Cerberus at the White House Gates

In Greek mythology Cerberus is the ferocious three-headed dog who guards the gates of hell. In current Republican folklore, the dog has been replaced by the Justice Department, State Department and Internal Revenue Service, who defend the White House gates and the devil who lives behind them. Now that Congress’s vigilant and moral majority has neutered the modern Cerberus, we can all sleep better at night. It is the IRS scandal, in which federal agents stand accused of screening “politically active organizations seeking tax exemptions,” that really has Republicans salivating. "Is this still America?” Kevin Brady of Texas demanded. “Is this government so drunk on power that it would turn its full force, its full might, to harass and intimidate and threaten an average American who only wants her voice and their voices heard?"

Whoa there, Congressman, isn’t it the IRS’s job to vet organizations seeking tax exemptions? Otherwise, heaven forbid, groups might take advantage of a loophole.

Ah, but didn’t the agents target “conservative” organizations? No, they targeted groups with “tea party” and “patriot” in their names.

Whatever gave them the notion that those organizations are not “operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare” as the law requires? Perhaps they read the same news accounts the rest of us do.

And what benefit does the 501(c)(4) exemption confer on them? Only one: they get to keep their donor lists secret. Just like Karl Rove’s somehow-exempt Crossroads GPS, which raised hundreds of millions from anonymous donors in the last election. That’s the real scandal.

The Tea Party, the IRS and Me

I never thought I’d be writing this, but I empathize with the Tea Party. Three years ago I was part of a group seeking to launch a non-profit investigative reporting organization. We believed that the decline in the traditional media’s ability to conduct in-depth, independent investigations deprived the public of a critical source of information and oversight. Our efforts were not novel: The Center for Investigative Reporting, NPR and others had been operating as non-profits for years, and Pro Publica has won two Pulitzers since it began in 2008. We knew the IRS process was cumbersome, but we had no idea how bureaucratic – after three years and three revisions of our application, we are still awaiting judgment. My assumption, to be honest, was that the IRS did not like journalists, especially those with no corporate ownership and no agenda but the truth – which would make the agency a good target for the journalism we proposed to do. Singling out organizations for special scrutiny based on their political convictions is not new in this country, nor has it been confined to conservative organizations. In any form, it is reprehensible and a threat to the democratic process. But there is another question to ask: why are purely political groups granted tax-exempt status in the first place – not just the tea parties, but the huge political fund-raising machines, spawned by the Citizens United case, that spent more on advertising in 2012 than the SuperPACS, and whose secret donor lists and covert activities are no less dangerous to the republic?

Three Questions

• Have global levels of carbon dioxide reached their highest concentration in human history? • Did the Obama administration make serious mistakes before and after the Benghazi attack that killed four Americans, including the ambassador to Libya?

• Is Barack Obama an American citizen?

What do these questions have in common? First, the answer to all of them is yes. Second, the monumentally unhinged wing of the Republican Party sees them as part of a giant conspiracy to undermine American institutions and take over the country; and they intend to get to the bottom of it, no matter how long it takes, how much it costs and how much damage it does to, well, American institutions and the country. And since there is no bottom – no scientific consensus on global climate change that will satisfy Senator Inhofe, no birth certificate that will convince Congressman Hudson, no investigation that will mollify Congressman Issa – these matters will remain party applause lines through 2016.

However understandable the president’s frustration with the Benghazi investigation, he should release the unclassified emails John Boehner wants. Yes, Boehner’s staff has seen them already, but perhaps they are slow readers. Don’t just make them available to Congress, publish them for all of us. Google probably has them anyway. The best antidote to conspiracy theorists is complete transparency. You will never convince the witch hunters, but you will answer the questions they raise in others, and even the hint of a cover-up can be fatal.

The I Test

  The Heritage Foundation’s assertion that immigration reform will cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion is the latest example of a complex study used to support a foregone conclusion. Jim DeMint, the Foundation’s president and Tea Party stalwart, is a vociferous opponent of legislation to create a “pathway to citizenship” for 11 million undocumented immigrants. And it isn’t just the Tea Party grinding its own axe: Silicon Valley companies are lobbying for more highly educated “STEM” (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) immigrants; labor unions protest cheap and compliant workers; farmers want migrants to harvest their crops; environmentalists fear population overload. Many of the arguments, however self-serving, are legitimate, and in the face of a bill that keeps getting bulkier and wordier (over 50 amendments already filed), how are the rest of us supposed to know what to think?

Overwhelmed, we gravitate to positions that fit our preconceived prejudices, and the politicians continue preaching to the converted. In such cases I recommend the “I Test” – looking through the prism of personal experience. For example, I live in an area that is politically conservative and overwhelming white – and has a large undocumented Latino population. They arrived poor and uneducated, and there are worrisome pockets of gangs, drugs and crime. But on balance my life has been greatly enhanced by their contributions – colorful Cinco de Mayo celebrations, thousands of people who seek nothing more than a chance to work, the diversity required to keep a community vibrant. The I Test is not a substitute for rational analysis, but it affords the opportunity to step back and look through the stereotypes.

One Powerful Man

With 54 of 100 senators voting in favor, and strong popular support in the country, Senate Bill 649 was defeated yesterday. The Safe Communities, Safe Schools Act of 2013, a compromise offered by NRA members Joe Manchin (D) of West Virginia and Patrick Toomey (R) of Pennsylvania, would have required background checks for online and gun show sales only. But the National Rifle Association, which once supported such checks, threw its money and muscle into the fight, as Wayne LaPierre, its executive vice president, has emerged from the carnage in Newtown as one of the most powerful men in America. We have come a long way since 2000, when a single Supreme Court vote gave George Bush the mandate to invade Iraq. Yesterday, a majority of senators could not pass a bill. Much is being made of the partisan nature of the vote: only four Democrats voted no and four Republicans voted yes. But consider this: according to a recent study, the ten states with the most gun violence are: (10) Georgia; (9) Arkansas; (8) Missouri; (7) New Mexico; (6) South Carolina; (5) Mississippi; (4) Arizona; (3) Alabama; (2) Alaska; (1) Louisiana. In those ten states, 15 senators (75%) voted against SB 649, including two of the four Democrats, Mark Begich of Alaska and Mark Pryor of Arkansas. The only Republican to vote yes was John McCain.

Note the absence from the list of all those big urban states, which are actually curbing gun violence in their cities. Meanwhile, the most gun-violent states want no checks. Sometimes you reap what you sow.

Lessig and Pell

When Haven Pell stopped by my house a month or so ago, we had not seen each other in 50 years. We had become friends at the age of four, and one year for his birthday, Haven’s mother took us to the Howdy Doody show in New York, where we sat in the legendary Peanut Gallery. We met again this winter because Haven had discovered that we were both “sunset” bloggers, who were interested in thinking about and sharing what we had observed over the years. Our perspectives and our politics are different, but we both believe that something has gone seriously wrong in Washington, and we want, not just to point out the obvious, but to work for change. It is how we try to avoid self-indulgence. Last night Haven’s blog showed up in my inbox. It was short, because we are conscious that our “free” posts demand your valuable time, and we don’t want to abuse it. So he just urged readers to watch Lawrence Lessig’s TED talk on the financing of federal politics. I beg you to do the same. Here is where this country’s growing wealth disparity, the Citizens United case, and feckless career politicians combine to threaten our republic.

PS If the links don't show up above, cut and paste this: http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_the_republic_we_must_reclaim.htm

Haven's link is www.libertypell.com

Stockman’s Screed

David Stockman, the aging boy wonder who was Ronald Reagan’s budget director at 34, wrote a 2700-word op-ed piece in Sunday’s New York Times. Its bottom line was “get out of the markets and hide out in cash.” Stockman takes us on quite a journey to get to this simple point. He tells a tawdry story, peopled with many scoundrels and few heroes, an eight-decade morality play of government excess, corporate greed, entitlement explosion, political cowardice and intellectual dishonesty, in which the losers are the 99% of Americans, and especially the poor, while the winners, at least for now, are the greedy manipulators of finance and their bi-partisan henchmen in Congress, the oval office and, above all, the Federal Reserve Bank. It’s a relentless, depressing march to Armageddon – one that is actually part of a long American tradition of populist anger that stretches from the Whiskey Rebellion to the Tea Party. Sometimes the issues change: in the 1890s the insurgents wanted cheap money; Stockman (and the Doctors Paul) want a return to the gold standard. Its twin villains are Washington and Wall Street. Its solutions are less clear: “These policies have brought America to an end-stage metastasis,” writes Stockman. “The way out would be so radical it can’t happen.”

From a curmudgeonly conservative, this is a disquietingly bi-partisan indictment. Stockman challenges the core policies of both parties, and his analysis of a country whose answer to everything is, as George Bush urged, to “go shopping” is too insightful to be dismissed.

The Bottom Up

This, says my friend Henry, is where my “grasp of the obvious” kicks in: People who look at the world from the bottom up have a very different view from those who look at it from the top down. Despite my empathetic efforts to do so, I don’t know what life looks like from the bottom, and that may explain why I am always losing political arguments with my friends. For to us, life presents a series of rational choices. We may disagree on particular solutions: whether to build a fence along the Rio Grande or offer citizenship to undocumented immigrants; whether to address unemployment or the deficit. But we seek rational and coherent solutions because we know that when reason breaks down, chaos results.

But my arguments founder on a world that refuses to cooperate. In Burma, the generals end 50 years of unholy repression that pitted neighbor against neighbor, and now in the city of Meiktila rampaging Buddhists (itself an oxymoron) slaughter their Muslim neighbors; while today in Detroit, a state-appointed manager, whose independence from community stakeholders is supposed to make him impartial, tries to resuscitate a city near death.

For the people in Meiktila and in Detroit, the big picture, the rational solution, is often hard to see, when what they are trying to do is survive. So when we ask them to understand the long-term benefits of whatever plan we impose, we need to do all we can to understand the pain it will inflict

Dining with the Stars

The first time Arshad Hasan met Gov. Howard Dean, Hassan was putting a big messy forkful of spaghetti and tomato sauce into his mouth. This information arrived in a personal email in which Hassan, executive director of Democracy for America, “a grassroots powerhouse working to change our country and the Democratic Party from the bottom up,” breathlessly described Dean’s Olympian response to this chance meeting: “Right there in the office, he introduced himself, talked about how excited he was to meet me, and made me feel so at home, I almost forgot to put down the fork.”

I have never met Hassan, but apparently my contributions to the Obama campaign have made us intimate enough to share such personal details. Moreover, Hassan offered me the same opportunity. Well, almost. For a $3 donation, my name will go into a pool, and if I win, “DFA will pick up the tab for airfare, hotel, and dinner, so you can focus on what's important: Getting to know Governor Dean.”

Sixty years ago I had a haircut next to Gary Cooper, but this is the closest I’ve come to dining with a celebrity, even if the invitation seems kind of smarmy. It’s the $5,000-a-plate equivalent for little people, except my $3 buys a raffle ticket instead of influence.

But wait. Gov. Dean himself has written, “James, I'd like to take you out to dinner. Chip in $4 . . . and you and a friend will be automatically entered to join me for dinner in DC.”

I’m holding out for “all you can eat.”

Bridges to the Future

Last week, Senate Democrats finally produced a budget. It is for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, which means we must keep lurching ahead without a roadmap until then. Many people think we don’t need a map to figure where the country is heading, and since this budget is not going to pass the Republican-controlled House, it’s not really a map to anywhere. Much has been made of the difference between Paul Ryan’s House budget and Patty Murray’s Senate one. Depending on your point of view, the latter is either a reasonable effort to balance a trillion dollars in increased revenues and spending cuts – or it is another example of the Democrats’ refusal to get serious about the deficit, cut taxes and reduce the size of government, which to Republicans minds are all the same thing.

Lost in the “heartless spending cut versus job-killing tax hike” argument is something Murray’s budget actually addresses: Investment. Unlike other spending, investment is not a cost of doing business, it is a guarantee of staying in business. The senate budget includes about $200 billion for investments that we badly need in the country’s worn-out infrastructure: from rail lines to bridges to schools. It comes under the government’s constitutional responsibility to “promote the general welfare,” which many people no longer trust our government to do. But if not our government, then who? I am weary of listening to politicians prattle on about protecting “future generations,” as they let the foundation of that future crumble right now.

Cutting to the Bone

The New York Times has again revealed its bias by juxtaposing two articles on its digital front page that allegedly have nothing to do with each other. In one, the newspaper reports that Congressman Paul Ryan (R, WI) has presented a budget that would slash not only Medicare and social security but job training, infrastructure investment and higher education. Nearby, we learn that “A New York police officer was convicted on Tuesday in a bizarre plot to kidnap, torture, kill and eat women, ending a trial whose outcome hinged on the delicate legal distinction between fantasy and reality.” Coincidence? I don’t think so, although a spokesperson for the paper called the charge “complete b*ll sh*t, just like the rest of your blogs.” A representative from Ryan’s office scoffed at the comparison, defending the budget proposal as “necessary and long-overdue surgery to save the lives of Medicare and social security.” Quoting a famous maxim from Vietnam, he noted that “sometimes it is necessary to destroy a thing in order to save it,” adding, with regard to cannibalism, “it’s Obamacare that’s eating our young.”

He said there was no comparison between the current proposal and the Romney-Ryan budget the voters soundly rejected in November. “In the election we had to take the plan to the country, where people like Obama better than us. But here on Capitol Hill, the Republicans rule. We have a majority in the House of Representatives, and in the Senate, we have the filibuster.”

Party Lines

Senator Lindsey Graham (R, SC), who grows increasingly shrill in the face of a possible Tea Party primary challenge in 2014, called Chuck Hagel “one of the most unqualified, radical choices for secretary of defense in a very long time." Senator, get a grip . . .

More radical than Donald Rumsfeld (2001-6), who oversaw the disastrous war in Iraq,who became the first leader of America’s military to justify torture, and who rationalized the condition of U.S. battlefield equipment by telling his own troops that “you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want ” – even though it was America that had decided to go to war?

Or than Jefferson Davis (1853-7), the only secretary of war to be subsequently charged with treason – for leading a war against the U.S. government that resulted in 700,000 American dead?

More unqualified than Dick Cheney (1989-93), who responded to a question about his five Vietnam-era deferments by saying, "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service?”

Or than Simon Cameron (1861-2), who resigned from the war department after less than a year because his corruption was so astounding?

Republican objections to Hagel seem fourfold: He challenged the Israeli lobby; he opposed the Iraq war; he seeks alternatives to bombing Iran; and he crossed party lines to support Obama in 2008. Good for him.

In 1997 Bill Clinton nominated Republican Senator William Cohen to be secretary of defense. The senate confirmed him unanimously. And he went on to do an excellent job. How times have changed.

Old Money

It’s ironic to me that Ponce de Leon stumbled onto Florida while searching for the fountain of youth. My experience of the state has been a place where old people get fleeced by a workforce that exists solely for that purpose. Case in point: when my stepgrandmother died years ago, she left a strip of her property to the nice man next door who had looked after her place. Unfortunately, that strip was the driveway, which made it hard to sell the property to anyone but the nice man next door. Meanwhile, her stock certificates had disappeared from her safe deposit box. That history probably predisposed me against Marco Rubio’s speech, and to be evenhanded I now turn to the unseemly relationship between Robert Menendez, the Democratic senator from New Jersey, and Salomon Melgen, a Palm Beach eye-surgeon-cum-venture capitalist, who seems to have done very well by the elderly. Maybe too well, as the government wants to recover $8.9 million it calls fraudulent Medicare billings. Melgen is also the largest contributor to Menendez, the next chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and coincidentally the doctor is trying to secure a contract to supply drug-screening equipment to the Dominican Republic that could pay him $500 million over 20 years. Such investments require flying your important friends to see them on your private jet, and I am happy to report that the senator recently reimbursed the doctor $58,500 for two trips he made in 2010 but had inadvertently forgotten.

We are Citizens

Three issues rarely heard on last fall’s campaign trail made their way forcefully into the president’s State of the Union speech Tuesday evening: the poor, climate change and gun control. I was happy to see them; we have ducked an open discussion of them for too long. Obama was most oblique about the poor. But his reference to “inescapable pockets of poverty” was a rare acknowledgement in a country where everything is meant to be escapable, where a new life lies just beyond the frontier. I hope the president’s “ladders of opportunity” will enable us to rebuild American communities that are as ravaged as any in the developing world, rather than be simply the means to get out of them.

The president’s most encouraging message was his full engagement with climate change, which is becoming a signature issue for him. He may well be our most environmental president, although with Richard Nixon often offered as the reigning champion, the competition is pretty thin. But the president must show us how we can simultaneously have all the growth we seem to need and protect the increasingly ravaged earth on which our lives depend.

It was not a passionate speech until the end: first, on guns, when Obama adopted the “call-and-response” cadence of a Baptist preacher, “They deserve a vote;” and then the finale: “We are citizens . . . this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations . . . our rights are wrapped up in the rights of others.” Amen.

The Other Speech

One measure of how much Barack Obama has grown over his four years in office was Marco Rubio’s speech last night. I don’t just mean the cotton-mouthed diction, the furtive search for that tiny bottle of Poland Springs, or the high school debating team delivery, for he has the skills to surmount his oratorical infelicities over time. No, it wasn’t so much his style. It was his substance. What a hypocrite. The opposition’s response to the State of the Union, first given by Everett Dirksen and Gerald Ford in 1966, is a delicate matter, for on this night the president reports to the country in his role as leader of the nation, not simply of his party. Not to sound too naïve, but some sense of protocol would demand that the response rise above the slash-and-burn partisan invective we saw last night, filled as it was with straw men and taking aim at things the president did not say but that his opponents have long insisted he stands for. On this night, at least, the president need not be presented as a cartoon character.

But Rubio has a deeper problem. His overriding message of damning the government that has been his only career and praising the private sector, which he has experienced primarily through campaign donors, was kind of irritating. And as he listed the government programs that have benefited him and his family – from student aid to Medicare – I waited in vain for a single word that might have tempered the shrillness. Gratitude.

Sequestration

Of course they have to do it. Congress needs to pass some package of interim spending cuts and tax “reforms” to head off the drastic reductions (known for some reason as “sequestration”) that will automatically go into effect on March 1^st because . . . well, because once again our representatives have backed themselves into a corner on the elementary issue of what kind of country we want and how to pay for its governance. “At some point, Washington has to deal with its spending problem,’” said John Boehner yesterday. “Now I’ve watched them kick this can down the road for 22 years since I’ve been here. I’ve had enough. It’s time to act.” It’s worth noting that Boehner is not exactly a disinterested observer. He is the Speaker of the House, the person who is supposed to lead his colleagues, not just wring his hands. In fairness, though, a budget would help, and the president needs to submit one. It is wrong, I think, to consider the budgeting process as simply a financial exercise in allocating the money we have (or even the money we don’t have). It is a vision for where we want to take the nation and a blueprint for the journey. Last November, Americans had a clear choice, and a majority of us gave Barack Obama a mandate to govern because we believe in his vision. Now we want to see his blueprint. Why should plotting the nation's journey be any less exciting in 2013 than it was in 1789?

Stumble of the Week

Bullying is not only for young males, as 76-year-old John McCain demonstrated when he went after Chuck Hagel during nomination hearings for Secretary of Defense. Still infuriated over Hagel’s opposition to the Iraq war (not to mention to McCain’s 2008 presidential candidacy), McCain attacked his former friend for opposing the 2007 “surge,” which has become the last straw of Republican honor in Iraq. But Hagel was right. The costs were enormous and the gains short-lived, as the current situation in Iraq makes clear. It’s time for those who insist on resurrecting in Iraq the American honor that was buried in Vietnam to recognize the parallels: two ill-conceived and badly executed wars, marked by “collateral damage” and fought in the end primarily to extricate our own troops. If the purpose of war is to extricate our troops from the mess we created, umm . . . Hearts and Minds. We have read far too much about the tragic brain damage suffered by professional football players. San Francisco 49er cornerback Chris Culliver is only 24, but his pre-Super Bowl comments show that muddled brains can come young. “I don’t do the gay guys, man,” he said in an interview. “Can’t be with that sweet stuff.” His damage control? “The derogatory comments I made yesterday were a reflection of thoughts in my head, but they are not how I feel.”

Liberal Hollywood’s image was jolted by a recent study that reported that two of the 10 highest-grossing film actors, Tom Cruise and John Travolta, are Scientologists, and a third, Clint Eastwood, talks to empty chairs.

Hagel

The nomination of Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense illustrates again what so many politicians and pundits keep missing – and that is how fundamentally centrist the Obama administration has been. That may change in the next four years, but I would be surprised. My sense is that Obama has generous instincts on human rights and dignity issues, which drive, for example, his health-care initiative. The communitarian philosophy that his right-wing antagonists denounce as socialism, seems more an effort to build an inclusive consensus than to impose a big-government solution. And his foreign policy seems intent on building a similar consensus internationally by returning to the principles Thomas Jefferson set forth in his first inaugural: "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none." Nowhere is this rethinking more necessary than with Israel, and the time seems propitious: last week’s elections showed that Israelis themselves are tired of the intransigent politics of their leaders. Chuck Hagel is well qualified to lead the effort to reconsider our defense policies there and elsewhere. His experiences under fire in Vietnam gave him a skepticism about war, whose glories are so often touted by those who avoided its carnage. And it’s worth remembering that the department he will lead changed is name from War to Defense in 1947. But that hasn’t penetrated to the people now mounting an unprecedented public and well-financed attack on Hagel’s nomination. Leftovers from last fall’s SuperPACs, they embody big money's continuing and insidious determination to have its way.

The Second Inaugural

I cannot wait to be part of the next four years. President Obama’s speech, so masterfully crafted and so mercifully short, called on all of us to embrace the ideals of our past as we work to transform the future of our world. “With common effort and common purpose, . . . let us answer the call of history and carry into an uncertain future the precious light of freedom.” That is the essence of America at its best, and it is fitting that, 150 years after Gettysburg, a man who is half-black and half-white should stand up and tell us so. Obama built his speech on the bedrock of American exceptionalism, which has of late become a touchstone of conservative politicians. But he hardly expropriated their ground, for the belief that America was founded on ideals that make it a beacon for the world is ingrained in the three defining documents of our history – the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Each specifically harks back to those that came before, and Obama repeatedly references every one of them. Each summons the nation to live up to its stated ideals and to honor its past, not by worshipping at its altar, but by building a new future on its foundation. Each expands the definition of community – “Seneca, Selma, Stonewall;” “the poor, the sick, the marginalized” – and all make clear that “our journey is not complete.” And thank God our government has finally acknowledged global warming.

Life of Orion

Before offering even the most minor restriction on guns in America, advocates must genuflect to “the hunter.” Alone in nature, with only his rifle for food, survival and protecting the vulnerable, the hunter has become an icon of America’s mythic past and a guardian of its present values. I have no quarrel with hunters, although I don’t see why the attitudes of those who shoot animals – that are often beautiful and that do not shoot back – should be the sacred touchstone of gun policy. In one of my favorite old New Yorker cartoons, two young bucks look over a woods teeming with men with guns, and one says to the other, “Why don’t they thin their own damned herds?” And so Congress has cast a cold eye on the regulations the president proposed yesterday, addressing an issue that no candidate dared even to touch in the last election. Obama’s “sweeping” package seems a modest list, which includes renewing the 1994 assault-weapons ban; prohibiting the sale of magazines with over 10 rounds; banning the possession of armor-piercing bullets; toughening gun-trafficking laws; and requiring background checks for all gun sales. The NRA responded with a repellant video that called Obama an “elitist hypocrite” because his daughters have secret-service protection in their school.

The proposals do not seem to gut the Second Amendment. Whether they will help thwart future killing sprees, I don’t know; but restricting some people’s access to some weapons seems a more hopeful step than arming everybody in sight.