Congress & The People

In the middle of a must-read article by Ryan Grim and Arthur Delaney on Huffington Post, Rep. Tom Perriello has what I believe is a fundamentally true quote about the American people and politics:

“Part of the problem is that we often take this “What’s The Matter With Kansas?” approach that assumes that people are reactionary and stupid and that we just need to convince them that they’re going to make more money under our plan,” says Perriello. “But the fact is people are good, decent, smart people and we should treat them that way. … People don’t have to agree with you on every issue but they do have to believe that you are genuinely doing what you believe is right.”

This has absolutely been my experience working in politics. I’ve had the privilege to travel all over America while working on campaigns and at the end of it all, I have seen that Americans everywhere are pretty similar. They care about their families, their children’s education, their job security and planning for retirement. They want to succeed and they want to be good to their neighbors, improving their communities. It doesn’t matter where I have been, I have had the same experience: Alaska, Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, Florida, Connecticut, or Michigan. We are one people, smart and seeking to be engaged genuinely by political candidates and elected officials.

Tom Perriello seems to get this. Good for him.

Perriello also sounds a lot like one of my heroes, Paul Wellstone, who used the same good faith and authentic attitude towards his constituents to repeatedly win elections he was never supposed to win.

NYT Blankenship Hagiography

The New York Times has a bizarrely hagiographic piece today on Don Blankenship, the CEO of Massey, which owns the Upper Big Branch mine. Blankenship’s mine suffered the largest disaster in American mining in decades, costing over 25 workers their lives. Rescue operations are ongoing, but Blankenship is in full spin mode and the Times praises his efforts to not have as large of a bullseye on his chest as he should. The Times piece raises up his anti-union efforts and largely ignores the repeated safety violations and cavalier attitude towards safety that Blankenship displayed leading to this tragedy.

Blankenship is an avid climate change denier and has spent more than his fare share of time as a rightwing political funder and Teaparty agitator with the Chamber of Commerce. Perhaps if he spent more time focusing on the safety and rights of his employees, and less being a political hack, this disaster could have been prevented.

Moreover, it’s downright offensive to praise this chump’s union busting savvy and personal professional successes while the bodies of his miners have yet to be put in the ground. Stories like this don’t happen on their own and it’s hard to doubt that Blankenship and the Massey PR team placed it to improve his public image now.

Jonathan Chait at TNR makes a good observation:

But the general portrait of Blankenship is a figure utterly contemptuous of anything that stands in the way of profits. The risks of a business strategy that places low wages above experienced workers and disdains regulation are fairly clear. The Forbes profile emphasizes the risks to Blankenship’s stock value, but of course the costs imposed upon workers and the environment are even greater.

Blankenship must be held to account for these costs, as should his company. Being an ambitious businessman does not obviate him from culpability in at least twenty-five deaths.

Obama’s America

I feel like I’m in Bizarro World when the Democratic President and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize authorizes the assassination of an American citizen, without trial — something that not even George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and John Yoo had the temerity to do. Glenn Greenwald’s analysis of how outrageous this is is a must-read. Greenwald documents all the ways and places both Obama and renowned liberal jurists like Antonin Scalia and Yoo say that actions short of assassination of an American citizen are not allowable. Obama himself opposed the detention of Americans without habeas corpus as fundamentally beyond a President’s power.

There are plenty of places where the Obama administration have continued on the path of the Bush administration when it comes to protecting a very expansive view of executive powers. This is one of the rare instances where Obama is actually going substantially further than Bush. Sadly, this most appalling assertion of executive power is also infinitely more offensive than warrantless wiretapping or detention without habeas corpus of Americans.  The President just said he can assassinate an American without trial. What a sad day for our country and for the rule of law.

Kaus-tastrophe

Alleged goat blower Mickey Kaus is apparently, sort of, running for US Senate as a Democrat in California. James Wolcott makes the brilliant point that Kaus’s campaign site looks like something Stephen Glass cooked up during his fictionalization of sources on Jukt Micronics. But beyond the shoddy design, the fact that Kaus thinks he can appeal to Democrats as an anti-union, anti-immigrant, anti-teacher candidate is appalling. If he wants to run on these issues, there is a natural home to him: the Republican Party.

Of course, I doubt his campaign is serious.  It’s more likely an effort to get some page views on Kaus’s column on Slate. And, at least for today, the role he plays as a punchline to progressive blogger jokes will likely help that effort succeed, albeit temporarily.

More Chinese Internet Espionage Exposed

Articles in the Globe and Mail and the New York Times document the work by researchers at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto to expose a new network of global hack attacks originating from China. From the Globe and Mail:

The report is careful not to conclude the Chinese government is behind the operation, since it is difficult to tell who is orchestrating the attacks. Last year, the Chinese government denied any involvement in GhostNet after the researchers uncovered nearly 1,300 infected computers in 103 countries linked to servers in China.

But computers belonging to exiled Tibetan leader, the Dalai Lama, who is denounced by China, have been the most compromised.

Almost every e-mail sent to or from the Dalai Lama’s offices in 2009 has shown up in the files, the report says. Nearby India has also taken the brunt of the cyber attacks, with numerous secret government documents recovered by the Canadian researchers. They include 78 documents related to the financing of military projects in India, details of live fire exercises and missile projects, and two documents marked “secret” belonging to the national security council.

Sensitive data from 16 countries, such as visa applications by Canadian citizens, were also recovered. It is believed the hackers accessed those files through computers at India’s embassies in Kabul, Dubai, Nigeria and Moscow, which were corrupted.

As is often the case, while there are potential ties between these hacking rings and PLA military schools and think tanks, there is little explicit evidence that the perpetrators are, in fact, the Chinese government. The two things that stand out, though, are that the biggest targets are the Tibetan Government in Exile, human rights activists, and the Indian government. I find it hard to believe that your run of the mill hacker cares too much about the emails from the Dalai Lama’s office nor the movement of human rights activists in North America and Europe.

Moreover, if the Chinese government wasn’t behind these particular attacks (or GhostNet or the attacks on Google), why are they allowing these high level hackers to remain in operation? If they are not connected to the Chinese government then surely the Chinese government knows more about who these criminal hackers are than a few researchers in Toronto, Canada? And if not, what does it say about the actual grip the Chinese Communist Party really has over control of its power?

Nuclear Posture Review

Say what you will about the Obama administration’s shortcomings in policy at home (and I’ve said a lot), but his work on reducing the global threat from nuclear weapons is truly admirable. From securing a new arms agreement with Russia to last night’s announcement that the US will not launch a nuclear attack against a country that is compliant with the NPT, the President is making bold strides that are finally commensurate with his campaign promises of Change and Hope. The world is a dangerous place, but possessing the ability to turn a country to glass at the slightest threat only makes the world more dangerous. Proportionality seems to be the core of the Nuclear Posture Review. Hopefully this attitude towards proportional military actions is extended in the future for US foreign policy. After all, were we dealing in proportional responses instead of preventive attacks, we would not have gone to war against Iraq. In that regard, this new position adopted by the Obama administration isn’t just a revision of decades of nuclear uncertainty, but a rebuttal to the essential attitudes that drove the Bush administration.

Warrantless Surveillance Ruled Illegal

Judge Vaughn Walker yesterday ruled that the Bush administration program of wiretapping Americans without warrant required by FISA was, in fact, illegal. The Obama administration had fought to protect the same powers of the executive branch used by the Bush administration in this program and had attempted to block the case by using arguments on state secrets would be revealed if the case moved forward. Walker rightly rejected this Bush/Obama argument:

The judge characterized that expansive use of the so-called state-secrets privilege as amounting to “unfettered executive-branch discretion” that had “obvious potential for governmental abuse and overreaching.”

The Department of Justice can appeal Walker’s ruling, but Marcy Wheeler doesn’t think they will.

The state secrets defense and the broader use of arguments about the supremacy of the executive branch were key to the Bush administration’s construction of the war on terror. The continued defense of these arguments poses the risk of further excesses by the executive branch that fly in the face of the rule of law. In effect, what makes “unfettered executive-branch discretion” so scary is that it is the antithesis of the republic envisioned by the Founders, who knew the perils of monarchy and executive tyranny. Why we would suddenly forget the founding principles of our nation is beyond me. But at least there is a federal judge who is standing in the way of what has already been done as a bastion for the rule of law.

Freedom of the Press

Another day, another shining instance of the Chinese government’s take on the freedom of the press.

In what appears to be a coordinated assault, the e-mail accounts of more than a dozen rights activists, academics and journalists who cover China have been compromised by unknown intruders. A Chinese human rights organization also said that hackers disabled its Web site for a fifth straight day.

The infiltrations, which involved Yahoo e-mail accounts, appeared to be aimed at people who write about China and Taiwan, rendering their accounts inaccessible, according to those who were affected. In the case of this reporter, hackers altered e-mail settings so that all correspondence was surreptitiously forwarded to another e-mail address.

…

Kathleen McLaughlin, an American freelance journalist in Beijing who sits on the board of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China, said the group has confirmed that 10 journalists, including herself, had their accounts compromised.

Like the others, said she received a message from Yahoo on Thursday indicating that her account had been disabled because, according to an automated message, “we have detected an issue with your account.”

It’s additionally a puzzle that anyone inside China, Hong Kong or Taiwan would use Yahoo or MSN for their email services. Yahoo has shown a repeated predilection to share user data with the Chinese government. Their comfort in helping totalitarian states crack down on the press and people who share different ideas from the Chinese government should trouble anyone who, like me, thinks American companies should not be allowed to aid in repression by foreign regimes.

Leo Hindery on Dissent

Leo Hindery has a great piece on Huffington Post about the need for the administration to shift its focus and stop triangulating against the left to set itself out as moderate and reasonable.

It’s pretty obvious that there are people in the administration telling the president every day that he’s exactly ‘where he needs to be’ in the tug-of-war between Progressives on the left and the Tea Party-goers on the right. But there’s a big difference between moving away from the ‘crazies’ and ignoring your true political base, which I would argue for President Obama is mostly the American workers who gave him victories in those states that John Kerry unfortunately was not able to win in 2004.

Those of us at that dinner desperately want President Obama to succeed, but even more desperately we want to see the entirety of his/our government focused on a full and fair economic recovery that quickly creates and then retains millions of new good-quality jobs. The House Members among us at dinner were compelled in Obama’s first year to accept compromises on the stimulus package and on the bank bailouts, and we all grew to accept (if not really like) the administration’s ‘promise’ that after health care reform, everything would be about jobs, jobs, jobs.

Beyond winning politically, as I said yesterday, there has to be an intentional effort to make the public understand the value and importance of government as a positive factor in Americans’ lives.

What’s Next?

As regular readers know, I haven’t spent a lot of time over the first 15 months of the Obama administration feeling great about how things are going. But the passage of healthcare, while not the bill that I would have written in the slightest, does allow for an opening for the administration to do more elsewhere. It’s undoubtedly a political victory that came at a high price; but that cost must be leveraged into momentum to accomplish more things. This one law, historic though it may be, will not completely inoculate Democrats from electoral perils in November.

In The West Wing President Jed Bartlett frequently ended discussions by asking his staff, “What’s next?” The statement was definitive, making clear that the fictional President was ready to address something new. I’ll certainly grant that there is a lot of possibilities for what is next for President Obama. Even last week, he was able to bring together a major nuclear arms deal with Russia. But there needs to be a clear statement about where this administration is heading over the next eight months.

Moreover, the healthcare victory should embolden Democrats to push their agenda farther and faster. Maybe that means working on high level regulation of the financial industry, while simultaneously pushing through smaller infrastructure and jobs bills to help the Main Street economy recover. There’s need for comprehensive immigration reform, with or without Republican support. There could be a major reevaluation of Pentagon spending on Cold War era weapons systems that have no value in the fight against small groups of terrorists and irregular insurgents.

In short, now is the time for President Obama to push for a Democratic agenda, big and small, high profile and low. We can’t afford to spend another 15 months on the next issue, whatever it is. Obama and the Democratic majority has to produce results and show the public that they are the best choice to govern America now and in the future. And while they’re doing this, every argument must tie back to the importance of government as a social support network for all Americans, the value of us coming together to care for and protect each other. The Teabaggers will only keep trying to tear apart not just this administration, but the idea of government. It’s up to the President and Democratic leaders to fight back against this anti-democratic (small d) rhetoric.  Failure to do so, coupled with a failure to achieve more legislation that helps working American, will lead to electoral defeat.

We’re not at the point yet where the results of November’s election are clear. But President Obama setting out his priorities and pushing hard and fast for them will be one of the best lines of defense for the Democratic majority. Now is not the time for timidity. We need the President to tell the country what’s next.