NDN Blog

From nationally syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman:

The Perils of Cyberbaggage
Posted on Feb 21, 2007
By Ellen Goodman

BOSTON—I suppose you could describe these two women as cybertrailblazers. But their cybertrails, alas, followed them from a checkered past, not to the glorious future. And the blaze they created was a bit more like a flameout.

Bloggers Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan came in from the heady environment of the blogosphere to the more staid climate of presidential politics, to work for John Edwards.

The political cyberspace where they were known as Pandagon and Shakespeare’s Sister is usually described with euphemisms such as raucous and freewheeling. On that terrain, no weasel wordsmiths need apply. You win attention with controversy and get hits with an over-the-top persona and a vivid vocabulary. A campaign, on the other hand, no matter how much it wants netroots, is, well, controversy-averse.

Marcotte’s blog style was described by Time magazine as “issues-based but not above snark and a healthy dose of profanity.” McEwan describes herself as a “firebrand” opponent of theocracy: “I am, however, vulgar. And I am trash-talking.”

I doubt these descriptions were in their job interviews with the Edwards campaign, but it didn’t take long for a conservative watchdog to glean through the 24/7 postings of the two bloggers and come up with the sort of sound bites that leave teeth marks on a campaign. There was McEwan’s description of Bush’s “wingnut Christofascist base.” There was Marcotte’s slam on the Catholic prohibition on birth control as a way to force women to “bear more tithing Catholics.” Within days, the two women resigned from the campaign and returned to the briar patch of their blogs.

This may be the first certifiable staff flameout of the 2008 campaign. But it’s also about a clash between two cultures and two languages.

We are living now in both the blogosphere and the mainstream. One is ironic and edgy, challenging and partisan. The other is cautious and modulated. Marcotte’s and McEwan’s fate raises the question about whether it’s possible to move from the world of AnkleBitingPundits to presidential politics without every word sticking to your shoe.

We already know that in the digital world, the past is never past. As Simon Rosenberg of NDN, a progressive advocacy group bridging these two worlds, says, “All of us are going to be living every moment of our past lives. People are living with things they did and said in their youths in a way they never did before.”

President Bush once famously said, “When I was young, I did a lot of foolish things.” Bill Clinton said he smoked marijuana but didn’t inhale. Barack Obama admitted doing “a little blow.” But we didn’t have postings of the partying George, the smoking Bill or the snorting Barack.

These days politicians are one “macaca” away from videotaped disaster. If you don’t believe it, see Rudy Giuliani as a drag queen flirting with Donald Trump on YouTube.

Meanwhile, the cybertrail doesn’t just track bloggers. Five million college students use Facebook. When Bob Corker was running for the Senate, voters in Tennessee were treated to his daughter kissing a girl on Facebook. California Rep. Brian Bilbray’s underage daughter Briana posted a picture of herself on MySpace with a cooler of Miller High Life.

Postings come down but never really disappear. They sit, like land mines, in the digital archives.

Last year, a college administrator in Boston sent out a campuswide warning: “Digital Dirt May Hurt.” But how many students working on their grade point average think that an employer may also be checking their booty calls and keg parties? Will recruiters get the joke when they see Bill Frist’s son Jonathan in Facebook claiming membership in a group where there were “No Jews Allowed. Just Kidding. No seriously’’?

“The culture is going to be confronting this,” says Rosenberg. “Can you have youthful indiscretions? Can you evolve, grow up? In recent years the culture has been more forgiving of youthful indiscretions. Will it continue?’’ Which culture will decide?

I have no fear for Shakespeare’s Sister or Pandagon, who are both up and writing with great energy. But as Marcotte has written, “even the more even-keeled bloggers are likely to have something in their archives that could be taken out of context and bandied about on the cable news networks.” It will be a loss if only the most buttoned-up bloggers can make the transition from uncompromising critic to campaign staff or even candidate.

As for young people who are increasingly on the Internet side of this cultural divide? Parents, it’s 11 p.m. Do you know where on the Internet your children are—and what they are doing to mess up their résumé? Follow the cybertrail.

By now we've all heard about the despicable conditions outpatients are living in at Walter Reed Hospital.  Veterans wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan are living in squalor and are often not getting the care they need.  Hopefully pressure from Congress will start to change that.  As usual, the White House refuses to accept blame for a lack of Presidential leadership.  Watch Press Secretary Tony Snow dodge responsibility here:

When Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez fired 7 federal prosecutors for no apparent reason, it raised suspicion.  When it was reported that one of the fired prosecutors was about to indict two figures at the center of the massive Republican Congressional appropriations scandal, fears were confirmed.  And when it was discovered that an obscure passage of the Patriot Act allowed the Bush Administration to replace those prosecutors with whomever they wanted, without normal Senate confirmation hearings, the residents of Denmark began evacuating en masse to escape the stench. 

Now the WAPO confirms that these 7 wrongly fired prosecutors were accomplished, highly qualified attorneys whose only offenses were investigating corrupt Republicans and working on cases that displeased conservatives in Washington:

All but one of the U.S. attorneys recently fired by the Justice Department had positive job reviews before they were dismissed, but many ran into political trouble with Washington over issues ranging from immigration to the death penalty, according to prosecutors, congressional aides and others familiar with the cases.

Two months after the firings first began to make waves on Capitol Hill, it has also become clear that most of the prosecutors were overseeing significant public-corruption investigations at the time they were asked to leave. Four of the probes target Republican politicians or their supporters, prosecutors and other officials said...

And this isn't an example of normal partisan gamesmanship.  The Bush Administration is so devoted to protecting their failed ideology and even the most corrupt members of their party, that that they're firing Republican-appointed prosecutors:

The end result is an unusual spectacle in which Democratic lawmakers are bemoaning the firings of Republican-appointed prosecutors. The political pressure has become so great that Cummins's successor in Arkansas, former White House aide J. Timothy Griffin, announced on Friday that he had decided not to submit his name to the Senate for a permanent appointment.

Fortunately, Congress, and public opinion, may ride to the rescue:

Lawmakers from both parties are pushing to strip Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales of his power to name replacement U.S. attorneys for an indefinite period, although Republicans blocked that proposal in the Senate last week. The House Judiciary Committee is planning hearings on similar legislation in March.

And Senator Chuck Schumer is on the case:

Distressing news from the Justice Department today.  Apparantly Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and co. are too busy stripping Habeas Corpus rights, defending torture, and firing highly qualified federal prosecutors to find time to effectively fight terrorism.

Inspector General Glenn A. Fine found that only two of the 26 sets of important statistics on domestic counterterrorism efforts compiled by Justice and the FBI from 2001 to 2005 were accurate, according to a 140-page report. The numbers were both inflated and understated, depending on the data cited and which part of the Justice Department was doing the counting, the report said...

The analysis is the latest to find serious faults with the Justice Department's terrorism statistics, some of which have been featured prominently in statements by President Bush or the attorney general as evidence of the terrorist threat and the department's successful efforts to combat it.

The data are used to justify expenditures and explain to Congress and to the public how the Justice Department is using its resources to protect the country against terrorist attacks, officials said.

And what are they doing to fix the problem?  Papering it over it appears:

The Justice Department said in a statement that it has already made most of the improvements suggested by Fine's office and that the U.S. attorneys' office would rename its "anti-terrorism" category to remove the implication that every case involves terrorism.

Today's WAPO gives context to the debate over Medicare Part D.  The Part D benefit is clearly helping seniors afford their prescription drugs and, by extension, slowing down rising health care costs.  What is unclear is if direct negotiations between the federal government and drug companies, as mandated by a bill passed by the Democratic House, would bring those costs down further.

Federal number crunchers said yesterday that the new Medicare drug benefit appears to be slowing the growth in national spending on prescription medicines because the drug plans are negotiating lower prices with drug companies.

But the analysts also forecasted that overall health-care spending would continue to rise and would account for nearly 20 percent of the economy -- or more than $4 trillion a year -- by 2016. In contrast, health-care spending was about $2.1 trillion in 2006, accounting for about 16 percent of the economy. In 1985, it was just over 10 percent...

Analysts said they expect to see that spending on prescription drugs rose more slowly in 2006 because of the Medicare Part D drug benefit that began last year. In the program, private insurers negotiate prices with drug companies as they compete to attract Medicare beneficiaries.

That has helped hold down prices even as more seniors are able to get drugs, John A. Poisal of the CMS said in a briefing. National spending on prescription drugs was expected to rise to $214 billion in 2006, from $201 billion in 2005. But that increase is 0.4 percentage points less than it would have been without the new drug benefit, he said.

Several national polls have shown that a majority of the public believes government negotiations would hold down drug costs even more. A survey of 1,000 adults released yesterday by AARP, for instance, found that 87 percent of respondents -- including majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents -- supported allowing the government to use its bargaining power.

The NYT has good news on American corporations embracing preventive care for its employees.  I only hope this is more than anecdotal and is the beginning of a major trend:

Major employers like Marriott International, Pitney Bowes, the carpet maker Mohawk Industries and Maine’s state government have introduced free drug programs to avoid paying for more expensive treatments down the road.

Companies now recognize that “if you get people’s obesity down, cholesterol down, asthma down, you save a lot of money,” said Uwe E. Reinhardt, a health economist at Princeton University.

Despite the Bush administration’s efforts to promote “consumer directed” health care, many companies are recognizing the limits to shifting too much of the cost of medical care to employees. Experience, Professor Reinhardt said, is contradicting the theory that “patients will be more prudent shoppers for health care if they ache financially when they ache physically.”

Another motive for the business world could be to stave off a greater government involvement in health insurance, now that most presidential candidates and other politicians are promoting health care reform.

A new Wall Street Journal Online/Harris health-care poll found that 49% of Americans do not trust President Bush when it comes to health-care reform. Only 9% trust him “a great deal.” Among 2008 presidential hopefuls, Hilary Clinton ranks highest in voter confidence, with 48% saying they have a great deal or some trust in her ability to effect health-care reform.

Senators Carl Levin (D-MI), Barack Obama (D-IL) and Norm Coleman (R-MN) have introduced long-overdue legislation to crack down on overseas tax havens. The Washington Post has more:

Three senators proposed legislation that would target what they say is $100 billion a year in tax revenue lost each year because of overseas tax havens, in part by forcing hedge funds to track their foreign investors.

The measure would impose tougher requirements on U.S. taxpayers using offshore secrecy jurisdictions, give the U.S. Treasury the authority to take action against foreign jurisdictions that impede tax enforcement, stiffen penalties against abusers and close offshore trust loopholes, according to a summary of the bill released by Michigan Democrat Cal M. Levin.

The legislation would require hedge funds to establish programs to combat money laundering and better track offshore investors, under guidance from the Treasury Department. The measure would also prohibit the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office from issuing patents for accounting strategies intended to "minimize, avoid, defer, or otherwise affect liability for federal, state, local, or foreign tax."

"We cannot tolerate tax cheats offloading their unpaid taxes onto the backs of honest taxpayers," Levin said in a joint statement with co-sponsors Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.). "Offshore tax havens have declared economic war on honest taxpayers by helping tax cheats hide income and assets that should be taxed in the same way as other Americans."

Davos seems to have worked a little bit of magic, and now there is talk of one more push on the stalled Doha round of WTO trade negotiations.  Richard Holbroke and Stuart Eizenstat wrote an op-ed on Doha in the WSJ, and it's a great primer for understanding why these negotiaitons are morally as well as economically urgent:

Africa's Last Best Chance Wall Street Journal

By RICHARD HOLBROOKE and STUART EIZENSTAT

 The long-stalled Doha round of trade talks recently had, in the words of WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy, a jolt of "new energy" after the recent meeting of key trade ministers in Davos. What is not clearly understood is that if a successful agreement is reached, it will be especially good news for Africa. 

Failure, conversely, would have tragic consequences for the continent. It would lead the United States and the European Union to negotiate more bilateral free-trade agreements with key countries, but not with sub-Saharan Africa and other poor countries, which offer few attractive markets for developed countries' manufactured goods and services. Africa, which has seen its share of world trade shrink in recent years, would fall even further behind. 

Developing countries felt that previous multilateral trade negotiations like the Kennedy round, the Tokyo round and the Uruguay round primarily benefited the highly developed nations. While they undertook costly obligations to protect developed countries' intellectual property and impose sanitary and phytosanitary standards, the developed countries did not significantly open their markets to the labor-intensive manufactured goods and agricultural products of developing countries. 

For the Doha round launched in 2001, however, there is a development agenda. At its heart is agriculture -- a politically sensitive sector in the EU and the U.S. but the largest employer in low-income countries, accounting for about 60% of their labor force and 25% of their GDP. The World Bank estimates that these agricultural products face what former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Portman observed is a practically insurmountable global average tariff rate of 62%, and that 93% of the benefits from a successful Doha round would come from improved market access for developing nations' agricultural products. 

Farmers represent less than 5% of the labor force in industrial countries, but they have very substantial political power in the U.S., EU and Japan.  These political forces, especially in the EU, led to the eventual derailment of the Doha round last summer. But as the Doha talks take on new life, Congress and the Bush administration need to stay true to the commitments of the Doha Development Agenda, especially in agriculture. 

Two weeks ago the administration proposed ending subsidies for 80,000 wealthy farmers, substituting trade-distorting subsidies with cash payments to farmers, and trimming traditional agriculture programs by $4.5 billion over the next decade. These proposals, if approved, would directly benefit some of the poorest people on earth, save lives and ultimately reduce American foreign aid, while helping Susan Schwab, the U.S trade representative, put wind in the sails of the ministers' pledge in Davos to restart serious talks. 

The promise for developing countries, and particularly the poorest African nations, is huge. In particular, Africa stands to gain significantly if sensitive product exclusions do not disproportionately target key African exports. Peter Mandelson, the EU trade commissioner, pledged recently that Europe will significantly improve its previous tariff reduction offer; he needs to make good on that promise. But even the current U.S. and EU proposals on the table far surpass those offered in previous multilateral trade rounds and offer real gains for developing countries: 

* WTO members have agreed to provide duty-free/quota-free market access to the least developed countries for at least 97% of their products. 

* An agreement has been reached to end the direct EU and U.S. export subsidies by 2013 that have squeezed out the products of farmers in Africa, Asia and Latin America.  

* Assistance will be given to help poor countries streamline their customs procedures to help with the red tape and corruption that historicallyimpeded engagement in significant international trade. 

Developing nations also must make serious commitments to complete the Doha round. A growing percentage of trade is between developing nations, withmore than 70% of the duties paid by developing countries to other developing countries. This makes no sense. 

The World Bank has found a significant increase in per capita income of developing countries that lower their own trade barriers, and concluded thattotally eliminating global trade barriers could lift 300 to 500 million of the world's poor out of poverty -- growing their economies by $259 billion by 2015. Opening their trade arteries to manufactured goods and services is also important. It will help developing nations trade with each other, which is growing 50% faster than world trade overall, but where levels of protection on goods are four times higher than levels of protection in rich countries. Intraregional trade in Africa was only 5.3% of GDP in 2002, in part due to self-destructive trade barriers between African countries. 

As trade ministers make an effort to reach a Doha deal, they should recognize that it is the poorest nations, particularly those in Africa, that would be the biggest losers if Doha collapses. We hope this will be understood by everyone, on a bipartisan basis, as this crucial negotiation heads into its final phase. For Africa, this may be the last best chance.  

Mr. Holbrooke is a former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. and vice chairman of Perseus, LLC. Mr. Eizenstat held several senior positions in the Clintonadministration, including U.S. ambassador to the EU, and heads the international practice at Covington & Burling, LLP. 

The NYT also wrote recently on the need for A Bipartisan Consensus on Trade, employing the same language NDN has been using for months, beginning with our major paper: Rebuilding the National Consensus on Trade. 

This one is going to be very embarrassing for the GOP, and that's the best case scenario for them.  This one could make Checkers and the Lincoln Bedroom sleepovers seem like small potatoes.  From the AP:

A New York man accused of trying to help terrorists in Afghanistan has donated some $15,000 to the House Republicans' campaign committee over three years...

From April 2002 until August 2004, the man also known as "Michael Mixon" gave donations ranging from $500 to $5,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee, according to Federal Election Commission reports...

A resume listed in his name and posted on an MSN group Web site on Jan. 8, 2007, identifies him as being an "industrialist and philanthropist" and references previous connections to the Republican Party.

The resume says that in 2003 Alishtari was named a National Republican Senatorial Committee "Inner Circle Member for Life" and was appointed to the NRCC's "White House Business Advisory Committee." The resume also says Alishtari was named the NRCC's New York state businessman of the year in 2002 and 2003.

Frank Rich, Vanity Fair and now Rolling Stone.  Increasingly, hard-hitting, issues-bases reporting is coming from sources once considered entertainment-focused.  Matt Tabibi's Rolling Stone magazine blog looks at Bush and the Estate Tax, and he's not talking about the 90s alternative rock band.  Warning: Mr. Tababi's language is not family friendly:

Not only does [the President's proposed FY 2008 budget] make many of Bush's tax cuts permanent, but it envisions a complete repeal of the Estate Tax, which mainly affects only those who are in the top two-tenths of the top one percent of the richest people in this country. The proposed savings from the cuts over the next decade are about $442 billion, or just slightly less than the amount of the annual defense budget (minus Iraq war expenses). But what's interesting about these cuts are how Bush plans to pay for them.

Sanders's office came up with some interesting numbers here. If the Estate Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to just one family -- the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune -- would be about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.

The proposed reductions to Medicaid over the same time frame? $28 billion.

Or how about this: if the Estate Tax goes, the heirs to the Mars candy corporation -- some of the world's evilest scumbags, incidentally, routinely ripped by human rights organizations for trafficking in child labor to work cocoa farms in places like Cote D'Ivoire -- if the estate tax goes, those assholes will receive about $11.7 billion in tax breaks. That's more than three times the amount Bush wants to cut from the VA budget ($3.4 billion) over the same time period.

Some other notable estimate estate tax breaks, versus corresponding cuts:

• Cox family (Cox cable TV) receives $9.7 billion tax break while education would get $1.5 billion in cuts
• Nordstrom family (Nordstrom dept. stores) receives $826.5 million tax break while Community Service Block Grants would be eliminated, a $630 million cut
• Ernest Gallo family (shitty wines) receives a $468.4 million cut while LIHEAP (heating oil to poor) would get a $420 million cut

Read more...