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The Christie Fraud

[ 50 ] June 4, 2013 | Erik Loomis

Rich Democrats can be really stupid, as the Newark Star-Ledger shows:

Gov. Chris Christie is cashing in donations from top Democratic fundraisers and other traditionally liberal donors across the country, even nabbing the support of a handful of rainmakers aligned with President Obama and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a Star-Ledger review of state and federal records shows.

The checks are flying into the Republican governor’s war chest from all sorts of unlikely places — the hedge fund run by liberal billionaire George Soros, for example, and the politically progressive halls of the University of California, Berkeley.

The nascent support from Democratic donors is an early sign of Christie’s fundraising prowess in a potential run for the White House in 2016, experts and Democratic donors said, and dovetails with recent polls showing him gaining popularity nationally among Democrats and independents.

Christie’s partnership with New Jersey Democratic leaders and his warm relationship with Obama after Hurricane Sandy could be enticing donors who don’t often give to GOP candidates, even if they are closer ideologically to Democrat Barbara Buono, Christie’s lesser-known challenger, political scientists and Democratic fundraisers say.

“While I do not agree with his stance on every issue, he is one of the best political leaders I have talked to in a long time,” said Ken Rosen, a UC-Berkeley professor who cut a $3,800 check to Christie after chatting with him at two events. “He is willing to take on tough issues such as pension reform, education reform, mental-health issues, even if his views are not politically correct.”

The Star-Ledger review found:

•…Five executives at Soros Fund Management have chipped in a combined $19,000 to the governor’s re-election campaign, state records show. The donor roll includes Soros’ protégé and chief investment officer, Scott Bessent, who tends to fund liberal Democrats, and Sender Cohen, a partner at the hedge fund who more often favors Republicans.

•John Doerr, a top Democratic fundraiser and venture capitalist in California, sent Christie the maximum $3,800 donation for the Republican primary this year. So did his wife. Federal records show the couple has given more than $1.2 million to national Democrats since 1997.

•Tim Mullen, a Chicago investor who gave more than $100,000 to Emanuel’s campaign for mayor in 2011 and bundled from $200,000 to $500,000 for Obama in 2008, has also sent Christie a maximum donation, as has his wife Alice. Mullen was already a Christie donor in 2009, state records show.

What these wealthy donors seem to forget is that Chris Christie is horrible on basically every single policy point. The Political Carnival lists a few of them:

Chris Christie Vetoed Same-Sex Marriage

Chris Christie Is No Friend to Workers

Chris Christie Doesn’t Believe in Universal Pre-K

Chris Christie Misuses State Funds

Chris Christie Supports the Ryan Budget

Chris Christie Vetoed a Hike in the Minimum Wage

Chris Christie Vetoed Equal Pay Legislation

Chris Christie Targeted Poor Families in His Budget

Chris Christie Cut Funding to Family Planning Organizations

Chris Christie Is Proudly Anti-Choice

But there’s a lot of people who love both claiming bipartisanship and the Christie persona of a Republican daddy talking tough and being a rude jerk to people who question him. Christie is of course an extremely dangerous politician for Democrats. There’s a real chance he could be president if Republicans were smart. Of course, they are not and I really don’t see how Christie can survive a Republican primary, no matter what he does in this Senate vacancy problem. But if he did, watch out because too many Democrats love this guy for whatever reason.

Tuesday Link Bringing

[ 11 ] June 4, 2013 | Robert Farley

Let’s find us some links…

DC comics, law school edition

[ 29 ] June 4, 2013 | Paul Campos

This WAPO story notes that applications to law school have declined sharply for the third straight year (they’re going to total about 58,500 in this cycle, down from a high of 102,000 nine years ago).

It features some typical babble from an admissions dean at GULC:

“In the boom times three to eight years ago, when applications were much higher, I think it got glutted,” Cornblatt said. “I think this is the right-sizing. There’s this adjustment being made.”

Cornblatt said growing concerns about the legal job market and law school debt are driving away less-serious potential applicants who a few years ago might have been eager to enter law school to weather the recession.

“There’s been so much noise about the legal job market and how tough it is, whether it’s worth the tuition and borrowing all that money,” he said. “That group of people who weren’t as committed just aren’t applying now . . .

(1) The highest percentage of law grads who got full-time long-term jobs requiring bar admission within nine months of graduation since NALP started recording this stat 12 years ago was 71% in 2007. So three out of ten grads weren’t getting jobs as lawyers at the height of the “boom” (the number for the class of 2012 was 56.4%, but this declines to barely over 50% if you exclude solos and law school funded positions.)

(2) Schools haven’t cut enrollments to nearly the extent that applications have declined. “Right-sizing” the entering first year class would require cutting it from last fall’s 44,500 to between 15,000 to 25,000 1Ls, depending on how much one wants to take into account the tremendous amount of oversupply already in the system (25,000 would represent about 10% more than the annual number of new jobs for lawyers).

(3) The claim about less serious applicants being deterred is based on no data. What we do know is that the decline in applicants has been sharper among those with higher LSAT scores, which would seem to suggest the opposite.

(4) I was told yesterday by a law professor who used to be on the faculty of one of the schools in question that GULC and GW are both offering transfer spots to everyone in the top 20% of last year’s American class, at whatever tuition they were paying at American (American is infamous for giving out very little in the way of tuition discounts, so this strategy makes sense for the higher ranked schools, especially given American’s horrible employment stats. The WAPO story doesn’t note that GULC and GW both inflate their graduating classes with enormous numbers of transfers — sometimes more than 100 at each school. Transfer LSAT and GPA scores aren’t reported to the ABA so admitting transfers is a great way to balance your budget without endangering the reported entry stats for your students).

(5) A 29 year old Ivy League STEM grad wanted to talk yesterday about whether he should enroll in law school this fall. This guy claims to have read everything I’ve written on the subject.

His situation:

Works in DC

Admitted to GW and American at close to sticker. Half tuition scholarship at Catholic.

Thinks he wants to do securities law, either in private practice or on the government regulatory side.

Does financial analysis for a big bank. Is becoming increasingly bored and has questions about the long-term stability of his position.

Current salary: $112K

Ummm . . .

Labor Should Demand Political Value for Money

[ 44 ] June 4, 2013 | Erik Loomis

Two stories here that revolve around the theme of organized labor rarely getting value for the money it donates to Democratic politicians.

On the national level, Communication Workers of American president Larry Cohen held a conference call with reporters and bloggers yesterday to say that Senate Democrats who do not support institutional changes within the Senate that would allow presidential nominees to get an up or down vote will lose CWA support. Without a functioning National Labor Relations Board, Democratic judges on federal courts, and other key agencies not being staffed due to Republican obstructionism, this is a huge issue for CWA and other unions.

The question I have is what losing support means? Does it mean not getting union money? None of the union’s tremendous GOTV efforts? Funding primary challengers? None of this is at all clear. But it’s clear that CWA does not believe it is getting its money’s worth for supporting Democrats regardless of what they do or do not do for labor.

Let’s look at the recent South Carolina special election to replace Tim Scott. Elizabeth Colbert-Busch received $32,500 from organized labor, including $10,000 from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Her payback?

Ashley Byrd, News Director for South Carolina Radio: We are going to stay on the topic of job creation. And, uh, let’s start with this: Boeing is bringing more than 8,000 jobs into South Carolina. So here is a two part question first to Ms. Colbert Busch: Did the NLRB overstep its bounds when it tried to block Boeing’s approach to expansion in South Carolina? Yes or No, and why?

Elizabeth Colbert Busch: Yes. This is a right-to-work state, and they had no business telling a company where they could locate.

If the first thought that ran through your mind was, “Sounds like a standard Republican answer to a question like that,” you would be right. But, of course, Elizabeth Colbert Busch was the Democratic nominee for Congress in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District. In response to the Republican candidate, former Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC), stating that Colbert Busch “wants to be the voice for labor unions in Washington, DC”, she said the following:

First of all, um, Mark, what you’re saying is just not true. Things can be taken out of context, and everybody knows that. I am proud to support and live in a right-to-work state, and I am proud of everyone who has supported me.

Now of course it is South Carolina so what do you expect, right? Well, maybe. But why should labor should provide its valuable resources to politicians who do not support its fundamental positions? For 80 years, organized labor has thrown its hat in with the Democratic Party through thick and thin. This was a pretty good strategy for awhile, but today, everyone is questioning it, including at the very top of the AFL-CIO. Today (and increasingly since the 1970s) the Democratic Party just assumes labor is writing the checks and that it’s just an interest group to assuage but not take seriously.

The South Lawn has more here:

Labor also gave $68,000 in 2009-2010 to U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR). Yes, that would be the same Blanche Lincoln that played a large role in blocking the Employee Free Choice Act and who now works for Wal-Mart as a “special policy advisor” (read: lobbyist). You know, the same Wal-Mart notorious for its anti-union policies. It is not altogether surprising, though, given that Wal-Mart gave her $83,650 in donations over the course of her last term in the U.S. Senate.

Something is not adding up here.

Labor gave $1.1 billion in donations to candidates in federal elections between 2005 and 2011, and what do we have to show for it? No Employee Free Choice Act. President Obama’s nominee for Commerce Secretary heads a corporation that is being boycotted by labor for anti-union practices and horrible working conditions. The candidate who stated in 2008 that he would put on his walking shoes and join a picket line wherever collective bargaining rights were threatened seemed to forget where his local Foot Locker was when it came to worker oppression in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. But then again, that should not be surprising, given that the 2012 Democratic National Convention was held in a right-to-work state at non-union hotels.

I don’t necessarily agree with the article’s argument to use all those resources strictly in local politics. That needs to happen too, but ignoring the national scene would be counterproductive. Labor of course should and will stay involved in electoral politics. But the question is how it should operate. How can it receive value for its dollar? I think the answer is probably supporting individual candidates instead of the Democratic Party as a whole. It needs to act more like the Bloomberg anti-gun group, making politicians pay if they don’t support union issues. And while you are not going to hurt a South Carolina Democrat by running an ad saying they are anti-union, you are going to hurt them by not giving one red cent. For a Democratic Party strategist, this is not an idea you want to hear. But from the perspective of what is best for labor unions and pushing their causes in Washington, this is a sensible strategy.

It’s Them Damned Trains!

[ 42 ] June 3, 2013 | Erik Loomis

Scott claims one of the most important questions of our time is why Canadian teams haven’t won the Stanley Cup for so long. He may be right, but THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION OF OUR TIME is the issue of members of Congress killed by trains or who died while riding the train. David Nir points us to Eric Ostermeier, who profiles the 23 members of Congress who died in train-related incidents. This includes Connecticut Rep. Dwight Loomis, who I believe is the only person of my name to serve in Congress. Loomis served in 2 terms from 1859-63 and then was hit by a train in 1903 at the age of 82.

This also reminds me that I’ve thought about doing a blog series on famous Loomises over the ages. There are more than you’d think. Of course, I’d start with Randy Quaid’s character from Quick Change.

….This is also a good place to note that I think the weirdness of the train guy was Sergio Leone’s attempt to create a character based vaguely on what Walter Brennan would look like in a spaghetti western.

…..I have now learned via a Twitter follower that Wendell Willkie died after suffering approximately 20 heart attacks on a train while traveling from Indianapolis to New York City. That’ll do it.

Sizes Extra-Small to Extra-Cool

[ 99 ] June 3, 2013 | bspencer

Awhile back, some of you expressed an interest in merch that was sort of inside-jokey. With this in mind, I’d like to design a t-shirt for you guys. I’d like to make a “Minotaurs of Oppression” t-shirt for the LGM store.

Thing is, I don’t know whether to go hip/simple/graphic-designy or whether I want to make a MINOTAURS OF OPPRESSION tour date sort of t-shirt.

Should I go cool with an eye towards pretty graphics or should I go a more jokey route ?

Thoughts, ideas, taglines, etc. appreciated.

Stock Update: So three images really caught my eye and each of them would influence the design in different ways. This is kinda cool and hip. This is kind of METAL. And this is kind of just weird and silly.

For One Thing, Depression and “Sadness” Are Not the Same Thing

[ 172 ] June 3, 2013 | Scott Lemieux

Jesus Christ, what a pathetic operation Tucker Carlson is running.

…Emma Roller has more.

The Stupidest Argument About Immigration Written in the 21st Century

[ 103 ] June 3, 2013 | Erik Loomis

Arguments against immigration reform are usually pretty bad. Racism is at the heart of most, sometimes couched in dog whistles like “culture” or the Republican “they won’t vote for us because we’re racist so let’s not allow them a path to citizenship.” You don’t hear too many arguments anymore about immigrants stealing our jobs, though it’s still a commonly held belief among some working-class people. But unions also know that there is no more pro-union group than immigrants and it is in their interests to support sensible immigration reform.

But sometimes you get an argument against immigration so full of hate and so laughably over the top that you just have to point it out. Such is the case with Ying Zh-Ye’s column at PolicyMic. Arguing that so-called “amnesty” would destroy the United States “financially and politically,” Ying’s collection of self-refuting arguments, right-wing strawmen, and nuttiness producers a real winner of an article. This is my favorite part:

Many immigrants have deep scars from socialism. They know how their home countries turned into one-party communist countries many years ago. They also learned, as a part of Asian history, how elite people were humiliated and tortured, little by little, begging for their rights, dignity, and properties. Unfortunately, America is not immune from turning into a socialist country if it imports large numbers of low-income immigrants to change its political landscape.

There will be little or no way for highly skilled immigrants or wealthy Americans to prevent future tax hikes or social injustice against them, when they are increasingly outnumbered by others. It may eventually become a better choice for them to leave this country. The U.S. then will be on a pathway to socialism.

Immigrants are fleeing socialism. If we let immigrants into the United States, that socialism they are fleeing is the inevitable result!!

Also, immigrants will convince rich Americans to migrate to other countries, turning the United States into a 3rd world socialist hellhole.

I look forward to hearing Jefferson Beauregard Sessions and Jim Inhofe repeat these arguments on the Senate floor during the immigration bill debate this month.

Today in the War on the Fourth Amendment

[ 87 ] June 3, 2013 | Scott Lemieux

When a Supreme Court majority wants to reach an outcome but the argument on behalf of said outcome is particularly indefensible, it’s likely that the opinion will be handed off to Anthony Kennedy, like radioactive waste. Today’s task for Kennedy was to hold that suspicionless searches without exigent circumstances could be consistent with the Fourth Amendment, and his opinion was exactly the atrocity you’d expect. His approach was to claim that DNA samples were taken from a suspect not for investigatory purposes but for identification, an argument that’s ridiculous on its face and even less tenable when you look at the facts. Since it was a Fourth Amendment case Scalia voted correctly, but Breyer and Thomas joined with the Court’s more consistent authoritarians to swing the case to the dark side.

Read the whole etc., but I’d also like to highlight the conclusion of Scalia’s unanswerable dissent:

Today’s judgment will, to be sure, have the beneficial effect of solving more crimes; then again, so would the taking of DNA samples from anyone who flies on an air plane (surely the Transportation Security Administration needs to know the “identity” of the flying public), applies for a driver’s license, or attends a public school. Perhaps the construction of such a genetic panopticon is wise. But I doubt that the proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties would have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection.

I therefore dissent, and hope that today’s incursion upon the Fourth Amendment, like an earlier one, will some day be repudiated.

I would rather focus on our values and liberty than those of “the proud men” who wrote the Bill of Rights, but otherwise this is completely right. If this decision stands, we might as well just collect DNA samples from everyone at birth and be done with the pretense that we’re applying the Fourth Amendment to DNA collection. The originalist language is useful, though, because it highlights what a particular embarrassment it was for Thomas to have joined Kennedy’s opinion without comment. I’d love to hear the “originalist” justification for the proposition that you can conduct a search of one’s body without suspicion (let alone warrant) or exigent circumstances as long as the information collected is really useful.

Today in the Coming Republican Coalition

[ 112 ] June 3, 2013 | Erik Loomis

The College Republicans have released a report that shows that all young people hate Republicans. And that’s only a slight overstatement, with 54% of young people supporting raising taxes on the wealthy and 3% supporting lowering taxes on the wealthy. Wow. The College Republican answer to the problem–just stop talking about actual Republican positions. I’m sure lying will be a good strategy in the long run. Alex Pareene with more on the bright shiny future of the Republican Party:

It is a bit interesting that these calls for change in how the party presents itself are coming from the College Republicans, traditionally one of the party’s most proudly assholish wings. College Republicans across the country think a great way to get people excited for Republicans is by holding “affirmative action bake sales.” College Republicans bred Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. The co-author of the report, former College Republicans head Alex Schriver, won his election to that post following a drunken speech in which the Texas College Republicans Chairman called Schriver’s opponents “nerds and fags.” A previous national chairman notoriously sent fundraising letters aimed specifically at “elderly people with dementia.” (He won the chair with the assistance of the odious North Carolina Rep. Patrick McHenry, himself a former College Republican.) The culture that so desperately needs to be changed in the GOP begins with its college boosters, a lily-white crowd of entitled bow-tied pricks who go out of their way to be detested by “nerds and fags” on every campus on which they have a chapter.

It’s also true that the GOP cannot possibly take real steps to make itself a more appealing party to a younger, more diverse and tolerant generation without alienating the people who currently put the GOP in control of the United States House of Representatives. The old guard, who refuse to change anything, have a decent argument: It’d be political suicide to abandon the reactionary old people who currently always vote Republican, because while they’re a shrinking demographic, they’re also a large and loyal one.

The Republican Party is dependent on the votes and dollars of the people who make young voters detest the Republican Party. There’s no way to “message” the GOP out of that trap.

But hey, if they just stop young people from being able to vote, the Republicans can still win!

Frank Lautenberg, RIP

[ 102 ] June 3, 2013 | Erik Loomis

Frank Lautenberg has passed.

Lautenberg’s most significant legacy is his role in raising the drinking age to 21. In principle, I think the drinking age should be lowered. But given the American automobile landscape and the American tradition of teenage driving, it was almost certainly a good policy. If we could combine lowering the drinking age with massive public transportation infrastructure funding and a robust system to get kids home if they’ve been drinking, that would be ideal. Alas, we do not live in an ideal society. I don’t see how any could criticize Lautenberg’s second most important legacy, banning smoking on airplanes. I can’t even imagine riding an airplane full of smoke. Yuck.

Can’t say that I’m too excited about the inevitable Senator Cory Booker, but that was going to happen in 2014 anyway.

Hacktacular: Conservative “Reformer” vs. the ACA Edition

[ 117 ] June 3, 2013 | Scott Lemieux

While there are flaws that will be exacerbated by the fact that the American legislative process makes correcting defects nearly impossible, there’s good reason for some optimism about the PPACA: in addition to things like the clear benefits to act has brought to women, the exchanges in California have worked better than expected.   This presents a challenge for Republicans who want to pretend to support some kind of health care reform while supporting the repeal of the PPACA even though it would be replaced with “nothing.   (Although it must be admitted that the Republican fake-reformers are still being more rational that left-wing opponents of the PPACA, who also favor replacing the PPACA with nothing for the foreseeable future, only they prefer to pretend that killing the PPACA would have led to the Magic Ponies and Unicorns Act because…look, Atari brought out a game for the 2600 based on E.T.!  It’ll be awesome!)   Conservative “reformer” and “intellectual” Avik Roy rose to the occasion, claiming that in fact the California exchanges have led to price increases for private insurance.  What’s his evidence?  Well, funny thing:

Having both lived in California for over thirty years and having reason to be particularly focused on health insurance issues—including policy costs—I found any allegation that the rates published by Covered California could raise the existing policy prices by as much as 146 percent to be, to say the least, quite shocking. But then, one must always be open to the possibility that something was missed or a mistake was made.

And so, I read on.

What policies, I wondered, had Avik used as his point of comparison in reaching his startling conclusion?

I soon had my answer as Roy revealed where he had acquired his data, writing, “But in 2013, on eHealthInsurance.com, the median cost of the five cheapest plans was only $92.”

I must admit that it took a moment to sink in as my first reaction was to laugh. eHealthInsurance.com? Seriously?

Was Avik really using teaser rates published on the Internet by eHealthInsurance.com as his point of comparison? I mean, you don’t have to be a healthcare policy expert to know that websites like eHealthInsurance.com always flash low rates in front of you—prices that maybe one person in a thousand might actually hope to achieve—to tickle the interest of a potential customer.

Oh, my. I’ll turn it over to you, Ezra:

Roy got his 146 percent by heading to eHealthInsurance.com, running a search for insurance plans in California and comparing the cost of the cheapest plans to the cost of the plans being offered in the exchanges. That’s not just comparing apples to oranges. It’s comparing apples to oranges that the fruit guy may not even let you buy.

If there was any reason to believe that Roy actually cared about making health insurance more accessible, this would be profoundly embarrassing for him. But it is a profound embarrassment for all the Republicans touting Roy as some kind of health policy guru. Needless to say, Roy’s transparently idiotic argument was immediately touted by fellow alleged reform intellectual Yual Levin.

…Cohn has much more.

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