President Wants 'Smart Spending Reductions'

 Highlight transcript below to create clipTranscript:  Print  |  Email Go  Click text to jump within videoMon 04 Feb 13 | 04:10 PM ET Former Sen. Judd Gregg, (R-NH), explains what is a "smart" spending cut. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, weighs in.

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VIEWPOINT: How A Very Smart Senator Showed Us Everything Wrong With The Modern GOP In One Week

It shouldn’t have been this way.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) is an undeniably smart man. Cruz is by all accounts a brilliant litigator, one talented enough in the courtroom to clerk for a Supreme Court justice and win a number of difficult cases as Texas’ Solicitor General. It wouldn’t have been crazy to expect that Cruz would bring a degree of argumentative rigor into the Senate after his victory in the 2012 election.

Well, Cruz had two golden opportunities to showcase his keen analytical mind, as he sits on both Senate committees that held high profile hearings last week, one on gun violence prevention, the other on Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE)’s nomination to be Secretary of Defense. And Cruz distinguished himself alright. Just not in the way one might have hoped.

The Senator misrepresented official documents to the point of falsehood, placed the words of an raving call-in viewer on a television show in Hagel’s mouth, and played “six degrees of guilt by association” with Hagel’s record in a manner that would make Sen. Joe McCarthy blush. And yet, Cruz’ behavior, embarrassing as it was, was by no means irrational. Rather, it’s a perfect illustration of how the Republican Party’s internal structure, particularly its allied media and electoral base, incentivizes the replacement of real policy thinking with fact-free paranoic fantasism.

Let’s begin with Cruz’ monologue at the gun hearing. The proposed assault weapons ban bore the brunt of his ire. He leaned heavily what he claimed were two Department of Justice papers — one from what he sneeringly characterized as the “Janet Reno Department of Justice under President Clinton” — that had proven the 1994 ban failed to reduce gun violence. In his words, the Senate was about “to reenact a law that, according to the Department of Justice, did absolutely nothing to reduce gun violence.”

Literally every claim in that sentence is false.

First, the Senate is not “reenacting” the 1994 ban. The law proposed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) closes a series of loopholes that even gun regulation proponents admit limited the first ban’s effectiveness. Second, the studies in question were not official judgments of the Department of Justice, as Cruz says, but research by Professor Christopher S. Koper supported by the Department.

Which brings to the third, and most important, point: any fair reading of Koper’s work suggests Cruz has entirely mischaracterized its findings about the ban – a reading shared by Prof. Koper himself. Koper’s research found, among other things, clear evidence that the 1994 ban limited criminal access to assault weapons as well more tentative evidence that assault weapon shootings were more deadly. While it’s true the studies didn’t find evidence that the bans reduced the homicide rate, they didn’t, as Cruz suggests, conclude from that that the ban didn’t work. Rather, Koper said that he didn’t have enough data, given that the ban was only in effect for ten years, to prove for one way or another. That’s why Koper, in a 2004 op-ed, referred to the then-expiring ban as a “work in progress” rather than, as Cruz suggested, a failure. And the assault weapons ban is far from the only issue on which Cruz did violence to the facts in the gun hearing.

As fact-free as Cruz’ diatribe during the guns hearing was, it had nothing on his performance the following day during Senator Hagel’s confirmation. During the excruciatingly long proceedings, Cruz had three chances to interrogate Hagel, each time resorting to grosser distortions of the former Senator’s statements to prove that Hagel was every Israeli’s worst nightmare.

In round one, Cruz played a tape of a rather concerned man calling into a talk show on which Hagel was a guest. The video was spliced to make it appear Hagel agreed with the ranter’s accusation of “war crimes in Palestine.” In reality, Hagel was endorsing, on the program host’s instruction, the need for “moral leadership” by the United States and Russia on nuclear arms reduction, a point made clear by his reference in the full clip to President Obama and then-President Medvedev. After Hagel said he did not believe Israel was committing war crimes, and asked for the full context of the clip, Cruz lied, saying “that was the full context.”

Cruz’ second attempt to cast Hagel as Israeli Public Enemy #1 was equally dishonest. Cruz ventriloquized the claim that Israel had committed a “sickening slaughter” in Lebanon into Hagel’s mouth, even though, as Dave Weigel points out, Hagel was condemning deaths in war themselves rather than Israel’s behavior. And his third sally, a failed attempt to tar Hagel with the views on Israel of someone on the board of an organization he chairs (yes, it’s that remote), struck The New Republic‘s John Judis as “classic McCarthy tactics.”

Judged kindly, Cruz’ performance in each of these two hearings was aggressively inaccurate. Judged more harshly (and accurately), it was mendacious demagoguery at its finest.

So why would Cruz, an intelligent man, resort to such dishonest tactics? There are certainly no shortage of ways to make the case against gun regulation or Chuck Hagel without mischaracterizing research or wrenching stray comments out of context.

But that’s not nearly as fun.

Guns and Israel are two issues of paramount importance to staple GOP voting blocs. These voters don’t want mealy-mouthed, hedged defenses of their positions — as evidenced by the Great RINO Purge of the past few election cycles. Rather, these voters want Republicans who see the world as they do: President Obama and the Democrats are attempting to attack their fundamental liberties and eliminate America’s “exceptional” global role, most prominently by “throwing Israel under the bus.” For these voters, the Assault Weapons Ban isn’t just bad policy; it’s a nefarious, unconstitutional gun grab that strikes at the heart of American liberty. Chuck Hagel hasn’t been more qualified in his support for Israel than Republicans would like; he’s an anti-Semite.

Cruz rode this apocalyptic mood to power, pairing a worldview extreme enough to please the base with packaging just well enough to make him acceptable to more establishment folks. As Mother Jones‘ Tim Murphy writes in a profile of the Senator, “Cruz’s greatest asset is that he lives in both worlds;” he’s “an intellectual face on a movement and ideology that have long simmered beneath the Republican mainstream.” Cruz pioneered a marriage between extreme ideas with a manner of expression that allows the party’s “respectable” thought leaders to support it.

Understanding the central dynamic of Cruz’ political strategy is the key to unlocking his intellectually abysmal outings at the Senate last week. His base wants the fireworks, but straight-up calling Hagel an anti-Semite on the Senate floor might be a bit much. So Cruz wraps up more extreme versions of his arguments in intellectual-sounding garb, citing studies and TV clips that are just good enough to justify his firebreathing.

Now, this strategy would fail if the conservative media said base relies on weren’t interested in playing along to Cruz’ tune. But the writers who are supposed to serve as conservatism’s intellectual gatekeepers lapped it up. “It would be hard to do much better,” National Review‘s Peter Kirsanow wrote, “than one of Hagel’s interlocutors — Senator Ted Cruz.” In response to criticism of Cruz’s arguments as, well, totally made up, Kirsanow scoffed. “Cruz should be pleased to be the subject of such scorn. Smart, principled, aggressive, conservative Republicans are subject to special opprobrium from Beltway elites.”

Kirsanow was far from the only one. “Sorry I missed @tedcruz carving up Chuck Hagel on TV like a roast,” tweeted RedState editor and Fox News contributor Erick Erickson. “Cruz showed what happens when preparation, talent, and discipline come together,” gushed Pete Spiliakos at the theoconservative journal First Things. Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin enthused that “tough questioning” from Cruz and other Republicans exposed “Hagel’s pose as a consistent and ardent friend of Israel and foe of Iran…to be nothing but a hastily constructed façade that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.” These are but a few examples from a vast ocean.

This adulation illustrates just how deeply rooted GOP dysfunction is. The Republican base elects someone like Cruz, who’s extreme enough to have suggested the United Nations was coming for America’s golf courses. Cruz, who’s not only a ideological member of the base but beholden to it, brings its unsupportable ideas and implacably hostile attitude to the center of the Republican party. And he’s rewarded not just by adulation from his supporters, but widespread praise from the ostensibly serious conservative commentariat. There’s just no incentive for any Republican to speak out against the party’s descent into paranoia, and every reason to believe you’ll be rewarded by giving into it.

So if you want to know why the Republican Party will remain broken for the foreseeable future, go watch the Ted Cruz game tape from this week. And try to think how it could have been otherwise.

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Chicago Suburb Oak Park Joins International Solar-Powered Smart Grid Test

Oak Park and Korea Smart Grid Institute sign agreement

The village of Oak Park, a suburb west of Chicago, was recently selected from a list of competing volunteer neighborhoods to be the test site for smart grid technology.

The project is a joint venture between the Korean Smart Grid Institute and the Institute for Sustainable Energy Development, and will involve placing a set of twelve or thirteen 3-kilowatt solar panels, along with a battery system, on the roofs of 100 residential and 100 multifamily buildings. They’ll also all be linked up to an electrical grid boasting smart meters, and once the test run of the system is over the building owners will get to keep the installations, worth $20,000 to $30,000 a pop.

Oak Park’s sustainability manager, K.C. Poulos, sat down with Grist for an interview about the project that ran on Friday. The hope, as she put it, is to demonstrate new ways to generate, transmit, and use electricity — providing greater efficiencies, lower costs to consumers, and hopefully the seed bed for a more sustainable energy economy:

[The Korean Smart Grid Institute] did the demonstration on an island in South Korea called Jeju Island. It’s kind of like their Hawaii — it’s a resort area. They were able to put up a demonstration that showed how distributed generation like solar can be connected to a network operations center. All of these houses got battery storage so when you weren’t using your solar power in the house, you could store it in a battery system. When the grid on that island became overloaded with demand, the network operating system could send messages to those households saying, “You need to use to your battery. We’re going to take all of the energy from your solar panels for the next four hours and put them right on the grid. And then we will send you a check next month. Thank you very much for letting us buy your power for four hours.” [...]

The [scenario for Oak Park homeowners] we talk about the most is this idea of collecting the solar energy during the day and storing it in the battery and then having the house run on the battery at night so you’re completely offline at night and the battery provides a phantom load — your clocks, TV. Your energy load is pretty low at night but that means you’re not taking anything off the grid. So you’re reducing your bill right there.

Then let’s say there’s an outage in your neighborhood. What we want these systems to be able to do is operate off the battery so these houses can stay somewhat energized. It’s only a three kilowatt system on the house so it’s not like you could have every appliance running at the same time. You’ll have enough for lights, fans, and the refrigerator or A/C. But at least you’re online still and you’re not losing an entire freezer of meat. [...]

The [average number of outages] for Oak Park is 45 minutes per year. What the number doesn’t tell you about is the stories I hear when [residents] call up on day three of still not having power. Then I get calls from restaurants. You’re talking about an entire week’s or month’s inventory gone.

The total bill for the project will be $5 to $6 million, though Oak Park itself will not have to pay the tab. Half the cost will be covered by the South Korean research institute, and the other by the ISED’s efforts to secure government funding. Oak Park’s residents are instead agreeing to participate in the project, to allow workers to set up the installations on their homes, and to allow data about their power usage to be gathered and transmitted digitally for further study and development of the technology. The information will be collected as an aggregate in order to help protect individuals’ privacy, and to keep the experiment consumer-oriented.

As with other smart grid systems, the Oak Park project will allow for two way communication between consumers and the grid hub, which will lessen the chances of outages and help improve efficiency of energy use.

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Eight Smart Gun Bills Introduced On Day One Of The New Congress — And Two Stupid Ones

The 113th Congress is officially in session, and legislators kicked off the new year, and new term, yesterday with several pieces of gun-related legislation, their response to December’s tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary.

In total — between the Democrats’ proposed gun safety laws and the Republicans’ plans for expanded gun access — ten bills are being introduced today. Here they are:

1. Banning high-capacity ammunition. HR 138. This bill from Reps. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) and Diana DeGette (D-CO) would ban anyone in the US from owning, buying, or trading high-capacity ammunition clips, like the kinds that are often used in mass shootings. Such clips allow a gunman to fire off as many as 100 rounds without stopping to reload. McCarthy’s connection to gun safety laws is personal: Her husband was killed and son critically injured during a mass shooting.

2. Closing the ‘gun show loophole.’ HR 141. Another measure from McCarthy requires that all gun purchasers undergo a full background check. As-is, the private sales of firearms, and the sale of guns at gun shows, are exempt from the background check requirements that are mandatory for other gun sales. That loophole is currently an easy way for criminals or the mentally ill to access a gun undetected.

3. Making the database of who cannot buy guns effective. HR 137. Currently, states do a terrible job of entering names — of felons or the mentally ill — into the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). This measure also from McCarthy is called the Fix Gun Checks Act, and has been introduced in previous legislative sessions. It would create incentives and penalties to encourage the efficient entry of names into NICS. It would also close the gun show loophole.

4. Regulating where and how ammunition is purchased. HR 142. McCarthy’s fourth and final bill would make it mandatory for all ammunition dealers to have a license to sell. It would also require anyone purchasing ammunition to do so in person, face-to-face with a seller. All bulk purchases of ammunition would need to be reported under McCarthy’s law. This bill responds to the criticisms that the internet is an open market for the unlimited sale of ammunition.

5. Requiring handguns to be registered. HR 117. Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) crafted this national law based on his state’s requirements for handgun purchasing. It would require every single handgun sold in the United States to be licensed and registered, without any exceptions or loopholes, and for that registry to be easily accessible.

6. Regulating how gun licenses are issued. HR 34. Like Holt, Rep. Bobby Rush’s (D-IL) bill aims to create a unified system of gun licensing procedures — for both handguns and semi-automatic weapons. Rush’s legislation, a reintroduction of “Blair’s Bill,” named after a murdered Chicago teen, would also require gun safety training for firearm owners.

7. Raising the age of legal handgun ownership to 21. HR 65. In a move that seems pointed toward combating youth street violence, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) proposed this bill that would make it illegal to own a handgun before the age of 21. Some states have such laws in place, but Jackson Lee’s measure would make the law national.

8. Requiring the reporting of stolen guns. HR 21. This bill, which Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) has introduced to Congress previously and is reintroducing to the new Congress, would also close the ‘gun show loophole’ by requiring all gun-owners to undergo background checks. Additionally, it would make sure that gun owners are required to report stolen guns — a measure that could help law enforcement track illegal guns.

9. & 10. Eliminating ‘gun free zones’ in schools. HR 35 and HR 133. Following the lead of the National Rifle Association, Reps. Steve Stockman (R-TX) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) are both proposing more guns in schools. They want to eliminate “gun free school zones.” In a press statement, Stockman used this highly flawed logic as the reasoning for his bill: “In the 22 years before enactment of ‘gun free school zones’ there were two mass school shootings. In the 22 years since enactment of ‘gun free schools’ there have been 10 mass school shootings.”

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