For the first time in recent history, the lobbying, grassroots and advertising budget of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has surpassed the spending of BOTH the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee.
This is significant. It means that the Great Transition has already begun. In the days following the decision in Citizens United, campaign finance experts predicted that the decision would open the floodgates of money for trade associations like the Chamber of Commerce. The influx of corporate money, according to some, would weaken the power of the political parties and candidates and lead the political parties to become less important. Republican lawyer Ben Ginsberg went so far as to say that the parties would be "threatened by extinction." And Ginsberg supports the CU decision!
As it turns out, the surge of contributions into the U.S. Chamber
has already caused its budget on lobbying, grassroots and advertising to
surpass that of both the Republican National Committee and the
Democratic National Committee for the first time in recent memory.
According to The Center for Responsive Politics, the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce and its national subsidiaries spent $144.5 million in 2009, far
more than the RNC and more than double the expenditures by the DNC.
The Chamber spent much
of its money in 2009 on campaigns that worked -- it scared the Senate
away from considering a version of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade
legislation, and an argument can be made that its cutting ads on health
care (with money taken from some insurance companies) helped to undercut
support for the legislation.
Included in the U.S. Chamber amount are expenditures of about $1 million each in Virginia and Massachusetts on electioneering in off-year contests in those states, and sizeable spending on advertising campaigns in key states and districts aimed at defeating health care, climate change and financial reform legislation.
The U.S. Chamber's expenditures this year even exceeded expenditures of many committees in 2008.
That year, the DCCC spent $142.9 million, the DSCC spent $136.5 million, the NRSC spent $73.9 million, and the NRCC spent $72.7 million. Finally, it's worth noting that none of the contributions that made up this $145 million were subject to disclosure. Ginsberg also believed that this would be a factor in the expected flood of contributions, noting that 501c6s -- the section of the tax code under which the Chamber is organized -- were "[l]ikely to emerge as the biggest players in the 2010 and 2012 elections, ideological groups and trade associations also have been granted the ability to engage much more robustly in the political process. Meager disclosure requirements of their donors will make them a favorite repository of funds for independent expenditures."
Yep. BTW:
The method of reporting chosen by the Chamber reflects all lobbying activity as well as grassroots and issue communication. While party expenditures surge during presidential election years, it is important to keep in mind that the U.S. Chamber has a policy against becoming involved in presidential races. 2002 marked a significant surge in Chamber spending, from approximately $20 million in 2001 to more than $40 million in 2002.
Marc Ambinder is an Atlantic contributing editor. He is also a senior contributor at Defense One, a contributing editor at GQ, and a regular contributor at The Week.
A hotly contested, supposedly ancient manuscript suggests Christ was married. But believing its origin story—a real-life Da Vinci Code, involving a Harvard professor, a onetime Florida pornographer, and an escape from East Germany—requires a big leap of faith.
On a humid afternoon this past November, I pulled off Interstate 75 into a stretch of Florida pine forest tangled with runaway vines. My GPS was homing in on the house of a man I thought might hold the master key to one of the strangest scholarly mysteries in recent decades: a 1,300-year-old scrap of papyrus that bore the phrase “Jesus said to them, My wife.” The fragment, written in the ancient language of Coptic, had set off shock waves when an eminent Harvard historian of early Christianity, Karen L. King, presented it in September 2012 at a conference in Rome.
Never before had an ancient manuscript alluded to Jesus’s being married. The papyrus’s lines were incomplete, but they seemed to describe a dialogue between Jesus and the apostles over whether his “wife”—possibly Mary Magdalene—was “worthy” of discipleship. Its main point, King argued, was that “women who are wives and mothers can be Jesus’s disciples.” She thought the passage likely figured into ancient debates over whether “marriage or celibacy [was] the ideal mode of Christian life” and, ultimately, whether a person could be both sexual and holy.
On Thursday, after the wrestler Sakshi Malik secured India’s first Olympic medal in Rio, the Pakistani journalist Omar Quraishi taunted his country’s top rival: “Finally one of the 119 competitors that India sent to Rio has won a medal—a bronze—now see how they portray it as if they won 20 golds,” he wrote on Twitter. Norway, with a population of 5 million, had won more medals than India, with a population of 1.25 billion, he noted.
As critics were quick to point out, Quraishi wasn’t in the best position to talk. Pakistan may not be the second-largest country in the world, but it is the sixth-largest, with nearly 190 million people. And it is the biggest nation to be leaving Brazil without a medal. It gets worse. Pakistan dispatched its smallest-ever delegation to this year’s games, composed of seven athletes. Most of those athletes participated through “wild-card” slots granted by the International Olympic Committee, not because they directly qualified for their events, according to Agence France-Presse. Pakistan sent as many athletes to Rio as Nepal, despite having nearly seven times Nepal’s population. It sent twice as many officials as athletes. Its once-celebrated men’s field hockey team failed to qualify for the first time since Pakistan began competing in the Olympics in 1948. Pakistan has not won an Olympic medal in 24 years.
Has the vice president made a lasting contribution in foreign policy?
Joe Biden is now the vice president who will not be president. He’s been VP for seven and a half years, preceded by decades of work on U.S. foreign policy in the Senate, but the question remains whether he is distinctive in any memorable way for his work in international affairs. Was he simply a glad-handing flack pushing the Obama agenda, a manic schmoozer of foreign leaders? A gaffe-prone foreign-policy dilettante who, in the long run, won’t matter?
Biden puts some people off. His critics argue that despite his passion for worthy causes—from efforts to stabilize Iraq to the “cancer moonshot” to his task force devoted to “a strong middle class”—his bouts of imprecision and occasional foot-in-mouth foibles get in the way. An adviser to retired General Stanley McChrystal reportedly referred to Biden as “Bite Me.” Former Defense Secretary Bob Gates wrote in his memoir, Duty, that Biden has been “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
Led by Rudy Giuliani, surrogates for the struggling Trump campaign are trying to seed doubts about the Democratic candidate’s fitness for office.
If you can’t beat ’em, you can at least hope they have to withdraw for medical reasons.
The last two weeks have seen a steady increase in innuendo by supporters of Donald Trump who claim—without evidence—that Hillary Clinton is frail, unhealthy, or on the verge of physical collapse. The rumors, spread by voices ranging from the conspiracy theorist radio host Alex Jones to former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, represent a sort of updated birtherism for the 2016 election: a fervent hope for a deus ex machina that will rescue a struggling candidate by disqualifying his opponent.
The innuendo has reached the Sunday shows. “She has an entire media empire that … fails to point out several signs of illness by her. What you’ve got to do is go online,” Giuliani said on Fox News Sundaythis weekend. “So, go online and put down Hillary Clinton illness, take a look at the videos for yourself.”
The film flopped hard at the box office after studios tried to copy the success of 2004's The Passion of the Christ.
In 2004, Mel Gibson’s biblical film The Passion of the Christ hit theaters after a months-long, small-scale ad campaign that focused on church groups and evangelical leaders, despite controversy over its violent content and allegations of anti-Semitism. After opening on Ash Wednesday, it became the highest-grossing R-rated film in history, earning $611 million worldwide. It was a genuine indie phenomenon born out of circumstances so unusual they’d be impossible to replicate—so naturally Hollywood has tried anyway with Ben Hur, the biggest and most disastrous result of the industry’s hubris to date, which opened this weekend to a pitiful $11.4 million at the box office.
The fifth film adaptation of Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ was a $100 million co-production between Paramount Pictures and MGM. It starred the relatively unknown British actor Jack Huston in the title role, was directed by the mid-tier action maestro Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter), and drew largely negative reviews. Many critics noted the film’s supreme inferiority to William Wyler’s 1959 version of the tale, which won 11 Oscars and is widely viewed as one of the greatest classic Hollywood epics. Just the idea of remaking Wyler’s film feels like a colossal error in an age of tiresome franchise reboots—but when you consider how studios tried to belatedly capitalize on religious audiences to save the movie, the existence of Ben-Hur seems all the more cynical.
About 1,500 Americans taking part in an annual “Float Down” event inadvertently floated into international waters after strong winds blew them toward Canada.
NEWS BRIEF An estimated 1,500 Americans aboard plastic rafts, inner tubes, and other flotation devices unknowingly floated to Canada after strong winds sent them into international waters, the CBC News reports.
The floaters began their journey Sunday at Lighthouse Beach in Port Huron, Michigan, as part of an annual “Float Down” event, in which thousands of attendees spent the day floating along the St. Clair River, a 40-mile long river which forms an international boundary between Michigan and Ontario. Though the event was only supposed to span eight miles down the river toward Michigan’s Chrysler Beach, strong winds going as fast as 30 miles per hour blew the floaters toward an unexpected destination: Sarnia, Canada.
Most of management theory is inane, writes our correspondent, the founder of a consulting firm. If you want to succeed in business, don’t get an M.B.A. Study philosophy instead
During the seven years that I worked as a management consultant, I spent a lot of time trying to look older than I was. I became pretty good at furrowing my brow and putting on somber expressions. Those who saw through my disguise assumed I made up for my youth with a fabulous education in management. They were wrong about that. I don’t have an M.B.A. I have a doctoral degree in philosophy—nineteenth-century German philosophy, to be precise. Before I took a job telling managers of large corporations things that they arguably should have known already, my work experience was limited to part-time gigs tutoring surly undergraduates in the ways of Hegel and Nietzsche and to a handful of summer jobs, mostly in the less appetizing ends of the fast-food industry.
The parasite has devastated the whitefish population and is now threatening the trout.
On August 12, Montana officials realized that the mountain whitefish of Yellowstone River were dying en masse. They sent corpses off for testing and got grave news in return: The fish had proliferative kidney disease—the work of a highly contagious parasite that kills between 20 and 100 percent of infected hosts. Tens of thousands of whitefish were already dead, and trout were starting to fall.
Humans can spread the parasite from one water source to another. So, on the morning of August 19, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks closed a 183-mile stretch of the Yellowstone River, banning all fishing, swimming, floating, and boating. “We recognize that this decision will have a significant impact on many people,” said FWP Director Jeff Hagener in a press release. However, we must act to protect this public resource for present and future generations.”
America’s poorest are still dealing with the consequences of the legislation that Bill Clinton signed into law two decades ago today.
As recently as April of this year, former president Bill Clinton defended the welfare reform bill he signed into law on August 22, 1996—twenty years ago today—as one of the great accomplishments of his presidency. The bill scrapped the welfare program known as Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC) and created a new one that lasts to this day—Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). There was a grandiose idea behind the change: TANF was no simple safety net; it was also meant to be a springboard to self-sufficiency through employment, which it encouraged recipients to find work by imposing work requirements and limiting how long they could receive benefits.
Today, across the country, welfare is—at best—a shadow of its former self. In much of the Deep South and parts of the West, it has all but disappeared. In the aftermath of welfare reform, there has been a sharp rise in the number of households with children reporting incomes of less than $2 per person per day, a fact we documented in our book, $2 a Day. As of 2012, according to the most reliable government data available on the subject, roughly 3 million American children spend at least three months in a calendar year living on virtually no money. Numerous other sources of data confirm these findings. According to the most recent data available (2014), TANF rolls are now down to about 850,000 adults with their 2.5 million children—a whopping decline of 75 percent from 1996. TANF was meant to “replace” AFDC. What it did in reality was essentially kill the U.S. cash welfare system. (We use the term “cash welfare” to distinguish it from other forms of assistance, such as housing vouchers and food stamps, which have pre-designated uses.)
Most elite athletes are unusual in some way. So why does Caster Semenya alarm spectators more than Michael Phelps?
The South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya will compete in the women’s 800-meter final this Saturday in Rio de Janeiro, and she’s favored to win. Her potential victory is already being described as a “dilemma.”
At best, her detractors will give the credit for her win to the 25-year-old's body chemistry rather than her skill. It might even prompt international sporting agencies to once again rethink what it means to be a female athlete.
No one is accusing Semenya of using illicit substances. Quite the opposite: Some have suggested she should be taking drugs in order to bring her hormone levels more closely in line with those of average women.
Semenya was raised and identifies as female. But according to a leaked medical test, Semenya’s testosterone levels are three times as high as those of most women, and she has internal testes instead of ovaries.
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