Blog Archive: April, 2007

More than 3.5 million people will receive health insurance and 2.7 million people will receive pension benefits if Congress passes the Employee Free Choice Act, according to a report released Monday by the Campaign for America’s Future.

The study, which is also broken down by state, underscores the importance of the fight in the Senate for passage of the bill, which would level the playing field between employers and employees seeking to unionize. The bill (H.R. 800) passed the House in March, and is expected to be on the Senate floor soon.

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Click on this picture.

We don't yet know all the details behind why one section of interstate collapsed upon another in San Francisco after a crash set off a tanker truck carrying 8,600 gallons of gasoline. Does this always happen when bridges are subjected to, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported, 3000 degrees of heat? Is this, as the insurance folks put it, force majeur - an "act of God" - or more evidence of the systematic problems of America's infrastructure under conservative rule, and thus preventable? I don't know.

Those are the kind of questions we at The Big Con will be asking - and you should be asking, too.

I don't know either if California has a good Department of Transportation or a bad one, or a satisfactory transportation budget or an inadequate one. I don't know whether California - home of a historic property tax reform in 1978 which has kept municipal budgets chronically underfunded - keeps around enough money to respond to the inevitable emergencies (and emergencies are always inevitable). Do they have the resources required to keep the 80,000 vehicles that use the spur efficiently detoured, and avoid a hit on the local economy with a minimum of inconvenience?

People described the bridge looking like a slab of melting plastic. Maybe there's no way to prevent a bridge from melting under the onslaught of 8,600 gallons of burning gasoline; I don't know. If you do, please share in the comments.

I know that a municiple engineer told the Chronicle that reconstruction might be delayed by a local steel shortage. Was that preventable? Did, say, President Bush's tax cuts end up taxing whatever municipal agency it is in charge of loosening up bottlenecks to get vital materials to the right place in case of emergencies? He also said "there is $10 billion worth of construction currently going on in the Bay Area -- and all those projects need concrete and steel." I don't know what powers of eminent domain might or might not be able to be activated when an accident nearly shuts down a city - and how badly those powers might have atrophied under the reign of conservatism, with its abiding obsession against government "takings" of any kind.

All Bay Area transit systems offered free rides today to ease the congestion, but that this will hardly be enough ("'We are sharply limited in our ability to add extra service,"' said AC Transit spokesman Clarence Johnson, who noted there is extra capacity on its Transbay service on normal weekdays. It's not like we have a bunch of extra buses or drivers sitting around.'") Governor Schwarzenegger has made emergency declaration that provides $2.5 million to reimburse mass transit agencies for the service. I don't know: can the state budget absorb the hit - and for how many days?

What I do know is that "27.5% of the nation's bridges (162,000) are rated structurally deficient or functionally obsolete by the Federal Highway Administration, and that in their 2001 infrastructure report card, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation's bridges a C."

What I also know: an infrastructural disaster like this is a nearly inevitable component of any future terrorist attack. And that in their latest report card the nation's bridges still rated a "C" - because of a conservative Congress's inability

I know that Tennessee is handling its transportation budget shortfall by making a

We were hoping to hear some tough questions asked of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain on the Sunday talk shows.

For Rice (CBS' Face The Nation): You did not claim executive privilege when you were asked to testify under oath to the 9/11 Commission. Isn't it inconsistent to claim executive privilege now, when you've been subpoenaed to testify about the White House charge that Saddam Hussein sought uranium from Niger?

On ABC's "This Week," Rice pre-empted George Stephanopoulos. Without being asked, she delivered her talking point to justify her refusal to comply with a fresh House subpoena, when in 2004, the White House backed down from executive privilege claims and had her testify to the 9/11 Comisssion.

I testified before the 9/11 Commission. At the time, the President made clear that he did not consider that a precedent, but that the overwhelming concerns about 9/11 did make it necessary.

Well, there you have it. It's not a precedent because Bush said so. Besides, there's no "overwhelming concerns" about how intelligence was manipulated anyway.

For McCain, R-Ariz. (Fox News Sunday): In your announcement speech, you said:

No government program is the object of more political posturing than Social Security and Medicare. Here's the plain truth ... if we don't make some tough choices today, Social Security and Medicare will go bankrupt or we'll have to raise taxes so drastically we'll crush the prosperity of average Americans.

But if you were really interested in giving the public the "plain truth," why didn't you include in your announcement what you said three years ago: that you support Social Security "privatization"?

Fox News Sunday's Chris Wallace did ask about McCain's views, but failed to question why McCain masked his support for "privatization" in his announcement .

McCain did make a hash out of what he would support, telling Wallace he could support a tax increase as part of Social Security compromise, then seconds later, saying he "will not support a tax increase."

We were hoping to hear some tough questions asked of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain on the Sunday talk shows.

For Rice (CBS' Face The Nation): You did not claim executive privilege when you were asked to testify under oath to the 9/11 Commission. Isn't it inconsistent to claim executive privilege now, when you've been subpoenaed to testify about the White House charge that Saddam Hussein sought uranium from Niger?

On ABC's "This Week," Rice pre-empted George Stephanopoulos. Without being asked, she delivered her talking point to justify her refusal to comply with a fresh House subpoena, when in 2004, the White House backed down from executive privilege claims and had her testify to the 9/11 Comisssion.

I testified before the 9/11 Commission. At the time, the President made clear that he did not consider that a precedent, but that the overwhelming concerns about 9/11 did make it necessary.

Well, there you have it. It's not a precedent because Bush said so. Besides, there's no "overwhelming concerns" about how intelligence was manipulated anyway.

For McCain, R-Ariz. (Fox News Sunday): In your announcement speech, you said:

No government program is the object of more political posturing than Social Security and Medicare. Here's the plain truth ... if we don't make some tough choices today, Social Security and Medicare will go bankrupt or we'll have to raise taxes so drastically we'll crush the prosperity of average Americans.

But if you were really interested in giving the public the "plain truth," why didn't you include in your announcement what you said three years ago: that you support Social Security "privatization"?

Fox News Sunday's Chris Wallace did ask about McCain's views, but failed to question why McCain masked his support for "privatization" in his announcement .

McCain did make a hash out of what he would support, telling Wallace he could support a tax increase as part of Social Security compromise, then seconds later, saying he "will not support a tax increase."

We were hoping to hear some tough questions asked of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain on the Sunday talk shows. read more »

We were hoping to hear some tough questions asked of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain on the Sunday talk shows.

For Rice (CBS' Face The Nation): You did not claim executive privilege when you were asked to testify under oath to the 9/11 Commission. Isn't it inconsistent to claim executive privilege now, when you've been subpoenaed to testify about the White House charge that Saddam Hussein sought uranium from Niger?

On ABC's "This Week," Rice pre-empted George Stephanopoulos. Without being asked, she delivered her talking point to justify her refusal to comply with a fresh House subpoena, when in 2004, the White House backed down from executive privilege claims and had her testify to the 9/11 Comisssion.

I testified before the 9/11 Commission. At the time, the President made clear that he did not consider that a precedent, but that the overwhelming concerns about 9/11 did make it necessary.

Well, there you have it. It's not a precedent because Bush said so. Besides, there's no "overwhelming concerns" about how intelligence was manipulated anyway.

For McCain, R-Ariz. (Fox News Sunday): In your announcement speech, you said:

No government program is the object of more political posturing than Social Security and Medicare. Here's the plain truth ... if we don't make some tough choices today, Social Security and Medicare will go bankrupt or we'll have to raise taxes so drastically we'll crush the prosperity of average Americans.

But if you were really interested in giving the public the "plain truth," why didn't you include in your announcement what you said three years ago: that you support Social Security "privatization"?

Fox News Sunday's Chris Wallace did ask about McCain's views, but failed to question why McCain masked his support for "privatization" in his announcement .

McCain did make a hash out of what he would support, telling Wallace he could support a tax increase as part of Social Security compromise, then seconds later, saying he "will not support a tax increase."

The New York Times analyzes its own environmental poll, and concludes, "Public Remains Split on Response to Warming." But on the poll questions (PDF file) that relate to actual proposals in Congress, the public isn't split at all. For example:

• 92 percent favor "requiring car manufacturers to produce cars that are more energy efficient."
• 75 percent are "willing ... to pay more for electricity if it were generated by renewable sources like solar or wind energy."
• 64 percent would "pay higher taxes on gasoline and other fuels if the money was used for research into renewable sources like solar and wind energy."
• 69 percent approve of more coal-power plants "if the plants used a new method of burning coal, which would cost more but produce less air pollution." (Otherwise, support for coal was at 41%.)

Some of these questions misstate what is being proposed. The main push on Capitol Hill is for tax credits for renewable energy, so they won't cost more than fossil fuels. Yet even with the poll's conservative framing, renewable energy comes out on top.

Meanwhile, the poll doesn't even ask about the big issue facing Congress, a cap on carbon emissions, which earned 58 percent support in a recent Center for American Progress poll.

You really can't call the public split on how to deal with global warming, if your poll doesn't address how to actually deal with global warming.

Watch conservative leader William Kristol of The Weekly Standard and Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect debate whether "conservatives can be trusted to govern" during a May 3 luncheon at the National Press Club. read more »

In little more than a decade after President Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on poverty,” President Ronald Reagan led the nation in the equivalent of a helicopter evacuation from the epicenter of the fight.  Reagan and his band of conservatives also so poisoned the political discussion about poverty that even today many progressives dare not use a phrase that even smacks of “war on poverty” for fear of being tagged that epithet of epithets, an “out-of-touch, ’60s-style liberal.”

So when President Bush presides over a Gilded Age of economic inequality exacerbated by his own policies, the political response is too often muted. That is true even as one in eight Americans lives below the official poverty line  and as a total of at least 90 million Americans have incomes that are not high enough to meet all of their housing, food, education and health care needs.

Truth is, it’s time for some ‘60s-style liberalism when it comes to poverty in America.

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Celebrities spewing racist drivel get the headlines and the outrage, but largely out of the public eye the Bush administration has been doing something far more damaging to victims of discrimination than the utterance of a few vile slurs. In its classic Grover Norquist way, the Bush administration is shrinking the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission so, as Norquist would say, it can be drowned in a bathtub.

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