What happens when you privatize a major piece of public infrastructure and  shovel piles of money to unelected and unaccountable figures in the private sector? Pro-Publica has the answer,

Bin Laden is dead, but Ben Laden lives on. I caught up with one, Benjamin “Ben” Laden, Pennsylvanian, bandleader, and all around good guy, to talk about the ten years he spent sharing a name with the world’s most reviled terrorist. In our first email correspondence, Ben Laden said it’s been, “an interesting ride since 9/11,” but he imagines this will be the, “last hurrah.” Laden has taken the coincidence in good humor, but in many ways these have been trying years filled with absurd, disturbing, and Kafka-esque difficulties for a man whose only crime is to have been born with an unlucky name. -Adam Wilson

Do you go by Benjamin, or Ben Laden? Benny Laden? Did you ever consider changing your name?

When I was little I was called Jamey, taken from the last few letters of Benjamin. In 2^nd grade my parents told me they wanted to call me Jamey when I was a baby but now that I was a ‘big boy’ I could try changing to a more grownup-sounding variation of the name. They suggested ‘Benji’. That sounded as childish as Jamey to me. So I went with Ben.

In the 90’s I formed my band called Benny and The Vildachayas. Since then a number of people have started calling me Benny, and I sometimes use it when writing to someone about the band or music. 

You seem to have taken this bizarre coincidence with good humor. Has that been hard to come by? Have there been some difficult moments?

In 2001, I was working at a job that had me on airplanes almost every week. I was shocked that during the period when there were armed soldiers in the terminals, I was not stopped a single time going through security. It was almost to the point where I wanted to go up to them and say, “Do you realize who you just let through security?”

I took my family on a trip to Disneyworld in December 2001. We had to catch a very early flight and arrived at the airport with what is usually the normal amount of time required to get through security. This time I got stopped when I tried to get our boarding passes.  There was a security block on my ticket. Nobody at the airport knew what to do about it. I was with my four kids, my wife. We were going to miss the flight. They took my identification and disappeared with it for about 20 minutes. Nobody would tell me what was happening. We did catch the flight in the nick of time.

Right after 911 I received many crank calls to my home. Most were obviously people fooling around, and I fooled around right back at them. I’d say stuff like, “Do you really think it is wise to make crank calls to a terrorist?” But there were several calls that were scary and threatening, including one threatening to fire bomb my house at a certain day and time. I called the police and told them what was happening. They would not take me seriously. I pleaded for them to have a cruiser in front of my house at the specified time. They laughed me off. No police ever came. I kept my family in the back of the house away from the windows in that night.

At that time the FBI had solicited anyone getting harassed over having an Arab-sounding name to contact them. I called the FBI office in Philly to tell them about the threats I was receiving. I could not get the guy on the phone to believe that I wasn’t another FBI agent pulling a practical joke. He just would not take my call seriously fearing some other agents were just waiting to laugh at him. That was pretty frustrating.

What was your first reaction after 9/11, when you found out that the mastermind terrorist shared a variation of your name? What was your initial emotional response? Has that changed over the past ten years?

I knew about Bin Laden before most Americans. When I did the rather vain act of putting my name in an Internet search engine, a bunch of stuff about a music festival I organized and my bands came up at the top of the list. About halfway down the page were some links about Bin Laden who at that point was called an International Weapons Dealer.  When 9/11 happened, that all changed. Now if you Google “Ben Laden” you won’t find my information because it’s all Osama. However I did wonder if Osama ever Googled his name and saw all the stuff about my music. If so, he never called to book us for a gig.

During the first weeks many reporters as well as Rumsfeld were calling him Ben Laden,  pronounced exactly as I pronounce my name with a long “A” in Laden,  not Bin Laden with a short “A,” which became the standard pronunciation of his name a little later on. It was very weird to hear all these people saying my name, in such a negative connotation. I knew it wasn’t gonna be good. I wondered how many Adolph Hitlers there must have been who went through a similar experience. I recalled an old colleague whose last name was “Hettler”and realized they probably changed it from Hitler.

Were your parents concerned?  Was it awkward making dinner reservations?

Everyone in my family got some razzing for having the last name “Laden.” But they all easily deflected it by saying, ‘You think that’s bad, you should meet my son, his name is friggin’ Ben Laden.’

I don’t make reservations…I just show up and say, “Table for Ben Laden, please.” People scurry.

I assume it’s been difficult to get through airport security. What’s that experience been like? Any interesting anecdotes?

At the one year anniversary of 911 the TSA stepped up security and all of a sudden I was being stopped every time I needed to get on a plane. Once I knew what to expect I used it to my advantage. If there were long lines at the ticket counters, I just walked right up to the counter and said to whoever was working there, “I need to see a manager, I am Bin Laden” (Intentionally using the wrong pronunciation of my name). There’d be a flurry of activity, a manager would appear from the back office, I’d show my ID and tell them we would need to override the stop on my ticket. They had to call the FBI, who did some magical thing in the background that allowed me to get on the plane. And I didn’t wait in the line…Ha!

Could you talk us through the general experience of spending the last ten years as Ben Laden? Highs? Lows?

Until 2007, my job involved traveling all over to teach classes to adults. I had to introduce myself to a new group of students each week. I started using Benjamin instead of Ben more often. I stopped putting my name as a return address on mail and started using my initials instead. I went through the Internet and changed every reference to me that I could find from Ben Laden to Benjamin Laden.

A few weeks after 9/11, I got calls from several news stations. I was a Howard Stern fan and gave him the first interview. He asked “Are Arabs calling you and asking what they’re supposed to do next?” He suggested I should change my name. “No good can come from being named Ben Laden,” he said.

I did a phone interview for Fox News and asked them to send me a copy. When a video was sent to me I was dismayed to see that throughout the phone interview they showed footage of the real Osama. It was those jerks on the Fox News show in the morning. The one guy ended by saying something like, “Well I guess this is your 15 minutes of fame.” I responded, “Maybe, and hopefully one day you’ll get yours.” Touché!

I was called by someone from the David Letterman show about reading the top 10 list. I agreed to do it but they called a few days later saying they realized there was no ‘joke’ there. After the initial “Really? Your name is Ben Laden?”-- there’s nowhere to go.

Has the name affected your career at all? You’re a pretty tough guy to Google, no?

I did try to think of a way to capitalize on this…maybe putting out a CD called ‘The Music of Ben Laden” or some such thing, but I never came up with a way this could lead to money in my pocket.

What was your reaction upon hearing that Bin Laden had been killed?

I was at home and was watching reruns of Sanford and Son and during a commercial flipped through the channels and saw they were speculating and that the President was due to speak.  In all honesty, I felt a sadness when I heard he was killed. It is a sadness that I feel about our human condition where we have to live with and even accept violence.  I knew his death would not lead to a safer world in the near term and really don’t know what it means in the long term.  What he did was awful.  But I can’t help but think of the parent who hits their child for hitting. Violence begets violence. I came up in a time where we thought we could change the world into a peaceful, just habitat for all living things. Accepting that it can’t be that way is not easy for me. I’ve also been dismayed at the chest thumping and cheering that took place. It is not something to cheer about, it isn’t like we won a ballgame.

You lead a Klezmer band. Do you feel that you’re balancing out the universe by spreading joyful music, sort of a yin to Bin Laden’s yang?

I play a lot of fun music. Besides Klezmer music, I’ve played in a Mardi Gras band called The Wild Bohemians for 27 years. I’ve played at many weddings and other fun-filled events. I like to make a fun time for others and in general reach peak moments of joy with the crowd I am entertaining.  That said, I have a lot of Ying, in me….but I also know I have my own more private Yang moments as well. We can look at people like Osama and ask what is wrong with them…or we can ask what is wrong with our human condition that allows people to develop such horrifying beliefs? I believe we can only really progress when we stop asking what is wrong with them, and start asking what is wrong with us, the us that includes both them and us. Why do we humans act in a violent way towards one another? What is in each of us that can cause one of us to do this?

What’s next for Ben Laden? Do you feel a sense of closure?

I do sense that the Bin Laden name fiasco has probably seen its last flurry of news stories — that is, until we hear someone has spotted Osama in Vegas.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOEpE7wOqBg

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxG7BtOyTLY

In his speech on Wednesday, the President closed the trap that he laid for Republicans in 2012.  It was, in terms of sheer gamesmanship, a master stroke. And, best of all, neither Representatives Paul Ryan, or Eric Cantor, nor any of the legion of dutiful GOP shock troops, nor any of the leading Republican Presidential candidates has any idea that they have been ensnared by Obama.

The trap was really sprung when Paul Ryan, through some combination of naivete and hubris, actually laid out his budget plan last week. I suppose we should applaud Ryan for his honesty – he wants to give hundreds of billions of dollars to the wealthiest Americans while slashing away at Medicare and Medicaid, and he makes no no attempt to hide his priorities.

These are the sorts of ideas that Republicans in years past didn’t talk about so explicitly – at least not in mixed company. Tax cuts for the rich were paired with middle-class cuts – thus hiding the out and out class warfare behind a polite facade. And in 2010 Congressional Republicans ran as the protectors of Medicare. But now it is 2011 and the mask has slipped from their face. Trying to ride the Tea Party tiger has led Congressional Republicans to put out there for all to see what their priorities are – handouts for the rich and a kick in the teeth for everyone else.

Conservative writer David Frum agrees that Republicans have given Obama exactly what he wanted,

Here’s a basic fact of American politics. The American people like Medicare. They are not so enthusiastic about tax cuts for the rich.

Those of us on the political right have different preferences. We believe that low rates for high earners accelerate economic growth. We believe that the cost of Medicare must be restrained. And I think we have a lot of good arguments on our side.

But we must never deceive ourselves: We are arguing for policies with a lot of political negatives attached to them. Which means we have to take some basic political precautions.

In the current Republican mood, however, precautions are for girlie-men. Republicans have succumbed to a strange mood of simultaneous euphoria and paranoia. Republicans have convinced themselves both that: (1) American freedom stands in imminent danger of disappearing into totalitarian night; and (2) that the vast majority of the great and good American people are yearning for a mighty rollback of big government, even at considerable personal sacrifice.

And so Republicans have united around Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) proposal that for the first time in modern conservative history explicitly joins a big tax cut for the rich to big cuts in health care spending for virtually everybody else.

The Ryan plan has presented an opportunity for Obama to debate openly with Republicans about our national priorities. There are now actual contrasting proposals to debate. On the one hand the President wants to raise taxes on the wealthy, trim the defense budget and protect Medicare and Medicaid. On the other hand Republicans want more tax cuts for the rich and the dismantling of two very popular programs (among the other burden shifting to the proles that are found in the Ryan plan).

Obama and every Democrat in the country relishes the opportunity to publicly debate these issues. The Obama plan is right on the economics and right on the politics.

And with the dearth of viable GOP Presidential candidates and the subsequent void that has been created, the Ryan plan has just boxed in every GOP candidate from now until November 2012. The candidates themselves will not get to define their positions on spending, taxes and social programs. Rather they will be asked to either endorse the Ryan plan, which will be wildly unpopular with the general public, or reject the Ryan plan, which will be wildly unpopular with the increasingly delusional GOP base.

If Republicans had merely waited for the President to go first they could have avoided this obvious trap. But their arrogance led them to over-reach and to put their wildly unpopular and transparently plutocratic vision out there for the whole nation to see.

Obama’s cabinet: who are the winners so far? Losers? Who do you hope will move up to a bigger job? Who do you hope will disappear and never be heard from again? Biggest disappointment? Biggest (positive) surprise?



While Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s plan to destroy the public employee unions in his state has garnered much national attention in the last week, his assault on unions is really just one part of his three-point plan to radically alter Wisconsin. Tim Fernholz of the National Journal looks deeper into the Governor’s budget proposal,

The bill includes a provision that would allow the state to sell or contract out the operation of heating and cooling power plants without a bidding process and without consulting the state’s independent utility regulator. Democratic legislators worried aloud that the process would attract abuse, and Jon Peacock, director of the Wisconsin Budget Project, called the no-bid approach a “red flag.”

The bill also employs “emergency” powers that would allow the governor’s appointed health secretary to redefine the foundations of the state’s Medicaid program, Badgercare, ranging from eligibility to premiums, with only passive legislative review. The attorney in the legislature’s nonpartisan reference bureau who prepared the bill warned that a court could invalidate the statute for violating separation of powers doctrine.

The legislation, the lawyer wrote in a “drafter’s note” about the bill, would allow the state Department of Health Services to “change any Medical Assistance law, for any reason, at any time, and potentially without notice or public hearing… in addition to eliminating notice and publication requirements, [the changes] would leave the emergency rules in effect without any requirement to make permanent rules and without any time limit.”

So Governor Walker hopes to destroy one of the only countervailing forces against corporate cronyism and advocates for public health. And then he’ll start throwing poor people off of Medicaid handing out no-bid contracts to well-connected companies. Like maybe to his friends the Koch brothers? I’m sure it is simply a coincidence that the Koch brothers have just opened a lobbying shop in Madison.

Here is Mike Konzcal on who and what are driving this assault on Medicaid,

From the CBPP: “[Walker's] bill would strip the legislature of practically all of its authority to set the guidelines for the program (known as BadgerCare), leaving the power to do so almost solely in the governor’s hands.”…

The Wisconsin Department of Health Services is currently being run by Heritage Senior Fellow Dennis Smith, who has been making his right-wing think tanker bones arguing that states should drop out of Medicaid, the long-time dream of the extreme right. It is telling that “Smith wouldn’t discuss Medicaid provisions in the upcoming budget bill” even though it’s all he’s been writing about for years.

Specifically, one of the last things he wrote had this talking point: “Congress and the Administration have enacted a sweeping overhaul of one-sixth of the American economy, dramatically expanding the scope of federal power….When governors and state legislators realize that they have been reduced to mere agents of and tax collectors for the federal government, bipartisan opposition from the states will be inevitable.”

This power grab by the Governor will be the beachhead for slashing medicaid rolls to record lows and planning the conservative opposition against health care reform more broadly.

Felix Salmon explores the privatization scheme,

The advantage of privatization in cases like the Chicago parking meters is that it removes the utility from political meddling — in that case, from local aldermen who would always agitate for parking rates well below the optimal level. (Relatedly, if you haven’t read it yet, go read Ed Glaeser’s Atlantic essay on the massive economic cost of urban zoning regulations.)

But in the case of Wisconsin-owned energy plants, such considerations don’t come into play. There’s no reason to believe that the private sector will run those plants in a way that is better for the public, and every reason to believe that they will run the plants in a way that is worse (ie, more expensive) for the public. If the state wants to cut such a deal in return for a one-time check, that check had better be enormous. And there’s absolutely no reason to believe that it will be.

Of course it won’t be. Scott Walker isn’t working in the public interest at all. His interest lies solely in advancing his rigid Gilded-age ideology and in funneling public monies and public property to his corporate benefactors. Ed from Gin and Tacos closes the circle on the Koch brothers influence here,

In case it isn’t clear where the naked cronyism comes in, remember which large, politically active private interest loves buying up power plants and already has considerable interests in Wisconsin. Then consider their demonstrated eagerness to help Mr. Walker get elected and bus in carpetbaggers to have a sad little pro-Mubarak style “rally” in his honor. There are dots to be connected here, but doing so might not be in the public interest.

We have a Tea Party Governor, bought and paid for by the Koch brothers, with Heritage Foundation fellows in the cabinet. Here we have it on full display for the entire country to see, the conservative id – crush workers, attack the poor and let the corporations plunder the public treasury. All under the fig leaf of a self-inflicted “budget crisis.”

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“Public employees should pay their fair share!” That’s what I am hearing in the general public about the situation in Wisconsin and I don’t think you will get any disagreement, even from public employees, about that statement. But what you must understand is that what is happening in Wisconsin has nothing to do with public employees paying their fair share or even balancing Wisconsin’s budget. Whatever Governor Walker’s motivations, concern for the immediate fiscal health of his state is not one of them. How can you tell?

1. There was no budget deficit until Walker came into office. Indeed there was a budget surplus. The current deficit is a direct result of Walker’s actions since he became governor, employee benefits have nothing to do with the current “crisis.”

2. The unions in Wisconsin have offered to work with the legislature and give in to every financial demand of Governor Walker. And yet the Republican’s in Wisconsin are saying, “no compromises.” If your stated motivation is balancing the budget and your opponents offer to give you everything you need to balance the budget and you still refuse to accept their offer, well then it’s safe to say that you have motivations that go beyond simply balancing the budget.

3. Wisconsin public employees are not over-compensated. Here is what the Economic Policy Institute had to say about the levels of compensation in Wisconsin after studying the data (something that you can be sure almost no opponent of public employee unions has done),

However, the data indicates that state and local government employees in Wisconsin are not overpaid. Comparisons controlling for education, experience, organizational size, gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship, and disability reveal that employees of both state and local governments in Wisconsin earn less than comparable private sector employees. On an annual basis, full-time state and local government employees in Wisconsin are undercompensated by 8.2% compared with otherwise similar private sector workers.

4. Walker is exempting from his sweeping changes unions who supported him in the 2010 election. If you believe that public employee unions are destroying Wisconsin, as Walker apparently does, then a decision to exempt any public employee unions seems curious. That these unions are political allies makes the decision less curious but no more justified.

Although Governor Walker argues that public employees are bankrupting Wisconsin and that only the most draconian actions can save the state, we know for a fact that the budget was running a surplus until Walker became governor, that the unions are willing to give in to the economic demands of Walker and the Republicans, that these employees are not overcompensated, and that Walker has decided to exempt politically friendly unions from his sweeping demands. It’s obvious that Governor Walker has ulterior motives here – he wants to eliminate not just public employee unions but land a fatal blow to unions in general. Why?

I’ll let Kevin Drum explain why, despite their pathologies, unions still matter,

conservatives will take whatever chance they can to rein [unions] in, regulate them, make it nearly impossible for them to organize new workplaces. But they also routinely argue that labor unions simply shouldn’t exist. This is what’s happening in Wisconsin: Gov. Scott Walker isn’t satisfied with merely negotiating concessions from public sector unions. He wants to effectively ban collective bargaining and all but do away with public sector unions completely.

Nobody should buy this. Of course unions have pathologies. Every big human institution does. And anyone who thinks they’re on the wrong side of an issue should fight it out with them. But unions are also the only large-scale movement left in America that persistently acts as a countervailing power against corporate power. They’re the only large-scale movement left that persistently acts in the economic interests of the middle class.

So sure: go ahead and fight the teachers unions on charter schools. Go ahead and insist that public sector unions in Wisconsin need to take pay and benefit cuts if that’s what you believe. Go ahead and rail against Davis-Bacon. It’s a free country.

But the decline of unions over the past few decades has left corporations and the rich with essentially no powerful opposition. No matter what doubts you might have about unions and their role in the economy, never forget that destroying them destroys the only real organized check on the power of the business community in America. If the last 30 years haven’t made that clear, I don’t know what will.

Private sector unionization is down to about 7% of all workers, the public sector remains strong at about 36%. With private sector unions almost all but destroyed conservatives have turned their attention to the public employee unions. If they destroy the public employee unions they will eliminate a large source of funding and energy for the union movement and, not coincidentally, for the Democratic Party.

Note: The statements and views expressed on this site are the personal views of the author and the author alone. They do not reflect the opinions of the author’s employers, clients or any other person.

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News has broken today that the so-called centrist-minded, and corporate friendly, Democratic Leadership Council is closing up shop. Ezra Klein thinks the DLC can pack up because, well, they’ve won,

but it looks to me like the DLC is a victim of its own success. Its onetime chairman, Bill Clinton, is now an ex-president. Its most recent leader, Bruce Reed, just moved to the White House. The major policy initiatives Democrats have pushed in recent years — the Affordable Care Act and cap-and-trade — both hew closely to the “liberal means through market ends” formula that the DLC favored. The group’s primary stylistic argument was that Democrats needed to do a better job reaching out to independent voters and the business community and demonstrating independence from their traditional interest groups, and Barack Obama, who appeared at the Chamber of Commerce just this morning, is clearly making an effort to do that…

But if I were Al From, the organization’s founder, I’d feel pretty good about myself. For better or for worse, the DLC won. That’s why potential donors and others are now comfortable letting it die.

I actually agree with Ezra that the DLC has largely won. But I don’t share his glib view of the “success” of the DLC. Viewed in light of last week’s news that the Democratic National Convention is headed to Bank of America’s hometown I think today’s actions by the DLC can best be described as declaring victory – the anti-labor, anti-worker, coproratist take-over of the Democratic Party is now complete.

At a time of tremendous suffering in the middle and working classes, suffering brought on in large part by the financial industry, the Democratic Party is going to literally deliver itself  to the feet of Bank of America.

Charlotte, the site of the 2012 DNC, is not just Bank of America’s hometown but also located in the state with the lowest density of union membership of any in the nation. Lower than Mississippi, lower than Alabama, lower than Arkansas and Georgia. But the leadership in the Democratic Party decided to look past the retrograde labor policies of North Carolina, to turn their backs on strong labor communities (like my hometown of St. Louis) and instead throw a big party in Bank of America’s back yard. Oh, did I mention that the convention is scheduled to begin on Labor Day? Nothing says celebrating the legacy of labor by throwing hundreds of millions of dollars into non-unionized hotels and convention halls.

But this is of course the world that the DLC desired. A world where the Democratic Party no longer even pays lip service to the plight of the American worker, to the role of labor in building this nation and the middle-class. No, it is now the DLC’s party and the rest of us are just living in it.

This is much more than a symbolic snubbing of the Democratic Party’s historic base. It is the culmination of 3 decades of the party abandoning labor and abonding the cause of economic justice. As the Democratic Party abandoned workers and their unions and focused primarily on social issues we, not coincidentally, have seen a rapid decline in union density and a subsequent delcine in the quality of life for the middle and working class. Gone are the days of wages that helped you buy a home and put your kid through college. Gone are the days of a secure retirement. Gone is the counter balance to corporate greed and excess. Welcome ,instead, to the world of unfettered capitalist impulses running through our body politic.

As Kevin Drum writes at Mother Jones unions are the only proven counter-balance,

Unions have lots of pathologies: they can get entranced by implementing insane work rules, they can get co-opted by other political actors, and they can end up fighting progress on social issues, just to name a few. But they fight for economic egalitarianism, and they’re the only institution in history that’s ever done that successfully on a sustained basis. That’s what makes them so indispensable to liberalism and that’s what makes them the sworn enemies of conservatism.

The economic collapse of 2008 is a direct out-growth of the 30 year lack of counter-balance in our government and in our economy. The dirty secret of capitalism is that is based upon two conflicting pathologies – 1. large-scale consumer consumption is neccesary to fuel economic growth and 2. that all businesses will always seek the lowest possible labor costs. The conflict is obvious – consumers are workers, workers are consumers. So, how can you sustain consumer consumption while simulataneously driving the wages of those same consumers further and further down? Well, obviously, you can’t.  And so instead, consumers are forced to borrow more and more just to simply maintain the life-style they enjoyed, 1 or 2 or 5 years ago. At some point the merry-go-round of borrowing and spending is going to stop, as it did in 2008.

For decades labor unions were there to make sure that the great capitalist pie was cut up in a way that ensured that workers could also be consumers. And for decades the Democratic Party stood side by side workers and labor. But as unions began to delcine neo-liberals like the DLC shifted their focus away from workers and began to search for their campaign cash from other sources. Wall Street and corporate America proved to be the highest bidder and neo-liberals glady sold out labor to their new corporate masters.

So here we stand today and the Democratic National Convention is headed to a putrid swamp of anti-labor and anti-worker hostility, which just so happens to be the home of Bank of America. The decision to locate the DNC in Charlotte is revolting but I guess I am not surprised that the DLC is closing up shop – they’ve won the war.

We are hours away from the start of the President’s State of the Union address. I haven’t flipped cable news on this morning, but my hunch is that the airwaves are filled with pundits and prognosticators telling us What It All Means and what the President absolutely must do. Which, coincidentally, also happens to be whatever policy position is most important to that particular pundit.

I hate to be the one to break it all of you, but the State of the Union doesn’t really matter. Sure, it’s a snapshot in time that describes the President’s vision and draws a contrast with the opposition. And it can momentarily coalesce politicians, activists and interest groups around  a common vision. And yes, I will no doubt get annoyed as the President makes sure to genuflect to the gods of Wall Street because, apparently, there is nothing more dangerous in America today than the wounded ego of a Wall Street Banker. But as a substantive matter, outside of the Beltway and the chattering masses, the State of the Union just doesn’t make much of an impact. TAPPED’s Jamie Bouie took up this mantle yesterday,

Ahead of the State of the Union (and all its attendant chatter), it’s worth noting that these have little effect on the public’s perception of the president…

Bill Clinton was the only president in 35 years to see a measurable bump in his approval rating following the State of the Union. Even then, it was a modest 3-point gain that had little impact on his ability to move legislation through Congress.

Far from helping, the State of the Union is more likely to hurt a president’s approval rating; Carter and George W. Bush saw a 1-point drop in their approval, while George H.W. Bush saw a significant 4-point decline. Even Reagan — the so-called Great Communicator — saw an average drop of 1 point. There is simply little evidence that the State of the Union moves public opinion, which isn’t a big surprise, since in general, the president is rarely able to move the public, even in the most favorable conditions.

So keep that in mind tonight when the Great Bloviators of network and cable news come on the air to Tell You What It All Means – it probably doesn’t mean much. This year is unique though, coming just weeks after the attempted assisantiation in Tucson the spectacle of the State of the Union has taken on a much larger role in our public discourse.

Aside from just the speech this year’s State of the Union provides another bit of “news” which has occupied the Versailes Georgetown cocktail scene for weeks now – my senior Senator’s idea that Republican’s and Democrats should sit together tonight, as a show of unity. At first (and second and third) blush Senator Mark Udall’s proposal is a classic Beltway Bubble idea – shallow, trite, a superficial papering over of the fact that hey, you know what? People disagree about things! To be fair Udall’s idea was borne out of the tragedy in Tucson and is an attempt to make Senator’s interact with the other party a little more and to, hopefully, see the other side as a little more human. And Udall isn’t totally off base – his idea just doesn’t go far enough. You see, one night of kumbaya on the House floor isn’t going to change the culture in Washington but there is evidence that who a legislator sits next to can, over the long run, influence their voting patterns.

University of Denver Political Scientist Seth Masket wrote about this phenomenon in 2008 after studying decades worth of roll-call votes in the California Assembly. In the abstract Masket lays out his findings,

…each member [of the California Assembly] is paired with a deskmate. By comparing deskmate pairs with nondeskmate pairs, I fund that legislators vote identically to their deskmates on a sizable subset of roll calls. This deskmate effect appears to remain strong even as a rival influence – legislative partisanship – increases in strength.

Masket’s article really is a fascinating read; He found that as the parties become more and more internally cohesive (as today’s Congress is) the “deskmate effect” does not diminish. Masket acknowledges that the effect is small and that modern political institutions are strong but,

Nonetheless, the influence of legislators upon each other continues. Although it is difficult to be certain how much this seating effect ultimately affects the legislative outcomes of a chamber, this paper has shown that such an effect exists at the individual level and is surprisingly robust…”

So Congress, just like with impetuous children, can be influenced by their peers. I say we assign deskmates tonight at the State of the Union. Everyone is already there, we can have the members number off like we’re picking teams in gym class.

Next week we’ll look into adding nap time and maybe increasing their feedings.

While details of today’s tragedy in Arizona continue to leak out I have a question for conservatives who are rushing to absolve their political leaders of any responsibility in fomenting this environment.

If this had been an average Iranian citizen and he had shot George W. Bush in the head would you absolve Ahmadinejad of all responsibility and blame it on some lone wolf with a mental illness?

To press this further, is it your sincerely held belief that an environment wherein people are openly encouraged to carry weapons to political town hall meetings, where Giffords’ opponent held fundraisers at shooting ranges with Giffords head as the target, and where numerous political figures explicitly used violent, eliminationist rhetoric during their campaigns had absolutely nothing at all to do with this?

The shooter is obviously mentally ill but it was only a matter of time before something like this happened. Congresswoman Giffords herself has been threatened recently. Judge Roll, who was murdered in today’s shooting, was under protection in recent years because of threats concerning an immigration ruling. The Secret Service has never been busier handling threats to the President.

You don’t need to embrace violent and eliminationist rhetoric in order to advance a political cause. There has been a conscious decision on the part of some to stoke that rage for political gain. They lit a match, fanned the flames and now are feigning surprise that we’ve had an attempted assassination on a Congresswoman who was a direct target of that rhetoric for the last 2 years.

The assassin is a disturbed individual who bears ultimate responsibility for his actions today but those actions did not occur in a vacuum. They occured in a political environment which has spent the last several years celebrating the idea of violent, armed resistance.

Is Judge Henry Hudson’s decision on Monday striking down the individual insurance mandate a bump in the road for reformers or a sign of the looming demise of the Affordable Care Act at the hands of the United States Supreme Court? I’ve long been of the mind that the individual mandate is Constitutional and that, given precedent, the Supreme’s would have no choice but to ultimately rule in favor of the mandate’s constitutionality. But while discussing the issue with a former professor of mine he wisely reminded me that the analysis of even the most esteemed scholars doesn’t matter. In fact even precedent itself doesn’t matter. All that matters is what 5 men and women on the Court believe – or want. Judge Hudson’s ruling today, on the heels of the 10 year anniversary of Bush v. Gore no less, should be a wake up call to us all – a partisan judge will not be bound by the limits of logic, legal reasoning or precedent.

Hudson is a George W. Bush appointee who just so happens to be a part owner of a political consulting firm which has actively worked against health care reform and in support of some of the most polarizing political candidates of our time. From Gawker,

As the Huffington Post and others first noted last July, Hudson’s annual financial disclosures show that he owns a sizable chunk of Campaign Solutions, Inc., a Republican consulting firm that worked this election cycle for John Boehner, Michele Bachmann, John McCain, and a whole host of other GOP candidates who’ve placed the purported unconstitutionality of health care reform at the center of their political platforms.

Better still, one of Campaign Solutions clients was Ken Cuccinelli – the Virginia Attorney General who brought the case which Hudson ruled on today. If you think this whole thing smells rotten you’re right, it does. And we haven’t even arrived at Hudson’s sloppy legal analysis.

Conservative legal scholar Orin Kerr, writing at The Volokoh Conspiracy, noted the gaping hole in the decision,

I’ve had a chance to read Judge Hudson’s opinion, and it seems to me it has a fairly obvious and quite significant error. Judge Hudson assumes that the power granted to Congress by the Necessary and Proper Clause — “To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers” — does not expand Congress’s power beyond the Commerce Clause itself…

Judge Hudson does not cite any authority for this conclusion: He seems to believe it is required by logic. But it is incorrect. The point of the Necessary and Proper clause is that it grants Congress the power to use means outside the enumerated list of of Article I powers to achieve the ends listed in Article I…

Given that existing Supreme Court caselaw gives the federal government a fairly straightforward argument in support of the mandate under the Necessary and Proper clause, Judge Hudson’s error leads him to assume away as a matter of “logic” what is the major question in the case. That is unfortunate, I think.

It is truly an astonishing omission and the fact that the error is so brazen just reinforces that Hudson’s decision is wholly without merit. Judge Hudson knew full well how well publicized his decision would be. He knew that his opinion would be read by legal scholars across the country within hours of it being published. He knew that this would be the case to land at the Supreme Court. And still he couldn’t muster any rational basis for his holding regarding the Necessary and Proper clause. Not even a fig leaf of an argument.

Writing for AOL Ian Millhiser notes that Hudson’s decision places him squarely at odds with the Supreme Court and with arch-conservative Justice Antonin Scalia,

As Justice Scalia explains, [the Necessary and Proper clause] means that “where Congress has the authority to enact a regulation of interstate commerce, it possesses every power needed to make that regulation effective.” [this is from Scalia's concurrence in the 2005 case of Gonzalez v. Raich]

Given that the Affordable Care Act bans insurance companies from rejecting people based upon pre-existing conditions then it becomes necessary to mandate that individuals carry insurance. A ban on pre-existing conditions without an insurance mandate would lead individuals to wait until they are sick, sometimes very sick, before purchasing coverage. Such behavior makes a mockery of the very concept of insurance. The mandate is necessary to make the regulation of insurance effective – it very clearly and very obviously fits within the scope of Congress’ powers under the necessary and proper clause.

And while I agree with Millhiser that this flaw exposes the opponents of the mandate as lacking in any serious legal grounds to oppose the law I cannot share in his conclusion that,

If Henry Hudson’s folly represents the best case against health reform, then the Affordable Care Act will be just fine.

I return to the words of my sage professor – at the end of the day the mandate is only Constitutional if 5 Justices say it is. Unfortunately one does not have to look back very far to see the lengths that the right-wing members of the Supreme Court will go to in order to carry out their political agenda. It was less than 1 year ago when the so-called conservative block on the Court disregarded a century of precedent, the actual petition before them and any semblance of judicial restraint to reach their decision in Citizens United. As Jeffrey Toobin wrote in a profile of Chief Justice Roberts last year,

In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.

The question before us is likely one of when, and not if, the Supreme Court will strike down the individual mandate – and just how far is the right-wing of the Court willing to go in its efforts.

Photo here