run roughshod through the halls of the Capitol.

If you want an example of politicians playing politics, take a close look at Juneau and you'll see it at work. If you want an example of elected officials working hard at crafting quality public policy, then I don't know what to tell you.
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The Koch brothers are targeting Colorado and Iowa

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Koch brothers’ network skips middlemen to shape U.S. Senate races
April 8, 2014

The central fundraising network of billionaire Wichita energy executives Charles and David Koch bought its first batch of television ads in this year’s U.S. Senate races, public documents filed by broadcast stations show.

The ads booked yesterday by Freedom Partners, a business league based in Arlington, Va., knock Democratic Senator Mark Udall of Colorado and Representative Bruce Braley of Iowa for their support of President Barack Obama’s health-care law.

Republicans are targeting Colorado and Iowa in their quest for a net gain of six seats to capture a majority in the Senate. Democrats control 55 of the 100 seats and are defending 21 of the 36 seats on November ballots.

Party strategists became more bullish on Colorado last month after Republican Representative Cory Gardner announced he would challenge Udall. In Iowa, Braley will face the winner of a multi-candidate Republican contest that includes state Senator Joni Ernst and Mark Jacobs, a former Goldman Sachs managing director and energy executive.

“Congressman Bruce Braley voted for Obamacare. The government spent millions of taxpayer dollars to promote it,” a female narrator says at the start of the 30-second Iowa spot. It concludes: “For Iowans, it’s canceled policies and higher costs. That’s not right.”

Udall’s campaign has denounced the Koch brothers for having helped “usher Tea Party extremists like Representative Cory Gardner into Congress.”

Braley’s campaign said the ads were “misleading” and that his opponents supported policies “that would hurt Iowa’s economy.”

Similar messages

The Freedom Partners ads represent an escalation in TV warfare among outside groups intervening in the Iowa and Colorado contests. In both cases, Americans for Prosperity, another Koch organization, began by attacking the Democratic candidates for backing the health-care law.

Then, Senate Majority PAC, which aids Democrats, put up response ads defending Braley and Udall as fighting corporate interests. The Freedom Partners spots say the two took campaign contributions from health-insurance companies that benefited from the law.

James Davis, a spokesman for Freedom Partners, said his group plans more activity in other races to “point out that kind of cronyism and hypocrisy.”

Special interests

Lawmakers who backed the health-care law “had an opportunity to stand up against the health insurance special interests when it mattered, and they didn’t,” he said in a statement. “Now, it’s time for them to stand with their constituents and stop supporting Obamacare.”

Freedom Partners raised $255 million in its first year, which began Nov. 1, 2011, its tax filings show. It spent most of that by making grants to other groups. Annual membership in the league costs at least $100,000, Freedom Partners’ spokesman James Davis has said. The group’s website claims more than 200 members.

Until now, the league has primarily served as a conduit for money between donors who share the Kochs’ support for smaller government, and organizations aligned with the brothers. The 3-year-old group keeps its donors secret.

Freedom Partners has been merging with other outside groups and plans to take a more direct approach this year, rather than focusing entirely on grant-making, Davis has said.

Two states

The Daily Caller, a web-based publication founded by Republican Tucker Carlson, first reported the Freedom Partners ad buy, saying the group spent $1.1 million on it between the two states.

Americans for Prosperity has been the primary vehicle for the Koch brothers’ political activity. The group, which does not disclose its donors and says more than 90,000 people have contributed to it, has run 20,000 ads since October – more than any other outside group, political party or candidate, according to New York-based Kantar Media’s CMAG.

The three-week run of Freedom Partners commercials in Denver includes advertising during the game shows “Jeopardy!” and “Wheel of Fortune,” TV station documents filed with the Federal Communications Commission show.
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The outsized influence of the billionaires like the Koch Brothers is a threat to our democracy

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For Adelson, Koch brothers, buying a politician is good business
By Donna Brazile, April 7, 2014

Despite Republicans' claims that they're going to shorten the 2016 primary process, the contest is already under way.

At the end of March, potential Republican presidential candidates Chris Christie, Scott Walker and Jeb Bush were among those who rushed to Las Vegas to compete in the first primary for an all-important constituency of one: billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.

In 2012, Adelson and his wife, Miriam, spent at least $93 million backing Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and other Republicans in their effort to defeat President Obama and Democrats at every level. These candidates are all too eager to try to court and please the likes of Adelson, who's trying to buy the White House.

But the problem's not just that Adelson is writing blank checks to the candidates of his choosing. The problem is that Adelson and other super-wealthy Republican donors are directing their largesse to buy elected officials who support policies that benefit their bottom lines at the expense of middle-class American families.

People like Sheldon Adelson support candidates who are in favor of lowering tax rates for corporations and the super-wealthy -- people like Sheldon Adelson.

But those tax giveaways aren't free. Rep. Paul Ryan's House GOP budget pays for those tax breaks by gutting funding for investments in education and infrastructure, ending Medicare as we know it, and raising taxes on middle-class families with children.

Sheldon Adelson's not alone.

The billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch and their allies have given hundreds of millions of dollars in support of Republican candidates and causes.

And their focus isn't limited to the White House, or even House and Senate seats. They're opening their checkbook to tip the scales in local races in towns and neighborhoods across the country.

The Washington Post and The New York Times report that the Koch brothers are investing resources in local races, such as county board and small-town mayoral elections. They're exerting their influence in debates over local issues such as property taxes. It's a tall task to stand up to, especially when people like the Kochs are spending with no end in sight.

Even Gingrich, whose 2012 candidacy was kept alive month after month by Adelson, is now turning on his former patron and his ilk:

"Whether it's the Koch brothers or (George) Soros on the left or Sheldon (Adelson)," Gingrich told the National Journal, "if you're going to have an election process that radically favors billionaires and is discriminating against the middle class — which we now have — then billionaires are going to get a lot of attention."

According to a George Washington University Battleground Poll, about half of Americans know who the Koch brothers are. Considering the lengths that they have gone to keep their involvement in local affairs secret, that figure is a victory for watchdogs and government sunshine groups, not to mention Democrats. But it's alarming for anyone disturbed by their ability to exert disproportionate influence with millions of dollars that represent little more than pocket change to them.

The Koch brothers are legally allowed to flood "dark money" into your town, influencing who represents you in Congress or the Senate, or who sits in your mayor's office. They can do so anonymously, thanks to a ruling by the Supreme Court in Citizens United.

And with the court's recent ruling lifting the cap on the number of candidates Adelson, the Kochs and others can give money to, there seems to be little left in their way.

Even though it's only April, the Koch brothers are already breaking spending records. Americans for Prosperity, one of the Kochs' front groups, has spent more than $30 million since last August running ads in at least eight states. According to The New York Times, AFP has more than "200 full-time paid staffers in field offices in at least 32 states."

It's no coincidence that these targets tend to follow Koch Industries' business interests.

In Michigan, Rep. Gary Peters has called attention to the toxic mountain of petroleum coke -- a byproduct of refining oil sands -- that stands in Detroit and is owned by Koch Minerals. Also called petcoke, the substance poses environmental and public health concerns when the dust blows into the air and water.

Peters called out the Koch brothers in a news conference at the restaurant of Jacques Driscoll, who lives near one of the petcoke storage sites in southwest Detroit and said he was fearful for the health of his then-pregnant wife and then-unborn child.

In return for his efforts to represent the well-being and safety of his constituents, Peters's bid for the United States Senate has been targeted with millions of dollars in attack ads from the Kochs and AFP. And like the petcoke, the commercials play dirty.

One such ad featured Julie Boonstra, who has cancer, claiming that she lost her doctor under the Affordable Care Act and that insurance became "unaffordable." A fact check showed that neither claim was true and noted that she even experienced "substantial savings" under the law.

No community is too small. AFP's Wisconsin chapter flooded Iron County, home to fewer than 5,000 voting-age residents, with a thousand brochures attacking seven county board candidates as "anti-mine radicals." Another full-color mailing supported the organization's preferred pro-mine candidates.

The dispute? A debate over new mining regulations friendly to Gogebic Taconite and their proposal to construct a $1.5 billion iron ore mine in Iron and Ashland counties. David Fladeboe, state director of Americans for Prosperity, recently admitted, "the mining issue has been a big one for us."

One candidate attacked by AFP told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, "I have a hard time understanding why the Koch brothers think I am such a threat to their well-being — that they single me out in poor little Iron County?" Sure enough, on Election Day, four out of the seven Koch- and AFP-backed candidates won.

Whether billionaires are buying federal candidates who will lower their taxes or local officials favorable to their business interests, their outsized influence is a threat to our democracy, particularly when it is obscured in the form of "dark money."

Middle-class Americans -- who can't afford to buy a school board seat, let alone a U.S. Senate seat -- deserve elected officials and a system that will ensure their voices are heard.
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Trust the Republicans to get fusion voting banned. Threatened much?

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How fusion voting played a role in American politics
By Chuck Todd, April 7, 2014

In last week’s #TDR50 segment, we introduced New York’s fusion voting system as a unique process that gives third parties political clout in a system dominated by two major parties. But it wasn’t always this rare. Electoral fusion played a major role in 1800s politics and contributed to the success of many third party candidates.

Electoral fusion allows one candidate to be nominated by multiple political parties. This allows smaller parties to have an impact on the election and forces lawmakers to pay attention to the platforms of these parties. It also allows voters to support the platform of a party, such as the Working Families party in New York, without feeling like their vote will go to waste if they don’t cast it for a Democrat or Republican.

Electoral fusion was common throughout the 1800s and contributed to the rise of the Populist Party at the end of the century.  Populists joined candidacies with both major political parties, depending on which candidates best served the needs of their supporters, especially small farmers.

The Republican Party started to grow wary of fusion voting after the Populist Party joined with the Democrats in the 1892 elections, and Republican dominated state legislatures began to ban the process. A Minnesota state senator even admitted that he was threatened by the rise of a third major party, saying, “We don’t propose to allow the Democrats to make allies of the Populists, Prohibitionists, or any other party, and get up combination tickets against us.”

Though Democrat-Populist candidate William Jennings Bryan came close to winning the Presidency, the Populist Party started to dwindle by the beginning of the 20th century, due to the bans on fusion voting and voting restrictions such as literacy tests. Though some third party candidates were able to drum up supporters, such as Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party, it was very hard to convince voters to vote for an independent candidate who would most likely lose to a candidate from one of the major parties.

The Supreme Court has even addressed fusion voting. In Timmons v. Twin Cities Area New Party (1997), it ruled that the Twin Cities Area New Party in Minnesota could not nominate someone who was already being nominated by another party. The Court argued that Minnesota’s anti-fusion laws did not go against people’s right of association, as the Twin Cities Area New Party could still endorse whoever they wanted to.

Today, there are eight states that allow their candidates to receive the nomination of more than one political party: Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Mississippi, New York, Oregon, South Carolina and Vermont. 
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“While they don’t wear Koch Industries’ ties and jackets, they display their sponsors proudly through their actions here in the United States Senate.”

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Harry Reid: GOP should wear Koch insignia
By Burgess Everett, April 7, 2014

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said that Republicans might as well wear the insignias of the billionaire Koch brothers on their suits, likening the connection between the Kochs and the GOP to corporate sponsors and NASCAR drivers.

“NASCAR fans can easily find their favorite drivers by simply looking at the cars as they fly by, because there are corporate emblems on the hood of the car … for our clothing here in the Senate, we don’t bear commercials logos. Many Republicans might as well wear Koch insignias,” Reid said Monday. “While they don’t wear Koch Industries’ ties and jackets, they display their sponsors proudly through their actions here in the United States Senate.”

Reid’s Twitter account then tweeted a graphic of what a Koch-sponsored suit might look like.
The Nevada Democrat was seizing on Senate Republicans’ defense of Charles and David Koch, particularly the reading of a Charles Koch op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) last week on the Senate floor. In that piece, Charles Koch referred to his critics as “collectivists” and rebutted Reid’s repeated assertions that the Kochs are trying to “buy the country” through their political activities.

“Collectivists … is that a new right-wing buzzword for communist?” asked Reid, who by now could say little that would surprise the Kochs. The majority leader has been a months-long crusade against the Koch brothers and the affiliated Americans for Properity group, recently describing the Kochs as “un-American” and “radical.”

It’s all part of a Democratic strategy to portray Republicans as being on the side of the wealthy rather than the middle-class, though Republicans are quick to note that billionaires like Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg have supported Democrats’ defense of their Senate majority this year.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) maintains that the tactic is working, and both he and Reid said on Monday that Democrats plan to keep up the Koch-bashing.

“The Koch brothers’ agenda is an agenda that is not my agenda. It is not our agenda. But is it your agenda, I say to my Republican friends?” Reid said Monday. “We Democrats, we’ll continue to defend American families from the oil baron bullies who want nothing more than to enrich themselves. We will continue to oppose their efforts to buy our democracy.”
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"When we, as a society, accept falsehoods in our political discourse, it cheapens everyone’s argument and lessens the integrity of robust debate."

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Factual truth is too often lost in heated political discourse
By Noah M. Horwitz, April 7, 2014

When is a lie a lie and when is it a political conviction made in good faith? Recent flare ups in Washington and the Texas gubernatorial election show that sometimes the two are interchangeable. Unfortunately, our political system has grown to accept its participants’ fibs, sometimes with strange results.

For example, about two weeks ago, the popular crafts chain store Hobby Lobby was in the news after its suit against the federal government reached the Supreme Court. The store was arguing against a provision in the Affordable Care Act, known by some as Obamacare, that requires employers to provide free or reduced-cost contraception to their employees. Citing religious liberty, the owners of the privately held corporation refused to do this, which triggered the lawsuit.

At first glance, a suit such as this, about corporate personhood and religious liberty, would appear to be a good-faith dispute made over legitimate political convictions. The problem with this is that Hobby Lobby does not actually cite categorical opposition to contraception as the basis for its lawsuit. Instead, it cites a belief that many forms of contraception, including some pills and intrauterine devices, are tantamount to abortion. Scientifically speaking, this is simply not true, as no evidence exists that indicates these methods end a pregnancy after fertilization. In fact, most evidence decisively shows that IUDs — or the other birth control methods Hobby Lobby cited, such as Plan B — are contraceptives and not abortifacients.

“The two companies that challenged the law — Hobby Lobby, a chain of crafts stores, and Conestoga Wood Specialties, which makes furniture — say that some drugs and intrauterine devices are tantamount to abortion,” said Adam Liptak, a Supreme Court correspondent for The New York Times. “Those claims are not generally accepted by scientists.”

Another example of these misleading claims has oft been cited in the recent gubernatorial controversy over equal pay for women. Attorney General Greg Abbott, the Republican nominee for governor, recently made headlines when he announced he would veto a bill that would have made it easier for women to sue over wage discrimination in state court. Supporting this bill was the claim that women make 77 cents on the dollar compared to men, which is probably a statistic you have read before. All by itself, that claim is more or less true, but when the phrase “for equal work” is added, the claim loses its factual potency.

“The 77-cent figure compares all male and female workers, regardless of their occupation,” PolitiFact ruled in 2012. “Whether due to a historical legacy of discrimination or because of personal choice, women and men are disproportionately represented in certain jobs.”

Granted, women still earn less than men for doing the same work, and they should have a wide variety of options at their disposal to fight that injustice through the court system. But the 77 cents statistic is misleadingly exaggerated and does no favors for the movement. Similarly, Hobby Lobby is frankly a terrible plaintiff in this Obamacare case if, indeed, it is really about contraception and religious liberty. Making untrue claims hinders the cause at hand.

When we, as a society, accept falsehoods in our political discourse, it cheapens everyone’s argument and lessens the integrity of robust debate.

While I may not personally oppose Obamacare’s contraception mandate, I still believe we should address any legal disputes that may arise from it. But American courts are not supposed to humor theoretical cases, so we all lose in cases such as this one, where the Supreme Court must accept false premises in a landmark case. If another store owned by a fundamentalist Christian, who specifically had a categorical opposition to all forms of contraception, wanted to bring the suit, that would be one thing. Hobby Lobby’s strange argument is quite another.

These cases should serve as a gentle reminder to dig a little deeper into the details of political debates to see why someone argues what he or she does and what evidence may be used to support those points. Blindly accepting or believing something can sometimes come perilously close to condoning fibbing.
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At least SCOTUS decided not to mess up this

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‘Religious’ right to discriminate? Supreme Court won’t hear case
By Joel Connelly, April 7, 2014

The U.S. Supreme Court will not review whether a New Mexico photographer had a “religious” right to refuse to photograph the commitment ceremony of a same-sex couple.

The New Mexico Supreme Court had ruled that the denial violated the public accommodations section of the New Mexico Human Rights Act.  The commitment ceremony took place before a court ruling brought marriage equality to the “Land of Enchantment.”

Washington state has a similar, high-profile case headed into the courts, in which Attorney General Bob Ferguson sued a Richland florist who refused on religious grounds to provide flowers for the wedding of two men.  They were longtime customers of the floral shop.

The high court in Washington, D.C., as is customary, did not explain why it refused to take the New Mexico case.

The case, Elaine Photography v. Willcock, centered on the commitment ceremony that bonded Vanessa Willcock and Misti Collinsworth.

The photo shop owners, Elaine and Jonathan Hugenin, explained that they would “Gladly serve gays and lesbians by, for example, providing them with portrait photography,” but that to photograph the same-sex ceremony would “require them to create expression conveying messages that conflict with their religious beliefs.”

“Photographers, writers, singers, actors and others who create First Amendment-protected speech must have the right to decide which commissions to take and which to reject,” the libertarian-minded Cato Institute argued in a brief supporting the Hugenins.

But the state human rights commission declared:  “When Elaine Photography refused to photograph a same-sex commitment ceremony, it violated the New Mexico Human Rights Act in the same way as if it has refused to photograph a wedding between people of different races.”

The case has helped inspire legislation in Arizona, Mississippi and other conservative states that would give businesses sweeping rights to discriminate and refuse service on “religious” or ethical grounds.

A similar bill was introduced by a dozen Republican members of the Washington State Senate, but has yet to be voted on in either house of the Legislature.
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"... it’s not good democracy or good government when politicians choose their voters rather than the other way around"

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Redistricting should not be left up to politicians
April 4, 2014

“Gerrymandered by the best.”

That’s how state Sen. Mike Folmer, R-Lebanon, described his 48th District at a recent York County Economic Alliance legislative luncheon.

He can say that again.

For those unfamiliar with these wide-ranging municipalities, his district gerry-meanders from Lebanon County, through Dauphin County and deep into York County. According to Google maps, it would take about an hour and 15 minutes to drive from the rural northern border of that district to Suburban Springettsbury Township in the south.

“I had nothing to do with that,” said Sen. Folmer, who many York countians were surprised to learn is already their senator — despite the fact that no one in York County voted for him — as a result of some legal weirdness that accompanies reapportionment.

Well, maybe he had nothing to do with drawing the district, but the Republican would seem to benefit from it, as the district is chock full of conservative voters.

And maybe Sen. Folmer, who carries a copy of the Constitution around in his suit pocket, could have something to do with changing and depoliticizing the way we draw state and federal legislative districts.

State government reform is all the rage these days, as gubernatorial and legislative candidates respond to allegations that several Philadelphia-area lawmakers were targets of a sting operation involving gift-giving by lobbyists.

Many have rightly jumped on the gift-ban wagon — particularly the Democratic gubernatorial candidates, who might see vulnerability in an incumbent governor who has reportedly accepted a boatload of gifts (including, yes, a weekend on a yacht).

But banning or limiting such gifts is pretty low-hanging fruit on the government reform tree.

How about changing the way real power is wielded in Harrisburg? Apportionment is one them.

Don’t believe it? Look at the results in Pennsylvania. A recent Associated Press analysis shows that Republicans who control the governor’s office and both legislative bodies used gerrymandering to solidify control of state government — and also to command a strong majority of U.S. House seats. The GOP controls 13 of the state’s 18 U.S. House seats — despite the fact that Democrats have a 4-to-3 registration lead in the state, and President Obama won the state by more than 300,000 votes.

And that has national implications, as another AP analysis shows such gerrymandering in key states such as Pennsylvania gives Republicans a built-in structural advantage in controlling Congress.

That might be smart politics, but it’s not good democracy or good government when politicians choose their voters rather than the other way around. Such gaming of the system makes for uncompetitive elections in all but a few districts, fewer choices for voters and a solidification of the status quo.

That can’t be what our forefathers intended.

Perhaps Sen. Folmer can find inspiration in that Constitution copy in his coat pocket to fight for changes in this system.

It’s time for a nonpartisan redistricting commission that would draw compact, competitive districts that are centered on communities rather than politicians.

We’ve been talking about this for a long time. It will be a popular topic in this election season. Our leaders can show they’re serious about reform — and not just full of a lot of rhetorical blather — by passing reapportionment reform before the November election.
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Face it-- the Koch brothers are scammers!

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Greediest family on earth: Proof Koch brothers have just one political principle

The Koch brothers like to pretend they're high-minded free marketers. Here's proof it's a scam

By Brian Beutler, April 4, 2014

Would you believe me if I told you that the Koch brothers actively participate in, and benefit from, a healthcare system in which the government subsidizes private insurance; carriers are prohibited from discriminating against the sick; the young cross-subsidize the old; and qualified beneficiaries who opt out suffer a big financial hit?

Well, they do. Not Obamacare, of course — they want to repeal that. But as employers, they can and do compensate their employees with tax-exempt health insurance benefits, their employees are all part of one risk pool, and everyone contributes the same amount for equal coverage.

I know this because in Koch Industries’ weird, official screed against Obamacare, issued on the day Healthcare.gov first launched, its human resources director Dale Gibbens boasted, “For years, Koch Industries has worked to provide reasonably priced health care benefits.”

This is not something the Koch brothers consider a threat to the Republic, apparently. Perhaps deep down, or in the abstract, they think the government should not be subsidizing this healthcare and are simply following the rules of the road as set by others. That was the line they took when explaining why they participated in a temporary Obamacare program for early retirees. “Once laws or programs are enacted we will not place ourselves or our employees at a disadvantage by turning our back on incentives offered to our competitors.”

Yet despite the fact that employer-sponsored health insurance resembles Obamacare in many ways, the Koch network is not actively trying to repeal ERISA — the law that regulates employer-sponsored health plans — or to repeal the tax expenditure that allows them to advantageously provide the benefits they claim they’re working so hard to maintain.

That is an effort they reserve especially for Obamacare. To the Koch brothers, there’s apparently a big difference between government subsidizing and regulating health insurance for their employees and government subsidizing and regulating insurance for the self-employed, individuals whose employers don’t provide health benefits, and the unemployed.

I know this, because in a Thursday Wall Street Journal Op-Ed, Charles Koch had absolutely nothing to say about the system the government has put in place to make it cheaper for Charles Koch to compensate his employees, but said the following about the other system:

The more government tries to control, the greater the disaster, as shown by the current health-care debacle. Collectivists (those who stand for government control of the means of production and how people live their lives) promise heaven but deliver hell. For them, the promised end justifies the means.

This might seem strangely contradictory, unless you stop and consider what the existence of a universal right to health insurance coverage means for employers and the people who work for them. When the Congressional Budget Office updated its analysis of the Affordable Care Act’s labor market effects, it concluded that the existence of a coverage guarantee for all, and subsidies for many, would reduce employment by more than 2 million people over the coming decade. Opponents of the law pounced on this as proof that Obamacare would be a job killer, but for the most part what CBO actually meant was that Obamacare would shift the center of power between workers and employers a bit closer to the workers.

For some of those workers, that shift will mean the freedom to quit — hence the “job killing” canard. But for other workers — current and prospective — it will mean the freedom to ask for more money. All thanks to a program that’s financed largely by taxing people like Charles and David Koch. And I think therein lies the key to understanding why they’re devoting so much time and so many resources to destroying Obamacare.

The Koch brothers like to pretend that their ideological and political commitments stem not from their own financial interests but from high-minded, principled beliefs about how American society should be organized. I know this because in that same Op-Ed, Charles Koch wrote, “I have devoted most of my life to understanding the principles that enable people to improve their lives. It is those principles—the principles of a free society—that have shaped my life, my family, our company and America itself.”

And yet, the vast difference of intensity with which he and his brother David oppose the employer-based healthcare system and Obamacare gives the lie to the idea that their advocacy efforts are abstracted from their personal circumstances.

I get that the employer-sponsored healthcare system is old and enormous, and Obamacare is new and relatively small. I also get that the Democrats running for reelection today helped create Obamcare, not ERISA. But both systems now benefit a bunch of people. And both make it easy for people of all incomes and health statuses to become insured in similar ways. The former, though, redounds immensely to the Koch brothers’ benefit, while the latter imposes big new taxes on them and reduces their leverage over their employees. And by sheer coincidence that’s the one stuck in their cross hairs.
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"... stop talking about 'money, democracy and campaign finance,' and start talking about corruption"

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All Is Not Lost: How to Win Money-in-Politics Reform
By Josh Silver, April 4,2014

If you have a heartbeat, you are one of the vast majority of Americans thoroughly disgusted by this week's McCutcheon Supreme Court decision. It allows one donor to write a $3.6 million check to buy political influence, providing us all with yet another "just-when-you-thought-it-couldn't-get-any-worse" moment. As if we needed it.

You are also likely someone who rationally believes that money-in-politics corruption is a huge problem and something that simply cannot be fixed, because doing so requires the fox (politicians) put a lock on the henhouse (campaign contributions). This vexing dynamic is why we wallow in collective cynicism while the issue has only gotten worse since the last major reforms were passed 40 years ago.

But don't give up just yet. Contrary to popular belief, the money-in-politics problem can be fixed by emulating the stunning successes of marriage equality and marijuana decriminalization over the past twenty years. Here's how to do it.

First, we need to take the fight to local communities, by passing city and statewide reform initiatives. For too long, reformers have advocated small-step, incremental reforms at the federal level, such as ending secret donations. This is a good and popular proposal, but alone will not come close to fixing the problem. Other reformers are advocating "publicly funded" elections, which is also good policy, but remains unpopular with many voters and would not fix the entire problem if passed without simultaneous ethics, lobbying and transparency reforms.

And here's the key thing: comprehensive reform proposals that overhaul ethics, lobbying, transparency and provide public funding in one fell swoop enjoy over 80% voter approval, and they are constitutional, even under the current Supreme Court. Together they are much more popular than public funding alone, and far more palatable to moderates and conservatives to boot. As an added bonus, public funds created by statewide laws can go towards federal candidates from those states, and to judicial candidates in states that have them. This is a game-changing reform package, and in the words of one veteran pollster, "with these kinds of numbers, it's virtually impossible to lose a ballot initiative."

Next, you stop talking about "money, democracy and campaign finance," and start talking about corruption. A national poll in December of last year revealed a 30 point increase in support amongst conservative voters for stopping the undue influence of "corruption" in politics rather than "money."

It is time to move from defense to offense, and pass a wave of local anti-corruption laws across the nation over the next few years -- while simultaneously organizing a 21st century anti-corruption movement made of grassroots conservatives, moderates and progressives. The nation is ripe for such a movement, with voters abandoning the major parties in droves. A recent Pew study shows that a full half of millennials identify as political independents, up from 38% in 2004. It is the combination of passing bold reforms in cities and states, while creating a loud and visible, right-left anti-corruption movement that will provide the political power necessary to force change.

We stand at a crossroads. Political corruption has grown so severe that reality is much closer to the dark TV drama "House of Cards" than what we learned about in grammar school. A recent New Yorker story about corruption in North Carolina describes state Senate Majority Leader John Unger:

"Unger recalled the first time that a lobbyist for a chemical company asked him to vote on a bill. "I said, 'I don't sign on to anything until I read it.' And he said, 'Well, that's not the way it works around here.' I said, 'Well, I don't know how it works down here, but that's the way I work.' And he said, 'Well, if you don't learn to get along, when it comes to your reelection, we'll stick a fork in you."

McCutcheon turned that lobbyist's salad fork into a pitchfork. But with the right strategy, we the people can, and will, stick a fork in the beast that our system has become. That fight starts here.
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A Movement for the People

Represent.Us is the non-partisan movement behind the American Anti-Corruption Act: a law that would overhaul campaign finance, impose strict lobbying and conflict of interest laws, and end secret political money. We are mobilizing millions of Americans to put an end to the culture of legalized corruption that has come to define modern politics.

We believe that a government of, by, and for the people isn’t an idealistic fantasy — It’s non negotiable. Visit anticorruptionact.org to read the full provisions of the Act and learn more.

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"... Clinton cited the need to 'get back to evidence-based decision-making'"

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Hillary Clinton: Partisanship eroding politics
April 4, 2014

Hillary Rodham Clinton said Thursday night that excessive partisanship flowing through the nation's political system is causing the U.S. to march "backwards instead of forward" and pointed to fall elections as a sign of how the country might tackle problems, according to The Associated Press.

The AP reports the former secretary of state reflected on her time at the State Department, the U.S. relationship with Russia and the advice she gives to young women during her appearance at the annual Women in the World summit. But when the moderator asked her to address the nation's future, Clinton cited the need to "get back to evidence-based decision-making."

"There is just pure ideology, pure partisanship. We disguise a commercial interest behind a political facade and the result is that we're kind of marching backwards instead of forward," Clinton said. She said the U.S. needs to address economic hardships facing many young people to produce an "inclusive prosperity."
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"... the most insidious aspect of responsibility politics is that this way of thinking divides people from one another ..."

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The shenanigans of 'responsibility' politics
By Amy Laura Hall, April 5, 2014

A media-savvy child of the new millennium, my older daughter is privy to all sorts of terms.  This includes informally coined, succinct phrases to describe complicated concepts.  These include phrases to label public conversations about tricky, politically charged issues. 

When I told her about the Moynihan Report from 1965, and gave her a thumbnail sketch, she rolled her eyes and groaned, “responsibility politics.” In case some readers are, like me, not clued in to this phrase, I will need to make a long story, well . . . long.

Basically, the problematic idea my daughter named succinctly is the notion that social conditions for true human flourishing will come about by way of small, individually responsible changes.  Reusable grocery bags are a helpful, simple example.  There is something of a consensus that the environment matters.  But, in many circles, the way environmentalism cashes out is through composting, recycling and carrying around reusable grocery bags.  Because bags are so public, they take on disproportional importance. Plastic grocery bags are an infinitesimal part of the environmental problem.  But, remembering my bags is a daily thing.  The detrimental dumping practices of Duke Power is a giant, systemic thing.  So, I walk around with my bags and my responsibility politics.

There is also a large dose of responsibility politics going on in the United States regarding economic issues, during what many economists (and normal people) agree is the Second Great Depression.  Maybe this is a kind of mental, survival mechanism gone awry.  If I think poverty and unemployment are primarily about individual responsibility, then maybe these problems will seem less humongous and insurmountable.  Dan Ariely and Michael Norton found in a study they published in 2011 that most people in the U.S. do not explicitly approve of the radical inequality we are swimming in right now, but we are in denial about how bad things really are.

Again, maybe this is because most of us can’t reckon with a giant mess.  (Dan Ariely highlights on his website that our situation includes “the bottom 40 percent of Americans possessing less than 0.3 percent of total wealth” and “the top 20 percent possessing 84 percent.”)  Norton and Ariely found plenty of people who call themselves Republican as well as who call themselves Democrat who think the actual economic situation must surely be better than it is, and who, when asked about their ideal scenario, prefer an economic system that is even more equal than (gasp!) Sweden.

Media conversations seem to eschew large, structural sorts of reasons for economic struggles.  Stories reflect too often a form of responsibility politics, even when the story is ostensibly about a particular group.  For example, a whole generation of college graduates has become a curiosity as, in story after story, we hear about those quirky young adults who, strangely enough, “choose” to live with their parents while working a hard-won, part-time job for minimum wage.  Or, just recently, NPR played an ostensible human interest story about those plucky, middle-age professionals signing up for unpaid internships with the hope of new employment.  And the middle-class success stories are often individual and morally soporific.

The tendency to individualize large problems suggests, in a more subtle way than the Moynihan Report did in 1965, that patterns of human diminishment and struggle are matters of individual or cohort pathology.  If people in particular neighborhoods are drastically unemployed, then find a few heroes with moxie or discipline, recalibrate individual people’s thinking, and life will be better for the 40 percent who possess 0.3 percent of the wealth.  Or, if a generation of young adults can’t find jobs, narrate desperation as the mother of ingenuity, and christen them as resiliently “creative.”  If people nearing retirement are being let go due to corporate downsizing, then maybe each one can find a computer screen and play those nifty memory enhancement games NPR just talked about until the economy recovers.

I think the most insidious aspect of responsibility politics is that this way of thinking divides people from one another, allowing scarcity to seem ineluctable and casting our plight as a chance to distinguish ourselves as fit.  I am holding out hope instead for abundance, and solidarity.
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