Privileging the Opposition

Howard Kurtz finally opened his trap about the Birther movement yesterday on CNN, actually appearing to understand the issue.

On his Reliable Sources show today, CNN’s Howard Kurtz criticized Dobbs and others in the media who have given airtime to the “fringe of the fringe” that is the “birther” crowd. “These are ludicrous claims, there is no factual basis for them,” said Kurtz. “Why give the birthers any airtime?” He then specifically criticized Dobbs for not acting “responsible”:

KURTZ: Callie Crossley, Lou Dobbs on his radio show said, “I believe the president is a citizen of the United States.” But he keeps raising these questions, complaining about criticism from “limp-minded, lily-livered lefties.” Is it responsible for Dobbs and others to go on the air, talk about these claims, demand proof, when we have seen a copy of the birth certificate? When Hawaii officials say that Barack Obama was born there in 1961?

CROSSLEY: It absolutely is not responsible.

"Giving airtime" is precisely the point. The news media, whether legitimizing the Birthers or disputing them, have paid far more attention to them than they ever did the 9-11 Truthers or any other crazy and actually irrelevant conspiracy theorists:

Ask yourself this: What would have happened if, in July of 2002, Lou Dobbs would have conducted respectful interviews with various Truthers, in the course of which Dobbs called on the Bush administration to prove by documentary evidence that the U.S. government hadn’t actually carried out the 9/11 attacks?

The answer is obvious: Dobbs would have been fired before the next morning—which is another way of saying that it’s inconceivable that he or any other mainstream media figure would ever do such a thing. Similarly, it’s equally inconceivable that any Democratic member of Congress would go on a program like Hardball and repeatedly refuse to say whether he rejected the idea that the Bush administration was behind the 9/11 attacks.

The short answer is that conservative media figures and politicians are essentially afraid of and courteous to the craziest part of their right-wing base, while liberal politicians hold them in contempt. This is true even in those cases where the "conspiracy" has a fair bit of evidence, say, in the stolen election in Florida in 2000.

I don't doubt that the Birther issue is a headache for the GOP, but they respond to it seriously, giving it some breathing space, rather than self-loathing Democrats like Collin Peterson, who are so contemptuous of their own citizens that they'd rather cancel all access to their constituents.

Out-party politicians have long had to deal with conspiracy theorists on their side — the people who think that the Clintons killed Vince Foster or that the Bush administration helped orchestrate the Sept. 11 attacks.

“Twenty-five percent of my people believe the Pentagon and Rumsfeld were responsible for taking the twin towers down,” said Rep. Collin Peterson, a Democrat who represents a conservative Republican district in Minnesota. “That’s why I don’t do town meetings.”

Now I don't want to get into an argument about which crazy conspiracy theorists get more respect from official discourse. But this doesn't stop there. It seeps into the mainstream in other ways, on other issues. The best recent example concerns Chris Matthews' harping on abortion funding in the health care bill based on 100% conservative framing, plucked out of The Weekly Standard (by his own admission):

MSNBC's Chris Matthews is illustrative of the approach to the topic some have taken. Matthews, who acknowledges his approach to this topic has been shaped by the conservative Weekly Standard, has made his opposition to coverage for abortion clear, claiming President Obama "says they're going to reduce the number of abortions, and that same week he pushes to subsidize abortion? You can't do that."

On a recent Hardball, Matthews questioned Democratic Sen. Richard Durbin and Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch about the topic, asking leading questions that encouraged them to state their opposition to insurance coverage of abortion. But Matthews didn't ask them -- and hasn't asked any other guest -- one simple question: Why shouldn't abortions be covered, given that the procedure is legal? Nor has he asked if there are any other legal procedures that shouldn't be covered.

Instead, Matthews has adopted the premise that taxpayer funds shouldn't be used to pay for abortions, no matter how indirectly, because some taxpayers believe abortion to be immoral. On Wednesday's Hardball, for example, Matthews asked Obama adviser David Axelrod: "[I]f the federal government spends money on abortions, that means people who believe abortion is evil would be forced to have their tax money go to pay for abortions. How do you justify that?"

That premise is only superficially compelling, and has no business underlying an impartial news report. After all, millions of Americans believe the death penalty and wars of choice are immoral. But the moral beliefs of pacifists and death penalty opponents are not granted the privilege the media grants opposition to legal abortion -- and so you rarely see a news report premised on the idea that taxpayer funding for war or capital punishment is inappropriate.

How the Birther issue has been handled in Washington is a teachable moment, one that shows how the Beltway remains wired for conservatives, no matter how crazy.

When CBO Scores Vanish

When a partial Congressional Budget Office score revealed that health care would be more expensive than expected and not cover as many Americans, mainly because it was scoring something, you know, PARTIAL, the press had a field day, egged on by Republicans. Hell, they're still talking about it.

"Meet the Press" has really got to step up its game on the health-care debate. Last week, host David Gregory tweeted "Compelling fact today: dem-wh health care plan would only cover 16 of the 50 mill uninsured. That makes it a harder sell. Info from cbo." Problem was, his fact wasn't much of a fact. CBO didn't score a "Dem-White House" plan. It scored a partial version of the Senate HELP Committee's plan. The White House wasn't involved. And nor, for that matter, would that plan have only covered 16 million. The version of the bill examined by CBO was missing the employer mandate and the specifics on the individual mandate. It was missing, in other words, the parts of the bill that would cover people. Gregory was right to say that the CBO score was a setback. But not for the reasons he suggested.

By contrast, over the weekend, that same CBO scored the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill to determine the annual cost per household of a cap and trade system and a renewable energy standard.

On that basis, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the net annual economywide cost of the cap-and-trade program in 2020 would be $22 billion—or about $175 per household. That figure includes the cost of restructuring the production and use of energy and of payments made to foreign entities under the program, but it does not include the economic benefits and other benefits of the reduction in GHG emissions and the associated slowing of climate change. CBO could not determine the incidence of certain pieces (including both costs and benefits) that represent, on net, about 8 percent of the total. For the remaining portion of the net cost, households in the lowest income quintile would see an average net benefit of about $40 in 2020, while households in the highest income quintile would see a net cost of $245.

In other words, in another partial score, since it doesn't take into account the benefit of mitigating climate change, low income households would actually benefit slightly from the impacts of the bill, while high-income households would see a fairly nominal cost. Republicans have argued for months that doing anything on greenhouse gas emissions would cost anywhere from $1,600 to $3,100 a family.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that this score will have absolutely no impact on the debate over whether or not we should enact climate and energy legislation. Those who want to cover for polluting industries will still lie that the impact on "working families" will be too costly, and the press will "cover the controversy." In other words, the CBO only matters when it matters.

Meanwhile, Democrats have, apparently, a global warming denier in charge of the House Agriculture Committee, and he's doing whatever he can to stop the bill.

House Agriculture Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) on Friday said climate change bill negotiators are heading back to the drawing board after discussions between Democrats “blew up last night.”

A meeting between chairmen drafting the climate bill and Democrats on the Agriculture Committee “by and large blew up last night” over the issue of offsets, Peterson said.

Specifically, he said, Agriculture Democrats rejected a concept pitched by bill drafters that would set money aside for a new greenhouse gas conservation program tied together with some offsets [...]

“We’re back to how do we deal — we want USDA to run our offset program; they want EPA to run it,” Peterson said. “Not that we’re necessarily against the EPA; they just speak a different language. They don’t have the infrastructure out there to deal with us.”

Added Peterson, “I’m tired of this running around in circles.”

Funny, I was about to say the same thing.

I'm beginning to think that humans have a better chance of adapting with gills than adapting legislatively with meaningful climate change legislation. After all, lawmakers have to protect those poor families from getting that $40 in ten years.

Consensus By A Thousand Cuts

Environmentalist Henry Waxman and seeming global warming denier Collin Peterson are moving to an agreement on a climate and energy bill.

House Democrats are within sight of agreement on a comprehensive energy and global warming bill, but it is still unclear if they have satisfied enough rural and fiscal conservative lawmakers to guarantee the votes for floor passage by next week.

"I think we made some real progress," Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) told reporters yesterday as he left a meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Agriculture Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.). "There's still black smoke going up. The white smoke, however, we might be able to send some up, but only after we have resolved these final issues. We made some real progress in that meeting. But it's not final yet."

Waxman described a "conceptual understanding that we're now looking at in more detail" with Peterson, adding that the work now rests on staff to come up with legislative language that could be unveiled as soon as today or Monday.

Peterson also sounded an optimistic note yesterday about the negotiations. "We got a couple things resolved," he told E&E. "They came up with a new idea that has good possibilities. We're going to take a look now and see if it works."

It doesn't look like a huge set of concessions, mainly on rural electricity and carbon allowances as well as the EPA ruling on biofuels (that's going to be near-impossible to dislodge, and it's a shame), but of course we've been nicking at this thing for a long time, taking away a little something here and a little something there. I still think we have a decent bill that's worth passing, particularly because of the job possibilities in the energy space - 1.7 million jobs looks pretty good right now. But it's a far cry from what's needed.

Still Time To Strengthen Waxman-Markey

Henry Waxman will suffer the endless string of GOP amendments to his climate and energy bill only until today, before he puts the hammer down and moves the bill out of committee. He's even hired a speedreader in case the GOP wants to delay the bill some more by having the whole 900-page behemoth read in full. Waxman wants the bill out of committee rather than being held up by procedural silliness and self-serving amendments. You can watch this thing drag on over at C-SPAN 3.

But of course, once the bill leaves committee, that's not the end of the story. While the Chairman believes he has the votes, and the Energy and Commerce committee is generally more conservative than the House as a whole, the bill has plenty of other hurdles. Charlie Rangel and the Ways and Means Committee wants his hands on it, and he will prioritize health care well before this bill. Collin Peterson over at Agriculture wants a piece of it as well. And Waxman wouldn't commit yesterday to this bill even reaching the House floor before August.

My point in bringing this up is that there are months to go before the final bill takes shape. Various fiefdoms in the Congress want to put their fingerprints on it, and nothing will happen quickly. This is important, because there's substantial debate over whether this bill represents a true compromise that everyone can live with, or a flawed bill that would not have the kind of impact that makes it worth the many giveaways involved. Brad Plumer at TNR highlights the biggest, but by no means the only, compromise.

One of Waxman's biggest compromises, the one attracting the most attention, was that roughly 85 percent of the pollution permits under the bill's carbon cap-and-trade system will be given out to companies for free, rather than auctioned off by the government [...]

If Congress auctioned off all or most of the pollution permits under a cap-and-trade system, companies would have to pay more for the allowances, and the U.S. government would raise more revenue. That'd be money Congress could then rebate directly back to consumers to soften the blow of higher energy prices; or it could spend some of the money on clean-energy research or efficiency projects (many of which won't necessarily come about just because there's a price on carbon). Right now, there's less money in Waxman-Markey for both of those things.

Ultimately, Plumer believes that, while the bill is flawed, it would still represent a step forward and progressives ought to support it. The Economist appears to disagree, noting the looser cap on emissions (now 17% below 2005 levels by 2020 instead of 20%). Adam Siegel calls it a coal subsidy bill because it subsidizing the fossil fuel industry far more than renewables. The bill is so large and includes so many competing measures that it's impossible to really divine what it would do at this point. But there are many months left to make that determination and find the points where it can be improved.

Progressives will either have to eat these compromises or reject anything this mushy, depending on the political movement that grows up around the issue, and right now, that movement is relatively silent.

There are two ways to overcome the political hurdle. Either cut deals with the coal, oil, auto and utility industries that weaken (but hopefully don't completely undermine) the legislation. Or convince voters in those areas that their interests are not the same as those of fossil fuel CEOs, motivating them to take action and putting public pressure on key congresspeople to back stronger climate protection legislation.

Cutting deals can be handled behind closed doors in the halls Congress. Generating public pressure requires major grassroots mobilizing.

The political reality Reps. Henry Waxman and Ed Markey had to face is there has been no major grassroots mobilizing in the broader progressive movement. While poll numbers show strong support for strong legislation, there has been no grassroots intensity to back that up, to convince skittish politicians that the public is demanding action immediately, and will hold politicians accountable if they don't follow through.

...broad, deep, relentless and coordinated grassroots mobilization is the only thing that can put a wedge between special interest lobbying and Congress. If we aren't present in the halls and offices of Congress, you better believe every day corporate lobbyists are.

Bill Scher is absolutely right. But there's a larger question about political capacity here. All these problems hitting at once really dilutes the energy that can be put to any one topic. We have a couple wars, a financial meltdown, major health care legislation and about 100 other things going on. The President prioritized health care and that's what has gotten much of the activism. The enviro groups haven't done their job of building a movement outside of throwing a couple ads on the air. But I wonder what they really could have done. And I also wonder if there won't be possibilities for movement pressure down the road. We're at the beginning, not the end, of this fight.

...Just to be clear, I think the bill should be improved. Giving away pollution credits will put the burden of transforming the energy sector on the poor and not save anyone on their electric bills. The renewable energy standard ought to be strengthened up to at least 25%. My point is we have a lot of time to do this, but the enviro groups have to take the lead.