Author: Andrew Sullivan

Khimm has details on their new tax plan:

Under [Maryland Congressman Chris] Van Hollen’s new proposal, working Americans earning up to $100,000 would receive a $1,000 tax credit per individual; working couples earning up to $200,000 could receive up to a $2,000 tax credit. The plan also increases tax credits for child-care expenses, creates a new credit that rewards workers who save for retirement, and reduces the so-called “marriage penalty” for dual-income families.

The $1.2 trillion plan would be paid for through new limits on tax deductions for the top 1% of American households, as well as a 0.1% fee on a broad array of financial transactions. In 2015, the top 1% will have $518,000 or more in adjusted gross income, according to the Tax Policy Center.

Kilgore raises an eyebrow:

[W]e haven’t seen the whole package. But suffice it to say it’s one of the more frankly redistributive proposals coming from anywhere other than the Progressive Caucus in a good while, and the central prominence of the financial transaction tax makes it a direct shot at Wall Street.

Russell Berman admits that, with “the GOP firmly in control of Congress for the next two years, Van Hollen’s proposal has no chance of going anywhere immediately”:

But it lays down a marker for Republicans, who have talked increasingly about wanting to move away from their budget-slashing reputation and toward policies that can win over the prized middle class. And it can also be seen as an offering to Hillary Clinton, who will need a platform to run on in 2016 as well as a way of attracting the liberals who are disappointed that the more populist Warren won’t challenge her. So while it won’t become law, Van Hollen’s plan is likely to help shape the economic debate both in Congress and on the campaign trail.

Sean McElwee and Lenore Palladino focus on the proposed tax on financial transactions:

The small FTT in this bill—which also includes provisions to boost stagnant wages and close lucrative tax loopholes—wouldn’t burden longer-term investors. The tax is applied to every transaction—the sale and purchase of a stock, bond, or other financial instrument—so as long as the investor holds the investment for a decent period of time, the tax is a tiny percentage of their overall portfolio and won’t drastically alter their trading behavior. It’s the high-frequency traders who have fought this tax tooth and nail, and who will gear up to fight it now, because if you trade multiple times a millisecond then your tax burden will be higher.

Jared Bernstein stands up and applauds:

Whether you like [Van Hollen’s] approach here in attacking inequality through the tax code or favor ideas that target market outcomes, what’s so very notable here is that a senior member of the Democrat’s caucus is trying to do something about the relentless inequality that’s beset the middle class and poor for decades.

But Ponnuru brushes off the plan:

[T]he proposal sounds entirely redistributive. Much of it also seems likely to be ineffective. The tax incentive to boost wages does little to combat the powerful forces that have suppressed wage growth in recent years (such as rising health-care costs). The new higher-education policies mostly funnel more money to a system that does a poor job of meeting the needs of middle- and lower-income students.

The elements of the Democratic tax proposal would almost certainly poll well, but Republicans have an obvious counter to it. Senators Mike Lee and Marco Rubio have been working on a plan that cuts taxes on business investment while increasing the tax credit for children. Unlike the Democratic proposal, it seeks to help the economy grow rather than just milk it. And increasing the tax credit for children would benefit a broader range of parents, and give them more freedom over how to spend their money, than increasing the tax credit for child care.

Waldman, on the other hand, thinks the GOP is at a disadvantage:

If we look back at the recent history of presidential campaigns, we see that Republicans win the argument on the economy under three conditions. The first is when there’s a Democrat in the White House and the economy is terrible, as it was in 1980. The second is when there’s a Republican in the White House and the economy is doing well, as it was in 1984 or 1988. And the third is when the economy is doing so-so, but the election turns on an entirely different set of issues, as in 2004 — in other words, when there really isn’t much of a discussion on the economy.

The 2016 election doesn’t look (at the moment anyway) like any of those three. Unless there’s a dramatic change, the economy will be doing well in broad terms like growth and job creation, but voters will want to hear what the parties are going to propose to improve wages, working conditions, and the fortunes of the middle class and those struggling to join it. Winning that argument will be an enormously difficult task for the GOP, and they aren’t off to a promising start.

Copyright lawyer Jonathan Band highlights another important reason for Selma‘s diversions from history:

[D]irector Ava DuVernay may well have taken more license than artistically necessary in the confrontational scenes between Martin Luther King Jr. and President Johnson. But inaccuracies in other significant parts of the film were forced upon DuVernay by copyright law. The film’s numerous scenes of King delivering powerful speeches regarding civil rights all had to be paraphrased, because the MLK estate has already licensed the film rights in those speeches to DreamWorks and Warner Bros., for an MLK biopic Steven Spielberg is slated to produce.

The litigious MLK estate, controlled now by King’s descendants, has a long history of employing copyright to restrict the use of King’s speeches. The estate appears to have two objectives: maximize revenue and control King’s image.

Let freedom ring? King, and now his estate, have the copyright because he was never a government official, in which case his speeches would have been part of the public domain. Also, as Band bemoans, “thanks to aggressive lobbying by publishers, the estates of authors and, more recently, the motion picture studios, Congress has repeatedly extended the copyright term”:

The extensions have always been retroactive, applying to works already in existence. Thus, King’s speeches and other writings will not enter the public domain until 70 years after his death: January 1, 2039. In Congress’ rush to please copyright owners, it has lost sight of the balance the founders intended. A term of protection of “life plus 70” grossly exceeds the economic incentive any author needs to create a work while constraining the ability of new artists to build on the original.

Meanwhile, a reader react to our big roundup on the film:

I believe Yglesias is absolutely right about too many Hollywood movies portraying the “hero” as the white person in the story. But then Hollywood has always been pretty awful when it comes to race (in more recent decades more out of incompetence or fear of alienating white audiences than actual racism). But I also feel Yglesias misses what LBJ defenders are upset about: the persistently inaccurate and sometimes downright malicious portrayal of LBJ himself. So many movies that portray this time period show JFK as a fully enlightened and enthusiastic supporter of Civil Rights and LBJ as a redneck rube. Of course, if one knows the actual history, they would know better, but how many people really know enough about the subject? Isn’t the point of the film to educate people?

This has always been driven, at least in my mind, by prejudice against white Southerners, the (sometimes absurd) deification of JFK, and bitterness over Vietnam. As a fan of LBJ’s domestic accomplishments, this has always driven me nuts. And to see LBJ once again unfairly depicted is aggravating from a movie that I think many of us expected better from. One does not have to make LBJ out to be unsupportive in order to make sure MLK is the real hero of the story. And while artistic license should be granted to movie versions of historical events, perpetuating widely held falsehoods should not be given such leniency.

Yesterday, a group of hackers calling themselves the “Cyber Caliphate” briefly took over CENTCOM’s Twitter and YouTube accounts and posted pro-ISIS propaganda and anti-US taunts. They also “leaked” some documents that were already available publicly and tried to make it seem as though the US was planning a war with North Korea. Though he acknowledges it’s a decent publicity stunt, P.W. Singer isn’t very impressed:

[S]eizing control of those accounts is the equivalent of controlling a social media megaphone, but not the actual networks that matter to military operations. The networks are civilian controlled and hosted, not Pentagon owned or run. No critical command and control networks were touched, nor, for that matter, were any of the military’s internal or external computer networks that are used to move classified or even run-of-the-mill information.

Fred Kaplan passes along the above XKCD cartoon and shrugs:

Hackers try to launch assaults on Defense Department computers and networks hundreds of times a day. Sometimes they succeed; once in a while, the breach is serious. This one is not.

He nonetheless cautions:

Having a Twitter feed hacked is no big deal, but it indicates that someone was careless with a password or fell for a phishing expedition (i.e., clicked on an email attachment that installed malware); and if doing that exposed Twitter and YouTube to a cyberattack, someone else higher up might get careless with the passwords for a more substantive site.

Classified servers have rarely been hacked by adversaries, at least as far as officials know. (Who knows whether, or how often, they’ve been hacked without detection? The answer is, by nature, unknowable.) But the military runs many “sensitive but unclassified” sites that, if hacked, could reveal vital information about military operations—a particular unit’s travel and logistics plans, the workings of a computer-controlled electrical power grid, the phone numbers and addresses of key officers, and so forth.

The federal government responded to the embarrassment by ordering a security audit for its more than 800 social media managers. By the way, it’s not clear ISIS actually had anything to do yesterday’s prank:

[tweet https://twitter.com/Ali_H_Soufan/status/554699999456423937]

However, as Alex Krasodomski points out, these days “it doesn’t take much to be an Isis member”:

Amedy Coulibaly, who murdered four people in Paris and Mountrouge last week, pledged allegiance to the movement while sitting underneath an A4 flag he’d printed out. The hostage taker in Sydney had forgotten his flag, but offered to release a hostage if somebody brought him one. Travelling to Syria or Iraq is no longer a predicate for becoming a terrorist in the Islamic State’s name: all the contacts, material and propaganda that might be associated with planning and carrying out a terrorist attack can be found online.

The hack on @CENTCOM is likely to have fallen in this vein. A ‘lone wolf’, sympathetic to Isis but with no ‘formal’ links carrying the hack out from their bedroom. The internet has brought us all a bit closer. The distance between a wannabe terrorist and extremist content, the distance between a cyberterrorist and their targets, and the distance between their acts and their onlookers.  This is the real threat of #CyberJihad: that anybody can get involved.

Bouie thinks “it’s not crazy for Romney to think that he’s still viable”:

Given 1.8 percent gross domestic product growth in the first seven months of 2012, President Obama was projected to win 51.2 percent of the two-party vote. He won 52 percent, to Romney’s 48 percent.

It’s possible that a stronger, more charismatic Republican could have moved the needle and beat the fundamentals. But I doubt it. A growing economy is like a Power Star for an incumbent president, and barring some other disaster—like a bungled war or serious terrorist attack—there’s little you can do to stop the momentum. And even then, it’s difficult. John Kerry outperformed the fundamentals and still lost the 2004 election. It’s not that he was a bad candidate, it’s that beating an incumbent president is hard.

But, should Romney’s gambit succeed, Aaron Blake points out that Mitt “would be only the second major-party nominee since the 1800s to lose a presidential race and then come back and win one.” Nixon and Grover Cleveland are the exceptions to the rule:

Nixon lost the 1960 popular vote by less than one point, and Cleveland actually won it in 1888, despite losing the Electoral College. In other words, they were near-miss candidates who probably earned another shot, in the eyes of party supporters. Romney’s 2012 loss — at nearly four points overall and the Electoral College 332-206 — while technically one of the closer popular votes in history, wasn’t really regarded as much of a near-miss (by everyone except perhaps the Romney campaign).

Larison is highly skeptical that Romney can follow in Nixon’s footsteps:

Romney fans like to cite Nixon’s example as proof that it is possible for a losing general election candidate to come back later and win, but they don’t try to explain why no one since Nixon has even made the effort. In the last century, it is not unheard of for a party to turn to a losing nominee a second time, but it is still fairly rare for a reason, and that reason is that it is almost always a guarantee of another loss. As it was, Nixon was (barely) able to win in ’68, and he had come much closer in 1960 than Romney did in 2012. He had been Vice President on two landslide-winning tickets, and already had far more relevant political experience before becoming president than Romney will ever have. Such comebacks for losing candidates are possible, but they are extremely difficult even for someone with Nixon’s background. Romney doesn’t have that background or anything like it.