Ben Buckman.net

All the compromises in ACES could very well make it counter-productive:

Most of the allowance value (74 percent) is dedicated to blunting the impact of the carbon price established by the program on industries and consumers (and securing the critical swing votes on the committee representing these entrenched energy and industry interests).

In contrast, just 12 percent of the allowance value is dedicated to clean energy investments, broadly defined.

If the Republicans had half a brain, this would be their argument: the Democrats are pork barreling and compromising their principles again, doling out cash and goodies just to get votes. To really spur innovation, cap&trade needs to have a clear set of incentives, without the murkiness of backroom dealing and lobbyist shenanigans. All the revenue from the program should go back into innovation. Every penny of subsidies that blunts the additional costs of dirty energy is a long-term dollar lost on the future economy.

A half-baked bill is better than a bad bill or no bill in this case. But in the end, we all lose from the lack of an intelligent, reality-based opposition.

An anonymous citizen-journalist is following and reporting on the ongoing debate in Congress over ACES (the American Clean Energy and Securities bill, aka Cap&Trade, aka Climate bill) on a blog and twitter.

The Republican plan is to stall the bill with hundreds of bullshit amendments.

They're arguing that Cap & Trade, the cornerstone of the bill, will hurt the economy, have no positive economic impact, and that CO2 isn't really a pollutant after all. (We need it to live! after all. We need water to live too but wouldn't like our beach houses to be under it!)

Cap & Trade is inherently murky. No one really understands how it'll work. It's incredibly prone to political games that can undermine its whole purpose, even make it counterproductive. But the essence is simple and sound: to internalize the costs of unsustainable energy use into the market. Discourage CO2-emitting/dirty energy, encourage alternative/sustainable/clean energy, by harnessing market forces (and more than a healthy dose of subsidies, tax breaks, and so forth) to change the trends (of energy and the economy) in positive directions.

Will it create millions of "green collar" jobs overnight? Obviously not. But neither will it kill millions of jobs either: contrary to popular belief, we're a very innovative society, especially when forced to be, and there's nothing like a good incentive. Will cap&trade reverse global warming, bring pack the polar ice caps, and keep Boca Raton above sea level in 100 years? Probably not, either. But worst case scenario is, we end up with an economy based on cleaner, more sustainable energy, fewer systemic market failures from externalities, and an innovative edge over the rest of the world. Definitely a bill worth killing!

Why the Republicans haven't seized cap&trade as the greatest thing since sliced bread, I really don't understand. Rather than try to destroy the concept, they should have co-opted it and worked to make it leaner, smarter, less pork-infested. Cap&Trade done right should be the free-market-meets-21st-century-reality silver bullet policy. But they're not reality based. Human-caused warming is a "theory," not a "fact." Like evolution. The party of free markets, whose candidate couldn't admit we had an economic crisis because our workers are so smart, is promising doom and gloom if the status quo gets jolted. What a damn shame, for them. And hopefully a big step forward for the rest of us.

Matt Taibbi:

Anyway this teabag thing has really gotten out of control. It’s amazing, literally amazing to me, that it wasn’t until Obama pushed through a package containing a massive public works package and significant homeowner aid that conservatives took to the streets. In other words, it wasn’t until taxes turned into construction jobs and mortgage relief that working and middle-class Americans decided to protest. I didn’t see anyone on the street when we forked over billions of dollars to help JP Morgan Chase buy Bear Stearns. And I didn’t see anyone on the street when Hank Paulson forked over $45 more billion to help Bank of America buy Merrill Lynch, a company run at the time by one of the world’s biggest assholes, John Thain. Moreover I didn’t see any street protests when the government agreed to soak up hundreds of billions in “troubled assets” from Citigroup, a company that just months later would lend out a jet furnished with pillows upholstered with Hermes scarves to former chief Sandy Weill so that he could vacation in Mexico over Christmas.

So yeah, government waste sucks, it’s rampant at every level, and taxes are a vicious racket, and everyone should be pissed off . What’s hilarious about the teabaggers, though, is how they never squawk about waste until the spending actually has a chance of benefiting them. You will never hear of a teabagger crying about OPIC giving $50 million in free insurance to some mining company so that they can dig for silver in rural Bolivia. You won’t hear of a teabagger protesting the $2.5 billion in Ex-Im loans we gave to GE through the early part of this decade, even as GE was moving nearly a hundred thousand jobs overseas over the course of ten years. And Michelle Malkin’s readers didn’t seem to mind giving IBM millions in Ex-IM and ATP loans at the same time it was giving its former CEO, Lou Gerstner, $260 million in stock options.

In other words teabaggers don’t mind paying taxes to fund the salaries of Bolivian miners, Lou Gerstner’s stock options, deliveries of “sailboat fuel,” the Hermes scarves on Sandy Weill’s jet pillows, or even the export of their own goddamn jobs. But they do hate it when someone tries to re-asphalt their roads, or help bail their slob neighbor out of foreclosure. And God forbid someone propose a health care program, or increased financial aid for college. Hell, that’s like offering to share your turkey with the other Pilgrims! That’s not what America is all about! America is every Pilgrim for himself, dammit! Raise your own motherfucking turkey!

Oh, and there’s one other thing. I heard today from Steve Wamhoff of Citizens for Tax Justice. He had an interesting tidbit to offer on the teabagging movement. According to his research, 39% of respondents with incomes below $30,000 told the Gallup agency that they felt that federal income tax levels were “too high.” Which is interesting, because only 32% of respondents in that income category will pay any federal income taxes at all on their 2008 income. You can draw your own conclusions.

The really irritating thing about these morons is that, guaranteed, not one of them has ever taken a serious look at the federal budget. Not one has ever bothered to read an actual detailed study of what their taxes pay for. All they do is listen to one-liners doled out by tawdry Murdoch-hired mouthpieces like Michelle Malkin and then repeat them as if they’re their own opinions five seconds later. That’s what passes for political thought in this country. Teabag on, you fools.

Continuing the thread that Rachel Maddow has been following about former or entrenched Bushies trying to sabotage the Obama administation, Politico has an interview with Dick Cheney in which he criticizes the Obama administration's repudiation of torture and Gitmo.

He expressed confidence that files will some day be publicly accessible offering specific evidence that waterboarding and other policies he promoted — over sharp internal dissent from colleagues and harsh public criticism — were directly responsible for averting new Sept. 11-style attacks.

His comments made unmistakable that Cheney — likely more than former President Bush, who has not yet given post-White House interviews — is willing and even eager to spar with the new administration and its supporters over the issues he cares most about.

Regarding torture, three things have to be established for there even to be a reasonable policy debate: 1) Torture works (to get real actionable intel), 2) No other interrogation method works as well, 3) It's extremely limited to only "ticking time bomb" terrorists.

Even with these 3 established, a strong case can be made that torture should never be legal or legitimate. (It was illegal throughout the Bush years whether it was legitimate or not.) But none of these have been established anyway. It's not clear that any actionable intel has come of it (though I'm open to Cheney's possibility of files proving otherwise in the future). Reports and interviews I've seen with interrogators all sugest there are superior methods to torture. And it was certainly not limited to ticking time bombs (if any such cases even existed).

So Cheney was and is wrong, was and is a criminal, and the Justice Department would be justified in indicting him for his crimes. Regardless, Cheney should shut up and write his memoirs quietly.

Watch this video. The NSA systematically spied on whole news organizations and tens or hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens' calls, credit card records, etc without any warrrants.

Don't kid yourself and think this is harmless and necessary counter-terrorism a la 24: law enforcement, defense, and intel agencies are now required by law to cooperate and share information. The program likely originates from DARPA's Total Informatation Awareness initiative (an Orwellian title if there ever was one). At least one reporter, Lawrence Wright, was asked by the FBI about calls he made that they had no warrant to know about. It's a small leap from there to this data being used for all kinds of illicit purposes. We have due process, the 4th Amendment, and other basic privacy rights for reasons, which we shouldn't forget.

(h/t: Alex)

Alex, responding to Nate Silver's wonderment over the House GOP leadership's zeal to bring every member in line against the stimulus bill, writes something very important (emphasis mine):

House Republicans believe that they are still in an era where voters will respond positively to open partisan warfare. And why shouldn't they believe that? It's how they came to power, and in their individual districts, it may be the only way for them to stay in power.

That's just it. In their distrincts they need to hate Democrats, hate unions, hate "big Government," hate immigrants, hate gays. Decades of gerrymandering have produced dozens of fringe districts. So that poses a fix: no Democrat can win those districts, but no Republican who wins those districts can be taken seriously by the mainstream.

Personally I'm at the point where I'd be happy to see the Republican Party go the way of the Whigs, into oblivion. Let another party - a libertarian party, or some new kind of conservative party, or another party on the left - take its place. It'll take a few years for the Democrats to get stale and entrenched; the GOP isn't serving as a constructive opposition now anyway.

Bottom line: maybe we shouldn't be bothered in the short run by the GOP's [minority] extremism. It's better in the long run.

Frank Rich's NYT op-ed yesterday is a must-read.

The crisis is at least as grave as the one that confronted us — and, for a time, united us — after 9/11. Which is why the antics among Republicans on Capitol Hill seem so surreal. These are the same politicians who only yesterday smeared the patriotism of any dissenters from Bush’s “war on terror.” Where is their own patriotism now that economic terror is inflicting far more harm on their constituents than Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent W.M.D.? [...] No one should expect the Republicans to give the new president carte blanche, fall blindly into lock step or be “post-partisan.” (Though that’s exactly what the G.O.P. demanded of Democrats with Bush: You were either with him or with the terrorists.)

But you might think that a loyal opposition would want to pitch in and play a serious role at a time of national peril. Not by singing “Kumbaya” but by collaborating on possible solutions and advancing a policy debate that many Americans’ lives depend on. [...]

The current G.O.P. acts as if it — and we — have all the time in the world. It kept hoping in vain that the fast-waning Blago sideshow would somehow impale Obama or Rahm Emanuel. It has come perilously close to wishing aloud that a terrorist attack will materialize to discredit Obama’s reversals of Bush policy on torture, military tribunals and Gitmo. The party’s sole consistent ambition is to play petty politics to gum up the works. [...]

The problem is not that House Republicans gave the stimulus bill zero votes last week. That’s transitory political symbolism, and it had no effect on the outcome. Some of the naysayers will vote for the revised final bill anyway (and claim, Kerry-style, that they were against it before they were for it). The more disturbing problem is that the party has zero leaders and zero ideas. It is as AWOL in this disaster as the Bush administration was during Katrina.

If the country wasn’t suffering, the Republicans’ behavior would be a laugh riot. The House minority leader, John Boehner, from the economic wasteland of Ohio, declared on “Meet the Press” last Sunday that the G.O.P. didn’t want to be “the party of ‘No’ ” but “the party of better ideas, better solutions.” And what are those ideas, exactly? He said he’ll get back to us “over the coming months.”

His deputy, the Virginia congressman Eric Cantor, has followed the same script, claiming that the G.O.P. will not be “the party of ‘No’ ” but will someday offer unspecified “solutions and alternatives.” Not to be left out, the party’s great white hope, Sarah Palin, unveiled a new political action committee last week with a Web site also promising “fresh ideas.” But as the liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas Zúniga observed, the site invites visitors to make donations and read Palin hagiography while offering no links to any ideas, fresh or otherwise.

For its own contribution to this intellectual void, the Republican National Committee convened last week under a new banner, “Republican for a Reason.” Perhaps that unidentified reason will be determined by a panel of judges on a TV reality show. It had better be brilliant given that only five states (with 20 total electoral votes) now lean red in party affiliation, according to Gallup. At this rate the G.O.P. will be in Alf Landon territory by 2012.

The Republicans do have one idea, of course, but it’s hardly fresh: more and bigger tax cuts, particularly for business and the well-off. That’s the sum of their “alternative” stimulus plan. Obama has tried to accommodate this panacea, perhaps to a fault. Mainstream economists in both parties believe that tax cuts in the stimulus package will deliver far less bang for the buck than, say, infrastructure spending. The tax-cut stimulus embraced a year ago by the G.O.P. induced next-to-no consumer spending as Americans merely banked the savings or paid down debt.

We also now know conclusively that the larger Bush tax cuts, besides running up record deficits and exacerbating income inequality, were also at best a placebo on our road to ruin. In a January survey of economists, including former McCain advisers like Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Mark Zandi, The Washington Post determined that the job growth the Bush administration kept bragging about (“52 straight months!”) was a mirage inflated by the housing bubble. Job growth — about 2 percent — was in fact the most tepid of any eight-year period “since data collection began seven decades ago.” Gross domestic product grew at a slower pace than in any eight years since the Truman administration.

But even if tax cuts alone could jump-start a recovery, they couldn’t do the heavy lifting that Obama has promised and the country desperately needs: a down payment on a new economy to replace our dilapidated 20th-century model and bring back long-term growth. The Republicans don’t acknowledge the need for this transformation, or debate it in good conscience, preferring instead to hyperventilate over the contraceptives in a small family-planning program since removed from the stimulus bill. All it takes is the specter of condoms for the party of Vitter, Foley and Craig to go gaga.

The Republicans’ other preoccupation remains Rush Limbaugh, who is by default becoming their de facto leader. While most Americans are fearing fear itself, G.O.P. politicians are tripping over themselves in morbid terror of Rush.

These pratfalls commenced after Obama casually told some Republican congressmen (correctly) that they won’t “get things done” if they take their orders from Limbaugh. That’s all the stimulus the big man needed to go on a new bender of self-aggrandizement. He boasted that Obama is “more frightened” of him than he is of the Republican leaders in the House or Senate. He said of the new president, “I hope he fails.”

Obama no doubt finds Limbaugh’s grandiosity more amusing than frightening, but G.O.P. politicians are shaking like Jell-O. When asked by Andrea Mitchell of NBC News on Wednesday if he shared Limbaugh’s hope that Obama fails, Eric Cantor spun like a top before running off, as it happened, to appear on Limbaugh’s radio show. Mike Pence of Indiana, No. 3 in the Republican House leadership, similarly squirmed when asked if he agreed with Limbaugh. Though the Republicans’ official, poll-driven line is that they want Obama to succeed, they’d rather abandon that disingenuous nicety than cross Rush. [...]

“It’s up to me to hijack the Obama honeymoon,” Limbaugh soon gloated, “and I’ve done it.” In his dreams. He has hijacked what’s left of the Republican Party; the Obama honeymoon remains intact. The nightmare is that we have so irrelevant, clownish and childish an opposition party at a moment when America is in an all-hands-on-deck emergency that’s as trying as war. To paraphrase a dictum that has been variously attributed to two of our most storied leaders in times of great challenge, Thomas Paine and George Patton, the Republicans should either lead, follow or get out of the grown-ups’ way.

Can someone explain to me why this wasn't considered a top priority by Congress or the media during the Bush administration? (I won't bother asking why it wasn't a priority by the administration itself, obviously.)

The ranking -- which grades the condition of 15 infrastructure entities such as roads, bridges and dams -- is the same as the the last time such a report was issued, in 2005. In 2001, the grade was D+, slightly better but still poor.

Roads got a D-, with Americans spending more than $4.2 billion a year stuck in traffic. "Poor conditions cost motorists $67 billion a year in repairs and operating costs. One-third of America's major roads are in poor or mediocre condition and 45 percent of major urban highways are congested," theengineers' report said.

Drinking water, D-. "America's drinking water systems face an annual shortfall of at least $11 billion to replace aging facilities," the report said. "Leaking pipes lose an estimated seven billion gallons of clean drinking water a day."

Inland waterways, D-. "The average age of all federally owned or operated locks is nearly 60 years, well past their planned design life of 50 years. The cost to replace the present system of locks is estimated at more than $125 billion."

Wastewater systems, D-. "Aging systems discharge billions of gallons of untreated wastewater into U.S. surface waters each year."

evees, D-. Many levees are locally owned and maintained, but they are aging and their "reliability" is not known. "With an increase in development behind these levees, the risk to public health and safety from failure has increased."

Solid waste got the highest grade at C+ because of success in recycling. "More than a third was recycled or recovered, presenting a 7 percent increase since 2000."

Bridges get a C. One in four of the country's bridges "are either structurally deficient or functionally obsolete." The report cites progress in reducing such structures in rural areas but the problem is increasing in urban areas.

Rail gets a C-, with the report noting that a "freight train is three times as fuel efficient as a truck, and traveling by passenger rail uses 20 percent less energy per mile than traveling by car."

A C-minus was also given to public parks and recreation, with parks, beaches and other facilities generating jobs, income, and cleaner air and water.

The national power grid received a D+. "Progress has been made in grid reinforcement since 2005 and substantial investment in generation, transmission and distribution is expected over the next two decades."

The other categories -- aviation, dams, hazardous waste, schools and transit -- each received a D.

The group estimates that the government and the private sector need to invest $2.2 trillion over five years, roughly three times the size of President Obama's stimulus package.

Rachel Maddow analyzes her own excellent interview with indicted IL governor Blagojevich yesterday. His legal defense seems to boil down to free speech: what he said on his home phone, however nefarious, is just talk and should be protected. As the legal expert she brings on explains, however, the 1st Amendment doesn't immunize criminal conspiracy. He's going down.

I really would like to believe that the Republicans have a coherent alternative to the Democrats' economic plan, one also based on sound principles, perhaps with different but equally valid assumptions. (Economics is full of such assumptions; it's not just math.) It would be nice to hear the differing assumptions straight out so we can judge between them. But the congressional GOP's opposition to this stimulus bill is plainly incoherent.

We have John McCain, for instance, opposing the bill because it would invest in broadband infrastructure. Because truly, in a 21st century global economy, universal internet access has no economic benefit.

The GOP caucus wants immediate tax cuts, money put into the hands of people who best know how to spend it, not slow, pork-barrel construction projects dictated by pesky bureaucrats. There's some logic to that. So why are they so adamant that people who only pay payroll tax shouldn't get any relief? By their own logic, handing a check to every man, woman, and child in America, rich or poor, should be the best stimulus! Don't the hard-working people of America know how to spend their money better than Washington? Or are people too poor to pay income tax officially not hard-working, or smart, or something enough to be worthy of stimulus?

If their theory is that only people financially savvy enough to be rich in the first place are smart enough to use their money wisely to stimulate the economy, then they should come out and say just that, honestly. Fat chance of that.

Or maybe the entire Republican ideology really boils down to 2 principles: 1) Democrats are bad. 2) Rich people shouldn't pay taxes. (I'm sure some will say here: duh.)

It's one thing to be a coherent opposition, preparing for the inevitable failure of the administration's agenda, so they can pick up the wreckage and regain power. (The Democrats just did that, incidentally.) It's another to attack anything the Democrats propose, or anything the helps the poor, or anything that doesn't have the words "tax" and "cut" on it. That just looks like they're scared: scared the plan actually will work, scared that their only options are to support it as patsies or oppose the solution, scared they have no alternative, and know it, and don't know what the hell to do about it.

It's tough to be a Republican today. Boo hoo.