Sex, Lies, Videotape

2014 Was a Delectably Good Year for Sleaze

By Patricia Murphy

Remember the Christian congressman caught snogging a staffer? The cocaine congressman? OK, how about Bob McDonnell? Sleaze-a-palooza.

Cocaine busts, tax cheats, and bribe-taking, born-again Christians: Welcome to the political scandals of 2014. From the illegal to the merely offensive, from the tragic to the sublimely ridiculous, let’s take a look back at the bad behavior of 2014:

The trials of Bob McDonnell. The former Virginia governor was once the golden boy of the GOP. The born-again family man with a talent for winning elections was on the fast track to a national presidential ticket, but a wealthy vitamin executive plying McDonnell and his family with a Rolex, a wedding reception, and golf vacations changed all that. The ugly end for McDonnell came in 2014 when he and his wife went on trial for felony fraud only to expose the fraud of their “storybook” marriage. The now-convicted felons will hear their sentences in January, but their story continues to spiral downward. Son Robert Ryan McDonnell was busted on a DUI last week, while their daughters recently appealed to the court for leniency, but just for dad. They described their father as simple, religious man… and blamed their mother for everything that’s happened.

Chris Christie’s Bridgegate. “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.” With those eight words, an aide to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie closed most of the George Washington Bridge, snarled tri-state traffic for hours, and unleashed a media-fueled political scandal worthy of a B-grade mob movie. Christie called the emails, which were part of a revenge plot against Democrats who didn’t endorse Christie for governor, “inappropriate” and “unsanctioned” and went on to preside over an epic, two-hour press conference that was summed up with his declaration, “I am not a bully.” If Christie was not a presidential aspirant with an anger-management problem, the episode might not even make the list. But given the governor’s need to convince American voters he’s worthy of their trust, Bridgegate clocks in high.

VA Hospital Wait Times. The word “scandal” hardly seems strong enough for a system that left newly discharged Iraq and Afghan veterans waiting so long to see a doctor that some committed suicide as the months and years passed. Congressional hearings in 2014 exposed hospital administrators keeping secret lists of wait-times to mask their incompetence, but nothing could hide the shame of a process that treated disabled vets so badly. Newly installed VA Secretary Robert McDonald has announced a massive restructuring of the VA hospital system and promised that the 35 staffers he’s fired so far are just the beginning of the people he’s holding accountable for the tragic, inexcusable mess.

Both Morrissey and the girl, who is pregnant, say their phones were hacked by the girl’s estranged lesbian lover (are you following this?), but the judge who heard the case didn’t buy it.

Secret Service Gate Jumpers. The White House may look like a heavily guarded fortress from the outside, but a knife-wielding gate jumper who popped over the front fence in September exposed serious vulnerabilities at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, like the fact that the Obamas don’t lock their front door. Huh? A closer examination of the once-vaunted Secret Service, which is in charge of protecting the president, revealed an agency in turmoil that has been asked to do more, such as guarding the vice president’s grandchildren, while budgets have shrunk and asymmetric threats increased. Julie Pierson, the woman installed at the top of the agency after the 2012 Colombian prostitute scandal, resigned amid the controversy, while the president’s former bodyguard was brought in to restore the president’s protectors to their former glory.

Sen. John Walsh’s Doctored Master’s Thesis. Walsh, the former Army general and lieutenant governor of Montana, was appointed by Democrats in February to succeed outgoing Democratic Sen. Max Baucus. The deal would let Walsh run as an incumbent against Rep. Steve Daines for Baucus’s seat. But a funny thing happened on the way to the coronation when The New York Times reported that Walsh had plagiarized significant portions of a 14-page paper required for his master’s degree at the Army War College. Walsh initially said he’d done nothing wrong, but later told the AP that he had been suffering from PTSD when he wrote the paper. Walsh eventually withdrew from the Senate race, leaving Democrats just days to find a candidate to run against Daines, the congressman who flipped the Senate seat for Republicans in November and will be sworn into the Senate in January.

Michael Grimm’s Felony Plea. The lowest moment of 2014 for Staten Island Republican Rep. Grimm might have been the time in January when he threatened to throw a reporter off a Capitol balcony and break him in half “like a boy.” But then last Tuesday happened, when Grimm pleaded guilty to federal tax evasion, one of the 20 felony counts he’d been facing since April related to Healthalicious, a Manhattan restaurant Grimm operated before going to Congress. Feds accused Grimm, a former FBI agent, of paying employees with envelopes stuffed with cash and then hiding nearly $1 million from the IRS. Despite the scandal, Grimm beat his Democratic opponent by 18 points in November. After saying he wouldn’t resign from Congress because he was still “able to serve,” Grimm has announced he’ll step down Jan. 5.

The Cocaine Congressman. Freshman members of Congress do the darndest things, including buying three grams of cocaine from an undercover federal agent three miles away from the Capitol. America, meet Trey Radel, the self-described “hip-hop conservative” who once reviewed a Jay Z album in a series of tweets, including one that called the oeuvre “pretty sick.” Less than a year into his new job in Washington, Radel plead guilty in a DC court to cocaine possession and spilled the beans on the drug bust he tried to keep a secret from his constituents and Republican congressional leadership. Although he swore he wouldn’t resign over the incident, Radel stepped down in January after Republicans at home began calling for his head. Radel has since had his record expunged and, even better, is back on Twitter.

Rob Ford. That’s all. Just Rob Ford.

The Kissing Congressman. The first time that Vance McAllister (R-LA) went to Washington was in November 2013 to be sworn in as congressman representing Louisiana’s 5th District. But it didn’t take long for McAllister to succumb to the city’s charms, like passionately kissing a congressional staffer only to be caught in the act on surveillance video. When the video leaked, McAllister, a father of five who had campaigned as a devout Christian, asked for forgiveness from “God, my wife, my kids, my staff, and my constituents who elected me to serve.” McAllister’s wife, Kelly, campaigned for his reelection, saying she felt blessed to be married to a man “who owns up to his mistakes.” But the voters didn’t agree. McAllister finished fourth on Election Day, but declared to his local paper, “It’s all good.”

Virginia Delegate’s Minor Sex Texts If you thought all the bad behavior happened in Washington, look no further than Richmond, Virginia, where Democratic State Delegate Joe Morrissey entered a modified guilty plea this month for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, specifically for having sex with a 17-year-old staff assistant and then texting a naked photo of the girl to a friend. Both Morrissey and the girl, who is pregnant, say their phones were hacked by the girl’s estranged lesbian lover (are you following this?), but the judge who heard the case didn’t buy it. Morrissey had been granted a work-release program that would have made it possible for him to serve his jail time at night, while voting in the legislature during the day. But a judge revoked the option last week when Morrissey violated the terms of the deal. Although he recently resigned from the legislature, Morrissey has promised he’ll run in the special election to fill his open seat. Good luck with that.

Honorable mention: Charlie Crist’s fan. It wasn’t really a scandal, but you wouldn’t know it from the way Florida Gov. Rick Scott reacted to Democratic challenger Charlie Crist’s decision to put a small electric fan at his feet during the final Florida governor’s debate before the midterm election. Scott was so convinced that Crist had violated the debate rules that he refused to go onto the debate stage for a full six minutes, leaving Crist and his fan to have the spotlight all to themselves for the opening moments of the televised debate. Twitter dubbed the imbroglio “Fanghazi,” while The Atlantic wrote an ode to Crist’s love affair with the little fan. And what happened once the debate resumed? Who knows? All anybody remembered was the fan.

Solution to Income Stagnation

For Solution to Income Stagnation, Republicans and Democrats Revise Their Playbooks

By JOHN HARWOOD

For average American families, the United States economy is like a football team that cannot move the ball, and has not been able to for 30 years.

That is why frustrated economists in both parties are scrambling for a new playbook. Increasingly, they are looking away from grinding runs up the middle toward more freewheeling, long-yardage plays.

Among Democrats, that means greater government spending on education, infrastructure and even direct job creation. Among Republicans, it means far-reaching shifts in taxation and regulation. Those debates will help shape economic policy for the rest of President Obama’s term and during the 2016 campaign.

The economy has finally emerged from the financial crisis and Great Recession of 2007-9. Employers added 314,000 jobs in November, and third-quarter output grew at a strong 5 percent annual rate with no signs of resurgent inflation.

But the generation-long stagnation of middle-class incomes continues.

From 1947 to 1979, the postwar economic boom more than doubled median family income to $58,573 in 2013 dollars. Had earnings growth kept that pace through the careers of baby boomers, median family income would have topped $124,000 by 2013. Instead, it was $63,815.

The magnitude of that lengthy slowdown makes many government policy responses look small. The Bush tax cuts saved a median-income family of four about $2,000 per year. If such a family contained one full-time worker making the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, Mr. Obama’s proposed wage hike to $10.10 would add about $6,000 a year.

In a competitive global economy, Democratic strategy starts with improved education and training to enhance workers’ skills and productivity. Mr. Obama has unsuccessfully asked Congress to spend $75 billion more annually on early childhood education, but some allies advocate much more.

“My long bomb would be enacting a very large human capital strategy,” said Austan Goolsbee, the University of Chicago professor who once chaired Mr. Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. For such a plan, Professor Goolsbee would allocate as much as 3 percent of gross domestic product, or more than $500 billion per year “across as many different dimensions as you could,” from early education to community colleges to vocational training matching worker skills to employers’ needs.

Yet, even in the best case scenario, big gains would take years. “If you think that’s going to solve everything you’re kidding yourself,” said Jared Bernstein, the former chief economic adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

In an era of Tea Party backlash against Washington, Mr. Bernstein backs the politically risky idea of direct government job creation to tighten labor markets, bid up wages, and enhance prospects for the long-term unemployed. Every $1 billion in government spending, a recent analysis concluded, would create 100,000 “subsidized jobs” paying $10 per hour for six months.

More Democrats support infrastructure spending to create short-term jobs and boost long-term economic potential with better seaports, airports and highways. Mr. Obama, unsuccessfully, has proposed $10 billion for a new “infrastructure bank” and another $22.5 billion annually in new highway spending.

Lawrence H. Summers, a former director of the National Economic Council, advocates something far grander: $200 billion annually in new public and private infrastructure spending for 10 years. He calculates that low borrowing costs mean the investment would produce handsome returns.

For Democrats especially, boosting economic growth represents only part of the solution. Another part is countering economic trends that have most benefited the highest-earning families.

Len Burman, director of the Tax Policy Center, offers one “radical” idea that would not cost a dime. Under current law, tax brackets rise each year to protect everyone from the effects of inflation. Mr. Burman would target those adjustments to people with stagnant incomes.

Reallocating inflation protections each year, projected to reach $200 billion by 2025, “would push gently against the winds of rising economic inequality,” Mr. Burman wrote recently.

Richard Freeman, a Harvard labor economist, would push harder. In an economy producing big gains for businesses but not for workers, he proposes turning more workers into owners.

That would involve expanding incentives for workers to acquire stock in their employers, and for employers to offer workers incentive pay tied to the firm’s profitability. “We presented some of these things to the Obama administration and the Wall Street guys just killed them,” said Professor Freeman, a co-author of “The Citizen’s Share: Putting Ownership Back into Democracy.”

The Republican debate consists largely of getting government out of the way. Support by Jeb Bush, a prospective Republican presidential candidate, for Common Core educational standards cuts against the grain of his party.

In a recent manifesto by the conservative YG Network, Michael Strain proposed reducing occupational licensing for some industries, like cosmetology. James Pethokoukis, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute said shorter copyright terms for books, movies and other intellectual property would spur fresh innovation and job creation.

Others promote overhauling energy policy. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, backs capitalizing on this “most important economic event of the last decade” by lifting the longstanding ban on United States oil exports and relaxing restrictions on liquefied natural gas exports.

Others envision transformational effects from seizing on energy shifts to revamp the tax code. By moving away from taxing income toward taxing energy sources, said Steve Bell, a longtime Senate Republican aide now at the Bipartisan Policy Center, the United States could boost investment and growth, curb climate change and generate revenue to finance a currently insolvent entitlement system.

Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, proposes a new $2,500 tax credit for families with children. But the most popular conservative idea for boosting incomes is overhauling corporate taxation. Mr. Obama has embraced that goal if Congress closes enough loopholes while lowering the 35 percent top rate to ensure the government will not lose revenue.

Because loophole beneficiaries do not want to give them up, “revenue neutrality” makes cutting rates much harder. Casting off this constraint and simply lowering rates, said Kevin Hassett, an economist at A.E.I, would cause corporations to rapidly bring overseas jobs home.

“It would really help blue-collar workers,” Mr. Hassett said. “This is not a Hail Mary. It’s Tom Brady to Randy Moss.”

Some Democrats dismiss his enthusiasm — but not all of them. “An intriguing proposition,” said Professor Freeman of Harvard.

To be sure, replicating America’s postwar gains may prove impossible. “I don’t think there are long passes,” said Robert Reischauer, another former director of the Congressional Budget Office. “We’re in a ground game that will take many years.”

Worst Civil Liberties Violations

The 10 Worst Civil Liberties Violations of 2014

It’s been an exceptionally awful year.

By Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern

The world may not actually be falling apart—but it feels like America is. From police brutality and botched executions to voter suppression and election corruption, 2014 was a terrible year for civil liberties in the United States. Protests were quelled by military-grade weapons in scenes worthy of a banana republic, and the divide between the rich and the poor in the freedom and justice they are afforded is Dickensian in its scope. While the country has evolved on marriage equality, it often appears to be backtracking on just about every other advance we have made, from the racial and gender progress of the 1960s to the most basic principles of the criminal justice system. Below, we’ve listed the top 10 civil liberties nightmares of 2014 in no particular order. Here’s hoping this list is harder to put together next year.

10. The Supreme Court adds more sectarian religion to our lives.

In Town of Greece v. Galloway, the Supreme Court’s five conservatives ruled that legislative sessions in town council meetings can open with explicitly sectarian prayers. Almost immediately, town boards began inviting Christians to speak at their meetings while excluding speakers of minority faiths (and, naturally, atheists). In short order the Galloway majority’s gauzy vision of pluralistic civic tolerance began to look a lot more like a governmental endorsement of Christianity at the expense of minority religions. Increasingly, to the conservatives of the Roberts court, “religious liberty” means the freedom of religious majorities to push their religious beliefs on the rest of us. Speaking of which …

9. The Supreme Court invites our corporate bosses to takes away our birth control.

In the court’s Hobby Lobby decision, the same five conservatives ruled that “closely held corporations” had a religious right to deny female employees certain forms of birth control, if those employers believe the device or method causes abortions. It matters not at all whether the device or method in fact causes abortions. Writing for the court, Justice Samuel Alito downplayed the notion that women’s health and autonomy are “compelling interests,” leaving female employees’ intensely private health care choices at the mercy of their bosses. Alito reasoned that employees could rely on the government’s birth control accommodation granted to religious hospitals and colleges —then the court immediately suggested that the accommodation might be against the law, too.

8. Secrecy and botched executions.

In January the state of Oklahoma executed Michael Lee Wilson using a secret chemical cocktail. Twenty seconds after the injection of the drugs—which Oklahoma claimed would ensure a painless death—Wilson said, “I can feel my whole body burning.” Three months later, Oklahoma executed Clayton Lockett with another secret drug cocktail; the procedure turned into a brutal torture session after the drugs left Lockett “writhing and bucking” on the gurney. In July the state of Arizona executed Joseph R. Wood III using a protocol of secret drugs. The procedure took two excruciating hours during which, according to witnesses, Wood gasped and snorted. Arizona officials insisted that Wood hadn’t suffered—then added that if he had, he would’ve deserved it.

We are killing people in America, and we are doing so in a fashion that is ever more brutal, secretive, and flawed. Last week the 325^th person to be exonerated by DNA evidence was cleared of a rape for which he served nearly 31 years. The only thing certain about our current capital punishment system is that hiding its flaws, errors, and biases, doesn’t make them go away.

7. The great torture shrug.

In December the Senate Intelligence Committee released a declassified summary of a historic and long-awaited comprehensive report on the use of torture techniques implemented during the George W. Bush administration, including “rectal feeding,” waterboarding, confinement in small spaces, and shackling in stress positions. In hundreds of partly redacted pages, the report concluded that the CIA “enhanced interrogation” practices were ineffective and failed to provide unique or actionable information, and that the CIA systematically misled the White House, Congress, and the public about the torture methods and program for years. The report also revealed that the CIA’s tactics went beyond the generous legal terms laid out in Justice Department legal memos. The study, based on examination of more than 6 million internal CIA documents, concluded that the U.S. government engaged in what clearly amounts to torture practices and lied about it.

Nobody will be held to account. Nobody will be prosecuted. And the release of the report led to another shameful round of debates by public intellectuals willing to defend state-sanctioned violence against prisoners because it worked for Jack Bauer.

6. Voting rights.

In 2013 the Supreme Court gutted a key section of the federal Voting Rights Act. As a direct result of that decision, states with a history of suppressing voting rights, which had previously been required to seek “preclearance” before implementing new voting rules, were freed up to create voting requirements that made it harder for certain groups to vote. In the wake of the Shelby County v. Holder decision—in some cases, just hours later—states raced to impose new rules that would disproportionately burden the elderly, the young, the poor, and minorities. Last November we witnessed the fruits of those efforts: People in Texas were faced with new voting restrictions, as were those in Georgia, Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and others. The Supreme Court batted back some of these new voting restrictions if they were apt to cause chaos just before an election and allowed others to stand. But this whole raft of efforts to “protect the integrity of the vote” is and has always been nothing more than a fig leaf. Federal appeals court Judge Richard Posner, assessing an array of such laws, called them precisely what they are, “a means of voter suppression, rather than of fraud prevention.”

What was the impact of these newest efforts to fiddle with voting rights in the November election? The preliminary data show that felon disenfranchisement, voter ID laws, and ending same-day registration had some impact on the 2014 elections. This is to be expected. It is, after all, the whole point.

5. Money in elections.

In 2014 the Supreme Court handed down another campaign finance decision, McCutcheon v. FEC, striking down the aggregate limits that Americans may contribute. (The cap had been $123,200, or twice the median family income, to all federal candidates, parties, and PACs combined, not including super PACs.) Once the very, very, very richest among us were liberated to donate as much as they wished, the spending around the 2014 elections predictably bubbled over with McCutcheon money.

As the Washington Post reported, “More than 300 donors have seized the opportunity, writing checks at such a furious pace that they have exceeded the old limit of $123,200 for this election cycle, according to campaign finance data provided by the Center for Responsive Politics.” Election spending in general made all kinds of news in 2014, including on state judicial races, which have become some of the ugliest, spendiest battlegrounds going. But McCutcheon isn’t important simply because it put some more big money into political races; it’s also a signal that the Supreme Court plans to finish what it started with Citizens United v. FEC—give the wealthy unlimited power in the name of free speech—and that there are five votes to do so. Don’t worry. Your vote still counts. It just counts a little bit less with every election.

4. The Ferguson protest crackdown.

After Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson killed unarmed 18-year-old Mike Brown in August, residents took to the streets to protest the killing and a long-standing pattern of police mistreatment. They were met with a militarized police force that used tear gas, sound cannons, smoke grenades, armored vehicles, and assault weapons to shut down the protests. A federal judge later ruled that the officers’ stunningly aggressive tactics violated the protesters’ freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and due process rights. But images of officers illegally arresting journalists, training assault rifles on civilians, and gassing law-abiding demonstrators remain seared into Americans’ minds. This is how we are policed when we protest now. Our constitutional rights to speak and assemble don’t seem so inviolable when the police can break up rallies with armored cars and assault weapons. But wait, how did the police manage to finance military-grade equipment to quell civil disobedience? Glad you asked …

3. Civil forfeiture.

One of the shocking lessons of the events in Ferguson was the revelation that its local police department was financing itself—and in this case, its weapons purchases—with money wrested from people under civil forfeiture laws. These laws were developed to squeeze drug lords and mob bosses, but they are now used by thousands of police departments and drug task forces across the country to take cash and property, often from the poorest Americans, without proving any crime has occurred. The Washington Post found that police departments have used their massive civil forfeiture slush funds to purchase G.I. Joe toys including “Humvees, automatic weapons, gas grenades, night-vision scopes, and sniper gear” as well as “electronic surveillance equipment, including automated license-plate readers and systems that track cellphones.”

Civil forfeiture isn’t the only form of harassment facing people in poor communities. Americans were horrified this summer when they learned that in 2013, the city of Ferguson, a city of just 21,135 people, issued 32,975 arrest warrants for nonviolent offenses, most of which were trivial driving violations. The town was charging exorbitant court fines and fees for these nonviolent offenses, then arresting anyone who couldn’t pay. NPR produced a brutal series this year showing that the poor are being pressed into financing the very system that prosecutes and incarcerates them. Welcome to the return of the debtors’ prison.

2. Abortion clinic closures.

Roe v. Wade is still good law in America. Abortion is still legal. And yet throughout the country, abortion clinics are being shuttered at record rates. According to this report from Bloomberg last month, the rate of clinic closures is unprecedented. Since 2011, legislative reforms, protests, and a series of onerous and costly new regulations have ensured that more clinics than ever are closing their doors. One in 10 clinics have shut or stopped providing the procedure since 2011. Four states, Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming, have only a single clinic now in operation.

The best test case for what’s happened nationwide unspooled itself in Texas this year. A sweeping package of abortion regulations put into effect draconian building codes and requirements that physicians obtain admitting privileges at local hospitals. The law led 19 facilities to stop performing abortions, leaving only 22 in the state. The Supreme Court ordered Texas to stay some of those requirements pending a full hearing. One federal judge on the 5^th Circuit Court of Appeals, which approved the regulations, said driving hundreds of miles across the state to procure an abortion wasn’t that bad on a flat Texas highway at 75 miles per hour, and assumed that the prospect of perhaps one-sixth of Texas women having their abortion rights burdened did not represent a sufficiently large fraction to be constitutionally fussed about.

1. Grand juries reviewing police misconduct.

2014 has been a terrible year for relations between cops and citizens. A spiral of mistrust has led to a spiral of brutality and violence that exploded with the killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Akai Gurley, and John Crawford, among others. Then Ismaaiyl Brinsley shot and killed two Brooklyn police officers, claiming he was acting in the name of those who had been killed by police. This deplorable, appalling act of alleged retribution sparked a new wave of recriminations and accusations.

One fundamental problem with the criminal justice system that came to light this fall illuminates the reason there is such distrust between police and communities of color: We should not continue to use the grand jury system to hold police to account. One of the lessons of the Brown and Garner grand juries is that while grand juries will famously indict anyone up to and including a ham sandwich, they virtually never do so when a police officer is before them. As the Christian Science Monitor reports, “U.S. police officers kill approximately 1,000 citizens per year in the line of duty. On average, four officers are indicted for causing gun-related deaths on duty every year, according to a study by Bowling Green State University in Ohio. In one sample, grand juries in Harris County, Texas, haven’t indicted a police officer in a decade. Grand juries in Dallas looked at 81 possible cases of police criminality between 2008 and 2012, but handed down only one indictment, according to the Houston Chronicle.” There are many reasons for this: Grand jurors tend to trust cops; the prosecutors are in complete control of the proceedings; and prosecutors have every incentive to go easy on the police officers with whom they work. With grand jury proceedings taking place in secret, all of these incentives are compounded and mistrust is exacerbated.

Reforming the way we assess police shootings in the criminal justice system will not cure the extreme mistrust that now exists in America. But it will be a step toward assuring citizens that the system is not rigged to protect the powerful—which is certainly how it looks in the waning days of 2014.

10 Dynamics

10 Dynamics That Will Shape the Next Two Years of American Politics

by Joshua Holland

What’s past isn’t necessarily prologue, but the outcomes of some recent political battles – and a look at who will be coming and going when Congress reconvenes in January – give us a pretty good sense of the dynamics that will shape the next two years of American politics.

So while we don’t have a crystal ball, here’s our preview of what you can expect in the final quarter of Barack Obama’s presidency.

1. Gridlock, and an Endless Game of Chicken
The past two sessions of Congress have been the least productive in our history, and the next likely will offer more of the same.

We will see the “crisis governance” of the past few years continue. Deals will be cut in the final hours before the government shuts down, or the debt limit is breached, or — as with the Department of Homeland Security’s funding, which is set to end next February – a major budget provision is about to expire.

Recent experience with the “Cromnibus” spending bill – which will fund the government through next fall – suggests that Democrats will play defense in these negotiations. They accepted two provisions that infuriated their base, in order to maintain current funding levels for most government agencies, and obtain more money for things like combating Ebola.

But there are advantages for Democrats in these standoffs: First, Americans tend to blame Republicans for government shutdowns and debt limit shenanigans. Second, the Republican leadership hasn’t been able to impose enough discipline on their members to pass legislation without Democratic votes.

The Republicans’ advantage in these standoffs is the strength of what progressives describe as the GOP’s “suicide caucus.” This is a significant bloc of tea party-aligned legislators who refuse to vote for budget legislation that doesn’t defund Obamacare – or won’t undo the White House’s executive action on immigration. They don’t seem to care if doing so results in a government shutdown that hurts their party’s standing with the public. In a game of chicken, a seemingly irrational driver who doesn’t appear to mind a flaming car crash will always hold the upper hand.

In past negotiations, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has made good use of his own caucus’ defiance, claiming that while he personally wanted to avoid a shutdown or debt limit standoff, he could only marshal the votes necessary to head off disaster by giving conservatives steep concessions.

How these standoffs play out will have a significant impact on American families. Not only will they determine spending on things like health and education — and people’s tax rates — but if the government shuts down or we have more debt limit shenanigans, it could slow an economy that’s looking stronger as we head into the new year.

2. The Clash of the Republican Establishments
The media will continue to hold that there are deep divisions between the “Republican establishment” and the tea party.

That’s only true to a degree. There are few ideological differences between these camps; the “divide” mostly comes down to strategy.

The kernel of truth is that in the wake of Citizens United and other decisions deregulating campaign donations, effectively there are now two Republican establishments: The traditional one, made up of the party leadership and Congressional campaign committees that worry about the party’s long-term prospects in national elections, and the network of outside conservative funders who support “renegade” lawmakers like Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Mike Lee (R-Utah).

Earlier this month, Politico offered a good example of how influential this group of funders has become in a story about the Koch brothers’ efforts to build a nationwide voter database. Mike Allen and Kenneth Vogel reported that the billionaires “and their allies are pumping tens of millions… [into] developing detailed, state-of-the-art profiles of 250 million Americans, giving the brothers’ political operation all the earmarks of a national party.”

These dueling establishments will continue to be at loggerheads, with the tea party caucus making life difficult for congressional leadership, but the tactical divide will be more pronounced as lawmakers with presidential aspirations look to shore up their ideological bona fides and build campaign warchests in the run-up to 2016.

3. A Smaller, More Progressive Democratic Caucus
During the recent omnibus spending bill fight, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and other progressives came close to scuttling the legislation, which many observers took as a sign that Democrats feel that they can buck the administration during Obama’s final two years in office.

Expect more of the same, as a smaller, more progressive Democratic caucus takes office in January.
With the recent defeat of Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, there will be no Dems representing the Deep South in the incoming Congress.

Landrieu, a loyal friend to Big Oil, will be replaced as the lead Democrat on the Senate Energy Committee by Washington’s progressive Senator Maria Cantwell — the first time in years that position has been held by a Senator from a non-energy state. Independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont will take over as the ranking member of the Budget Committee, Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) will be the top Democrat on the Banking Committee — replacing conservative South Dakota Democrat Tim Johnson — and Elizabeth Warren will serve in a leadership position. All of these lawmakers are among the more progressive on the Hill.

4. A Not-So-Lame-Duck
In the two months since the midterm elections, Barack Obama has unilaterally normalized relations with Cuba, protected several million undocumented immigrants from deportation, created a special commission to consider new police reforms, told the FCC it should enforce net neutrality, made it harder for federal contractors to misclassify their workers as management and instructed the EPA to issue new regulations on ozone emissions.

That followed a year in which he used his authority to create what The Washington Post described as “the world’s largest fully protected marine reserve in the central Pacific Ocean,” raised the minimum wage for employees of government contractors and barred contractors from discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Obama told NPR that he feels “liberated” as a result of Congressional dysfunction, and will continue to use his executive power wherever he can. Watch for an order that could help the middle class significantly by strengthening overtime rules – progressive economists are coalescing around the proposed rule.

He also told NPR he would freely use his veto pen. The president has so far vetoed only two bills, but that number is set to explode in the coming years.

The battles lines already are drawn. The Hill reported last week that Republicans are “rallying behind using a rarely deployed budget tool next year to dismantle Obamacare.” Using a process known as reconciliation, Senate Republicans can pass some legislation with a simple 51 vote majority, skirting potential filibusters by the Democrats. According to The Hill, “While Obama is certain to veto anything that tries to roll back his landmark healthcare law, Republicans increasingly see reconciliation as an important messaging tool.” In other words, expect Congress to pass plenty of red-meat legislation that will go nowhere.

With a growing economy and a president who appears ready to fight, also expect Obama’s approval ratings — which this week matched Ronald Reagan’s at this point in his presidency — to continue to rise, especially among Democrats and Dem-leaning independents.

5. Republicans Will Continue to Overpromise, and the Tea Party Base Will Be Furious
Republicans have long assured their supporters that if they won the Senate and maintained control of the House they would roll back Obama’s agenda. But the reality is that their capacity to kill Obamacare, constrain the president’s executive authority and advance a conservative agenda will remain severely limited. Having been promised the moon, conservative base voters aren’t going to be happy with the modest spending cuts and largely symbolic concessions that their representatives are going to be able to deliver.

6. Democrats Will Make Concessions, and Their Progressive Base Will Be Furious
Democrats will have to pick their battles. Having won control of Congress, Republicans expect to advance at least some of their agenda. Many on the left will view this reality as a betrayal.

7. Fewer Backroom Deals
In the past month, two pieces of legislation stirred quite a bit of public controversy. First, there was a package of corporate tax cuts known as “tax extenders” which would have blown a hole in the budget in order to reward big business. Then there was the aforementioned Cromnibus, which loosened campaign finance limits – and into which bank lobbyists inserted a provision that weakened the Dodd-Frank financial reforms.

What’s notable about these bills is that both represent the kind of quiet corruption that usually passes with large bipartisan majorities, while going largely unreported by the political press and unnoticed by the public at large. Some of the tax extenders, for example, had been renewed every two years since the 1980s.

The most likely explanation for the media’s sudden focus on what these bills contain is the internal rifts emerging within the two parties. When progressive Dems led a revolt against the White House on parts of the Cromnibus spending bill, that became hot news, just as it was news when Ted Cruz bucked his leadership by briefly holding up the bill in an attempt to add language limiting Obama’s immigration order.

As long as there are intra-party fights about the details of this kind of legislation, K Street won’t be able to operate outside of the public’s view.

8. #BenghaziGruberFastandFuriousGate
With the GOP in control of the House and Senate, expect plenty of hearings in both chambers about a whole laundry list of Fox News-quality, White House “scandals,” especially any that can be linked to Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton. Like Benghazi.

In November, the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee released a report debunking all of the right’s conspiracy theories about the 2012 attacks on our consulate there, but days after the report’s release, John Boehner announced that he was reappointing members of a special select committee to investigate the non-controversy yet again, and a day later, The Hill reported that “Senate Republican leaders are under pressure from GOP lawmakers with presidential ambitions to join the House in investigating the 2012 Benghazi attack.”

With a limited ability to actually advance their policies, Congressional hearings offer lawmakers the ability to get facetime on TV, preen for their constituents and put their opposition to Obama — and Clinton — on display for their base and their funders.

9. The Issues
Immigration, the Keystone XL pipeline, new EPA regulations and Obama’s attempt to broker a deal with Iran will be among the most contentious issues in the coming years.

Republicans will continue their efforts to hobble the IRS and pare down the social safety net. According to Politico, the GOP is going to mount a full-court press against the Obama administration’s nutrition policies, including the school lunch standards Michelle Obama has championed.

There’s a remote possibility that the parties could come together to reform the tax code or pass legislation paving the way for trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But with both inter- and intra-party squabbles underway, and the heat of a presidential election, it’s doubtful.

The Affordable Care Act will continue to feature prominently in the political discourse, but the White House any efforts to undermine it will be greeted with a swift veto. More importantly, Republicans have been unable to coalesce around an alternative, and Obamacare has covered far too many people for their push for outright repeal to remain politically viable.

10. The Wildcard: King
Most legal analysts believe the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell – a case challenging Obamacare subsidies in states with federally-administered insurance exchanges – has no chance of succeeding. But that was also the conventional wisdom early on in the Hobby Lobby case, and it underestimated the activism of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority.

It’s difficult to predict the fallout if the Supreme Court were to strike down the subsidies – other than the fact that millions of people would likely be priced out of insurance coverage altogether. Would Congress, fearing a backlash from those who would lose insurance, scramble to fix the law? Will states scramble to establish their own exchanges?

A ruling is expected by June, and while it will likely affirm the status quo, it also has the potential to become a major political story for the next two years.

Inequality

Inequality and the American Child

by Joseph E. Stiglitz

Sadly, the United States is not living up to its obligations. In fact, it has not even ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The US, with its cherished image as a land of opportunity, should be an inspiring example of just and enlightened treatment of children. Instead, it is a beacon of failure – one that contributes to global sluggishness on children’s rights in the international arena.

Children, it has long been recognized, are a special group. They do not choose their parents, let alone the broader conditions into which they are born. They do not have the same abilities as adults to protect or care for themselves. That is why the League of Nations approved the Geneva Declaration on the Rights of the Child in 1924, and why the international community adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989.



Though an average American childhood may not be the worst in the world, the disparity between the country’s wealth and the condition of its children is unparalleled. About 14.5 percent of the American population as a whole is poor, but 19.9 percent of children – some 15 million individuals – live in poverty. Among developed countries, only Romania has a higher rate of child poverty. The US rate is two-thirds higher than that in the United Kingdom, and up to four times the rate in the Nordic countries. For some groups, the situation is much worse: more than 38 percent of black children and 30 percent of Hispanic children, are poor.

None of this is because Americans do not care about their children. It is because America has embraced a policy agenda in recent decades that has caused its economy to become wildly unequal, leaving the most vulnerable segments of society further and further behind. The growing concentration of wealth – and a significant reduction in taxes on it – has meant less money to spend on investments for the public good, like education and the protection of children.

As a result, America’s children have become worse off. Their fate is a painful example of how inequality not only undermines economic growth and stability – as economists and organizations like the International Monetary Fund are finally acknowledging – but also violates our most cherished notions of what a fair society should look like.

Income inequality is correlated with inequalities in health, access to education and exposure to environmental hazards, all of which burden children more than other segments of the population. Indeed, nearly one in five poor American children are diagnosed with asthma, a rate 60 percent higher than non-poor children. Learning disabilities occur almost twice as frequently among children in households earning less than $35,000 a year than they do in households earning more than $100,000. And some in Congress want to cut food stamps – on which some 23 million American households depend, threatening the poorest children with hunger.

These inequalities in outcomes are closely tied to inequalities in opportunities. Inevitably, in countries where children have inadequate nutrition, insufficient access to health care and education, and higher exposure to environmental hazards, the children of the poor will have far different life prospects from those of the rich. And, partly because an American child’s lifetime prospects are more dependent on his or her parents’ income and education than in other advanced countries, the US now has the least equality of opportunity of any advanced country. At America’s most elite universities, for example, only around 9 percent of students come from the bottom half of the population, while 74 percent come from the top quarter.

Most societies recognize a moral obligation to help ensure that young people can live up to their potential. Some countries even impose a constitutional mandate for equality of educational opportunities.

But in America, more is spent on the education of rich students than on the education of the poor. As a result, the US is wasting some of its most valuable assets, with some young people – bereft of skills – turning to dysfunctional activities. American states like California spend about as much on prisons as on higher education – and sometimes more.

Without compensatory measures – including pre-school education, ideally beginning at a very young age – unequal opportunities translate into unequal lifelong outcomes by the time children reach the age of five. That should be a spur to policy action.

Indeed, while inequality’s harmful effects are wide-reaching, and impose huge costs on our economies and societies, they are largely avoidable. The extremes of inequality observed in some countries are not the inexorable result of economic forces and laws. The right policies – stronger social safety nets, progressive taxation and better regulation (especially of the financial sector), to name a few – can reverse these devastating trends.

To generate the political will that such reforms require, we must confront policymakers’ inertia and inaction with the grim facts of inequality and its devastating effects on our children. We can reduce childhood deprivation and increase equality of opportunity, thereby laying the groundwork for a more just and prosperous future – one that reflects our own avowed values. So why don’t we?

Of the harm that inequality inflicts on our economies, politics and societies, the damage done to children demands special concern. Whatever responsibility poor adults may bear for their lot in life – they may not have worked hard enough, saved enough or made good decisions – children’s circumstances are thrust upon them without any sort of choice. Children, perhaps more than anyone, need the protection that rights afford – and the US should be providing the world with a shining example of what that means.

Cold Dead Hands....

2-year-old fatally shoots mom in Idaho Wal-Mart

By NICHOLAS K. GERANIOS

 A 29-year-old woman described as a loving mother was fatally shot by her 2-year-old son at a northern Idaho Wal-Mart in what authorities called a tragic accident.

NICHOLAS K. GERANIO, Associated Press

The toddler reached into Veronica J. Rutledge's purse and her concealed gun fired, Kootenai County sheriff's spokesman Stu Miller said. The woman, who had a concealed weapons permit, was shopping Tuesday with her son and three other children in Hayden, a politically conservative town of about 9,000 people about 40 miles northeast of Spokane, Washington.

Rutledge was from Blackfoot in southeastern Idaho, and her family had come to the area to visit relatives.

She was an employee of the Idaho National Laboratory, The Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Washington, reported. The Idaho Falls laboratory supports the U.S. Department of Energy in nuclear and energy research and national defense.

The young boy was left in a shopping cart, reached into his mother's purse and grabbed a small-caliber handgun, which discharged one time, Miller said.

Deputies who responded to the Wal-Mart found Rutledge dead, the sheriff's office said. "It appears to be a pretty tragic accident," Miller said.

The victim's father-in-law, Terry Rutledge, told The Associated Press that Veronica Rutledge "was a beautiful, young, loving mother." 

"She was not the least bit irresponsible," Terry Rutledge said. "She was taken much too soon." The woman's husband arrived to the store in Idaho's northern panhandle shortly after the shooting around 10:20 a.m. Tuesday, Miller said. All the children were taken to a relative's house.

Brooke Buchanan, a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart, said in a statement that the shooting was a "very sad and tragic accident." The Hayden store closed for the rest of the day.

"We are working closely with the local sheriff's department while they investigate what happened," Buchanan said.

Idaho National Laboratory senior chemical engineer Vince Maio worked with Rutledge on a research paper about using glass ceramic to store nuclear waste, The Spokesman-Review reported.

Maio said he was immediately impressed with her. "She had a lot of maturity for her age," he told the newspaper. "Her work was impeccable. She found new ways to do things that we did before and she found ways to do them better."

There do not appear to be reliable national statistics about the number of accidental fatalities involving children handling guns.

In neighboring Washington state, a 3-year-old boy was seriously injured in November when he accidentally shot himself in the face in a home in Lake Stevens, about 30 miles north of Seattle.

In April, a 2-year-old boy apparently shot and killed his 11-year-old sister while they and their siblings played with a gun inside a Philadelphia home. Authorities said the gun was believed to have been brought into the home by the mother's boyfriend.

Idaho lawmakers passed legislation earlier this year allowing concealed weapons on the state's public college and university campuses.

Despite facing opposition from all eight of the state's university college presidents, lawmakers sided with gun rights advocates who said the law would better uphold the Second Amendment.

Under the law, gun holders are barred from bringing their weapons into dormitories or buildings that hold more than 1,000 people, such as stadiums or concert halls.

Lovejoy

Comet Lovejoy has become visible to the unaided eye. To see the comet, just go outside an hour or so after sunset and look for a fuzzy patch to the right of Orion's belt. Binoculars and a star chart may help. Pictured here, Comet C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy) was captured three days ago passing nearly in front of M79, the globular star cluster visible as the bright spot slightly above and to the left of the comet's green-hued coma. The nucleus of Comet Lovejoy is a giant dirty iceberg that is shedding gas into a long and intricate ion tail, extending across the image, as it nears the Sun. The comet is expected to become even easier to spot for northern observers during January, as it is rises earlier and, hopefully, continues to brighten.

Hubble Sees an Ancient Globular Cluster

This image captures the stunning NGC 6535, a globular cluster 22,000 light-years away in the constellation of Serpens (The Serpent) that measures one light-year across.

Globular clusters are tightly bound groups of stars which orbit galaxies. The large mass in the rich stellar centre of the globular cluster pulls the stars inward to form a ball of stars. The word globulus, from which these clusters take their name, is Latin for small sphere.

Globular clusters are generally very ancient objects formed around the same time as their host galaxy. To date, no new star formation has been observed within a globular cluster, which explains the abundance of aging yellow stars in this image, most of them containing very few heavy elements.

NGC 6535 was first discovered in 1852 by English astronomer John Russell Hind. The cluster would have appeared to Hind as a small, faint smudge through his telescope. Now, over 160 years later, instruments like the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) on the NASA/ European Space Agency (ESA) Hubble Space Telescope allow us to marvel at the cluster and its contents in greater detail.

Krugman afraid?

What is Paul Krugman afraid of?

by Ezra Klein

Paul Krugman is a lot of things. New York Times op-ed columnist. Nobel prize-winning economist. Arcade Fire fanboy. Obama administration frenemy.

But the side of Krugman I've always found most interesting is the sci-fi obsessive. Krugman has long claimed it was science-fiction author Isaac Asimov's "psychohistorians" who led him to economics. "Someday there will exist a unified social science of the kind that Asimov imagined," he wrote, "but for the time being economics is as close to psychohistory as you can get."

Punditry tends towards the short view. What will happen in the next election? What will happen in Congress next week? What just happened on cable news? And as a pundit, Krugman takes on those topics often. But sci-fi takes the long view. It gravitates towards the threats and hopes humanity will face if it is lucky enough to survive into a world vastly different than our own. And so when I got a chance to sit down with Krugman recently, I asked him to take the long view — the science-fiction view.

Ezra Klein: You’re a big science fiction fan, so I'm curious if you have apocalyptic fears that lurk outside the policy window.

Paul Krugman: If you look at the long sweep of history, global integration has tended to bring mass pandemics in its wake. My understanding is that you basically got waves of major plagues in the ancient world, pretty much whenever somebody controlled the steppes of Central Asia well enough that substantial commerce between China and the West could take place. Pretty soon afterwards, lots of people died. In the opening of the New World, it wasn't the conquistadors, it was the microbes that really did it here.

Now we have this very integrated world with very uneven levels of public health. You have to think that a pandemic is at least a possibility. I think we can be reasonably sure that it won't actually involve zombies, but aside from that, it's a real threat.

Ezra Klein: I worry about that too, but I worry about it because I think it’s still hard for us to grok the level of bacterial integration we really have in the modern world. When I see the efforts to make sure that unauthorized immigrants can't access government healthcare programs, I always wonder what folks think is going to happen if these people get sick? These are the people who are preparing our food and taking care of our children. And it just gets worse when you’re talking about threats outside our borders.

Paul Krugman: Yeah, the way Ebola was covered was about at the same level as media coverage of shark attacks. The public would have learned nothing. Maybe we would have learned we need to close the borders or we need to fear people who don't look like us. I guess Time just named the Ebola responders their person of the year. Good for them, but the public has no idea of how much we depend upon this pretty much invisible line of defense that is looking pretty shabby these days.

Ezra Klein: A fear I hear about a lot lately is the idea that we’ll build a self-improving artificial intelligence that will ultimately destroy us.

Paul Krugman: The history of artificial intelligence is that it's always ten years ahead, and that's been true for about 50 years.

Ezra Klein: But let’s assume it does emerge. A lot of smart people right now seem terrified by it. You've got Elon Musk tweeting, "Hope we're not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable." Google's Larry Page is reading Nick Bostrom’s new book Superintelligence. I wonder, reading this stuff, whether people are overestimating the value of analytical intelligence. It’s just never been my experience that the higher you go up the IQ scale, the better people are at achieving their goals.

Our intelligence is really lashed to a lot of things that aren’t about intelligence, like endless generations of social competition in the evolutionary fight for the best mates. I don’t even know how to think about what a genuinely new, artifical intelligence would believe is important and what it would find interesting. It often seems to me that one of the reasons people get so afraid of AI is you have people who themselves are really bought into intelligence as being the most important of all traits and they underestimate importance of other motivations and aptitudes. But it seems as likely as not that a superintelligence would be completely hopeless at anything beyond the analysis of really abstract intellectual problems.

Paul Krugman: Yeah, or one thing we might find out if we produce something that is vastly analytically superior is it ends up going all solipsistic and spending all its time solving extremely difficult and pointless math problems. We just don't know. I feel like I was suckered again into getting all excited about self-driving cars, and so on, and now I hear it's actually a lot further from really happening that we thought. Producing artificial intelligence that can cope with the real world is still a much harder problem than people realize.

Ezra Klein: What do you think about the argument that’s playing out on the left between the vision of the Democratic Party represented by Hillary Clinton and the vision represented by Elizabeth Warren? Do you think they’re that different?

Paul Krugman: I would say at this point it looks mostly like symbolism. Among liberals in America, there’s actually fairly widespread dismay over actually what I think of as Clinton-Blairism; the kind of ‘90s liberalism that is not really taking on economic inequality, not really taking on Wall Street. And there’s a sense that Hillary Clinton might be a return to that.

But I don’t think Hillary Clinton is going to try and make it 1999 again. I remember in 2008 —as a Times columnist, I can't do endorsements, so you have no idea which party I favor in general elections — but I was skeptical of Obama at a time when a lot of people on the Left were very, very high on him. I heard a number of people saying, oh, god, if Hillary is elected, she's going to bring in the old Rubin crowd, people like Larry Summers, to run the economy. And then Obama got elected and did exactly that. I think, if anything, he was more conventional on economics than she was.

I think at this point, Elizabeth Warren is now the visible embodiment of the wing of the Democratic Party that’s determined not to return to Clinton-Blairism. That makes her useful even if she doesn’t run, as — I don't know — a ghost or something looming over Hillary.

Ezra Klein: Do you think it is possible at this point for a president to be successful amidst divided government in Congress?

Paul Krugman: I’d say basically no, but it depends on your definition of success. You can have the economy expanding, no foreign crises, and you can preside over a time of prosperity, which is kind of what happened with Bill Clinton. But if anything actually has to be done, no. Everybody in Washington has learned this very damaging lesson, which is that if somebody else holds the White House, but you have blocking power, sabotage works.

I think we are in for a very ugly time until one party or the other establishes a strong enough hold that the other party finally has an Eisenhower moment of essentially accepting the changes and going back to some kind of politics around a relatively narrow range of issues.

Ezra Klein: When you say it that way, it sounds like we're in a dangerous period in American politics. You have an electoral system that is biased a bit towards Democrats at the presidential level and heavily biased towards Republicans at the House level. So you're likely in for a really long period of divided government. And I agree with you, I think you have a level of political polarization that makes successful legislating very, very difficult amidst divided government. It seems possible that we’re looking at a decade or more in which we have a political system that is essentially unable to make any forward motion on major problems. It might be able to respond to a crisis, but it cannot affirmatively legislate.

Paul Krugman: Well, I'm not even sure about responding to a crisis. I find myself in meetings with international financial types. It's all the usual discussions, and they don't like to talk domestic U.S. politics, but then at some point, somebody says, what if we had another major financial crisis? What if we really needed something like TARP again? What are the chances that something like TARP could actually happen in this political environment? And everybody goes quiet, and looks down at their blotter.

Ezra Klein: I'd push on that a little bit. I think back to TARP, and it failing the first time, but then the crushing market reaction moving Congress. I still think market reactions can move Congress. What scares me is that you can really screw up a country by not doing things you should have done. But then the crisis doesn't come in a sharp moment where you can identify the cause. It’s just in lost percentage points of economic growth over a long period of time where nobody can be clearly blamed, and there’s not an easy, obvious fix.

Paul Krugman: One of my pet peeves actually is that people talk about policy as if, as long as you've avoided a hot crisis, things are okay even when they’re obviously not. The pet peeve that affects me personally is the cancellation of the Hudson Rail Tunnel in New York City, and it’s kind of perfect. Essentially, because of political partisanship, we still have the world's greatest city totally dependent on a tunnel completed in 1910 for all public transit linkage to the west. That doesn't show up in an abrupt collapse, but those sorts of things show up in a steady degradation of our prospects.

Ezra Klein: What do you think are the big stories for the next five years in American politics? What do you think it is that people should be paying attention to but they’re ignoring?

Paul Krugman: We have the continuing toll of a weak labor market. Yes, the unemployment rate is down, but we still have a lot of long-term unemployment. We still have a really lousy environment for new college graduates. This doesn't show up in any dramatic event, but it means that we're seeing a lot of dreams getting killed in ways that are going to take a toll on national morale, with hardly any focused political pressure to do anything about it.

Then there are the environmental issues. I think crashing oil prices are going to put the brakes on fracking, but as best as I can make out, done right, shale can in fact be an important, very positive force. But that requires that there be adequate regulation to make sure that it is done right. Given the current environment, it's very unlikely that that'll happen. So we're going to be seeing a lot more stories of poisoned wells, of earthquakes. These ongoing environmental issues that will probably produce a lot of local rage. You drive into certain parts of Pennsylvania and there's obviously huge local anger, but it's not likely to move things on a wider front.

Then there’s the trend towards inequality, which has not reversed, let’s put it that way. You might wonder at what point at which there's enough revulsion to be politically effective. I remember when we were writing stories about 30,000 square-foot mansions, and we're talking about those being torn down for 80,000 square-foot mansions. So it goes on.

Ezra Klein: Do you worry more about wealth inequality or income inequality?

Paul Krugman: Income inequality, but I don't think they're separable issues. We need to worry a lot more about lagging incomes in the bottom half or bottom two-thirds of the income distribution than we worry about soaring incomes at the top. And the people in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution have hardly any wealth. For them, wealth has gone from essentially zero 30 years ago to essentially zero now. So for them, it's income that is crucial.

The wealth inequality measures are useful because they are, in some ways, a more reliable gauge of what's happening at the top. If incomes fluctuate a lot at the top, you can argue, though it's overstated, that it's a changing cast of people. But the top 0.1 percent in wealth is not an ever-shifting cast of characters.

Ezra Klein: Do you think the story of median and lower-than-median wage stagnation and the story of income inequality are the same story, or different? It seems to me that you can see different patterns. The story of the huge changes in income inequality seems to really be focused in the top three or four percent, and it seems to start about 10 years after media wage stagnation. Or, I guess, to put it another way, do you think we could solve wage stagnation without solving income inequality?

Paul Krugman: Probably not. I think if you really did something about wage stagnation you would find that it would have a pretty strong effect in curbing incomes at the top as well. I think if you try to understand the factors behind soaring incomes at the top, they are many of the same forces that are leading to stagnating incomes for workers. The idea that we can totally separate these things is wrong. It almost harkens back to the Clinton-Blairism. You did have, in the UK at least, a fairly serious attempt in Blair/Brown to tackle poverty and to reduce income inequality, combined with a sympathetic, laissez faire attitude towards the top one percent. It produced results for a while, but in the end, it seems to be economically and politically unsustainable. It gave rise, eventually, to a regime that's doing its best to increase inequality on all fronts.

Ezra Klein: Have you seen plans from any politicians, or even any think tanks, for addressing income inequality that feel to you equal to the scale of the problem? I feel like you hear politicians rail on income inequality as a defining challenge of our time, and then they want to raise the top marginal tax rate by three percent or something. There's a real gap between the scale of the problem people are describing and the solutions they’re willing to embrace. Do you think this is a problem we actually know how to solve?

Paul Krugman: I think it is, but we know that it takes an extraordinary political environment to change it. The Great Compression took place under FDR. They took a society that was about as unequal as what we have now, maybe more so because of a weaker social safety net, and turned it into a broadly middle-class society that lasted for more than a generation. But that was done through a combination of a dramatic increase in unionization, extremely high rates of progressive taxation, and wage controls during the war that were used to compress the wage distribution.

So we can describe a set of policies that will restore a middle-class society, but they take FDR-sized majorities in Congress, and even then, it took a war to really bring those changes about. Which is why everybody, me included, talks about chipping away at the margins and hopes that, cumulatively, you're going to get something done.

Libya war is coming

‘A Ground Invasion of the Capital Is Imminent’

All-out war is coming to Libya, as rebel militias and a government-in-hiding begin a battle for control of the country.

By Bel Trew

Zeina, 27, was hanging out her washing when the first Grad rocket smashed into a neighbor’s house at the end of her dusty street. The deafening boom was followed by the telltale buzz of more incoming rockets. Libya’s civil war had landed on her doorstep.

“It started as a normal day — then we heard the sound of shelling and rockets,” said the young mother. “Without warning, they hit our houses. We fled with just the clothes we were wearing.”

Zeina is now crammed together with seven other people in a cinderblock outhouse that is part of Tripoli’s zoo. They are just a handful of the more than 400,000 people who are currently displaced inside Libya, which is witnessing its worst crisis since the 2011 NATO-backed revolt that toppled dictator Muammar Qaddafi.

For three years, Libya has been without a functioning government, police force, or army. The country has been ripped apart by warring fiefdoms of ex-rebels who helped oust Qaddafi but have since directed politics with AK-47s and anti-aircraft guns. This summer, as the battle lines began to harden, two rival factions emerged to vie for control of Libya: On one side is the newly elected parliament that has been banished to the eastern city of Tobruk — supported by the fractured remains of Qaddafi soldiers who defected during the uprising, as well as regional powers like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. On the other side is Libya Dawn, a self-described revolutionary coalition of militiamen and Islamist-leaning politicians that originated in the western city of Misrata, allegedly backed by Turkey and Qatar.

Zeina’s hometown of Kikla, which lies less than 100 miles southwest of Tripoli, is on the front line between the two factions, which are battling for control of the capital. With two governments and two parliaments, both of which have a tenuous grip on power and access to funds, there is no one in authority to ask for help.

“It’s winter now, and we’re in a desperate situation,” Zeina said. “We heard our houses have been flattened and burned. What do we do?”

Hundreds of miles to the east, smartly dressed lawmakers, Salafi militants, fighter jet pilots, and tribal leaders sat in a glittering hotel lobby. The building was under strict military lockdown — its long driveway studded with concrete roadblocks and checkpoints. But inside the hushed halls, uniformed waiters moved between the groups serving cappuccinos and croissants. Lavish three-course meals were served in the dining and conference rooms. Outside, the legislators’ children — forced into exile with their parents — played soccer on the abandoned tennis courts that overlook the Mediterranean.

This is the exiled parliament’s stronghold in Tobruk, over 900 miles to the east of Tripoli.

When Libya Dawn staged an armed takeover of the capital this summer, it forced the House of Representatives, which had been elected in June, to flee here. Now, loyalists are plotting their return to Tripoli.

Money and war are the main topics of conversation. The country’s oil authorities and ministries now lie in the hands of Libya Dawn, which claims to be the legitimate government. The Islamist coalition’s case was bolstered after a November Supreme Court decision, which it said nullified the House of Representatives and a constitutional amendment on which the June elections were based.

The Libyan Central Bank, fighting to maintain its neutrality, has refused to channel the country’s lucrative oil revenues to either administration since the court decision. It is only paying “expenses” for both administrations, and basic salaries, which ironically includes those of the militias, who were absorbed into the interior and defense ministries by the former parliament in 2012.

The decision has rendered the Tobruk parliament’s plans and newly drafted $42 billion budget for the next financial year nothing more than pieces of paper.

For the politicians and military leaders in Tobruk, that means war.

“The easiest solution is a military takeover [of Tripoli]; it’s the only way to move forward from this ridiculous stalemate,” said one senior lawmaker, dressed in a crisp suit. “We are trying to build a new central bank and premises for different ministries, but this is temporary until we take back Tripoli.”

The United Nations was supposed to have chaired a fresh round of peace talks between the warring factions this month. But so far they have been unable to set a date, let alone an agenda to resolve the crisis.

Tobruk’s military forces, meanwhile, don’t seem to be in the mood for talking. Gen. Khalifa Haftar, a formerly rogue military leader who embarked on a self-styled “War on Terror” against Islamists earlier this year, is at the helm of the recently rebranded “Libyan National Army” — the remnants of the Qaddafi-era armed forces that defected during the revolution. And he seems to believe the wind is at his back.

“A ground invasion of the capital is imminent,” Haftar told me from his sprawling military base in the countryside outside Merj, a town that lies roughly an hour-long helicopter ride west of Tobruk.

Haftar, 71, has seen his fortunes improve dramatically in recent months. He was declared an outlaw by the authorities after unsuccessfully attempting to overthrow the previous Islamist-dominated parliament in February, and was only recently reinstated by the House of Representatives, which lacked a military force of its own to wrest control back from the militias. Haftar quickly changed that: He absorbed pro-government western militias into his army, and is currently encircling the capital and fighting Libya Dawn militiamen in Kikla.

Haftar’s first major offensive was in the eastern city of Benghazi, where his troops have gained serious ground after six months of battling Libya Dawn-allied eastern militias and jihadis — including the U.N.-designated terror group Ansar al-Sharia. Haftar claims his forces have “secured” around 95 percent of the city.

Seeking to build on his momentum, Haftar then turned west. In November, he sent his battered MiG fighter jets to Tripoli to bomb Libya Dawn positions and weapons depots. This month, the general pushed further west, striking targets on the border with Tunisia, which briefly closed the largest border crossing, Ras Jedir. On Dec. 28, his forces hit Misrata, the hometown of most of the Libya Dawn leadership.

“We cannot continue with two governments, two parliaments, so Libya Dawn should end or we are going to arrest them all,” he said, promising further airstrikes in Misrata.

Haftar’s men told me that a large multimillion-dollar arms deal with an Eastern European country, which would see the acquisition of updated fighter jets, helicopters, and heavy weaponry, will be the nail in the coffin of their enemies. The Tobruk authorities are footing the bill, and are just waiting for delivery.

Tobruk Prime Minister Abdullah al-Thinni, a former military man himself, echoed Haftar’s hawkishness.

“We are supporting the front line with more jet fighters to break the deadlock,” he told me from his temporary offices in Labraq, a city just west of Tobruk, consisting of stark, Soviet-style concrete buildings. “Citizens of Tripoli are getting ready now and are waiting for the moment when the army enters the city.”

But there is lingering bad blood between Thinni and his military commander, which could presage a future conflict. In June, Thinni, who had been serving as prime minister then too, had been among those in the previous parliament who blacklisted Haftar. That same month, Haftar said that he wanted most of Thinni’s cabinet jailed. The distrust between the two men is still palpable, as both claim ownership of the war in the west.

Thinni said he would only come to the negotiating table if Libya Dawn accepted the legitimacy of his parliament, dropped its alliance with terror groups like Ansar al-Sharia, and gave up Tripoli — an impossible set of preconditions sure to scupper any U.N.-backed mediation initiative. “Libya Dawn members who committed crimes should be tried,” he added.

Establishing his government’s authority over the whole country is going to take a massive influx of money — and Thinni knows it. The prime minister admitted it was near impossible to run a country without access to the country’s government buildings and funds. As an interim solution, he appointed his own heads of the National Oil Corporation, the body solely response for the sale and purchase of oil and gas, and the Libyan Central Bank, which controls the country’s purse strings. He wants to move their offices east, to Benghazi and Ras Lanuf, redirecting oil funds and effectively carving Libya in two.

“It’s about who is controlling the money. We can change the direction of flow of oil income into the banks we choose,” he said. “So Libya Dawn can just sit in Tripoli and invent their own authorities, but in fact they control nothing.”

In Tripoli, Libya Dawn’s ascendance is visible by simply walking down the street. The Che Guevara-looking Zintan fighters, who backed the Tobruk government, were chased out of town, and have been replaced by Misrati militiamen, who cruise the neighborhoods in pickup trucks mounted with anti-aircraft guns. Their trucks — scrawled with text reading “Correcting the direction of the February 17 revolution” — guard the main ministries and parliament buildings. Graffiti praising Misrata, where Libya Dawn originates, has been scrawled on Qaddafi-era brigade bases they have commandeered.

The charred apartment blocks near the bombed-out airport are a stark reminder of the summer’s fierce fighting. Tripoli residents now tentatively go about their daily business, but activists in the city — who have been outspoken against the militias for years — say there has been a spike in kidnappings against their community since the summer, driving many into hiding or out of the country.

Prime Minister Omar al-Hassi, a 55-year-old former academic from Benghazi who was appointed by Libya Dawn, has the same idea as his rivals. He has moved quickly to seize control of the country’s sole remaining institutions: He headquartered his administration at the National Oil Corporation, taken over government buildings and websites, and appointed his own oil minister.

His forces are also on the offensive against oil sites held by Libya Dawn’s rivals. A few months ago, Libya Dawn militiamen seized control of the lucrative oil fields in the south — including El Sharara, Libya’s largest — bringing production to a grinding halt. In early December, they moved on the eastern oil ports and oil fields currently controlled by forces loyal to the Tobruk authorities, prompting new clashes with Haftar’s men. In the last week, five oil tanks that stored almost a million barrels of oil were set ablaze.

Hassi also sounded just as uncompromising about his enemies in Tobruk as they did about him. He described Thinni and Haftar as criminals for ignoring the court verdict invalidating the House of Representatives, and called on the international community to boycott the exiled parliament.

“Their crimes are huge and they are exacting a collective punishment on us all,” he said. “Whoever doesn’t listen to the court becomes an outlaw and should be stopped.”

Hassi called for fresh parliamentary elections “once the war stops.” Until that day, he argues that his “salvation government” should rule and preside over any peace talks. He defended his administration’s alliance with Ansar al-Sharia — saying the jihadi group had been misunderstood and actually represented a “simple, beautiful, friendly idea.”

Hassi promised his government “was all about dialogue,” but his militiamen, embittered by Haftar’s airstrikes in Tripoli and Benghazi, appear more determined than ever to fight to the death.

“They will keep going until the last man is gunned down — you can forget about peace deals or negotiations,” said the head of one of the largest Islamist militias operating in Benghazi. “We are losing between 20 and 25 men a day; there is no way after such huge losses the men will give up.”

While hatred for Haftar unites all the militias under Libya Dawn’s banner, wildly differing views of the country’s future could drive them apart in the future. The coalition includes both liberals and radical Islamists — and already there are signs of discontent simmering beneath the surface among some on the extremes.

Speaking on the phone from the front line in Benghazi, one Ansar al-Sharia fighter said they were not happy with Libya Dawn’s insistence on pursuing the trappings of a democratic state. “We’ll be happy if sharia law is properly implemented — but we won’t settle for less,” he said tersely.

Back in the cramped cinderblock outhouse that Zeina calls home, the young mother and her friends are stockpiling blankets in preparation for winter. They count themselves lucky, because they have access to running water. Next door, a family hastily constructs their own makeshift concrete block home in the dusty street. Others have been forced to make do living in parks and schools.

But there are many others who have fared far worse. Libya Body Count, a local independent monitoring organization, reports that over 2,700 people have been killed this year alone. As battles across the country intensify, that number goes up every day. Hundreds of thousands of civilians who have fled the war are now struggling to stay alive as the temperatures drop, and aid workers are unable to provide urgently needed medical care, food, and shelter. Meanwhile the economy is in tatters — Libya relies on oil revenues, and the fighting at the oil ports has seen production plummet by 60 percent in recent days.

The poorest and most vulnerable, like Zeina, have been hit hardest by the crisis. And with nobody truly in charge of the country, they have been left to fend for themselves.

“We just want to go home and for this war to stop,” Zeina said. “We were promised everything. It’s been three years now, and what good have we seen?”

Unsurprisingly Wisdom

The Year of Unconventional Wisdom

Unsurprisingly, political experts were wrong a lot in 2014.

By George E. Condon Jr.

People who make a living predicting the political future had a rough 2014.

Voters had a way of not always following the script—otherwise known as "conventional wisdom"—set out by those whose columns, microphones, talk shows, and TV appearances give them the prominence to proclaim what quickly is accepted as the way it is.

Perhaps the biggest lesson learned from the year gone by is that conventional wisdom—always subject to change—now does so more rapidly than ever. What is accepted conventional wisdom in January can look laughable in December. And that may be the biggest challenge for those who track the CW—trying to keep up. That was proved right from the start in 2014, a year that began with much of Washington still clinging to the belief that voters were in the mood to punish Republicans for shutting down government. That had been the prevailing wisdom after the 16-day battle between President Obama and the Republican House in late 2013. When it ended in acrimony that Oct. 16, the polls left no doubt that the voters thought poorly of the GOP architects of the shutdown.

But that held for only 11 days, until the first crash of the Obamacare website. And 2014 dawned with the president still struggling to explain why he had promised people they could keep their insurance if they liked it.
That was the changed environment when the new year began. But it led to dueling CW's, with Democrats clinging to the belief that voters would remember the shutdown and Republicans believing they would instead be thinking of their unhappiness with Obamacare when they voted. As was often the case in 2014, the Republican CW was closer to the truth. Democrats got trapped, failing to understand how quick political reality is to shift.

ADVERTISEMENT

To believe that the impact of the shutdown would be strong more than a year later "you would have to believe that politics is static and that events are not overtaken by subsequent events or fade over time," said Charlie Cook, editor of The Cook Political Report. "It also assumes that one thing can be isolated and that nothing else matters."

Few people in Washington have seen more conventional wisdom come and go in Washington than Stephen H. Hess, who worked in the Eisenhower White House and now is a senior fellow emeritus at the Brookings Institution. "Conventional wisdom is always right until it is wrong," he said. "Then we either start again or write 'on the other hand'."

There have always been opinion leaders in Washington. But nobody called it conventional wisdom until 1958, when economist John Kenneth Galbraith coined the term in his book, The Affluent Society. According to Safire's Political Dictionary by William Safire—whose New York Times column would itself help set conventional wisdom for years before his 2009 death—"the hallmark of the conventional wisdom is acceptability. It has the approval of those to whom it is addressed."

In the days when columnists like Walter Lippmann and James Reston reigned, it was clearer who was setting the CW. In a fractured media environment, it is much less clear. Conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh contends that David Gergen, who worked for several presidents of both parties, used to set the CW. "Whatever he said, whatever he thought, you could count on that being what everybody else in the power clique thought and believed," Limbaugh said on his show in October. "He was the arbiter, and may still be for many, of political correctness and conventional wisdom."

But Limbaugh suggested "it may be that that torch is being passed." He nominated Bloomberg columnists and TV hosts John Heilemann and Mark Halperin as the new arbiters. Isaac Chotiner in The New Republic earlier this year referred to "Ron Fournier and his ilk," suggesting the National Journal writer is helping set the CW. Others have pointed to print journalists, including Politico's Mike Allen, National Journal's Ron Brownstein, and The Washington Post's Dan Balz. With more immediate impact and the larger platform afforded by television, there are Chuck Todd of NBC, Jake Tapper of CNN, and Brett Baier of Fox.

For all of them, 2014 was a particularly challenging year. Those who stuck with history and said throughout that it would be a disastrous year for Democrats were correct. Those who thought the low approval ratings of Congress would hurt Republicans were wrong. So were those who thought the improving economy would help Obama rebound in popularity, those who thought women's issues could rescue Democratic candidates, and those who believed it was Republican pollsters whose results were skewed or that a superior Democratic ground game would alter the basic dynamics. This, again, was an example of the dangers of not adjusting CW—in 2012 it was true that the Republican polls and Republican ground game were inferior. That wasn't true in 2014.

Perhaps nothing demonstrates the fluidity more than the easy reelection victories in 2014 of Democratic Sens. Al Franken in Minnesota and Jeff Merkley of Oregon. Six years earlier, Merkley won with only 48.9 percent of the vote and Franken, with 41.99 percent, wasn't declared the winner until six months after Election Day and after a lengthy recount battle that left him the winner by only 312 votes. Everybody in Washington just knew that both would face tough sledding in 2014.

But things changed. When the votes were tallied in 2014, both had won easy reelections. Merkley, at 55.8 percent, had the second-highest vote percentage of any Democrat running. Franken, at 53.2 percent, had the fourth-highest total—higher than Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, something no CW practitioner ever envisioned. The CW was too focused on what was supposed to be Mark Warner's cakewalk to easy reelection. But the CW was wrong on Warner. He eked out the narrowest of all wins, getting only 49.2 percent of the vote in Virginia.

CW didn't even handle election night well. Even as the Republican wave was moving across the country, inundating one Democratic candidate after another and giving the GOP unexpected victories, commentators on CNN were declaring it an "anti-incumbent" night. They were undeterred by the fact that Republican incumbents seemed generally immune to this voter anger.

In victory, Republicans were not much better, though. As the victors almost always do, they tried to set a conventional wisdom of a large mandate—more specifically an anti-Obamacare mandate. That hasn't quite taken hold, though, since the exit polls showed it was more an anti-Obama verdict than anti-Obamacare. Plus, the most effective Republican attack throughout the campaign was branding incumbent Democrats as voting with the president 97 or 98 percent of the time.

Moving into the new year, James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, warns that CW may be more flawed and more fleeting. "Conventional wisdom has become more a function of an Internet marketplace than actual analytical insight," he told National Journal.

Stephen Hess adds another warning: Beware of the coming conventional wisdom on Hillary Clinton's presidential candidacy. Just about everybody in Washington in 2007 believed that Clinton would sweep aside all challengers in 2008 and coast to the Democratic presidential nomination. Everybody was wrong. She lost the nomination to the upstart Obama. Now the purveyors of CW are at it again. "I think Hillary is going to drive the conventional-wisdom people up the wall," Hess said.