DISPATCHES

REPUBLICAN CONGRESS WILL ATTACK OBAMA ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Republicans didn’t offer an overarching agenda or platform to voters during the 2014 midterm elections and instead sought to connect their Democratic opponents to President Obama and the slow economic recovery. But party leaders have offered some specifics about what they intend to actually accomplish should they reclaim the Senate majority, Igor Volsky noted at ThinkProgress.org (11/4). Here are some highlights:

1. Adopt small changes to Obamacare. “I think you’ll see the medical device tax removed, but I think you’ll also see the so-called death panels taken away,” outgoing Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) told Fox News on Tuesday, using her preferred term for the Independent Payment Advisory Board or IPAB.

The Affordable Care Act provision is tasked with making binding recommendations to Congress for lowering health care spending, should Medicare costs exceed a target growth rate. Both the medical device tax and the IPAB are also opposed by Democrats with close ties to the health care industry. Other Obamacare targets include: repeal of the employer responsibility provision — which the administration has delayed twice — and changing the definition of a full-time work week from 30 hours to 40 hours.

2. Approve the Keystone XL pipeline. During an appearance on MSNBC, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus pledged that Republicans will approve the Keystone pipeline, possibly attaching the provision to must-pass legislation. In May, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) had offered Republicans a vote on an amendment that would have authorized immediate construction of Keystone XL in exchange for passage of an energy efficiency bill. Republicans rejected the compromise.

The decision to build the pipeline ultimately lies with the State Department and President Obama. The State Department announced in April that it would extend the comment period on Keystone and the project is still awaiting a ruling from the Nebraska Supreme Court.

3. Pass a budget in both chambers. “We will pass a budget in both chambers,” Priebus added, though he did not specify if the GOP will seek to build consensus with Democrats — as Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) had done with Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) — or adopt a more partisan document that would include significant changes to the Medicare and Medicaid programs.

4. Declaw financial reform. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has repeatedly promised to repeal Dodd-Frank. Republicans are likely to take aim specifically at the Volcker rule, which goes into effect in 2015, and at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The House has already moved forward on legislation that limits the CFPB’s power and independence, but the Democratic Senate has refused to vote on them.

Republicans have also pledged to undercut Obama’s efforts to extend deportation relief for undocumented immigrants via executive action and the administration’s efforts to avoid bringing any tentative deal to stop Iran’s nuclear program to Congress. Republicans have threatened to restore all sanctions if Obama does not bring the agreement to Congress for final approval.

GOP AIMED TO PURGE MILLIONS OF VOTERS. Election officials in 27 states, most of them Republicans, have launched a program that threatens a massive purge of voter rolls, especially targeting minority voters.

Greg Palast, writing for Al Jazeera America (10/29), obtained 2.1 mln names from the target lists, kept confidential until the week before the election. Experts reviewing the lists concluded it is suspiciously over-weighted with Black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters.

The targeted voters have been tagged as “potential duplicate voters,” suspected of voting twice in the same election, in two different states, a felony crime punishable by 2-10 years in prison.

The lists of suspected double voters, called Interstate Crosscheck, contain nearly 7 mln names and was compiled for each state by Kansas’ controversial Republican Secretary of State, Kris Kobach, but they are rife with literally millions of obvious mismatches. Palast found that nearly one fourth (23% ) of the accused voters lack matching middle names.

For example, Kevin Thomas Hayes of Durham, N.C., is allegedly the same man who voted in Alexandria, Va., as Kevin Antonio Hayes. Also, “Jr.” and “Sr.” are regularly mismatched, potentially disenfranchising two generations in the same family.

While Kobach, in his public description of Crosscheck, claims that double voters are matched by Social Security number, in fact, internal documents admit that “Social Security numbers might or might not match.”

So far, no case has been made against a single one of the accused double-voters on the lists, though tens of thousands already have lost their right to vote based on inclusion in the lists.

North Carolina hired a former FBI agent to arrest double voters. However, because the match list of 190,000 suspects in that state was so recklessly compiled, the Board of Elections admitted to Al Jazeera that not one voter has been charged with the crime of voting twice. Nevertheless, the Republican-controlled Board of Elections has begun the process of removing the registration of voters on the lists.

The lists are heavily over-weighted with names such as Jackson, Garcia, Patel and Kim, common to minorities who vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, one in seven African Americans in those 27 states are listed as suspected of the crime of voting twice, one in eight Asian-Americans, and one in eight Hispanic voters. White voters too, one in 11, are at risk, though not as vulnerable as minorities.

“It’s Jim Crow all over again,” said Rev. Joseph Lowery, who cofounded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Martin Luther King, Jr. Lowery, now 93, told Palast he recognizes in the list of threatened voters a sophisticated new form of an old and tired tactic. “I think [the Republicans] would use anything they can find. Their desperation is rising.”

Though Kobach declined to be interviewed, Roger Bonds, the chairman of the Republican Party in Georgia’s Fulton County, responds, “This is how we have successfully prevented voter fraud.” See <http://bit.ly/1u6ZQJ9>.

CESCA: NO SUCH THING AS ‘WAR ON WHISTLEBLOWERS’. Bob Cesca is not buying news media complaints that the Obama administration is conducting a “war on whistleblowers.” Writing at TheDailyBanter.com (10/27), Cesca noted that James Risen, an investigative reporter with the New York Times, has claimed that President Obama is worse than George W. Bush when it comes to press freedom and whistleblowers, going so far as to call Obama “the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation.”

Cesca noted that there is a possibility that Risen could be tossed in jail for not revealing sources for a series of articles about a CIA operation targeting Iran’s nuclear program. However, Cesca noted that Risen has not been arrested in the six years since he was subpoenaed and “the chances of the current administration imprisoning Risen grows less likely by the day. ... That being said, jail time would be an unequivocally damning episode in the presidency of a constitutional law professor who promised to turn the tide away from the harsher policies of the previous administration.”

Cesca also noted that Risen’s colleague, Charlie Savage, reported at the New York Times in 2012 that the crackdown on whistleblowers had nothing to do with any directive from the President. Instead, it resulted from several leftover investigations from the Bush administration, proliferation of email and computer audit trials that can pinpoint reporters’ sources, bipartisan support in Congress for a tougher approach toward leakers, and a push by the director of national intelligence in 2009 that sharpened the system for tracking disclosures.

On the other hand, Cesca noted, the administration has acted to protect whistleblowers, who expose wrongdoing or illegal activity through proper channels within an organization. President Obama signed the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act of 2012 and Presidential Policy Directive 19 (10/10/12), which extended whistleblower protections to national security and intelligence employees.

PolitiFact reported (11/21/14) that President Obama has given federal employees better chances of appealing wrongful employer retaliation because of his appointments. “The Office of Special Counsel [OSC, the independent federal agency that investigates whistleblower complaints] now stands for whistleblower rights in a way that it didn’t in the past,” said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy, a watchdog group that promotes public oversight. The last two years have been the most successful in OSC’s history in achieving favorable actions for whistleblowers – like the rehiring of a fired employee or the reprimand of a supervisor, PolitiFact reported. For over a decade, OSC counted less than 100 successful favorable actions a year (including an all time low of only 29 in 2007), but in fiscal year 2012 they were able to reach 159 favorable actions, and in 2013 it was 160.

“This is worse than Bush? In what universe?” Cesca asked.

He noted that leakers typically sidestep internal channels and instead hand the information to reporters. “This is clearly illegal and should be ethically investigated (short of pursuing the reporters themselves, which is both unconstitutional and has a chilling effect on journalism,” Cesca wrote.

In terms of reporters, he added, “There’s simply no way the Obama administration has accumulated a worse record than the Bush administration. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, no American journalists have been jailed in the US by Obama’s Department of Justice. However, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press listed the following journalists who were arrested during the Bush administration:

2006, Josh Wolf, San Francisco, Calif., freelance video blogger was jailed for a month when he refused to turn over a video tape that federal officials said contained footage of protesters damaging a police car.

2005, Judith Miller, Washington, D.C. New York Times reporter was jailed for refusing to testify against news sources in the investigation into leaks of a CIA operative’s name by White House officials. She spent 85 days in jail, and was released when she agreed to provide limited testimony to the grand jury regarding conversations with vice presidential aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby without revealing her other sources.

2004, Jim Taricani, Providence, R.I., TV reporter obtained and aired in February 2001 a portion of the videotape showing a Providence city official accepting a bribe from an undercover FBI informant. The tape was sealed evidence in an FBI investigation into corruption by Providence officials. Taricani refused to reveal his source and was found in contempt of court. After a failed appeal to the US Court of Appeals in Boston, NBC paid $85,000 in fines and Taricani was sentenced to six months home confinement. He was granted early release after being confined for four months.

2001, Vanessa Leggett, Houston, Texas, author researching a “true crime” book was jailed for 168 days by a federal judge for refusing to disclose her research and sources to a federal grand jury investigating a murder. Leggett was freed only after the term of the grand jury expired. A subsequent grand jury indicted the key suspect in the murder without any need for her testimony.

It’s also worth noting that the Bush administration detained Al-Haj, a Sudanese cameraman for Al-Jazeera, at Guantanamo Bay, Cesca noted.

The Reporters Committee also listed four journalists as jailed by state courts during the Clinton administration.

“The record hasn’t prevented Risen from declaring that the Obama administration has been ‘the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation.’ This is astonishingly false. Case in point: if this were true, wouldn’t have Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Barton Gellman been jailed a long time ago? Say whatever you will about their veracity or their goals, but there’d be no justification whatsoever for arresting any of the now-famous reporters covering the Snowden beat. Appropriately, not one of the Snowden reporters has been subpoenaed, arrested, indicted or detained. Not one, in spite of the reality that they’ve all moved freely inside the United States for more than a year now (Greenwald most recently during his book tour).

“Even if we offer Risen some latitude for living with the threat of imprisonment, there’s simply no other rational justification for repeating such broadly inaccurate claims. We therefore have to turn Risen’s bewilderment against him and acknowledge that it’s really difficult to understand why he’s doing it.”

He added, “Again, there’s plenty of time for the Obama administration to prove Risen correct, especially if federal prosecutors opt to toss Risen in jail. But for now, the facts simply do not support his dramatically hyperbolic statements.”

CLIMATE SCIENTISTS WARN OF ‘IRREVERSIBLE IMPACT’ FROM CARBON POLLUTION. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) released a Synthesis Report (11/1) detailing the dangers of climate change. Hundreds of scientists spent the last five years preparing this final report, which says that carbon pollution must be slashed now or risk “severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems.”

None of the TV networks mentioned the stark findings on their Sunday shows, and climate change was little discussed in the midterm election campaign, but Joe Romm noted at ThinkProgress.org (11/4) that the biggest change in the new climate report compared to the one the world’s top climate scientists released back in 2007 can be summed up in one word: “Irreversible.”

In the 2007 assessment of climate science, that word appeared only 4 times in the final, full “synthesis” report. Irreversibility only received 2 mentions and minimal discussion in the Summary for Policymakers (SPM).

Seven years later, the word appears 31 times in the full synthesis report of the IPCC’s fifth assessment. The SPM mentions “irreversible” 14 times and has extended discussions of exactly what it means and why it matters, Romm noted.

“Certainly the fact that we are on track to harm billions of people who contributed little or nothing to their harsh fate makes climate inaction a grave ‘wrong.’ But what makes our current inaction uniquely immoral in the history of homo sapiens is that the large-scale harm is irreparable on any timescale that matters — and, of course, that we could avoid the worst of the irreparable harms at an astonishingly low net cost,” Romm wrote.

The world’s top scientists also noted that the cost of action is relatively trivial, as the cost of the most aggressive action to stave off irreversible disaster is so low that it would not noticeably change the growth curve of the world economy this century, Romm wrote. “With high confidence, we would be reducing annual consumption growth from, say, 2.4% per year down to ‘only’ a growth level of 2.34% per year.

“How bad can it get if we won’t devote that tiny fraction of the world’s wealth to action? The IPCC already explained that in the science report from last fall (see ‘Alarming IPCC Prognosis: 9°F Warming For US, Faster Sea Rise, More Extreme Weather, Permafrost Collapse’). And they expanded on that in the impacts report (see ‘Climate Panel Warns World Faces Breakdown Of Food Systems And More Violent Conflict’)...”

Romm added, “To even start reversing the irreversible, we have to go far below zero net emissions to actually sucking vast quantities of diffuse CO2 out of the air and putting it someplace that is also permanent, which we currently do not know how to do at scale at any plausible price. One can envision such a day when we might — if we sharply reduce net carbon pollution to zero by 2100, as we must to stabilize near 2°C. But it’s hard to imagine when it would ever happen if emissions are anywhere near current levels (let alone higher) by 2100, and we have unleashed myriad amplifying carbon cycle feedbacks that make the job of getting to even zero net emissions doubly difficult.

“If we don’t get on a very different emissions path ASAP, then some of the most serious climate changes caused by global warming could last 1000 years or more. The SPM explains, ‘Stabilisation of global average surface temperature does not imply stabilisation for all aspects of the climate system.’ That is to say, if we don’t quickly embrace the 2C emissions path, then even at a point many hundreds of years from now when temperatures start to drop, some changes in the climate — sea level rise being the most obvious example — will likely keep going and going.”

Among the other irreversible impacts if atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations increase from current levels near 385 parts per mln by volume (ppmv) to a peak of 450-600 ppmv over the coming century, scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported in 2009, are irreversible dry-season rainfall reductions in several regions comparable to those of the ”dust bowl” era and inexorable sea level rise.

YANKS GO TO COLLEGE FREE OVERSEAS. Since 1985, US college costs have surged by 500%, Rick Noack noted at WashingtonPost.com (10/29), but at least seven countries not only offer tuition-free higher education, but allow US students to go to college for free.

In the latest nation to go tuition-free, Germany, Dorothee Stapelfeldt, a senator in the northern city of Hamburg, said tuition fees "discourage young people who do not have a traditional academic family background from taking up study. It is a core task of politics to ensure that young women and men can study with a high quality standard free of charge in Germany."

What's more, US students can earn a German undergraduate degree or graduate degree without speaking German, Noack said. About 900 degree programs are offered exclusively in English. Other nations whose tuition-free universities are open to Americans, with courses in English, include Finland, France, Norway, Sweden, Slovenia and Brazil.

OBAMA’S APPROVAL RATING REMAINED UNCHANGED, DESPITE MEDIA REPORTS. In the weeks before the election, news media reminders arrived almost daily that President Obama’s approval rating is low and going lower, Eric Boehlert noted at MediaMatters.org (10/31). McClatchy Newspapers highlighted the “dropping approval ratings,” while the Washington Post declared “President Obama’s approval ratings have plunged to record lows.” The Christian Science Monitor noted the numbers have “plummeted.” The Washington Examiner stressed the president’s approvals were “sinking to historic lows,” while an Atlantic headlined announced, “”Obama’s Sinking Approval Could Drag Democrats Down With Him.”

“The portrait being painted by an array of media artists is unmistakable: Obama’s approval ratings are not only weak but they’re going down, down, down,” Boehlert wrote. “But it’s not true.

Does the White House wish Obama’s job approval rating was higher? I’m sure his advisers do. Does polling indicate that Democrats face the possibility of deep losses next week in the midterm elections? Yes. Does that mean the press should just make up narratives about the president’s approval rating simply because it fits in, again, with anti-Obama spin that Republicans are pushing? It does not.”

Cumulative ratings posted daily at Real Clear Politics, which averages an array of national polls to come up with Obama’s composite job approval rating, found the president’s approval on 1/1/14 stood at 42.6%. The president’s approval rating on 10/30 was 42%. “So over the course of ten months, and based on more than one hundred poll results in 2014, Obama’s approval rating declined less than one point,” Boehlert noted. And there hasn’t been a large fluctuation during the year. Obama’s high was 44% in February and his low was 41% in July.

Gallup tells the same story, showing 42% approval on 1/1/14 and 43% on 10/30. He peaked at 44% in May and June and bottomed out at 38% in September.

DEM VOTERS IN IOWA, N.H. LIKE CLINTON, GOP VOTERS LIKE HUCKABEE, BUSH, PAUL AND PERRY. In election polls by NBC News (11/4), two thirds of Iowa Democratic voters (66%) said they want Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic nominee in 2016. Elizabeth Warren was the choice of 11%, Joe Biden named by 8% and 15% named someone else. Among Iowa Republican voters, Mike Huckabee was top choice of 19%, followed by Rick Perry with 17%, 14% each for Jeb Bush and Rand Paul, 12% for Chris Christie and 23% for someone else.

In New Hampshire, 64% of Democrats favor Clinton, 18% favor Warren, 4% favor Biden and 14 support someone else. Among Republicans, 22% support Bush, 21% support Rand Paul, 15% Christie, 10% Huckabee and 4% Perry.

From The Progressive Populist, December 1, 2014