Daily Clips: March 18th, 2016

March 18, 2016 Nick Cassella

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Governor blocks $2.85 minimum wage increase after giving staffers $73,405 raises: Headlines like this demonstrate that trickle-down economics still has a grasp upon many important political figures. How else can you explain such idiocy? As you may remember, last month “Governor Bentley signed a bill blocking Alabama cities from raising their minimum wages above the federal floor of $7.25 an hour.” Not only does such a preemption block the will of the people, it also blocks more money from going into his 46th ranked state economy . The grim reality of American politics: The near-term future of politics and policy in America is a pretty grim one. Intimidated by the nihilist, nativist pressure from talk radio hosts and bloggers, Republican leaders in Congress are not all that likely to ignore their desires. That may mean continued stonewalling on a Supreme Court seat, leaving a 4-4 Court for a long time (though a Democratic Senate would likely do what it takes to confirm a Clinton nominee). A Trump loss—which he would surely blame on the enemy within—would not mean the demise of a Trump movement or the angry populism behind it, and the driving need by Republicans to recapture their party’s mojo in the midterm would probably have them fall back on the populist approach that worked in 2010 and 2014. So brace yourselves for a rocky road ahead, not just in 2016 but in 2017 and beyond. Tweet of the day: Excellent, from @NewYorker pic.twitter.com/lGCcUWsvYD — Joe Parkinson (@JoeWSJ) March 18, 2016

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Daily Clips: March 17th, 2016

March 17, 2016 Nick Cassella

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Are trade agreements good for Americans? The New York Times poses this question in its “Room for Debate” segment with the economist Robert E. Scott and former US treasury official Jeffrey J. Schott—guess who argues for pro-trade? US job market tightening; manufacturing sector healing ‘The labor market is tight as a drum. If we continue to receive strong reports like this, then the Fed is going to have to put a June rate hike on the table,’ said Chris Rupkey, chief economist at MUFG Union Bank in New York. What if Trump had run as a Democrat? A scary thought, but an illuminating article. Planning to run as a Democrat, Trump would have avoided backing the “birther” movement, but could have made other inflammatory charges (for example, against Hillary Clinton) to get media attention. To build Democratic support, he could have staked out positions in favor of single-payer health care, more progressive taxes, and a massive infrastructure program, while denouncing trade agreements, the war in Iraq, and illegal immigration. With only a slight shift from his current stances, he could have presented himself as an economic populist with business know-how who gets along famously with unions and working people, and is both a ferocious nationalist and a skeptic about foreign wars. In short, he could have wrapped his protectionism and nativism in a package more appealing to the left. This paragraph gives us a glimpse into a possible shift we will see from Trump after he wraps up the Republican nomination. As with Hillary, we will see a sudden shift back to the center. It will be abrupt and many of us have no idea how he will try and appeal to independents. My guess? He’ll play to the left of Hillary on trade and on foreign policy (by that I mean less liberal interventionist), while also railing against the establishment class and elites. Tweet of the day: Click the link, it’s worth
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Daily Clips: March 16th, 2016

March 16, 2016 Nick Cassella

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Obama chooses Merrick Garland for SCTOUS: And so it begins. Today, Obama called the Republicans bluff and chose a “well-known moderate who has drawn bipartisan support over decades.” On top of this, he nominated a 63 year old Supreme Court nominee, which shows Obama is “offering Senate Republicans a compromise not only on ideology, but also on tenure.” To me, Garland seems to be shrewd political move by Obama. If I had to guess, he was not the president’s first choice. He’s a sacrificial lamb. A pawn in the political game. The Obama administration must be 95 percent certain the Republicans would not confirm this nomination, otherwise I highly doubt he’d have picked such a centrist. Nonetheless, I expect Obama to fight like him to get him confirmed. 10 things you need to know about judge Merrick Garland: Judge Garland was appointed to the DC Circuit in 1997 by President Bill Clinton. At age 63, Garland is the oldest person nominated for the Supreme Court since President Nixon appointed Justice Lewis Powell in 1971. Like President Obama, Garland is from Chicago and attended Harvard Law school where he graduated with high honors. Garland is a centrist. In 2003, he held that the federal judiciary lacks authority, “to assert habeas corpus jurisdiction at the behest of an alien held at a military base leased from another nation.” Effectively prohibiting Guantanamo detainees from presenting themselves in civilian court. (The Supreme Court later reversed this decision in Rasul v. Bush.) Judge Garland is relatively conservative towards criminal justice cases. According to SCOTUSBlog’s Thomas Goldstein, “Judge Garland rarely votes in favor of criminal defendants’ appeals of their convictions.” There have been only eight such cases in the 13 years Garland has spent as federal judge. Judge Garland is fairly strict on gun laws. In D.C. Garland formed a decision, which restricted gun ownership for those seeking handguns for self-defense. The Oklahoma
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Politician Loves The Free Market Until It Effects His Constituents

March 15, 2016 Nick Cassella

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Like many libertarians before him, Rand Paul is obsessed with the concept of liberty. When Paul Constant and I went to hear him speak at Town Hall last year , we heard the then-presidential candidate refer to his supporters multiple times as “lovers of liberty.” (Note: if he was being honest, he’d admit that they were actually lovers of negative liberty which is concerned with freedom from interference, but that’s not quite as catchy or alliterative). Therefore, it comes as no surprise that a darling of non-interference like Rand Paul also worships The Free Market. A man who believes that there is no such thing as a free lunch unironically believes in an economic theory which allows one to just lie back and let an invisible hand sort out everything. From solving health care to setting interest rates , Paul has ceaselessly called upon the market to heal America’s societal ills. It is not only a great remedy to all of societies problems, it is the only one. All hail. A perfect example of Paul’s lazy reliance on the market came when Greta Van Susteren asked him “What happens if Republicans are successful in repealing Obamacare?” Paul smugly replied, “We could try freedom for a while.” Brilliant. I guess promulgating a detailed position like that is all it takes to be identified as a “ rising star ” in the modern Republican Party. Why didn’t he do well in the presidential primary again? Snark aside, you’d expect that a disciple of the free market would be utterly devoted to its forces. Predictably, however, that is not the case for Dr. Rand. Check out his recent rant about Kentucky’s dying coal industry. Tonight @hillaryclinton said out loud what the national democrat party has been trying to do quietly for the past 8 years #DemTownHall — Dr. Rand Paul (@RandPaul) March 14, 2016 I won't let her do it. I am running to fight for Kentucky and to stop the national democrats from killing more coal jobs. — Dr. Rand Paul (@RandPaul) March 14, 2016 Where to begin? Let’s start with
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Daily Clips: March 15th, 2016

March 15, 2016 Nick Cassella

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David Brooks talks about how youth today are “awash in moral judgment” : His columns seem to get worse by the week. This time, Brooks directs his moral repulsion towards young people and waxes lyrical about the good ol’ days (a common theme in his writing). Back when he was young “universal moral principles” supposedly ruled the land, but then came “The Closing of The American Mind” where “subjective personal values” usurped the natural order. Now, with the “omnipresence of social media” my generation has created a whole new “moral life..not built on the continuum of right and wrong; it’s built on the continuum of inclusion and exclusion.” If only we could revert back to Brooks’ days where the continuum of right and wrong prevailed; where blacks couldn’t go to the same school as white people, LGBT weren’t allowed to marry their lovers, and women knew their place in the kitchen! Americans have no idea marijuana is in the same legal category as heroin and LSD : Please, tell me again how weed is “practically legal.” Christian barber refuses to cut transgender Army veteran’s hair, citing religious views : I wonder where this lands on Brooks’ continuum of right and wrong? Tweet of the day: Seeing this, seems less likely Bernie's favorables wld collapse in general. Taxes, socialism, etc already in debate. pic.twitter.com/X5ZZkUNQO2 — Mike Konczal (@rortybomb) March 15, 2016

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Daily Clips: March 14th, 2016

March 14, 2016 Nick Cassella

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Daily Clips

Tweet of the day: Marco Rubio sounds like a really, really nice guy. Christian values and all. Marco Rubio sounds like a great guy pic.twitter.com/UMaKVQbezf — Brian Gaar (@briangaar) March 14, 2016 The hard power of “soft” voter-ID laws: “States are passing special measures to head off attacks on the constitutionality of strict voter-identification requirements. But such measures are often just as disenfranchising as the laws they shield.” Progressives also have an identity crisis on their hands: “The strength of Bernie Sanders’s challenge to Hillary Clinton from the left, like the radicalization of American conservatism, is a symptom of the decay of a moderate brand of progressivism that rose in the 1990s when Bill Clinton was president and Tony Blair was Britain’s prime minister. Its ideology was rooted in a belief that capitalism would deliver the economic goods and could be balanced by a ‘competent public sector, providing services of quality to the citizen and social protection for those who are vulnerable.'”

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Daily Clips: March 11th, 2016

March 11, 2016 Nick Cassella

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Louisiana will tax its poor to fill budget hole caused by tax cuts for the rich: But I thought tax cuts for the rich would lead to an economic boom?! In order to fill the budget gap, the state is raising the sales tax by 25 percent. Unfortunately, such a policy maneuver puts an uneven burden on lower income households. Because the sales tax applies to consumption rather than income, the hike Louisiana lawmakers agreed to will be regressive : While people in the top 20 percent of the income distribution will pay 41 percent of the total cost of the tax hike according to the Louisiana Budget Project, the sales tax mechanism takes a bigger bite out of a poor family’s income than a rich one’s. Politicians are making poor people shoulder a load caused primarily by ex-Gov. Bobby Jindal’s (R) tax breaks for the rich. Trade and tribulation: Paul Krugman opens up his latest column by asking “Why did Bernie Sanders win a narrow victory in Michigan, when polls showed Hillary Clinton with a huge lead?” Study sees positive impact of raising New York’s minimum wage to $15 an hour The false promise of last year’s wage gains: A new report from Economic Policy Institute “suggest that an apparent boost in buying power was really just the product of a dip in inflation.” A seniro economist at EPI and the paper’s author, Elise Gould, argued “that while shifts such as lower oil prices certainly helped middle-and lower-income households stretch their paychecks further, locking in the benefits of such boosts would require that inflation rates remain near zero for a prolonged period—which is quite unlikely in the long run.” Kenneth Copeland says Ted Cruz has been “called and anointed” by God to be the next POTUS: This video is beyond creepy. Side point: Why do pastors always take such long pauses?

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Daily Clips: March 10th, 2016

March 10, 2016 Nick Cassella

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2016

Video compilation of Trump protestors being hit and ushered out of events: Well, this is what you get when you incite hatred and contempt. You get your bone-headed supporters sucker punching black people, Secret Service slamming photographers to the ground, and general mayhem. r/politics is a joke: I am an avid redditor. I spend many hours of my day perusing the website, but I’ve gotten to the point where I simply cannot stand r/politics anymore. It has just become one entire Bernie lovefest. It’s sickening. Whether you like Bernie or not, the fact that 90% of posts are about the mistreatment of Bernie or what a lying scumbag Hillary Clinton is. Give me a break. The moderators of that subreddit have completely lost the plot. For shame. Who gets the blame for the slowing economy? The New York Times has a (slightly) meandering opinion piece on the state of the economy and why there has been a “drag on growth.” The author, Steven Ratner, says that “governments alone are not to blame; the reasons for the sagging economies are multifarious and jumbled.” One reason is “depressed consumer spending” as well as “increased saving and growing income inequality, which has pushed more money into the hands of the rich, who are less likely to spend it.” David Brooks and the depths of the GOP’s delusions: As the author correctly points out, “lost in the fiasco surrounding Donald Trump is that the so-called moderate Republican candidates are almost as bad.” Perfect. He then attacks a favorite target of mine (Brooks) and how he continues to be “in deep denial about the state of his party.”

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Daily Clips: March 9th, 2016

March 9, 2016 Nick Cassella

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Bernie shocks the nation in Michigan: I’ll let FiveThirtyEight do the talking. Both the FiveThirtyEight polls-plus and polls-only forecast gave Clinton a greater than 99 percent chance of winning. That’s because polling averages for primaries, while inexact, are usually not 25 percentage points off. Indeed, my colleague Nate Silver went back and found that only one primary, the 1984 Democratic primary in New Hampshire, was even on the same scale as this upset. Even if you support Hillary Clinton, I hope all Democrats (and Americans) take a moment to stand in awe of what Bernie Sanders just did last night. It was monumental. And yes, Hillary absolutely trounced him in Mississippi and won the overall delegate count on the night. There’s no denying she also had a good night. But no one can dismiss the historic nature of Bernie’s upset last night. Thomas Friedman rails on the modern GOP: Friedman’s anger is palpable in this column. He, unlike his colleague David Brooks, can see that one of America’s great parties has completely rotted to the core. What has this decline brought us? The GOP now thinks “climate change is a hoax; abortion, even in the case of rape or incest, is impermissible; even common-sense gun laws must be opposed, no matter how many kids get murdered; taxes must always be cut and safety nets shrunk, no matter what the economic context; Obamacare must be destroyed, even though it was based on a Republican idea; and Iraq was a success even though it was a mess.” Painkillers now kill more Americans than any illegal drug. Despicable. 19,000 Americans died from overdoses linked to legal opioid painkillers. Now tell me again why marijuana should be illegal. Universities are becoming billion-dollar hedge funds with schools attached: Though the exact figure is hard to determine, experts I consulted estimate that over $100 billion of educational endowment money nation-wide is invested in hedge funds, costing them approximately $2.5 billion in fees in 2015 alone. The problems with hedge funds managing college endowments are manifold, going well beyond
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Daily Clips: March 8th, 2016

March 8, 2016 Nick Cassella

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David Brooks asks his fellow Republicans to come to their senses: Call me crazy, but if “my” party’s best two options were politicians like Trump and Cruz, I’d ditch my party fast. Blatant racism and bigotry is usually where I draw the line. But Brooks cannot do that. It’s so weird to see in real time. He simply cannot get himself to realize that his party has left him. It’s like watching someone trudge through a terrible relationship where the other person has moved on, but the other person still thinks everything is fine. In meme form, this: Anyways, like all other “middle-of-the-road conservatives,” Brooks is hoping for a brokered convention this summer. He admits that this “would be bedlam for a few days, but a broadly acceptable new option might emerge.” So much for democracy, huh?! What’s the solution to political polarization in the US? Fine, the 1860s and the 1960s were bad. But the fact that the nation hasn’t fallen into civil war and our leaders haven’t been gunned down is a pathetically low bar for a first-world country with the greatest military and strongest economy on Earth. Even during the tumult of the 1960s, Congress created Medicare and Medicaid, enacted landmark civil-rights legislation, and passed a sweeping education bill that still serves as the foundation for federal funding of public schools today. Ever since Obama’s first two years in office, Congress hasn’t done anything except shut down the government and come close to tanking the economy with a near-default on the nation’s debt. Immigration reform stalled. Gun reform went nowhere. Congress can’t even agree to declare war on ISIS, and now that Antonin Scalia has died, it might leave the Supreme Court short-handed for more than a year. Tolerant white working-class voters, turned off by Trump, may side with Democrats: Democrats are going after that more tolerant sector with a progressive populism initially and charismatically championed by Bernie Sanders but increasingly advocated by Hillary Clinton as well. Tweet of
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