Last Call For Talking It Out

Had the honor of being a guest on the Tim Corrimal Show this week with guest host Sarah Cosgrove.  Sarah's a good friend of mine and we had a nice roundtable discussion about what the Democrats need to do in order to win big in 2016 with Sarah, myself, Justice Putnam of Netroots Radio, and Lori Paquette of FlirtyGrrl.com.

Give a listen to Episode 322.  I enjoyed being on the show a lot, hopefully it won't be my last appearance.

The Peak Of The Mountain

Congrats, older Millennials and young Gen Xers like myself!  Your earnings peak is pretty much at age 40 and after that it's all downhill from there.

By age 40 you're done. That's the conclusion of a report from the New York Fed that looks at lifetime earnings from age 25 through retirement.  

The top chart shows average earnings by age. It's a little hard to immediately see how dramatic the income peak is since the y-axis shows the log of earnings, but if you do the arithmetic it demonstrates that, on average, by age 40 you're within about $1,000 of your peak earnings. You'll get inflation adjustments after that, but for the bulk of us, that's it. Real earnings pretty much plateau after age 40. 

Here's the charts they are talking about:

 

The bottom chart illustrates this in a different way. The yellow rectangle shows earnings growth for the bottom 80 percent. The blue line is for ages 25-35, and there's a fair amount of earnings growth except at the very bottom. The red line is for ages 35-45, and it's pretty close to zero. There's virtually no earnings growth for anyone. And the green line is for ages 45-55. It's actually negative. If you put the latter two age groups together, the report concludes that "average earnings growth from ages 35 to 55 is zero." 

Now, outside the yellow box we have the top 20 percent: the well off and the rich. Those folks show a lot of earnings growth when they're young, but they also show fairly healthy growth between ages 35-45. 

And the top 1 percent? That's on the very far right, and as you can see, they show earnings growth at every age level.

So for any early 90's kid like myself, this is about as good as it gets in the paycheck department right about now. You've got 15, maybe 20 years out of college to get to where you're going to be in life, and after that you can expect to make that salary or less from then on out.  If you're a younger Millennial and you're still in retail or food service, well...clock's ticking, guys.

Unless you're a one percenter, that is.  Then the sky's the limit.

Bobby Jindal, Moderate Republican(?)

When pundits look back on the 2016 GOP race, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal will hold a special place as a man who not only turned his back on his constituents for political expediency, but also shredded his degree in biology for the same reason.

Planned Parenthood began construction here last year on a clinic that would perform abortions and provide other medical services for women. “High-Quality, Affordable Health Care for New Orleans,” a sign promised. “Seeing Patients Early 2015.”

That sign is now crumpled on the ground behind a chain-link fence at the project’s abandoned construction site, victim of efforts by Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) and other abortion opponents to block the clinic.

The push against the project began last year, when the Catholic archbishop of New Orleans wrote a public letter threatening to blacklist contractors on the clinic from any of the church’s numerous real estate projects. That led to several subcontractors walking away from the project, delaying work on the facility. An inspector for the State Licensing Board for Contractors also began making weekly visits, which one of the major contractors said was unprecedented.

Then last month Jindal’s administration denied Planned Parenthood an operating license, stating that the group failed to show the need for the clinic. Work has stopped at the site on a busy thoroughfare west of downtown, at least for now, while Planned Parenthood vows to appeal.

There's nothing moderate about Jindal anymore.  He knows his road to the nomination in Cleveland in July 2016 goes through Tea Party central, and he's trying to prove he's the guy who can punish his constituents the most.

In 2010, Louisiana had the sixth-highest rate of unintended pregnancies, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

Before opening its $4 million clinic, Planned Parenthood had to undergo a “Facility Need Review” under a 2012 rule created by Jindal’s Department of Health and Hospitals. In its 74-page application, Planned Parenthood used statistical analysis to estimate that its entrance into the market would allow another 2,844 women to get abortions per year. In its rejection, the state agency’s top official said Planned Parenthood had failed to establish the need for another abortion facility.

Of the five that exist in Louisiana, one is in New Orleans and another is in the suburban city of Metairie.

“The safety and protection of women is not an issue of economic debate,” the governor’s press secretary, Mike Reed, said in an e-mail.

So yeah, Jindal has gone full Tea Party these days.  He had before, but now it's official.

Last Call For The Other Shoe In Oregon

And now we know why Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber is going gently into that good night:  a major FBI grand jury investigation into his conduct is on the way.

A federal grand jury in Portland has launched a sweeping investigation of Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber and fiancée Cylvia Hayes that ranges from the state's 10-year budget plan to the proposed Port of Morrow coal terminal.

The investigation came into public view Friday when investigators delivered the three-page subpoena to the state Department of Administrative Services. It came hours after the Democratic governor had announced he will resign next Wednesday.

The subpoenas shed light on what looks to be the largest criminal investigation of a public official in Oregon. State officials are ordered to turn over to the grand jury records that are a catalog of Kitzhaber's climate and economy-related initiatives:Genuine Progress Indicator, Pacific Coast Collaborative, Oregon Prosperity Initiative, low carbon fuel standards and sustainable economic development.

Investigators are after any state record mentioning Hayes, her private consulting business and her role in the governor's office. They want her personal tax returns and those of her company dating back to 2009. The state also must turn over records of her use of state credit cards.

The state is ordered to turn over emails, correspondence, memos and other state records about Hayes' clients, including Demos, Resource Media, Energy Foundation, Rural Development Initiatives, Clean Economy Development Center, Waste to Energy.

It was the mounting scandal over those contracts, which paid Hayes at least $213,000 since 2011, that prompted the state's top Democratic leaders to call for Kitzhaber's resignation, setting in motion his announcement Friday.

It looks like Kitzhaber is in at least as much trouble as disgraced Virginia Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell, who got 2 years in prison for his bribery scandal (and his wife faces sentencing next week).  We'll see what happens, but I'm betting he's ending up in jail for a while.

Permission To Screw Things Up

President Obama's policies on Syria and dealing with the Islamic State are a place where I greatly differ from him, and I'm with Greg Sargent on the notion of another AUMF: It asks for far too much power and the damage in Syria and Iraq are already done.

A mere six months after military operations began against the Islamic State, the White House today formally requested that Congress authorize military operations against the Islamic State. The full text of the resolution proposed by the Obama administration is right here. 

Some Democrats criticized the proposal as too broad and too vague. They are right. Several critics I spoke to note that, in its current form, at least, it would not only do little to limit Obama right now, but could also leave thenext president with enormous war-making latitude — whether he or she is a Democrat or a Republican. 

To be clear, the proposal is merely an invitation to Congress to offer its own restrictions on Obama’s war-making authority. Still, it falls well short of what is needed, and it remains to be seen whether Congress can step in and do better.

The notion of this particular Congress "doing better" on anything at all is laughable, let alone the notion that they would craft a smart, limited authorization.  They're way too eager to send in tens of thousands of US troops and saddle us with another dozen years of boots on the ground.

The proposal would authorize armed force against “ISIL or associated persons or forces,” a category that is loosely defined as any entity that is fighting “alongside ISIL” or is a “closely-related successor.” It would not authorize the use of force in “enduring offensive ground combat operations,” which is also pretty loose wording and doesn’t say what operations force would be limited to. It says authorization would terminate three years after the proposal’s enactment by Congress, which means it might be operative after the mission is accomplished, however that might be defined. 

“This is a constructive proposal, but it’s not sufficiently limited,” Jameel Jaffer of the American Civil Liberties Union tells me. “It lacks geographic limitations, it uses loose language to describe the category of groups that can be targeted, and it fails to state at all clearly the specific objective for which military force is being authorized.”

In other words, Obama's authorization language after the Republicans get a hold of it is a disaster waiting to happen.  The problem is the GOP Congress will almost certainly make it worse. Depending on what they come up with, I'm hoping that Democrats will vote no.

The entire situation is just another decade plus of ground war waiting to happen, and there's no way in hell we can handle it.

In Which Zandar Answers Your Burning Questions

BooMan, on Rick Perry:

“Texas has been criticized for having a large number of uninsured,” he said, “but that’s what Texans wanted. They did not want a large government program forcing everyone to purchase insurance.”

Texas wanted “a large number of [medically] uninsured” people in their state. 

Why would anyone want that?

Well, it's really simple.  Texans believe Obamacare is a handout to blacks and Latinos from a black President.  They'd rather see blacks and Latinos go without insurance rather than help all uninsured Texans for two reasons, one, because they've been convinced they're "paying for healthcare" for people too lazy to go buy insurance, and two, because to Texans like Rick Perry, blacks and Latinos are subhuman scum who deserve to die.

Long and the short of it.

Last Call For Flowers In Concrete

I've been relatively silent on the decision by Little League International to strip the 2014 World Championship from Chicago's Jackie Robinson West squad, mainly because of the boiling rage the prospect has enkindled in my heart. The indispensable Dave Zirin manages to explain better than I ever could the heart of the problem: race and gentrification of cities like Chicago.

As for the decision itself, ironies abound. Jackie Robinson West was the first entirely black team to represent the United States in the Little League World Series. And yes, waiting until Black History Month to strip JRW of their title is at best tin-eared. But that insult shouldn't blind us to the greater injury. Recall their damnable offense: Jackie Robinson West didn't use 16-year ringers or cork their bats. They had players suit up who lived “beyond their geographical boundary”. The fact that the adults in charge of JRW felt the need to breach this rule perhaps has something to do with the fact that today’s urban landscape supports baseball about as well as concrete makes proper soil for orchids. A plurality of Major Leaguers is made up of people from either the US suburbs or the baseball factories of the Dominican Republic. Many of the few African American players on Major League rosters actually come from the suburbs. This is because 21st century neoliberal cities have gentrified urban black baseball to death. Boys and Girls Clubs have become bistros. Baseball fields are condos and in many cities, Little League is non-existent. The public funds for the infrastructure that baseball demands simply do not exist, but the land required for diamonds are the crown jewels of urban real estate. That's what made JRW such a profound anomaly. In Chicago particularly, which under Mayor Rahm Emanuel has seen school closures and brutal cuts to physical education programs, their success made people believe that—with apologies to Tupac—flowers could in fact grow in concrete.

And the fact that these boys had a championship ripped away from them because of literally where they lived just has me seeing red.

I'm glad Zirin wrote this column.  Give it a read.

Friday News Dump: The Big Kitz-Off

And it's official: Oregon Dem Gov. John Kitzhaber is resigning effective Wednesday, February 18th. His resignation statement is a doozy.

I am announcing today that I will resign as Governor of the State of Oregon.

It is not in my nature to walk away from a job I have undertaken – it is to stand and fight for the cause. For that reason I apologize to all those people who gave of their faith, time, energy and resources to elect me to a fourth term last year and who have supported me over the past three decades. I promise you that I will continue to pursue our shared goals and our common cause in another venue. 

I must also say that it is deeply troubling to me to realize that we have come to a place in the history of this great state of ours where a person can be charged, tried, convicted and sentenced by the media with no due process and no independent verification of the allegations involved. But even more troubling – and on a very personal level as someone who has given 35 years of public service to Oregon – is that so many of my former allies in common cause have been willing to simply accept this judgment at its face value. 

It is something that is hard for me to comprehend – something we might expect in Washington, D.C. but surely not in Oregon. I do not know what it means for our shared future but I do know that it is seriously undermining civic engagement in this state and the quality of the public discourse that once made Oregon stand out from the pack. 

Nonetheless, I understand that I have become a liability to the very institutions and policies to which I have dedicated my career and, indeed, my entire adult life. As a former presiding officer I fully understand the reasons for which I have been asked to resign. I wish Speaker Kotek and President Courtney and their colleagues on both sides of the aisle success in this legislative session and beyond. And I hope that they are truly committed to carrying forward the spirit of bipartisanship and collaboration that has marked the last four years in Oregon.

Oregon's Secretary of State, Democrat Kate Brown, will succeed him in the office (Oregon has no Lt. Governor) and she will be the first bisexual governor in US history, but she's not without her political controversies either.

Brown will have almost two years to govern before facing voters for the right to fill out the rest of Kitzhaber’s term, but Republicans are already critical of her record and stumbles during her first term as secretary of state. She angered Republicans when she scheduled an election for state Labor Commissioner in November 2012, rather than in May. 

Republicans said the decision was an overtly political act aimed at saving the Democratic nominee, Brad Avakian, who won. She fired several employees, including her chief of staff and the head of the state’s elections division, amid the criticism. Most major papers in the state endorsed her Republican opponent in 2012, though she won reelection in a favorable Democratic year. 

Brown also took fire for a letter she sent to the Federal Communications Commission in support of Comcast’s bid to take over Time Warner. The tech Web site The Verge reported that Brown’s letter was drafted by a Comcast lobbyist after the company contributed nearly $10,000 to her secretary of state campaigns. Brown has refused to answer questions about the letter.

We'll see how soon-to-be Governor Brown fares.  Meanwhile, if any political crisis consultants are looking for a new client to take on, I'd start in Salem..

Be Careful What You Wish For

There are some in the House GOP Tea Party brigade that want Mitch McConnell to end the filibuster completely in order to take Senate Democrats out of the equation for the next two years, starting with the Republican bill to defund President Obama's immigration actions.

A growing number of House GOP conservatives are pressuring Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Thursday to invoke the "nuclear option" and change the chamber's rules to pass a bill defunding President Obama's executive actions on immigration.

Reps. Raúl Labrador (R-Idaho) and Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.) said McConnell should change Senate rules, so the House-passed Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding bill, which includes language to revoke Obama's immigration-related actions, can bypass a Democratic filibuster in the upper chamber. 

Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.) also endorsed the idea at a Thursday news conference. He said there’s a “way to change the rules to allow us to move forward” and “take away the ability to filibuster.”

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) was the first House Republican to advocate such a rules change Wednesday evening, arguing that now-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) had established a precedent during his time in the majority.

But Senate Republicans don't see the point with Obama sure to veto the bill anyway, and they know that only holding the upper chamber with a four-seat lead means the Dems will someday be back in charge.

“The answer is not to change Senate rules,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said during the same news conference at which Mulvaney spoke. "The answer is for Senate Democrat not to be obstructionists.”

“I don’t think that’s an option we’re looking at right now,” freshman Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) added, arguing that things should move forward according to current Senate rules.

However the House Tea Party is getting pissed.  They see Obama winning and they want to change the game somehow.  Never mind that it's the Senate GOP who has to do the work here.

Labrador suggested Senate Republicans should just "pack up" and go home if they "don't want to fight" on the DHS funding issue.

"If they don't want to fight, if they don't want to work, if they don't want to do the hard work that is necessary to do the will of the American people, then maybe they just need to pack up, and they need to decide that for the next two years, we're just not going to do anything in the Senate," Labrador said.

Otherwise, Labrador argued, Senate Republicans might as well hand the majority back over to the Democrats.

"If we're going to allow seven Democratic senators to decide what the agenda is of the House Republican conference, of the Senate Republican majority, then we might as well just give them the chairmanships, give them the leadership of the Senate," he asserted.

Why, this doesn't look like a united front to me.  It looks like Republicans are in charge of a branch of Congress with approval ratings in the teens, and they are now 100% responsible for the mess.

Be careful what you wish for, folks.

StupidiNews!

• After more than 400 days in jail, two Al Jazeera journalists were freed on bail from an Egyptian prison today pending a retrial on charges of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood.
• New York Times media columnist David Carr has died at 58 after collapsing Thursday evening in the newsroom and being rushed to a nearby hospital.
• Joint US and Jordanian air strikes in Syria have killed at least 20 Islamic State fighters in the northeastern border area of the country near Iraq, according to human rights monitors.
• News that Germany's economy is on the rise pushed the country's DAX index to a new record as Greek and European Union leaders are getting closer to a compromise.
• A computer researcher has adapted medical imaging diagnosis software to develop an algorithm to identify authentic Jackson Pollock paintings among mimics.

Last Call For Ore-Gone Crazy

I'm beginning to wonder if at this point, there's anything that Oregon Dem Gov. John Kitzhaber can do correctly without looking like a moron.

Gov. John Kitzhaber decided to resign Tuesday but then changed his mind, insisting Wednesday afternoon that he's staying, The Oregonian/OregonLive has learned. 

Events developed as the Democratic governor, now in a historic fourth term and fighting multiple investigations, faced eroding support from other elected officials and even his own advisers. 

The governor decided to pull back from resigning - set for Thursday or Friday -- after meeting with his attorney, Portland lawyer Jim McDermott, and his fiancée, Cylvia Hayes. Hayes' role in his administration has been the source of much of his troubles. 

The account of the tumultuous 24 hours was developed from a half-dozen sources with knowledge of the events.

"My lawyer and my crazy fiancee talked me out of resigning" is a really, really good sign you need to resign anyway, man.

To resign, Kitzhaber needed Secretary of State Kate Brown, who would succeed him if he steps down. But Brown, 54, was in Washington, D.C., for a conference of the National Association for Secretaries of State. 

Kitzhaber called Brown on Tuesday afternoon, telling her she needed to return to Portland for a face-to-face meeting as soon as she could. She was on a plane by Wednesday morning. 

The governor's staffers set to work Wednesday morning, planning for a resignation announcement that all understood was imminent. 

But word soon got back to Oregon that Brown had been called back, leaving Washington two days earlier than she planned.

As news reporters began calling for comments from his office, Kitzhaber met with Hayes and McDermott.

Both pushed back against the planned resignation. It's unclear what arguments Hayes and McDermott used to pull Kitzhaber back from the brink. 

The governor decided then against resigning.

I don't honestly know what to say about this, other than this seems to be an almost Rob Ford level of failure here.  You have less than zero credibility after this story.  Dude, just go already.

Take The Money And Run

If you want to get more into the weeds on Obamacare, you should be reading Richard Mayhew's posts over at Balloon Juice frankly, but I wanted to point out a couple of things in the latest Obamacare sign-up numbers.

Signups for ObamaCare are surging in southern states, with increases of nearly 100 percent in some states compared to last year, federal health officials said Wednesday. 

Texas, Louisiana, South Carolina and Mississippi have each seen 80 percent more signups compared to last year, Deputy Administrator Andy Slavitt said. 

The same states are also reporting the fastest rate of growth in the final two weeks of the current enrollment period, which ends Feb. 15. Each of the states has reported 5 percent more signups over the last two weeks compared to last year. 

The trend is particularly significant given that the Republican governors in each of the states have made little or no effort to promote signups, leaving the outreach to state and national healthcare advocacy groups. State leaders, like Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, have been some of the law’s harshest critics. 

“Real simply, I think word is spreading. I think word of mouth is spreading really positively as neighbors tell neighbors how easy it’s been to get coverage this year,” Slavitt told reporters in a briefing Wednesday.

And these new signups on federal exchange red states with no Medicaid expansion are exactly the folks who are going to get screwed should King v Burwell go south in June. They are the most likely to be able to get subsidies because of low income (providing they don’t fall into the gap left by refusal to expand Medicaid), and the ones least likely to be able to afford insurance without them, should Scalia and company have their way.

In other words, Jindal and Abbott and Phil Bryant and Nikki Haley are going to have a bunch of rather angry constituents on their hands. The conventional wisdom is that red state governors are somehow going to be the ones pushing for a post-King fix should it come to that.

I doubt they will. They’ll simply blame Obama and walk away from the mess. It’s not like voters give a damn enough to punish these clowns. It’s possible that there may be a critical mass demanding Congress fix subsidies, but even best case scenario on that is Boehner and McConnell going “OK, so what do you want to give us in order to fix this?” and that’s without a full Tea Party revolt at the idea of “fixing” Obamacare.

It’s just depressing to believe that we’re seriously talking about the likely possibility of the Supreme Court wrecking the lives of millions over a goddamn typo, and it’s just obscene to consider the aftermath of a situation.

Popcorn Populists

Ed Kilgore on Republican fake populism playing a role in the 2014 GOP rampage:

The allusion is to the success of Thom Tillis of North Carolina, and even more strikingly (since reproductive rights were central to the messaging of his Democratic opponent Mark Udall) Cory Gardner of Colorado, who used the Bobby-Jindal-suggested gimmick of supporting OTC contraceptives as an anti-government gesture that also superficially rebutted Democratic claims they wanted to restrict access to contraceptives. It was clever, if not especially deep or credible. But what Edsall is suggesting is that if swing voters want to vote Republican, such gestures on economic issues could be effective even if they are shallow and insincere.

That’s something for progressives to keep in mind before mocking Republican “populism” too much. A little bit can go a long way if that’s the way the wind is blowing.

I'll counter with two words:  Sam Brownback.

The Kansas governor's "populism" has been an absolute austerity disaster so far, and if Democrats are smart, they'll keep Kansas's terrible economy in the news as much as possible.  If there's any Republican who wants to take Brownback's austerity program nationally and put America back into a deep recession, it's "budget guru" John Kasich.

Democrats can easily take this approach apart if they move now to head it off.

But Kilgore is right: unchecked, Republican fake populism is going to help them in places where the Obama recovery hasn't helped the middle class much at all.

StupidiNews!

• Talks between Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany have resulted in a ceasefire agreement that will begin Sunday and could finally put an end to the 10-month conflict in Ukraine.
• Veteran CBS 60 Minutes reporter Bob Simon has been killed in a car accident in New York City, while riding as a passenger in a car that struck another vehicle.
• Al Qaeda group Ansar al-Sharia has claimed responsibility for the takeover of a Yemeni army base in the southern part of the country, they say they have Yemeni soldiers as hostages.
• Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg believes America is ready for a national ruling to legalize same-sex marriage, according to a Bloomberg News interview.
• California Congressman Tony Cardenas is the latest lawmaker to have questions about the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger, voicing concerns over smaller Spanish language programmers.

Last Call For Yoga Inferno

So one Montana lawmaker wants to ban yoga pants in public because…I have no clue.

The Republican from Missoula said tight-fitting beige clothing could be considered indecent exposure under his proposal. 

“Yoga pants should be illegal in public anyway,” Moore said after the hearing.
Moore said he wouldn’t have a problem with people being arrested for wearing provocative clothing but that he’d trust law enforcement officials to use their discretion. 

He couldn’t be sure whether police would act on that provision or if Montana residents would challenge it. 

“I don’t have a crystal ball,” Moore said.

Can we ban stupid Republicans from making laws?

Seriously, "Well the cops might abuse this law but I don't have a crystal ball" is about the worst goddamn excuse I know of for making a law.  Doesn't this suggest your law is at best highly questionable and at worst patently unconstitutional?

Good job, Montana.