For those of you interested in the battle over abortion policy, I’ve written a review for The Washington Monthly of a book on the notorious 2009 political murder of Dr. George Tiller, the Kansas late-term abortion provider. The book, The Wichita Divide: The Murder of Dr. George Tiller and the Battle Over Abortion, by “true crime” specialist Stephen Singular, is a solid recounting of the facts of the case. But as I tried to convey in my review, its treatment of late-term abortion as the central theater in the war over reproductive rights is misleading, and its treatment of anti-choice activists as “fringe” players little different from (and in fact, often the same as) militia members underestimates their power.
A lot has happened to confirm my concerns since I wrote the review. Republicans in Congress and in the states have waged war on any sort of direct or indirect public funding for Planned Parenthood, which is not a late-term abortion provider, and in fact, is most significant as a dispenser of contraceptives. A House-passed appropriations bill also sought to all-but-terminate federal family planning services. And most ominously, states (so far, Nebraska, Kansas, and Indiana, with a bill pending in Missouri) are beginning to act on “fetal pain” bills designed to roll back abortion rights taken for granted for years, typically via bans on abortions that occur after 20 weeks of pregnancy. No one seems confident the Supreme Court will invalidate these new laws.
With respect to the late-term abortion issue, the most interesting development is currently unfolding in Iowa, where the planned relocation of a late-term abortion clinic run by Dr. Leroy Carhart (one of Tiller’s colleagues featured in the Singular book), whose Nebraska practice was shut down by the first of the “20 weeks” laws, is hanging fire. Iowa Republicans managed to get their own “20 weeks” law through the state House, which they control, citing Carhart’s plans as a chief motive. Senate Democrats (whose leader, Mike Gronstal, represents the Council Bluffs district where Carhart’s planned clinic would be located) have countered with a bill that through various technical means would thwart Carhart’s plans, but would not actually ban any late-term abortions, much less the second-trimester abortions that would be affected by the “20-weeks” bill.
The anger of anti-choicers (some of whom actually opposed the “20-weeks” bill as insufficiently radical) at this maneuver makes it pretty plain that their alarms over late-term abortion providers like Carhart simply provided a pretext for steps to shut down abortion providers more generally.
The drive to overturn reproductive rights is enjoying much more success than is implied by books like Singular’s, and is far more extensive than the controversies over Tiller and Carhart, reaching increasingly into the use of contraceptives by the vast majority of Americans. The election of a Republican president, who would be under an iron pledge to appoint Supreme Court Justices sure to overturn Roe v. Wade more explicitly, could have enormous implications in this area.
UPDATE: Stephen Singular offered a thoughtful comment to this post, and I responded in a way that I hope will allay any impression that I don’t fully appreciate his work. We’re equally alarmed about what’s going on in the “abortion battle” right now. Please check out the comments thread.

If you only read one meaty article today, it should be historian Rick Perlstein’s Mother Jones piece on how the Republican Party has come to inhabit a virtually fact-free zone in which ideology and spin dictate the terms of debate and there’s no one to referee.
Perlstein takes the reader quickly through the twentieth century development of counter-factual politicking, from William Randolph Hearst’s invention of the dastardly destruction of the U.S.S. Maine, to LBJ’s vast exaggeration of the Tonkin Gulf incident, to Ronald Reagan’s dangerous assertions that truth-telling about America’s sins and shortcomings was unpatriotic.
But the most recent lurch into “mendocracy,” says Perlstein, has involved an enormous expansion of the ranks of authorized liars, abetted by “neutral” media who no longer seem to think there is any such thing as objective truth:

There evolved a new media definition of civility that privileged “balance” over truth-telling–even when one side was lying. It’s a real and profound change–one stunningly obvious when you review a 1973 PBS news panel hosted by Bill Moyers and featuring National Review editor George Will, both excoriating the administration’s “Watergate morality.” Such a panel today on, say, global warming would not be complete without a complement of conservatives, one of them probably George Will, lambasting the “liberal” contention that scientific facts are facts–and anyone daring to call them out for lying would be instantly censured. It’s happened to me more than once–on public radio, no less….
And here, in the end, is the difference between the untruths told by William Randolph Hearst and Lyndon Baines Johnson, and the ones inundating us now: Today, it’s not just the most powerful men who can lie and get away with it. It’s just about anyone–a congressional back-bencher, an ideology-driven hack, a guy with a video camera–who can inject deception into the news cycle and the political discourse on a grand scale.

Perlstein has put his finger on one of the most important phenomena of contemporary politics, one that has no obvious solution and thus represents something we don’t really want to talk about. We can’t bring back Walter Cronkite to referee for us, but we also can’t just accept a situation where progressives are expected to go into “neutral” venues and yuck it up with Andrew Breitbart.

Robert Scheer has a thought-provoking column this week on the perspectives of multinational corporate executives about their prospects in the U.S. and elsewhere. And he goes beyond the usual hand-wringing about the inability of individual nation-states to control what multinationals do.
For one thing, he points out that multinationals depend on the U.S. government for a lot more than direct tax and spending subsidies: most notably, for a massive defense infrastructure that makes doing business around the world possible.
But Scheer also makes this observation based on what corporate CEOs say about what motivates them to invest in particular countries:

General Electric, which was bailed out by taxpayers and which stored so much of its profit abroad that it paid no taxes for the past two years, was forced to tighten up, but while cutting its foreign workforce by 1,000 it cut a far more severe 28,000 in the United States. Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of GE, recently appointed by President Barack Obama as his chief outside economic adviser, admits that this does not involve poorly paid work that Americans don’t want, but instead prime jobs: “We’ve globalized around markets, not cheap labor. The era of globalization around cheap labor is over. Today we go to China, we go to India, because that’s where the customers are.”

Interesting, eh? We are constantly being told by conservative pols and opinion-leaders that consumer demand in the U.S. is irrelevant to the current economic crisis; that it’s all about the terrible burdens faced by “job creators” (enjoying record profits, by the way) in the way of wage, tax and regulatory costs. Thus individual states, and the national government as well, are being encouraged avidly to pursue “race to the bottom” competitive strategies ravaging the public sector in the name of the almighty desideratum of lower business costs.
If this strategy made sense, of course, then “low-road” states like Alabama and Mississippi would be the economic dynamos of the whole world. But it’s good to hear a validation that something else is actually going on from a corporate titan.
This topic was discussed at length today on the syndicated public radio show “Left, Right and Center,” in which I sat in for Arianna Huffington along with regulars Scheer, Matt Miller and Tony Blankley. There’s a feature at the very end where everyone gets to say something very brief (in my case, 10 seconds were left) about any old topic. I got in a quick reference to today being Earth Day. It was the first and only time that was mentioned, which is, I suppose, a sign of the times.

When it comes to messaging directly to the public, one strong protest song can sometimes do the work of ten good political speeches, which is why The Nation is asking readers to submit the name of “your all-time favorite protest song” on this form. (Nation writer Peter Rothberg has a pretty good list here to joggle the memory). It’s a tough call with so many great protest songs, but I don’t see how you can do much better in terms of relevance to the current political moment than this prescient little ditty, penned by a reluctantly prophetic songwriter, Iris Dement and first recorded by her in 1996:

When Tampa community radio station WMNF played the song back in 1997, Republican state Senator John Grant reportedly got so ticked off that he pulled $104,000 of the station’s public funding. Over the next day and a half Florida listeners raised $122,000 for the station in an emergency appeal.

Old-timers probably remember when there was a robust ongoing debate on the Left and Center-Left about the word “progressive” as an ideological identifier. Was it a good replacement for “liberal,” which had been made toxic by billions of dollars worth of conservative demonization? Was it the property of serious Leftists, who had used to define themselves in opposition to conventional liberals (not to mention moderates and conservatives) in the Democratic Party for decades? Or did it connote the historical traditional that went back to the Brandeis-Croley debates of the early twentieth century, when self-described “progressives” could be found in and beyond both major parties?
This all remained inside baseball until Glenn Beck began developing his convoluted conspiracy theories for a rapidly expanding audience a couple of years ago, and made “progressivism” a lurid term for a quasi-satanic and quasi-totalitarian cabal going back to Woodrow Wilson, that was complicit in both communism and fascism and entirely inimical to American constitutional traditions.
Beck’s audience is now rapidly shrinking, but he’s still able to start a fight, and did so this week (as noted by Salon‘s Alex Pareene) on his radio show by applying the “P-Word” to none other than his old Fox buddy Mike Huckabee.

Nearly all of what Beck says about Huckabee is pretty ludicrous (aside from such stupid slurs as calling the Rev. Jim Wallis a “Marxist”). But the interesting thing is that Huck fired back in an unusually uninhibited way on his own blog:

This week Glenn Beck has taken to his radio show to attack me as a Progressive, which he has said is the same as a “cancer” and a “Nazi.” What did I do that apparently caused him to link me to a fatal disease and a form of government that murdered millions of innocent Jews? I had the audacity–not of hope–but the audacity to give respect to the efforts of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign to address childhood obesity. I’m no fan of her husband’s policies for sure, but I have appreciated her efforts that Beck misrepresented–either out of ignorance or out of a deliberate attempt to distort them to create yet another “boogey man” hiding in the closet that he and only he can see.

Wow. Them’s fightin’ words. It’s unclear whether they mean that Beck is now marginal enough that even Christian Right pols can take a swing at him, or that Huck’s really not going to run for president in 2012. But you can bet it wouldn’t have happened a year ago.

Writing in the April 15th issue of the New York Review of Books, Elizabeth Drew expressed a widely shared progressive criticism regarding Obama’s approach to the deficit and budget battles:

On Wednesday he (Obama) gave a good speech far too late. What if he hadn’t been so dilatory on a subject he inevitably would have to confront?
…if Obama had addressed the fiscal crisis at the outset of this year, rather than deliver a wan and cautious State of the Union address, he would have set the predicate for the current budget battle rather than leaving an opening for Paul Ryan’s radical (and somewhat nonsensical) proposal to fill the vacuum…Ordinarily, such a proposal would have been laughed out of town, but now it’s been transformed into respectability.

Many progressives have expressed similar “why did he wait so long” criticisms of Obama’s actions.
Underlying this attitude is a fundamental disagreement about political strategy – progressives generally want Obama to forcefully champion a clear, solidly liberal program and agenda at all times and in all circumstances. They support this approach on both moral and political grounds and as result do not approve of either compromise as an objective or flexibility as a negotiating tactic except in the most unusual circumstances.
The debate over this basic issue is a perennial staple of intra-Democratic discord and will not be settled any time in the foreseeable future. But it is important to note that the specific application of this view to the “why did he wait so long” discussion ignores a series of basic realities.
First, even on the surface it is hard to see how Obama could have laid out the broad vision he presented last week back in early 2010. At that time it would have directly conflicted with the desperate, all-out push that was going on to pass the health care bill and it would also have appeared to contradict the near-universal Democratic position at that time that any discussion of reducing deficits was premature while the economy was not yet showing even the most minimal signs of recovery – signs that have only begun to appear in the last few months.
More important, the notion that Obama could have “set the predicate” or “filled the vacuum” for the budget/deficit debate back in early 2010 with the proposal he outlined last week is based on a rather dated notion –that the president has a commanding “bully pulpit” at his disposal, a platform from which he can reliably drive the national agenda.
In the modern, fragmented media environment that has developed since the 1990’s this is simply no longer the case. The modern political media environment has three unique and critical communication channels, each of which shapes — and profoundly diminishes– the ability of a president to directly control a national debate. How a Presidential initiative is handled by each of these communication channels has to be evaluated on its own terms.

First, there is the conservative echo chamber – Fox News, talk radio, the conservative blogosphere and so on. This entire conservative media machine is directly connected to the message system of the Republican Party and is primarily designed for bitter, slashing and dishonest attack – the creation of straw men and simplistic caricatures. It is not equally well suited for the defense of conservative proposals or the adjudication of debates between conflicting views
Second, there is the “serious” mainstream political commentariat. In the 1950’s and 1960’s this group of newspaper and TV commentators had substantial influence on the national debate over issues and reflected a mildly liberal “establishment” sensibility. Since the Reagan era, however, liberal or progressive views have come to be viewed with vastly more suspicion than comparable conservative views by mainstream commentators. As a result, proposals that feature liberal or progressive ideas are invariably treated as “partisan politics” rather than “serious proposals.” On subjects that the mainstream media consider inherently conservative – taxes, deficits and budgeting being prime examples — conservative opinions are automatically treated as being more serious, responsible and “adult” than liberal ones. Underlying this notion is a definition of the word “adult” that essentially identifies it with “acceptable to the major business groups”. To most mainstream commentators today any proposal that provokes serious business opposition is, by that fact alone, proven inherently flawed.
Third, there is the superficial “headline” news of local stations and 24 hour cable channels that is designed as quick entertainment for casual viewers. This information source attempts to deliver a quick and breezy overview of major events mixed with a large number of human interest stories. It presents political debates in a rigidly balanced “He said, she said” format that essentially reduces the coverage to battling sound bites. On issues like taxes, budgets and deficits, the newscasters themselves almost invariably take refuge behind vacuous clichés delivered with cheerful smiles – “Well you know, Joe, nobody likes to pay taxes” – “Gee, George, government sure spends lots of money” or “Sooner or later, Ed, ya gotta pay your bills“.

Given this three-channel media environment, how would Obama’s recent speech have been received if he had delivered it in early 2010 instead?

Read more…

If you thought the nuclear power plant disasters in Japan were going to recast the energy debate in the U.S., you may have to think again — or at least wait a while. That would be a prudent conclusion drawn from the just-released CNN/Opinion Research Poll, conducted 3/18-20 (PDF here). According to CNN’s ‘Political Ticker’:

Opposition to building new nuclear power plants in the U.S. has edged up since last spring, a likely reaction to the nuclear power plants crisis in Japan, according to a new national poll.
But a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Tuesday also indicates a majority of Americans approve of using nuclear energy to produce electricity…Fifty-seven percent of people questioned in the poll say they approve of the domestic use of nuclear energy, with 42 percent opposed.
“Attitudes toward nuclear power in the U.S. are more positive than they were after Chernobyl in 1986, when only 45 percent approved of nuclear energy plants, or Three Mile Island in 1979, when 53 percent approved of nuclear energy and the number who said nuclear plants were not safe was 10 points higher than today,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.

I was a little surprised by the 57 percent approval, given the horrific video and images coming from Japan. But opponents of nuclear power plants may find encouragement in some other findings in the poll:

The survey indicates that 53 percent of the public opposes building more nuclear power plants in the U.S., up six points from last year. Forty-six percent support the construction of new plants.

A fairly even split, but favoring nuclear power skeptics. Six in ten would opose building a nuclear power plant in their community, while 57 percent say that the U.S. should rely less on nuclear power as a future energy source. Another new poll, by CBS News (conducted 3/18-21) found that 50 percent of respondents opposed new construction of nuclear power plants, with 43 percent favoring new plants. The CBS poll found that 62 percent opposed having a nuclear power plant in their community, with 35 percent saying it would be OK.
When it comes to existing nuclear power plants, however, the gap widens, favoring those who want to keep them, according to the CNN/ORC poll:

Sixty-eight percent say continue to operate all of them, with 27 percent saying that some should be shut down and one in ten calling for all of the plants to be closed.
According to the poll, 28 percent say domestic nuclear power plants are very safe, with just over half saying they are somewhat safe and one in five saying they are not safe.

The CNN report notes that 54 percent of the respondents considered nuclear power plants on or near earthquake zones and oceans “very safe) (12 percent) or “somewhat safe (42 percent). Two out of three respondents expressed confidence that the federal government was prepared to handle a major crisis at a nuclear power plant, which may be a bit of an “ostrich reflex,” given the post-Katrina mess. There are nuclear power plants on the Gulf of Mexico, near New Orleans, Galveston and Tampa, in addition to the two located on the Pacific in California earthquake country. The CBS poll found a higher level of skepticism, with 35 percent saying the government is prepared to deal with a nuclear emergency, while 58 percent say it is not
There are 104 nuclear power plants licensed to operate in the U.S. It’s hard to imagine that the public has a realistic grasp of the enormously expensive and complex security and safety issues surrounding the plants that merit concern. President Obama has expressed support of the expansion of nuclear power in the U.S., while calling on the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to review the safety of the 104 operating plants, most of which are aging significantly.
I was one of those ostrich Democrats who became complaisant about nuclear power in recent years, thinking that the diminishing anti-nuclear power plant protests had started to sound like Chicken Little. After all we had not seen reports of any major disaster threats in the U.S. since Three Mile Island.
But the sobering images from Japan have jerked my head out of the sand. And reports like the one out today noting that there is an advisory to new mothers in Tokyo not to let their babies have any tap water because it has double the level of radioactivity considered safe for infants insures that I’m staying opposed to it. It’s not like we’ve got a big edge in scientific or technical expertise over the Japanese. The Union of Concerned Scientists reports that U.S. Nuclear Power Plants had 14 “near misses,” or serious “events” in 2010 alone, involving “inadequate training, faulty maintenance, poor design, and failure to investigate problems thoroughly.”
I’m hoping President Obama will rethink the issue, declare a moratorium on new construction of nuclear power plants and invest the money saved in developing truly green energy options, like solar thermal and wind, which would create a hell of a lot more jobs, according to the Worldwatch Institute. Despite the relatively small number of jobs they create, nuclear power plants often end up being more expensive, because of unexpected safety issues that must be addressed. For a disturbing account of the ever-increasing expenses and dangers associated with nuclear power in the U.S., read Christian Parenti’s article “After Three Mile Island: The Rise and Fall of Nuclear Safety Culture” in The Nation.
The more you read about the dangers and expenses of nuclear power plants, the harder it gets to accept glib assurances about their safety and economic feasibility. Even if one accepts the premise that the odds are very high against a major disaster in the U.S., all it takes is one long shot disaster to do vast damage to America’s economy and politics. At the very least, Dems should consider a much stronger emphasis on development of alternative sources of power. Anybody up for a Manhattan Project/Marshall Plan for solar/wind power development?

One of the most effective talking-points of the unions and Democratic legislators battling Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin was: “It’s Not About the Money!” This battle-cry drew attention to the fact that Walker’s union-busting agenda had little or nothing to do with the state’s fiscal crisis, which Walker himself had helped engineer by pushing corporate tax cuts.
It’s time to make the same point in terms of the Republican agenda in Congress. Much of the battle between Ds and Rs over non-defense discretionary spending isn’t about the deficit numbers, but about GOP efforts to grind various ideological axes, from defunding EPA and bank regulators and NPR, to crippling abortion and contraceptive services, to repealing last year’s health reform legislation. Indeed, appropriations “riders” that have nothing to do with spending levels are what conservative House members are most adamently demanding in return for supporting any appropriations bill, temporary or permanent. In effect, alarms about debts and deficits are being used as an excuse to go after government functions that Republicans would object to even if the budget was in surplus.
Now on one level this isn’t surprising or even wrong-minded; the two parties can and should reflect their own sense of priorities in every budget decision, not just those driven by concerns or negotiations over spending reductions. But these priorities need to be acknowledged and discussed openly and directly, and not in the disguise of making “painful but necessary cuts.”
The truth is that most Republican these days would prefer to live in a country with little or no regulation of corporations (environmental or any other sort) or banks, a far more regressive tax code than has been the case historically, workplaces with no collective bargaining rights or even minimum wages, a status quo ante health care system in which private insurers are free to discriminate and rising costs are borne by the sickest and poorer Americans, the social safety net is weaker and not subject to any national minimum norms, and abortion (plus many forms of contraception) are illegal. They’d also prefer to get rid of legal protections against discrimination generally, and a federal government limited to the kind of functions typical of the eighteenth century in which the U.S. Constitution was adopted.
It’s their right to favor this kind of society, but given the abundant evidence that a large majority of Americans would be very unhappy with it, it’s the responsibility of non-Republicans and of the news media to make this agenda as clear as possible, and not just mindlessly accept that conservatives are only worried about the debt burden on future generations.
I made a small effort to do this on a nationally syndicated public radio show today, and am resolved to keep it up at the risk of redundancy. So should you.