Every few months, I check in on
whether Obama “owns” the economy yet. I was certainly expecting that by now, voters would be starting to blame Obama for the state of the economy. But it doesn’t look like that’s happening. A recent
Fox News poll found almost no change since July — Americans blame Bush over Obama for the state of the economy by more than a 3 to 1 margin.
I suppose this is reasonable — after all, the economy collapsed under the Bush administration, and the Obama administration has been making slow but steady progress towards a recovery. I just expected that after a while, people would start to lose sight of why we’re in the mess we’re in, but it appears that so far, we haven’t forgotten.
22. Who do you think is more responsible for the current state of the economy — President Barack Obama or former President George W. Bush? (ROTATE)
|
Obama |
Bush |
(Both equally) |
(Other) |
(Don’t know) |
| 27-28 Oct 09 |
18% |
58 |
9 |
12 |
3 |
| 21-22 Jul 09 |
16% |
61 |
5 |
14 |
4 |
[Via Political Wire]
The “credit cardholder’s bill of rights” will start to take effect early in 2010, and some portions will be phased in even later. That’s too bad, because we really need it immediately. As profits fall, banks have tried to squeeze consumers to preserve their bottom line; as a result, credit card practices have become even worse than they already were. The Pew Health Group’s Safe Credit Cards Project is out with a
new report showing the extent of the damage:
Our research included an examination of nearly 400 credit cards, including all consumer credit cards offered online by the largest 12 bank issuers in America. These banks control more than 90 percent of outstanding credit card debt nationwide.
We found that median advertised interest rates on bank credit cards were between 13 and 23 percent higher compared to rates in December of 2008, depending on a consumer’s credit profile. Meanwhile, practices labeled “unfair or deceptive” by the Federal Reserve remained as widespread as they were before Congress passed the new credit card law. In fact, some of these practices had become even more common. In sum, all surveyed bank cards included at least one “unfair or deceptive” practice. None of these cards would have met the requirements of the Credit CARD Act.
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It’s about time:
Galen Robinson, litigation director of Mid-Minnesota Legal Assistance and one of the attorneys who filed the suit, said Minnesota law allows governors to take unilateral action, known as unallotment, but only when the state has unanticipated budget shortfalls.
Pawlenty knew there would be a shortfall when he vetoed the tax-raising measure and signed budget bills into law, the suit says. He then let the session end and didn’t call legislators back to fix the problem.
Pawlenty’s decision to unilaterally redo Minnesota’s budget without the legislature was fraught with legal problems. Chief among them, as the article says, is that the budget didn’t need to be balanced — Pawlenty was given a balanced budget that included both spending cuts and tax increases, but he chose to create a major deficit by signing only the spending bills into law. Another problem is that some of Pawlenty’s changes go far beyond his authority to co-opt legislative powers.
I don’t know how the lawsuit will turn out. But Pawlenty’s move was always on shaky legal ground, so whatever the final ruling, I think it’s extremely important that the courts are involved. This lawsuit will do a service to Minnesotans by helping to clarify the laws on unallotment.
To follow up on
Zach’s post, looks like we’ll be getting an earlier primary — but only because Federal law will now require it. Tim Pawlenty doesn’t really support the earlier primary, but his hands are tied, so we’ll at least be moving the primary up by 15 days. That’s the minimum change that would be required under the new Federal law:
A defense spending bill signed into law by President Obama this week includes a requirement that U.S. Military personnel and other overseas voters get at least 45-days to receive and return their absentee ballots for the general election. Minnesota’s September primary currently allows only 30 days. Pawlenty said he’ll support legislation next session to move the primary to August. [MPR]
I love that Pawlenty says “he’ll support legislation” as if he had a choice in the matter. The “supports” the change because he’s required to. After all, it was just last year that the legislature passed an election reform bill last year which Pawlenty vetoed. In his veto message, he specifically wrote: “I am also opposed to the change in this bill moving the primary from September to August.” It seems pretty clear to me that the Federal law is the only reason he’s on board.
Why do I care about Pawlenty’s motives? Because I have a feeling that the bare minimum is all we’re going to get. 15 days just isn’t enough, as far as I’m concerned. It’s better than nothing, but I think we need at least 30 days — and my personal preference is for even a bit more than that. Given Pawlenty’s opposition to an earlier primary, though, I doubt we’re going to get anything beyond 15 days.
Pawlenty is finally willing to get behind an earlier primary in Minnesota.
Gov.Tim Pawlenty said today he supports moving up Minnesota’s primary elections next year in response to a new federal mandate.
A defense spending bill signed into law by President Obama this week includes a requirement that U.S. Military personnel and other overseas voters get at least 45-days to receive and return their absentee ballots for the general election. Minnesota’s September primary currently allows only 30 days. Pawlenty said he’ll support legislation next session to move the primary to August.
Long time readers of this blog know that we are big fans of moving up Minnesota’s primary election, which is currently one of the latest in the nation. A general election shouldn’t be lost just because one candidate had a contested primary and the other one didn’t. The other major advantage to an earlier primary is that it will decrease the influence of the endorsing convention. Personally, I’m not a fan of doing away with the endorsement all together - it forces candidates to campaign on a one-on-one basis and make appeals to the basic building blocks of our party. But the endorsement shouldn’t be the final word, especially considering the fact that endorsing conventions have a bad history of producing deeply flawed candidates. That being said, primaries aren’t perfect candidate selectors either (see Steve Kelley’s tragic loss in the 2006 AG primary).
Considering all of this, I think that August is probably a good month to hold a primary. Its late enough that the endorsement will still have an impact, but early enough that a contested primary won’t leave candidate’s bankrupt right in the heart of general election season.
We still have a long way to go — nobody ever expected this would be a quick fix. That said, GDP
increased this quarter after a year of declines. In fact in even increased more than expected:
The increase in GDP, reported by the government Thursday morning, was slightly better than expectations. Economists surveyed by Briefing.com had forecast 3.2% growth in gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the nation’s economic activity. The economy shrank at a 0.7% rate in the second quarter.
The positive GDP report is one more sign that the economy has likely pulled out of the deep recession that started in December 2007.
Does that mean the economy is completely fixed? Of course not. Unfortunately, employment growth tends to lag behind GDP, so there’s still going to be a lot of pain. But the fact that employment growth lags behind GDP also means that employment growth will come.
So for those who ask where the Democrats’ policies are getting us, the answer is to a growing economy.
Reading
this story, it’s no wonder consumers in North Carolina are upset. BlueCross BlueShield of North Carolina has either terribly unfortunate timing, or a complete lack of respect for their customers. Given the history of the insurance industry, I tend to assume the latter. Here’s what happened; BCBS customers received two letters on the same day:
First, they learned their rates will rise by an average of 11 percent next year.
Next, they opened a slick flier from the insurer urging them to send an enclosed pre-printed, postage-paid note to Sen. Kay Hagan denouncing what the company says is unfair competition that would be imposed by a government-backed insurance plan. The so-called public option is likely to be considered by Congress in the health-care overhaul debate.
“No matter what you call it, if the federal government intervenes in the private health insurance market, it’s a slippery slope to a single-payer system,” the BCBS flier read. “Who wants that?”
Who wants that? Gosh, let me think. How about people who don’t want their premiums increasing by over 10 percent a year to pay for the enormous cost of lobbying the Federal government?
Political Muse at
Liberal in the Land of Conservative tells Maureen Reed “I brought you into this world, I can take you out.” Okay, he probably can’t, really, but that’s not the point. The point is that the blogger who was one of the first* to introduce Maureen Reed, with great fanfare, is now urging her to drop out.
I’m not quite ready to take the position that Reed needs to drop out… yet. After all, the election is over a year away. But the CD6 race is already presenting a question that is a perennial problem for DFLers: Is it better to have an endorsement battle — and possibly a primary — to find the best candidate for the general election, or would it be better to have a single candidate as early as possible so she can raise money and build name recognition?
To me, one of the big problems is Minnesota’s insanely late primary. If there were more time for a general election campaign, I would tend to say that the primary would benefit the party by weeding out weaker candidates. But with a primary in September, all a primary does is play into the Republicans’ hands — which is why Tim Pawlenty vetoed a bill that would have moved the primary to August.
Can we afford to have a contest for the DFL nomination in CD6? We can for a while, but we don’t stand a chance in this race if we have to hold a primary. One thing is for certain — Reed needs to stop wavering and tell us unequivocally if she will abide by the DFL endorsement.
___
* “One of the first” is my wishy-washy way of not definitively saying he broke the story, as I don’t really want to get into an argument about who was first to report it.
…sometimes you just can’t help lashing out a bit. And that’s just what California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger did in a
veto message he sent to the state Assembly. The letter is posted after the break; check out the first letter of each line.
Is this an attack on legislators, or an incredible coincidence? Either way, it’s pretty funny.
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There’s not much to say about
Joe Lieberman’s statement that he’ll vote to filibuster a health reform bill that has a provision for a public option. First of all, I’m sick of hearing about Joe Lieberman. Second of all, this is really not about Lieberman — it’s more about Harry Reid, the Democrats’ ineffectual majority leader.
Lieberman’s position on this isn’t much of a surprise, and nobody should really be blindsided by it. I sure hope Reid was never counting on conservative Democrats like Lieberman and Mary Landrieu to be supportive of the public option. Regardless of their positions, though, Reid’s job is to figure out how to get the votes. Don’t have full support of your party? Figure out how to get it, even if that means hard-ball bargaining with fellow Democrats. Don’t have 60 Democrats? Then find a way to get a few Republicans on board, or look at passing the bill through budget reconciliation. Ultimately, the point is that Reid needs to get this bill passed, however he has to do it.
Look, I know Reid’s job is hard. I know that, sometimes, we’re just not going to get the votes we need. But Reid has consistently had a lot of trouble getting the votes and the party unity he needs. This really isn’t about Joe Lieberman — he’ll most likely be out of the Senate after this term anyway. This is about whether Harry Reid has what it takes to get something done in the Senate.
Perhaps the most glaring symptom of Tim Pawlenty’s failed leadership has been the budget deficit at MnDOT, which always seems to be millions and millions of dollars short for the projects it wants to complete. The most classic example occurred a few years ago, when Pawlenty and then-Transportation Commissioner Carol Molnau asked private companies to front the money the Crosstown Commons job, because MnDOT didn’t have the money to pay them.
Despite MnDOT’s budget woes, and despite the slow atrophy of our infrastructure, Pawlenty has continued to slash state spending and run up massive budget deficits. The reason he usually gives is economic competitiveness — businesses won’t locate here if they have to pay taxes, he says. Of course, I say businesses won’t locate here if they don’t have high-quality infrastructure to move their products and their employees.
Now, Pawlenty seems ready to admit that we do need more money to complete transportation projects. And here’s the incredible irony: He’s asking Minnesota businesses to pay for it. The Star Tribune reports:
Millions of dollars from corporations are accelerating construction of two major highway interchange enhancements in a funding strategy Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Transportation Commissioner Tom Sorel described as models for future projects.
Is it just me, or does this completely undermine Pawlenty’s whole argument about having a competitive economy? What businesses is going to care about our tax rates if they have to choose between either having insufficient infrastructure or paying for that infrastructure themselves?
Democrats, I have sad news for you. There’s finally proof that the Obama administration, after only 9 months, is washed up, ineffectual, and losing public support at an alarming rate. Yes, it turns out that the administration is a complete failure, and Obama will spend the next 3 years as a lame duck.
Oh, wait. That’s not reality — it’s Fox News. They’ve come up with the completely arbitrary “Obama Change Index,” which somehow shows the administration losing a lot of ground in the past week. In fact, Obama is down 71 points, or 20 percent, based on Fox’s completely made-up numbers.
You know, it’s funny, because the slide in this meaningless rating comes at a time when administration officials are on the offensive against Fox News. Does Fox think that Obama is going to see the drop in their fake index and decide to back off?
It amazes me that Fox develops these completely fact-free “news” features, but conservatives are still shocked that anyone would say Fox News is an opinion organization and not a news organization. Even if you agree with the opinions being pushed by Fox, who could really call this tripe “news”?
Sorry, Fox News. I just polled my household, and Fox is down 62 percent in the “Media Believability Index” this week.
We all know that waste is a major problem in our health care system. Nevertheless, when Barack Obama said we could pay for health care reform by reducing that waste, the general consensus seemed to be that he was crazy. Well, as it turns out, we waste such an astronomical amount of our health care spending that reducing even a small portion would pay for the entire health reform bill:
The U.S. healthcare system wastes between $505 billion and $850 billion every year, [a] report from Robert Kelley, vice president of healthcare analytics at Thomson Reuters, found. [Reuters]
Let’s put that in perspective. The study’s best estimate puts the average waste at $700 billion per year. President Obama has set a goal of a health reform bill that costs under $900 billion over ten years. That means if we could reduce waste by 13 percent, the health reform bill would pay for itself. We really can reduce health care costs without sacrificing access to health care or health care quality.
According to the study, both the right and the left have a few good ideas for how to reduce costs. For instance, the study finds that the overuse of antibiotics and lab tests wastes hundreds of billions of dollars. At least some of that overuse can be attributed to fear of malpractice suits, although I think the study goes overboard in suggesting that all overuse is a function of the malpractice insurance system. The study also shows that more preventative care would also generate significant savings, and that our nightmarish insurance bureaucracy has driven up costs due to the sheer volume of paperwork.
Below the fold, a quick overview of the study’s findings, as reported in the Reuters article:
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There are two Holy Cow! moments to deal with today. The first being AFSCME’s amazing endorsement of Mark Dayton, which we’ll deal with shortly, and the amazing announcement that the local OFA organizer is planning to take on Phyllis Kahn. What makes it so amazing is that
it comes in an article in the New York Times.
Mr. Griffin also has a more direct plan to keep the ball rolling. He is contemplating running for Minnesota’s Legislature — against a 19-term incumbent, Representative Phyllis Kahn. Ms. Kahn is not an obvious target for the progressives Mr. Griffin hopes to rally. A Yale-educated biophysicist, she rides a bike to work and has championed the environment and — of interest to college students — later closing hours for bars.
But to Mr. Griffin, she stands for the inertia that takes hold in local politics when incumbents are re-elected by a handful of voters and rarely face primaries. She represents the district that includes his campus and is home to thousands of students who campaigned for Mr. Obama or registered to vote in that election. So he believes he can challenge her in the Democratic primary, ride Mr. Obama’s coattails and take her by surprise….
…[H]e may face an uphill battle to get those students to turn out for a local primary. Mr. Griffin, who was asked to run by a classmate who is starting a career in political consulting, said he would pray hard and make a decision soon about whether to run.
I’ve got to think this was a neophyte candidate making a neophyte mistake, but that isn’t the place to announce ones intentions, particularly in Mike’s case.
I was formerly Representative Kahn’s campaign manager, so I’m a bit biased, but if there is going to be a challenge that knocks off Phyllis it will come out of a cohesive campaign engaging the University students. This has been attempted before, and didn’t work. While that was 10 years ago and plenty has changed one key peice will change as well, the DFL primary will be before school starts, making his road even harder.
Good thing he got such an audacious start.
Or maybe that should be “State that
Worked,” after Tim Pawlenty has had his way with us. If you think Pawlenty made a mess of things — and if you don’t, just wait until his accounting gimmicks start to fade — just imagine what will happen if we let some of the Republican gubernatorial candidates get ahold of the reins of power. It’s shocking to me just how giddy they are at the prospect of making sure your state no longer works for you.
Rachel Stassen-Berger has the story, albeit dressed up in nicer terms, at the Star Tribune:
The candidates are ambitious in their pledges to shrink government — “The sky’s the limit,” state Rep. Tom Emmer said at a recent forum
That’s encouraging: The sky’s the limit in making our government broken. But the big question, likely the one the Republican endorsement will hinge upon, is just how to break the government. Merge departments! says Emmer. No, break them up! says Pat Anderson. Slash human services funding! says Marty Seifert. No, slash education funding! says Anderson. No, slash absolutely everything! says Paul Kohls.
One of my favorite lines: “Seifert said he’d reduce ‘abuse’ of emergency rooms,” despite the fact that the Republicans are all against health reform, which would help all Minnesotans gain access to primary care. I suppose the Republicans want to eliminate the “loophole” that allows even the poorest Minnesotans to receive catastrophic health care.
I guess the problem I’m having here is that I’ve never understood the conservative trope that our government is the enemy. Our government, after all, is us — a government by the people and for the people, to which we all contribute and from which we all receive. Yes, it’s true that the neediest receive the most and contribute the least, but is someone out there really going to tell me it should be the other way around?
People Are Shouting
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