President Obama has nominated five people to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Two are Republicans. All are waiting for confirmation by the Senate. Let your Senators know these nominees should be confirmed so the NLRB can get back to work.

What Is The NLRB?

The NLRB is the agency that “safeguards employees’ rights to organize and to determine whether to have unions as their bargaining representative. The agency also acts to prevent and remedy unfair labor practices committed by private sector employers and unions.”

The NLRB supervises elections to form or decertify unions in the workplace. It investigates charges that employees, unions or employers violated rules over labor practices and rules on the charges. It works to get problems resolved rather than taken to court. And finally, when the NLRB has issued a ruling that is ignored it can take the parties to court.

But if the NLRB is prevented from operating there is no one to make sure that the rules for labor practices are being enforced. This hurts workers and companies.

Background Of The Nomination Battle

Individual workers have little power when up against giant corporations. They can ask for better pay, benefits and working conditions, please, and the giant companies can just say, “you’re fired” if they do — and working people know that. However, when the employees all band together it gives them collective power. It’s the old story of how a person can break a single stick, but when all the sticks are bundled together the person is not able to break them. Banding together the workers have the power to get better wages, benefits and working conditions.

The other side of this is that big companies can make a lot of money if they can keep their workers from organizing unions. So they use their money and power to try to stop workers from organizing unions.

Because the economy does better when people have better wages, benefits and working conditions, and because strikes and lawsuits can plug things up, it is the law that workers have the right to form unions and bargain collectively to balance out the immense power of the giant corporations.

This is why the NLRB battle matters. For years elected officials allied with anti-union businesses worked to block the NLRB from operating, so that workers are not able to form unions and existing unions are not able to enforce labor rules. At the same time these elected officials worked to get anti-union judges into the courts and block impartial judges from being confirmed. This enabled the giant companies to make more money — and working people less money. (Meanwhile as wages dropped nationally the economy slowed and slowed.)

A strategy unfolded, in which big companies would put up money to elect anti-union candidates. Then these anti-union elected officials blocked nominees to the NLRB and filled the courts up with anti-union judges. Senator Lindsay Graham, for example, has vowed to block all nominees to the NLRB, saying “the NLRB as inoperable could be considered progress.”

Over time this strategy meant that there were too few people confirmed to sit on the NLRB, and too many anti-union judges in the courts.

Timeline

After President Obama took office anti-union Senators rolled out a strategy of blocking confirmation of any appointees to the NLRB to keep the agency from having a quorum so it could not operate.

In 2010 the anti-union judges on the Supreme Court ruled that the NLRB could not issue rulings without at least three confirmed members.

Anti-union Senators continued to block confirmations to the NLRB.

In January, 2012 President Obama made recess appointments to the NLRB to enable it to operate again.

In January, 2013 anti-union judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) were unconstitutional.

Today’s Situation

Anti-union companies are refusing to comply with NLRB rules by allowing union elections or bargaining with unionized employees, thereby making money by keeping wages low. More than 85 companies are now challenging NLRB rulings that went against them, claiming the rulings shouldn’t count — even though they were found to have violated labor practices.

The result is that the rights of American workers to organize unions and bargain for better pay, benefits and working conditions are unprotected, and the big companies are taking advantage of this. Wages are stagnant and benefits are disappearing. Obviously the economy does better when people are paid better and have better working conditions, so this is also holding the economy back.

What Next?

Next week on May 16 a Senate committee will hold a hearing on the nominees to the NLRB. Anti-union senators are expected to try to block the nominations because a lot of money for the giant corporations rides on keeping the NLRB from operating.

Then the full Senate will consider the nominees.

What is needed now is for people to contact their Senators and let them know they need to confirm all of these nominees, Democratic and Republican alike, so the NLRB can get back to work.

—–

Follow me and CAF on Twitter:

In case you’re wondering where the Bush apologists on your TV today are getting their bizarroworld opinions about Bush being the most awesomest president in the whole wide world, Politico conveniently published the official talking points:

Strengthened K-12 education, which resulted in dramatic improvement of math and reading scores across the board and narrowed the achievement gap between white and minority students.

Injected consumer and competitive forces into the healthcare system, imposing more discipline and lowering cost while improving quality.

Increased the involvement of faith-based and community organizations in the delivery of social services, improving efficiency and effectiveness.

Strengthened the border and fought for rational updates to America’s immigration system, laying the foundation for future reform.

Proposed strengthening Social Security for future retirees by allowing younger workers to put some payroll taxes into personal retirement accounts and by changing the benefit formula so that those who depend on the program the most would see their benefits rise over time more quickly than wealthier Americans.

President Bush made tough decisions that kept Americans safe after 9/11

Combated terror and tyranny by standing for freedom abroad and removing threatening regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Ensured that the next president had every tool and capability available to protect the United States.

Merged more than 20 federal agencies to create the Department of Homeland Security.

Worked with Congress to pass the USA PATRIOT ACT and other measures to update American intelligence capabilities, many of which continue to be used today in the war on terror.

Established a Director of National Intelligence and tore down the wall between law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Transformed the FBI’s focus from investigating events to preventing and stopping acts of terrorism.

Dismantled al-Qaeda by removing it from its safe haven and decimating its key leadership.

Persuaded Libya to disclose and dismantle WMD program and renounce terrorism.

Broke up A.Q. Khan network, which was selling nuclear enrichment capability to rogue states.

Used speeches, executive orders, public statements, and day-to-day leadership to keep the federal government focused on the threat of terrorism. This focus ensured that the federal government, at all levels, took all the steps it could within the law to keep America safe.

President Bush promoted freedom abroad

As President Bush said, “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.” The idea of freedom is essential to keeping the United States safe and we reduce the risk of terrorism when extreme poverty and hopelessness are confronted head on

Fundamentally changed American foreign policy in the Middle East by refusing to pursue stability at the expense of democracy, and instead agitating for more democracy everywhere.

Doubled foreign assistance worldwide, while holding governments that accept U.S. assistance accountable for making democratic and economic reforms to increase transparency, strengthen their economies, improve the lives of their citizens, and ultimately decrease their dependence on aid.

Fought AIDS, malaria and other globally neglected diseases by providing life saving treatment for 2 million people and care for 10 million people, including more than 4 million orphans and vulnerable children.

Promoted international partnerships with India, Brazil, Mexico and Central America, to enhance global security and increased the number of countries partnering with the United States on Free TradeAgreements (FTAs) from three to 17.

President Bush created the conditions for private sector growth and rescued the financial system from the worst crisis since the Great Depression

President Bush believes that economic growth comes from the private sector, with firms competing to create new innovations and wealth in a free market. Government’s role is to set the rules for workers and firms rather than substitute for private efforts.

In his first year in office, President Bush responded to the recession created by the collapse of the tech bubble with a mix of economic reforms that included tax cuts for all Americans. In 2003, President Bush signed into law another round of tax cuts. What followed was more than four years of strong economic growth and strong employment.

President Bush’s policies rescued the financial system from the worst crisis since the Great Depression, provided tax relief for all Americans, submitted budgets that reduced and reigned in discretionary spending, and advanced the nation’s energy security.

No really. The put this out and have people using it on the TV today. And cable news gasbags are kind of into it. (makes ‘em feel young I guess.) They are even spewing this bilge with straight faces.

Oh hey, did I forget the last page?

President Bush presided over both a catastrophic terrorist attack and a catastrophic financial crisis. He bungled the response to both of them.

He also invaded a country that hadn’t attacked us and tried to legalize torture and indefinite detention.

He left office the most unpopular president in history.

Oh, and here’s Condoleeza Rice, torture apologist, throwing away what’s left of her reputation once and for all:

Not sidestepping controversy, Condoleezza Rice will defend the Bush administration’s enhanced interrogation and rendition program at the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum on Thursday.

The remarks will appear in a five-minute video presentation, which was obtained by Foreign Policy in advance of the dedication. In the clip, Rice emphasizes Bush’s deep commitment to civil liberties and national security while making “difficult decisions” following the Sept. 11 terror attacks. She also claims the interrogation program prevented future attacks on the homeland.

“The president asked two very important questions in the decision to use these techniques,” says Rice of her former boss’s interrogation program. “He asked the CIA if it was necessary and he asked the Justice Department if it was legal. Both departments answered yes.”

“Only when he was satisfied that we could protect both our liberties and our security did he signal that we could go ahead,” says the former secretary of state. “The fact that we have not had a successful attack on our territory traces directly to those difficult decisions.” A portion of the clip appears below:

I went to the old Nixon library that was run by a bunch of weirdo loyalists.  (It’s changed hands in recent years .) But I don’t think I saw anything in it that compared to the brazen bullshit in that clip.

Update: Here’s a great story about that Nixon library changeover.

Watch this opening from today’s All-In With Chris Hayes. Seriously, you might even tear up like I did.

I’m talking about his opening monologue about the Thursday fast-food strike in NY, and what this means. At about 1 minute into this clip he talks about why this event is remarkable, and what he says is remarkable.

Go here until I can get the video working http://video.msnbc.msn.com/all-in-/51435760

Chris talks about how people are terrified of losing their job, but here they are having had enough of it to just rick everything by organizing like this. It’s a miracle.

Chris’ words:

“All successful social movements are built – and all social progress is built out out of multitudes of tiny miracles just like the one we saw today in New York City. A single person, an accretion of people, a union of thousands or millions who decide against the odds, against great rick, with no protection, to do something courageous. To speak up for their dignity. To proclaim themselves fully human. That is what the striking fast-food workers did today.”

There was some coverage of today’s action:

LA Times, Fast-food workers again protest for higher wages

NY Times, Fast-Food Workers Plan Second Strike for More Pay

The Guardian, Hundreds of New York fast food workers go on strike over pay,

Hundreds of fast food industry workers in New York went on strike on Thursday in the largest such action to ever hit the notoriously low-wage industry.

Organisers behind the protest predict that about 400 workers were walking out or staying away from their jobs across the city in a move aimed at impacting at least 70 restaurants from big chains like McDonalds, Wendy’s, KFC, Burger King and Domino’s Pizza.

The workers were calling for wages of $15 an hour and the right to organise without the threat of retaliation or intimidation. It follows a previous protest in New York last November when 200 workers went on strike.

At a rally outside a Domino’s Pizza in Brooklyn, a group of about 30 workers and supporters held signs saying “We deserve better pay” and chanted slogans saying the minimum wage level of $7.25 was not enough to live on. Gregory Reynoso, 26, stood in front of the restaurant – where he works – and said it was hard to make ends meet on such low pay.

“It is impossible. I have a child and I have a wife. For us, it is impossible to survive. We deserve more for working hard,” he said.

Related: 40% Of Americans Now Make Less Than 1968 Minimum Wage

–

Follow me and CAF on Twitter:

David Ignatius wrote his Iraq mea culpa today and it’s a good one. He admits that Iraq was an epic strategic blunder and that he was wrong to have been such an enthusiastic cheerleader for it. But in chronicling his mistakes, I find this one to be almost shocking coming from a sophisticated man of the world:

Another lesson is the importance of dignity in the Arab world. Most Iraqis despised Saddam because, in addition to torturing their sons and daughters, he had taken their dignity. But many came to loathe America, as well, because for all our talk of democracy, we damaged their sense of honor and independence. As the Arab world proves over and over, from Palestine to Benghazi, people who are penniless in terms of material possessions would rather die than lose their sense of honor to outsiders.

Right. That’s unique to the Arab world. Imagine, if you will, how even a rich country would feel if someone crashed airplanes into their biggest city and killed thousands of their people? I’d expect they would be quite incensed.  It turns out that poor people, just like rich people, don’t care for it when strangers come in and start killing their families and taking everything they have. It doesn’t take a political genius or a psychologist to know that.

What Ignatius leaves out is that the Very Serious People not only believed that the Iraqis would greet them as liberators, they also assumed they were some kind of primitives.  They even consulted the “experts”:

Saturday, June 12, 2004

Bad Books For Stupid People

This business of using dogs to torture Iraqi prisoners actually is more depraved than is obvious, if you can believe that.

We know that big tough American guys like Trent Lott wouldn’t piss all over themselves if they were tied up naked while a 150 lb snarling German Shepard was allowed to back them into a corner and take a piece out of their flesh. They don’t have a problem with dogs like those arabs do.

This is but another example of the crude, stereotypical approach we seem to have taken toward the Iraqis (and undoubtedly the Afghans, as well.) And it is likely because the “intellectuals” who planned and implemented the war don’t have a clue.

Sy Hersh mentioned in his May 24th article in the New Yorker one of the many possible reasons why:

“The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was “The Arab Mind,” a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996.

The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. “The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world,” Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, “or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private.”

The Patai book, an academic told me, was “the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.” In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged—“one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.”

You might as well read a ZOG comic on mudpeople as read this for any true understanding. The passages on sex could have been written during Queen Victoria’s reign which is, indeed, the period from which many silly, crude stereotypes about Arabs and sex really got off the ground. (The funny thing is that Patai’s book portrays middle eastern culture as being rigidly sexually repressed when during Victoria’s time they were reviled for being scandalously oversexed. It seems that no matter what, westerners believe the Middle East is all fucked up when it comes to sex. Unlike we Americans, of course, who define healthy sexuality.)

So, a bunch of second rate minds read a third rate book about people they know nothing about except what they’ve seen at parties where Ahmad Chalabi is holding court, and they fashion a torture regime based upon a ridiculous thesis that arabs (unlike Western he-men apparently, which is interesting in itself) are particularly uncomfortable with being herded around naked, forced to pretend to masturbate in front of women and piling themselves up in naked pyramids, among other sexually charged, homoerotic acts.

It’s always interesting to see people’s innermost fears and insecurities projected on to another isn’t it? These neocons have some serious issues.

One of the most fatuous aspects of the Iraq war was the supporters’ insistence that the US was doing something uniquely benevolent by invading and killing people in that country.  And even more absurd, that they would love us for it.  Let’s face it, the throwbacks weren’t in Iraq.  They were here.  That anachronistic belief in “White Man’s Burden”got a lot of people killed for nothing.

It turns out that human beings are all pretty much the same when it comes to being humiliated, dominated and killed by strangers. They don’t like it. Who knew?

The next time your Republican representative says they support the troops, laugh and call them a liar because they obviously don’t care enough to make sure the men and women in the military will be able to afford college.

Due to the sequester many branches of the military have cut the tuition assistance program that helps thousands of troops pay for higher education. As I’ve said before, there need to be serious cuts to the Pentagon’s budget, but they should never come from programs that help our troops better support themselves and their families.

A friend of mine in the U.S. Marine Corps recently texted me a meme that said, “Congress gets a raise and sequestration hits our tuition assistance, F*** us right?” This sentiment is understandable, as this will be far-reaching and could affect as many as 300,000 enlisted members while only saving $600 million. This will put the squeeze on a lot of military personnel who are attending college, especially when the average in-state cost for public school is nearing $20,000 per year. With a large number of troops making under $30,000 a year a sudden loss of tuition assistance will put a greater burden on students.

This is not a good thing for enlisted members of the military or our country. Weighing troops and veterans down with extra debt further disadvantages a group that is already at increased risk for homelessness and unemployment. Increasing the financial strain on soldiers and their families shows what the right’s sequester and cuts not growth agenda is all about: forcing austerity on vulnerable groups and public servants, while protecting the payouts to corporations and the 1% — who in this case happen to be military contractors.

The best way to fix the issue is to repeal the sequester. If you want to support our troops against harmful cuts, tell your member of Congress to vote for H.R.900 to repeal the sequester.

If the sequester is not repealed, there are much better places to make cuts, without harming military employees who are most vulnerable to austerity, while still cutting down on wasteful spending that supports the military-industrial complex. Those cuts could start with programs like the parasitic F-35 program. Cutting the F-35 could save $46 billion this fiscal year. This cut alone could spare troops from major cuts to their tuition assistance.

If you’re a big fan of the Air Force there’s still plenty of other places to cut. For example, the Stimson Center has shown that upkeep of our military arsenal costs $31 billion per year. There is also a $10 billion dollar project to modernize the B61 gravity bombs. Cutting the tactical submarine fleet down to 40 (it would still be the one of largest in the world) by 2020 would save $32 billion over 10 years. Cutting any of these projects would ensure corporations that profit from this wasteful spending bear the brunt of the cuts, and not the troops.

So why hasn’t the right agreed to cuts that would allow us to really support the troops? Because that would mean that Lockheed Martin and others would lose some profitable corporate handouts and the right would lose some political donations.So why actually support the troops when you can support the multi-billion dollar corporations that donate to your campaign? The cuts hitting the troops the hardest and mainstream GOP refusal to reevaluate the sequester shows that the Republicans don’t care who the cuts hurt as long as it’s not their corporate friends.

As the US kicked off the Iraq War on the evening of March 19, 2003, with the infamous “shock and awe” bombardment of Baghdad, I huddled into a small high school classroom for an antiwar gathering organized by several faculty members. Little did I know at the time that, ten years later, the Iraq War would prove a defining moment in the development of my worldview.

Iraq War, 10 Years Later

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

I spoke about my experience on Take Action News with David Shuster last Saturday. Subscribe to YouTube.com/takeactionnewstv for free clips in your inbox.

I was a sophomore at The Ramaz School in Manhattan. Lo and behold, enough students were either against the war or sufficiently curious that the classroom where the teach-in had been scheduled was way too small for the turnout. It was packed to the point where people could barely get in the door. Kids were sitting on desks, standing, sliding in wherever they could. A large white sheet with a crudely painted black peace sign was draped over the blackboard. Faculty members made varying arguments against the war and answered students’ questions.

My history teacher, Dr. Jon Jucovy, made the strongest case against Iraq that I’d heard so far. He identified each of the claims being made about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction–nuclear weapons; chemical and biological weapons; and ties to Al Qaeda–and shot them down. One claim that stood out because of how quickly it had been debunked, but continued to be used by the Bush Administration, was that Iraq had purchased large amounts of “yellow cake” Uranium from Niger with which to make nuclear weapons. It had been clear since March 2002 that those purchases hadn’t taken place, Jucovy explained. In fact, the State Department and the International Atomic Energy Agency had flagged the document that was purported to record the sale as a forgery in early January 2003.

It didn’t take long to find out that Jucovy–like so many other skeptics–was right. There were no weapons of mass destruction.

Given the tragic consequences of the Iraq War, ten years later, however, there is no satisfaction in the knowledge that we were right before some other people. As Jucovy told us on the eve of the war, “I hope I’m wrong. I really hope they find weapons of mass destruction there.”

My personal experience and that of many of my peers, though, may offer lessons for avoiding other destructive policies that enjoy similarly unquestioned reverence among the political and media elite.

The Iraq War marked the end of our political innocence. It was our generation’s Watergate scandal. It instilled in us distrust in all institutions, but especially the government and the media. It taught us to question conventional wisdom even when it means enduring ridicule; to appreciate the overriding tendency of powerful people to abuse their power; and to accept that our institutions often reward failure and malice, while punishing excellence and goodness.

Questioning consensus. Conventional wisdom develops very easily, especially when people are afraid that questioning it will make them seem unpatriotic. Despite my doubts, I initially felt very uncomfortable opposing the war because everybody seemed to think it was such a good idea. My parents, many friends, and several liberals who I admired at the time, like Tom Friedman and Tony Blair, supported it.

Being marginalized taught us how to build our own communities. Experiences of solidarity with fellow dissenters like the teach-in I attended provided me and other opponents of the war with a very powerful countervailing force. So did alternative sources of information and a handful of personal mentors. Many of the tools we used to unite against the Iraq War–blogs, social media–and groups we became active in, such as MoveOn.org, continue to be important vehicles for political awareness and activism on a broad array of progressive issues where our positions may contradict conventional wisdom.

There is no greater validator though than the passing of time. If we felt nervous and alone in our opposition to the war in 2003, by the following year, we had learned the value of sticking to our guns. Not every issue pans out so quickly or clearly. And of course we are not always right. But the collective experience of liberals on the eve of the Iraq War should at least give us the confidence we need not to discard our ideas merely because they are unpopular in a given moment.

Appreciating the full potential for abuse of power. For some time, I had trouble believing there wasn’t at least some significant national security justification for–or benefit from–the war. I couldn’t believe they would send people to their deaths based on complete fabrications.

Discovering how absurd the WMD claims shattered those doubts. If Bush and his surrogates could baldly lie about something like the much-vaunted “yellow cake,” and out a CIA agent whose husband discredited their claims, then, I thought, perhaps our leaders really were capable of the worst. (We later found out that the outed CIA agent, Valerie Plame Wilson, was involved in tracking the “proliferation of nuclear weapons materials into Iran,” which meant that when her cover was blown, it hindered our ability to keep track of Iran’s nuclear plans.) I began to accept the possibility that the entire case for war could be not only dubious, but a deliberately perpetrated sham.

Getting over the initial shock of the Iraq War lies empowered us to acknowledge equally outrageous violations of public trust that we might otherwise not have seen, as well as more mundane deceptions that allow politicians to escape accountability.

Accepting that bad guys and good guys often don’t get what they deserve. The aftermath of the Iraq War has undermined our confidence in our system’s ability to reward excellence and punish failure. Many of the war’s most right-wing proponents continue to enjoy power and credibility–eg, Bill Kristol, Lindsay Graham and John McCain.

John Kerry, who is now Secretary of State, did not apologize for voting for the war when he was the Democratic nominee for President in 2004. Instead, Kerry offered the disingenuous excuse that his vote was based on assurances from President Bush that Bush was going to exhaust diplomatic channels before invading, but then Bush “went back on his word” to Kerry. That Kerry’s binding vote to authorize force was based on a verbal assurance from President Bush was apparently supposed to bolster Kerry’s credibility.

Worse still, we fall for new idiotic dogmas peddled by the same discredited warmongers. When liberal war cheerleaders like Tom Friedman insist that cutting Social Security and Medicare is as urgent as they once thought invading Iraq was, Beltway elites still take them seriously.

Even the adjectives Friedman uses in describing the indispensability of the Grand Bargain tracks directly with his language advocating the Iraq War. Friedman in the New York Times, September 2011 (emphasis mine):

I’ve been arguing that the only antidote to this debilitating situation is a Grand Bargain between the two parties — one that cuts long-term entitlement spending and raises additional tax revenues…

Friedman on Charlie Rose, May 2003 (emphasis mine):

And there was only one way to do it…What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying, ‘Which part of this sentence don’t you understand…Well, suck on this.’

The common denominator in both situations is that Friedman’s preferred idea is the only effective option.

And all of this has happened while the memory of the Iraq War is still fresh. Our memories will get worse as time passes, and then perhaps our pre-war naïveté will creep back in. After all, three decades after our parents’ generation lived through the Vietnam War, they fell for the lies that sent us to war with Iraq.

Let’s play: Pretend A Democrat Said That.

From CNN, here’s Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn claiming the sequester won’t hurt the military:

Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said he plans to make the case to other Republicans and the public that despite warnings from the Pentagon that the mandated cuts will be devastating, the overall amount of defense spending will actually still rise.

Cornyn conceded that until now he had been parroting what Defense Secretary Leon Panetta continuously warns — that automatic, government-wide cuts could jeopardize national security.

But the veteran senator said he looked into it and will now argue that even if the cuts go through on March 1, the Pentagon will still see its budget go up…

To be sure, Cornyn called himself a defense “hawk” and did say the role of the federal government should be first and foremost to protect American citizens.

But he also believes that the deficit should be paramount since the United States has ended its fighting in Iraq and is winding down the war in Afghanistan.

He added that if “God forbid” another 9/11 happens, Congress would act.

In other words, Cornyn is saying:

1. I have completely flip-flopped from being against the sequester because it would military, to being for the sequester since it won’t hurt the military.

2. If I am wrong, and a weakened military allows another 9/11 to happen, don’t worry, we can pass some legislation then.

How many minutes would it take for Fox News to destroy a Democratic politician for saying the exact same thing?

Of course, there’s no need for us to use Fox-style McCarthyite tactics in response to Cornyn. We can all acknowledge Cornyn doesn’t really want a 9/11 to happen or believe his actions would allow it to happen.

But the glib comment shows how quickly Cornyn and other Republicans have abandoned the “strong military” plank of their core platform, even if it means ignoring the facts.

Cornyn is flat wrong: the sequester will cut the overall military budget in inflation-adjusted terms, as the CBO graph below makes clear.

Granted, there is a fair debate to be had about how devastating those cuts will be.

As the New York Times editorial board and the Washington Post’s Walter Pincus recently reported, a Congressional Research Service memo outlines ways in the which the Pentagon will have some flexibility to carry out sequester cuts that will mitigate some of the worst-case scenarios.

But it’s ludicrous the suggest there will no impact at all.

The CRS memo outlines ways to “soften” the sequester blow, but it doesn’t argue all consequence can be avoided. As Pincus summarized:

Overall, [CRS' Amy] Belasco suggested that the Pentagon can limit “cuts to readiness-related O&M [Operations and Maintenance] operating forces to 10 percent to 12 percent, about half the level that the Joint Chiefs warned would be dangerous in its January letter to Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.”

Her analysis is based on Defense implementing a hiring freeze, furloughing civilian workers for 22 days over seven months, and cutting recruiting, administrative and servicewide base support, including contractors, which could reach 20 percent.

The CRS memo also notes that implementing those austere civilian workforce policies can have impact on soldiers in the field, affecting “the delivery of goods and services to military forces”, though it suggests being creative with the scheduling of furloughs could mitigate the impact.

However you interpret the numbers, reading the CRS memo makes one thing very clear: crude budget caps and across-the-board sequester cuts is no way to run a military, let alone a government.

Obviously, there is military waste to cut. But the meat ax of the sequester does not allow for the careful budgeting that would best target waste without risking military operations.

It is quite strange for a self-described “hawk” like Cornyn to suddenly turn glib about the prospect of abrupt, ham-fisted military cuts.

This is someone who in 2007 criticized proposals to put conditions on Iraq war funding, saying “Congress should not be involved in micromanaging the day-to-day tactics of the military commanders on the ground. Our Constitution provides for a single commander in chief, not 535 chieftains.”

Yet now, with a Democratic President, with an opportunity to gut government with the sequester, Cornyn is willing to flip-flop on a dime, misstate the facts, let Congress meddle with sound military budgeting and risk military readiness.

It almost makes you think Republicans never really cared about the military at all. Because once the military ceased to be a useful political weapon for the Republicans, Republicans stopped being so protective of the military.

Dave Weigel has the definitive post today on the Hagel nomination cock-up. He points out that Hagel himself is the only real loser here:

He botched up his confirmation hearing, giving Republicans all kinds of reasons to oppose him. (In his “no” statement, Sen. Mark Kirk, who was never undecided on Hagel, continues to pretend that Hagel’s “elected” government of Iran gaffe was a window into his real thinking, as opposed to lazy verbiage.) He has to wait 12 days for the Senate to take up his nomination again. In that time, he has to endure more reports and rumors about his past speeches (nothing since “Jewish lobby” has damaged his chances so far), and he probably has to shut up, which seems difficult for him.

On the other hand, Weigel says Democrats get to portray Republicans as lunatics, which they seem to believe is going to benefit them hugely (rather than normalize lunatic behavior) while the White House gets to take credit for “hanging tough” on a nominee whose confirmation has never rally been in doubt. Win-win for them.

But holy smokes, look who’s perceived as winners on the other side:

Senate Republicans have humiliated the administration, yet again, three mere weeks after filibuster reform passed. Those Republicans who grew to dislike Hagel (i.e., most of them) have humbled him. The humbling of a nominee doesn’t usually stay active once the confirmation votes come in — ask Sam Alito or Clarence Thomas — but it’s empowering, and it’s pleased the Lobby Which Cannot Be Named. “The Emergency Committee for Israel salutes the Senators who courageously voted today to prevent the rubber-stamping of Chuck Hagel as the next Secretary of Defense,” said Bill Kristol in a post-vote statement. Which brings me to…

The Anti-Hagelians. The scrappy, outnumbered troika of the Washington Free Beacon, Breitbart.com, and Jennifer Rubin have enabled a historic filibuster of a media darling. Rubin, who was given first crack at Ted Cruz’s letter asking for a longer Hagel debate, was proven right — Republicans Luntzified their language and claimed that they could delay Hagel without actually filibustering him.

Breitbart.com, Free Beacon and Jennifer Rubin have been empowered by this nonsense? Ok. If that’s true then I am more convinced than ever that too many progressives’ facile assumption (again) that the conservative movement is dead in the water is wrong. Filibustering a cabinet nominee to make a point is a bold exercise of political muscle, breaking with tradition and defying the agreement Reid made with the Republicans. They ain’t done yet. And they’ve got a new generation of wingnuts to help them do it.

Poor Krugman.  He must be tired of trying to make people understand that austerity is the wrong prescription for the economy.  But he soldiers on.  Thank God.  This week he takes on the situational Keynesians of the GOP who are now crying about the ill economic effects of ending taxpayer support for the nice white engineers in the defense industry:

Even Republicans admit, albeit selectively, that spending cuts hurt employment. Thus John McCain warned earlier this week that the defense cuts scheduled to happen under the budget sequester would cause the loss of a million jobs. It’s true that Republicans often seem to believe in “weaponized Keynesianism,” a doctrine under which military spending, and only military spending, creates jobs. But that is, of course, nonsense. By talking about job losses from defense cuts, the G.O.P. has already conceded the principle of the thing.

Still, won’t spending cuts (or tax increases) cost jobs whenever they take place, so we might as well bite the bullet now? The answer is no — given the state of our economy, this is a uniquely bad time for austerity.

One way to see this is to compare today’s economic situation with the environment prevailing during an earlier round of defense cuts: the big winding down of military spending in the late 1980s and early 1990s, following the end of the cold war. Those spending cuts destroyed jobs, too, with especially severe consequences in places like southern California that relied heavily on defense contracts. At the national level, however, the effects were softened by monetary policy: the Federal Reserve cut interest rates more or less in tandem with the spending cuts, helping to boost private spending and minimize the overall adverse effect.

Today, by contrast, we’re still living in the aftermath of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and the Fed, in its effort to fight the slump, has already cut interest rates as far as it can — basically to zero. So the Fed can’t blunt the job-destroying effects of spending cuts, which would hit with full force.

The point, again, is that now is very much not the time to act; fiscal austerity should wait until the economy has recovered, and the Fed can once again cushion the impact.

But aren’t we facing a fiscal crisis? No, not at all. The federal government can borrow more cheaply than at almost any point in history, and medium-term forecasts, like the 10-year projections released Tuesday by the Congressional Budget Office, are distinctly not alarming. Yes, there’s a long-term fiscal problem, but it’s not urgent that we resolve that long-term problem right now. The alleged fiscal crisis exists only in the minds of Beltway insiders.

I know it seems obvious to people who read Paul Krugman. But the powers that be are still determined to take this opportunity to once again declare “the era of big government is over.” But according to Dave Weigel, they’re getting clever about how they plan to deal with these defense cuts:

[D]e-coupling the cuts from taxes put Republicans back where they were in December, when they passed a “sequestration replacement” bill that replaced all the defense savings with entitlement cuts. So you’re already hearing Republicans talk about ways to delay or alter the cuts, again. I’ve heard a number of current members make the point made here by the Ghost of Past Republican Failure.

Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader, who was meeting with a few of his former colleagues on Wednesday at the Capitol, says Boehner’s playbook is “sharp,” since defense spending “can always be replaced during the appropriations process, after the cuts are put into place.”

Yes. If the sequestration happens, it’s only a mere four weeks until Republicans have to pass a continuing resolution to fund the government. They can move the money around again. That takes another cannonball out of the cannon.

Another one is being whisked away right now by Sen. Kelly Ayotte and Rep. Buck McKeon, who are schlepping the Down Payment to Protect National Security Act of 2013. It would replace the first year of defense cuts with austerity hiring freezes.

Weigel says this has deficit hawks in the GOP seeing red — of course. They play their role in this drama very well.

So, we have the president representing his patented balanced approach of chump change in exchange for big spending cuts to everything but defense, the hawks demanding a complete dismantling of government and the GOP leadership pushing some kind of plan to preserve defense spending by either staging a theatrical showdown and then putting the defense spending back in the budget or delaying cuts for a year with another 10% reduction in the entire federal workforce. (Or something else.) I’m going to take a wild guess that none of those plans will be good for the economy although the president’s insistence on putting “entitlements” on the menu means his plan is more likely to cause more of the pain in the future.

Who knows what they’re really going to end up with. But if those sequester defense cuts stick I’ll be very, very surprised. I don’t know how much people remember of the last round of base closings but it didn’t just cause an economic upheaval — it was a political nightmare. And we were in a period of peace and prosperity at the time. It’s tempting to think that the Democrats are now the hawks and the right wing is so obsessed with spending that they’re willing to slash military spending, but I think that’s a pipe dream. The Democrats with contractors and bases in their districts have always been for military spending — and the chance that a majority of the GOP agrees to cut the military is nil. Whether they will agree to pretend to cut the military in the short run (as Tom Delay suggests) is another question.

I am on the record saying that Hagel never seemed like the brightest bulb to me but I deferred to those who insisted that he’s really quite brilliant.  I dunno.  What I saw today didn’t exactly make me change my mind, even as I have to acknowledge that the Senators questioning him today sounded more like screeching harpies than serious statesmen. I just have the feeling old Chuck didn’t exactly prepare himself for a thoroughly predictable grilling. Or he just doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

I’m sure this has a lot to do with the fact that he’s seen as soft on Iran and hostile to Israel.  But I also think some of this is just the way the Republicans deal with apostates.  Hagel broke with the party in favor of the Democrats and that. is. simply. not. done. They are making an example of him.

I don’t know if they just want to beat him up and then let him in with a few GOP votes or if they will really tank this nomination.  Either way, Hagel didn’t do very well today.  If his performance is important (and I’m not sure it is) he didn’t do himself any favors.