-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger
There are two ways to increase your chances of winning an election, get more voters to cast their ballots for you, or get fewer voters to cast their ballots for your opponent. The GOP had decided to pursue the latter option.
There is nothing more sacred in a democracy that the right to vote, so an attack on voting rights is an attack on democracy. That is exactly what is happening in many states across our land. Republican governors and legislatures are passing laws making it extremely difficult for certain Americans to vote.
The Republicans use the illusion of voter fraud to mask their contempt of the Constitution. A report from the Brennan Center for Justice found the incidence of voter fraud at rates such as 0.0003 percent in Missouri and 0.000009 percent in New York. Michael Waldman, executive director of the Brennan Center said “Voter impersonation is an illusion.” The Brennan report also states:
We are not aware of any documented cases in which individual noncitizens have either intentionally registered to vote or voted while knowing that they were ineligible.
Kris Kobach, the secretary of state of Kansas and longtime conservative activist, has led the voter ID drive in his state. Kobach explained that between 1997 and 2010, Kansas has experienced “221 cases of reported voter fraud.” A dubious claim since not a single criminal conviction has resulted. Over the same period of time, Kansans cast 10 million votes. Even if everyone of the claimed cases of voter fraud were accurate, the rate of fraud would be miniscule.
Numerous surveys show that blacks, Hispanics, the elderly, and the young are less likely like to possess a form of government-issued identification. Except for the elderly, the other demographics are more likely to vote Democratic. The elderly are more likely to vote Republican. In a shameless display of the falsity of their voter fraud motivations, Republicans in Texas simply exempted the elderly from the new voter ID law.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, after signing a voter ID law requiring voters to have a photo ID, then closed DMV offices in Democratic areas and expanded DMV operating hours in Republican areas. South Carolina governor Nikki Haley said she “will go take them to the DMV myself and help them get that picture ID.” Even with carpooling, it would take 7 years, 4 months, 3 weeks and 5 days to take the 178,000 voters to the DMV. That assumes good traffic conditions.
H/T: WaPo, Bloomberg, E.J. Dionne, Think Progress, Daily Kos.
Otteray Scribe:
Unfortunately I dont think Reagan went far enough.
Japan has a shitty economy, France has high persistent unemployment, Germany is doing OK but only because they have more freedom than France does.
If you really cared about babies, you would strive for political and economic freedom. The proven method for extending life and improving health is prosperity. Political and economic freedom provide prosperity.
Why do you not like political and economic freedom? Personally I dont like seeing babies die, so that is why I am for freedom.
Look I was right.
Roco, I suspect OS’s answer involves some sort of magic and untried Democratic talking points. I would love to live in this fairytale world were competition is abolished, I have a job for life, and all my needs are provided for by a gentle, kind, uncorrupt government. Sign me up.
Roco, keep drinking the Kool Aid. Unfettered capitalism does not spawn jobs–the past couple of decades have proven that. And tax cuts to spawn jobs is just more of the widely disproved and ridiculed theory of Laffer, Ronald Reagan’s favorite economist.
If socialism does not work, then go tell it to the French, Germans, Chinese and Japanese. We are way behind the rest of the civilized world in health care and infant mortality, mostly due to lack of availability of health insurance. Live in your dream world. I feel sorry for those who care more for tax cuts than human beings, especially babies.
eniobob, people on SSI do not get Medicare. They are on Medicaid, which is for the poor and disabled. They do not have Medicare A or B deductions. Medicaid usually provides lower payments to providers, along with many restrictions. That is why many physicians who take Medicare refuse to accept Medicaid. Poor people get screwed coming and going.
“Otteray Scribe
1, July 31, 2011 at 11:13 pm
Raff, a very high percentage of disabled people get SSI with the maximum of $674/month”
Don’t forget eventual Medicare payment deductions from that $647/a month.
Otteray Scribe:
“Jack and others who think like Jack:
I do not dislike you, do not hate you and do not disrespect you. I simply pity you. Pity for your lack of compassion, lack of empathy and lack of soul. Pity for your inability to see a larger picture than your narrow economic self interest. I truly feel sorry for you and all who think like you.
I sincerely hope you do not fall on the kind of hard times that have befallen others and that if you you do, there will be programs that will save you. Those are not empty words; I mean that.”
What in your mind eliminates poverty? In my mind it is only one thing and that is wealth creation. There is only one proven system for wealth creation for a large number of people.
Have you ever stopped to think that people like me might have a tremendous empathy for people? That we want everyone to be prosperous and happy and well fed. And that we think the best way for that to happen is human freedom.
If I am a selfish bastard and want what is good for me, then I want to live in a country with both economic and political freedom. I want to live in a country where my future success is not guaranteed. Where I have to compete every single day for my daily bread and do a better job than the next guy, not one day a month but every single day or I may not eat. And where every other person is doing the same thing, innovating and expanding and creating new products and services to save a dollar and get a leg up on the competition.
Look at food, look at the Internet. It is happening where government doesn’t have a heavy hand.
For Christ sake, how many different kinds of tacos are there now? Chicken tacos, beef tacos, fish tacos, Asian tacos, vegetarian tacos, tacos with pork BBQ, tacos with a Vietnamese flair. Why is that? And how many little one man or 2 man operations has that spawned? And sometime soon someone is going to start mass producing designer tacos and make a shit pile full of money and put thousands of people to work.
There is only one way to lift human beings up, that is wealth creation. And there is only one system that provides the best opportunity for wealth creation for the largest number of people. And it isn’t socialism or its many variants.
OS:
In capitals,TOUCHE!!
Unless Obama pulls off some trick of legerdemain, he looks anything but like a leader. He has managed to look like the caboose on the train, not the locomotive.
His predecessor, Teddy Roosevelt, called the Presidency a “bully pulpit.” Well, Mr. President, we are waiting for you to step up to the pulpit and lay some fire and brimstone on the opposition party and its tea party sycophants. Sometimes a kind word and turning the other cheek does not work inside the beltway. To paraphrase author Robert Heinlein, if you go into politics, you need to be prepared to cut your opponent’s heart out and eat it. We are waiting for a signal that you finally figured out compromise is a foreign concept to the Republicans. Their interpretation of compromise is that you capitulate. I want to see the President act presidential. We need a Roosevelt (either one), a Lincoln or a Lyndon Johnson. We do not need a Buchanan or Hoover.
The President blinked.
“Clinton did not know how Obama could avoid a repeat shutdown, but insisted that the president stand his ground. “First, the White House could blink,” Clinton said. “I hope that won’t happen. I don’t think they should blink.”
The President Surrenders
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: July 31, 2011
A deal to raise the federal debt ceiling is in the works. If it goes through, many commentators will declare that disaster was avoided. But they will be wrong.
For the deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.
Start with the economics. We currently have a deeply depressed economy. We will almost certainly continue to have a depressed economy all through next year. And we will probably have a depressed economy through 2013 as well, if not beyond.
The worst thing you can do in these circumstances is slash government spending, since that will depress the economy even further. Pay no attention to those who invoke the confidence fairy, claiming that tough action on the budget will reassure businesses and consumers, leading them to spend more. It doesn’t work that way, a fact confirmed by many studies of the historical record.
Indeed, slashing spending while the economy is depressed won’t even help the budget situation much, and might well make it worse. On one side, interest rates on federal borrowing are currently very low, so spending cuts now will do little to reduce future interest costs. On the other side, making the economy weaker now will also hurt its long-run prospects, which will in turn reduce future revenue. So those demanding spending cuts now are like medieval doctors who treated the sick by bleeding them, and thereby made them even sicker.
And then there are the reported terms of the deal, which amount to an abject surrender on the part of the president. First, there will be big spending cuts, with no increase in revenue. Then a panel will make recommendations for further deficit reduction — and if these recommendations aren’t accepted, there will be more spending cuts.
Republicans will supposedly have an incentive to make concessions the next time around, because defense spending will be among the areas cut. But the G.O.P. has just demonstrated its willingness to risk financial collapse unless it gets everything its most extreme members want. Why expect it to be more reasonable in the next round?
In fact, Republicans will surely be emboldened by the way Mr. Obama keeps folding in the face of their threats. He surrendered last December, extending all the Bush tax cuts; he surrendered in the spring when they threatened to shut down the government; and he has now surrendered on a grand scale to raw extortion over the debt ceiling. Maybe it’s just me, but I see a pattern here.
Did the president have any alternative this time around? Yes.
First of all, he could and should have demanded an increase in the debt ceiling back in December. When asked why he didn’t, he replied that he was sure that Republicans would act responsibly. Great call.
And even now, the Obama administration could have resorted to legal maneuvering to sidestep the debt ceiling, using any of several options. In ordinary circumstances, this might have been an extreme step. But faced with the reality of what is happening, namely raw extortion on the part of a party that, after all, only controls one house of Congress, it would have been totally justifiable.
At the very least, Mr. Obama could have used the possibility of a legal end run to strengthen his bargaining position. Instead, however, he ruled all such options out from the beginning.
But wouldn’t taking a tough stance have worried markets? Probably not. In fact, if I were an investor I would be reassured, not dismayed, by a demonstration that the president is willing and able to stand up to blackmail on the part of right-wing extremists. Instead, he has chosen to demonstrate the opposite.
Make no mistake about it, what we’re witnessing here is a catastrophe on multiple levels.
It is, of course, a political catastrophe for Democrats, who just a few weeks ago seemed to have Republicans on the run over their plan to dismantle Medicare; now Mr. Obama has thrown all that away. And the damage isn’t over: there will be more choke points where Republicans can threaten to create a crisis unless the president surrenders, and they can now act with the confident expectation that he will.
In the long run, however, Democrats won’t be the only losers. What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question. After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation’s economic security, gets to dictate policy? And the answer is, maybe it can’t.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on August 1, 2011, on page
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Diminished President
By ROSS DOUTHAT
Published: July 31, 2011
By rights, Barack Obama should be emerging as the big political winner in the debt ceiling debate. For months, he’s positioned himself near the center of public opinion, leaving Republicans to occupy the rightward flank. Poll after poll suggests that Americans prefer the president’s call for a mix of spending cuts and tax increases to the Republican Party’s anti-tax approach. Poll after poll shows that House Republicans, not Obama, would take most of the blame if the debt ceiling weren’t raised.
Yet the president’s approval ratings have been sinking steadily for weeks, hitting a George W. Bush-esque low of 40 percent in a recent Gallup survey. The voters incline toward Obama on the issues, still like him personally and consider the Republican opposition too extreme. But they are increasingly judging his presidency a failure anyway.
The administration would no doubt blame this judgment on the steady stream of miserable economic news. But it should save some of the blame for its own political approach. Ever since the midterms, the White House’s tactics have consistently maximized President Obama’s short-term advantage while diminishing his overall authority. Call it the “too clever by half” presidency: the administration’s maneuvering keeps working out as planned, but Obama’s position keeps eroding.
Start with the first round of deficit debates this winter. After the Republican sweep, the White House seemed to have two options: double down on Keynesian stimulus or pivot to the center and champion deficit reduction. Instead, Obama chose to hover above the fray, passing on his own fiscal commission’s recommendations and letting the Republicans make the first move.
The strategy worked, in a sense. Goaded by the president’s evasiveness, Paul Ryan and the House Republicans put forward a detailed long-term budget proposal of their own, whose Medicare cuts proved predictably unpopular. But while the subsequent policy debate favored Obama, the optics of the confrontation diminished him. The chairman of the House Budget Committee looked more like a leader than the president of the United States.
Then came the spring’s great foreign policy dilemma, the civil war in Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libya. The president (wisely) didn’t want to put America’s blood and treasure on the line for the rebels, but he also didn’t want to take responsibility for letting Qaddafi crush the revolt. So the White House opted for a kind of quasi war, throwing just enough military power at the problem to ensure a stalemate and then punting responsibility to our NATO allies. An Obama adviser told The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza that the president was pioneering a new American way of statecraft: “Leading from behind.”
Again, the strategy worked, sort of. An immediate humanitarian crisis was averted, and Libya quickly fell out of the headlines. But it left Americans to contemplate a peculiar and unpresidential spectacle: The leader of the free world taking the country to war while pretending that he wasn’t, and then effectively washing his hands of the ultimate outcome — which, 135 days and counting later, is still very much in doubt.
The same pattern has played out in the debt ceiling debate. Instead of drawing clear lines and putting forward detailed proposals, the president has played Mr. Compromise — ceding ground to Republicans here, sermonizing about Tea Party intransigence and Washington gridlock there, and fleshing out his preferred approach reluctantly, if at all.
The White House no doubt figured that this negotiating strategy would either lead to a bipartisan grand bargain or else expose Republican extremism — or better still, do both. And again, the strategy is arguably working. Americans were given a glimpse of right-wing populism’s reckless side last week, and the final deal will probably let the president burnish his centrist credentials just in time for 2012.
But winning a debate on points isn’t a substitute for looking like a leader. It’s one thing to bemoan politics-as-usual when you’re running for the White House. It’s quite another to publicly throw up your hands over our “dysfunctional government” when you’re the man the voters put in charge of it.
In fairness, the president’s passive-aggressive approach is a bipartisan affliction. The ostensible front-runner for the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney, took a deliberately hazy position on last week’s crucial House debate, preferring to flunk a test of leadership rather than risk alienating either side. (The Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney quipped that “if you took Obama’s plan and Romney’s plan, and just met in the middle, you’d be in the middle of nowhere.”)
This leaves Americans to contemplate two possibilities more alarming than debt-ceiling brinkmanship. First, that we’re living through yet another failed presidency. And second, that there’s nobody waiting in the wings who’s up to the task either.
Puzzling: “I’m not sure how long ago you became disabled, but in 2011 individuals qualify for payments after five months. Benefits go to about $28K annually.”
The date of eligibility is the 1st of the month after 5 months of disability; however, an initial claim can take 5 or 6 months, a Reconsideration another 3 -6 months, and a Hearing as much as a year or two. A person’s receipt date could likely be 18 – 24 months after her entitlement date. (And lawyers get 25% of the retroactivity.
Thanks OS!
I do not want to be misleading in citing the numbers for Social Security Disability benefits. That maximum amount of $2,366 is available to those who have maxed out contributions every year they worked. Hardly anyone does that. Most SSD benefits I am aware of are more closely aligned with the SSI maximum, maybe a bit more. Most of the ones with whom I come in contact get around a thousand or so a month.
I started working and paying in close to the maximum starting at age 14 when I went to work at a local department store. The only years I did not pay the maximum was when I was in graduate school and was on a fellowship. I am here to tell you that compared to a fellowship, living on welfare is the life of Riley. Anyway, I had several years of living below the poverty level, but made up for it after graduation by working beyond retirement age and paying in the max, so I now draw the most the law allows for Social Security.
And since I am too damn hyperactive to retire, I have to pay taxes on some of the benefits I get. That sort of sucks, but is the price of doing business.
Facts are troublesome little buggers … thank you OS for the actual numbers.
Carol Levy,
rafflaw is right … most of your fellow countrymen/women have compassion for you and seek to help you better your situation
Raff, a very high percentage of disabled people get SSI with the maximum of $674/month. They do not get the (usually) somewhat higher Social Security Disability benefits They have to have been disabled five months before being able to draw benefits, and then every three years have to prove to the Disability Determination Service they are still disabled. Our state denies 70% of all people who apply. Now, use all your lawyerly persuasive argument skills to convince me that seventy percent of the people who come in with a six-inch-thick stack of medical records are not disabled.
i know my disability doesn’t touch 2,366 per month.
28,000? There would be a lot of unemployed people who would try to disable themselves for $28,000!
If a person has been employed and paid in the maximum in taxes, disability they draw will be equal to the maximum they would get if retiring on Social Security at age 66. That amount for 2011 is $2,366/month.