Rolling Stone: What are the stakes, politically, if Democrats fail to get a bill to Obama’s desk?

Rep. John Dingell: It will hurt us seriously. If you look at the 1994 election, we lost because our folks stayed home. If we give people an inducement to stay home in 2010, we can lose again.

Read the rest of Rollingstone.com’s exclusive interview with The “Dean” Of Health Care Reform.

More people are out of work than at anytime in the last quarter-century and those who are still employed created a jaw-dropping 9.5% surge in productivity in the last quarter. This is the essence of a jobless recovery.

The economics blogger Brad DeLong had a great post yesterday that I hope he’ll forgive me quoting at length:

Back in the 1930s there was a Polish Marxist economist, Michel Kalecki, who argued that recessions were functional for the ruling class and for capitalism because they created excess supply of labor, forced workers to work harder to keep their jobs, and so produced a rise in the rate of relative surplus-value.

For thirty years, ever since I got into this business, I have been mocking Michel Kalecki. I have been pointing out that recessions see a much sharper fall in profits than in wages. I have been saying that the pace of work slows in recessions–that employers are more concerned with keeping valuable employees in their value chains than using a temporary high level of unemployment to squeeze greater work effort out of their workers.

I don’t think that I can mock Michel Kalecki any more, ever again.

Video clips at Ustream

“It’s difficult enough when we lose these brave Americans in battles overseas. It is horrifying that they should come under fire at an army base on American soil.”

Sen. Jim Webb (D-Virginia) has bravely proposed legislation to create a Blue Ribbon commission to conduct an 18-month, “top-to-bottom” review of America’s criminal justice system with the goal of bringing U.S. incarceration rates in line with the rest of the civilized world.

The commission is to make sweeping recommendations for reform, and is tasked in particular with developing proposals to “restructure our approach to drug policy.”

Enter unreconstructed drug warrior Sen. Chuck Grassley, who has released the text of an amendment that would ensure the commission not reach any conclusions that threaten 40 years of failure. The commission would be prohibited, thanks to Grassley, from examining any “policies that favor decriminalization of violations of the Controlled Substances Act or the legalization of any controlled substances.”

Below, the text of Grassley’s gag rule:

AMENDMENT intended to be proposed by Mr. GRASSLEY
….
SEC. ll. RESTRICTIONS ON AUTHORITY.
The Commission shall have no authority to make findings related to current Federal, State, and local criminal justice policies and practices or reform recommendations that involve, support, or otherwise discuss the decriminalization of any offense under the Controlled Substances Act or the legalization of any controlled substance listed under the Controlled Substances Act.

Jack Cole, a retired undercover narcotics officer who now heads the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) tells Rolling Stone that “Senator Grassley’s censorship amendment would block what Senator Webb is trying to achieve with this bill. All along, Senator Webb has said that in the effort to fix our broken criminal justice system ‘nothing should be off the table.’ That should include the obvious solution of ending the ‘drug war’ as a way to solve the unintended problems caused by that failed policy,” says Cole.

The ideological purge of the Republican party is reaching new heights.

In case you’re late to the party in the New York district 23 special House election, a recap:

Dede Scozzafava, a pro-choice, pro-gay marriage Republican was tapped by local leaders to represent the GOP in a special election to fill the seat of Rep. John McHugh, a Republican who was tapped to become president Obama’s Army secretary. NY-23 is a moderate, but safely Republican district: In the last election, Obama edged McCain 54/47, but McHugh trounced his Democratic challenger 65/35.

But Scozzafava’s moderation was seen as an intolerable taint by the party’s ideological enforcers. And so it is that the grossly uncharismatic Douglas Hoffman, a nasally voiced certified public accountant from Lake Placid, has become the poster boy for the Tea Party wing of the GOP. Challenging Scozzafava from the anti-tax, anti-gay right as the nominee of the New York Conservative Party, Hoffman quickly picked up endorsements from Sarah Palin, Dick Armey, likely 2012 contenders Tim Pawlenty and Mike Huckabee and a host of other top GOP luminaries including Fred Thompson, who cut this ad for Hoffman. [Listen to the end to hear Hoffman's unbearably dweeby, "I approve this ad" line.]

Over the weekend, the hardliners got their scalp. Running a distant third, Scozzafava withdrew from the race… and threw her support to Democrat Bill Owens, turning a gimme seat for the GOP into what now looks like a tossup, much to the delight of the DCCC.

NY-23 has become ground zero for the “GOP Jihad” I first reported about for Rolling Stone in May, in a piece now available in full for the first time online.

Some of the players have changed. Forward-looking Utah governor John Huntsman is now riding out the ideological purge in China as the American ambassador in Beijing. After “hiking the Appalachian trail,” hardline fiscal conservative Mark Sanford has seen his shooting star fizzle. But the same dynamics that drove Arlen Specter into the open arms of the Democratic party are now at play in upstate New York.

A few leading Republicans are now speaking out against the folly of the purge. Newt Gingrich, among the most vocal cheerleaders of Specter’s departure, has changed his tune. Gingrich threw his ample girth behind the moderate Scozzafava, reasoning “you can’t have a purely right-wing majority.”

But majority building is not the point here. As @JonHenke, a top, tech-savvy GOP operative, tweeted last night: “Our job is to disrupt the establishment GOP. If we beat Democrats too, great. But the first priority is to fix the GOP.”

Here’s Rolling Stone’s full story from May: The GOP Jihad

TPMDC has the scoop.

It wasn’t so long ago that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was celebrating “Tort Reform Week” by urging the swift passage of the “Lawsuit Abuse Prevention Act.”

Now, in the wake of having been punked by the Yes Men over its head-in-the-sand climate policies, the U.S. Chamber is filing a frivolous lawsuit of its own, claiming that the Yes Men’s satirical activism constituted a “misappropriation” of the Chamber’s “valuable intellectual property.”

The Chamber’s complaint — filed by the lawyers of Hunton & Williams LLP — offers an object lesson in lawsuit abuse, seeking damages for everything from fraud to “cyberpiracy”, for actions that are clearly protected by the first amendment.

The Chamber runs a website called FacesofLawsuitAbuse.org that declares “lawsuit abuse is having a devastating impact on our society” and asks “Have you been victimized by a lawsuit? Do you know someone else who has?”

If yes, man, you can share that story here.