Via TPM:

In a surprising move Tuesday, six Republicans joined Senate Democrats to break a filibuster and advance a three-month revival of unemployment insurance that recently expired for some 1.3 million Americans.

On the off-chance that you’re wondering, Roy Blunt, our Republican Senator from Missouri was not among the Republicans who were at least willing to discuss putting the welfare of jobless Americans before partisan ideology – in spite of the fact that, as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch‘s Tony Messenger points out, people don’t have jobs because there aren’t any to be had:

Both liberal and conservative economists point out that the long-term unemployment problem is as bad as it’s been since after World War II. Kevin Hassett, an economist with the conservative American Enterprise Institute and former adviser to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, calls it “a huge emergency.”

So far, two days later, there’s no statement from Blunt – that I can find, at any rate – explaining his vote, so we’ll have to extrapolate for the time being from his past rhetoric and his predictable willingness to always toe the party line. My guess is that he’ll make some half-hearted statement that repeats one or the other of the strategies many in his party are adopting to try to take the sting out of their heartlessness: to wit, unemployment benefits somehow hurt the jobless, discourage full-employment, and that fiscal responsibility demands spending offsets.

The last reason, the demand for spending offsets, is especially risible. When Democrats in the House did, during the original budget negotiations, offer to pay for extending unemployment benefits by cutting agriculture subsidies – those very subsidies enjoyed by our Missouri Rep. Vicky Hartzler, incidentally – that wasn’t the type of spending cut that Republicans were willing to accept.

But there are, of course, other types of corporate welfare that could be cut in order to pay for extending jobless benefits. Oil subsidies, for instance. I’m going to be waiting with baited breath for Senator Blunt’s effort to excuse his vote(s). If I hear one word about fiscal responsibility from Senator “Big Oil” Blunt, the go-to guy for the energy industry who thinks oil subsidies, along with other types of corporate welfare are always just tickety-boo, I’ll spit. And if anyone buys this crap coming from Blunt, I might suffer cardiac arrest. Why not? Who wants to live in a world where folks are so stupid that they’ll buy Roy Blunt as a fiscal conservative?

In fact, who wants to live in a world where anyone buys the GOP as the party of fiscal responsibility? Spending offsets are simply a strategy designed to deflect disapproval and disguise a turnip as cake – as in let them eat cake. There’s a reason that the House leadership is trying to soften GOP rhetoric on the topic.  But no matter how they talk about it, it’s hard to make meanness attractive. As Brian Buetler notes in Salon:

But conservatives – even reform conservatives – are oddly indignant about the suggestion that they would support doing something that actually helps the poor. As always, for any given way of helping people, conservatives are against it because there’s some other better way. But they never actually favor helping.

Via TPM:

In a surprising move Tuesday, six Republicans joined Senate Democrats to break a filibuster and advance a three-month revival of unemployment insurance that recently expired for some 1.3 million Americans.

On the off-chance that you’re wondering, Roy Blunt, our Republican Senator from Missouri was not among the Republicans who were at least willing to discuss putting the welfare of jobless Americans before partisan ideology – in spite of the fact that, as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch‘s Tony Messenger points out, people don’t have jobs because there aren’t any to be had:

Both liberal and conservative economists point out that the long-term unemployment problem is as bad as it’s been since after World War II. Kevin Hassett, an economist with the conservative American Enterprise Institute and former adviser to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, calls it “a huge emergency.”

So far, two days later, there’s no statement from Blunt – that I can find, at any rate – explaining his vote, so we’ll have to extrapolate for the time being from his past rhetoric and his predictable willingness to always toe the party line. My guess is that he’ll make some half-hearted statement that repeats one or the other of the strategies many in his party are adopting to try to take the sting out of their heartlessness: to wit, unemployment benefits somehow hurt the jobless, discourage full-employment, and that fiscal responsibility demands spending offsets.

The last reason, the demand for spending offsets, is especially risible. When Democrats in the House did, during the original budget negotiations, offer to pay for extending unemployment benefits by cutting agriculture subsidies – those very subsidies enjoyed by our Missouri Rep. Vicky Hartzler, incidentally – that wasn’t the type of spending cut that Republicans were willing to accept.

But there are, of course, other types of corporate welfare that could be cut in order to pay for extending jobless benefits. Oil subsidies, for instance. I’m going to be waiting with baited breath for Senator Blunt’s effort to excuse his vote(s). If I hear one word about fiscal responsibility from Senator “Big Oil” Blunt, the go-to guy for the energy industry who thinks oil subsidies, along with other types of corporate welfare are always just tickety-boo, I’ll spit. And if anyone buys this crap coming from Blunt, I might suffer cardiac arrest. Why not? Who wants to live in a world where folks are so stupid that they’ll buy Roy Blunt as a fiscal conservative?

In fact, who wants to live in a world where anyone buys the GOP as the party of fiscal responsibility? Spending offsets are simply a strategy designed to deflect disapproval and disguise a turnip as cake – as in let them eat cake. There’s a reason that the House leadership is trying to soften GOP rhetoric on the topic.  But no matter how they talk about it, it’s hard to make meanness attractive. As Brian Buetler notes in Salon:

But conservatives – even reform conservatives – are oddly indignant about the suggestion that they would support doing something that actually helps the poor. As always, for any given way of helping people, conservatives are against it because there’s some other better way. But they never actually favor helping.

I admit it. I like making my own end-of-the-year lists, and I like to see how my opinions line up with other list-makers. It’s silly maybe, but it can help to refine one’s perspective. So here’s my first end-of-the-year list which names the political actors and/or acts that struck me as the most absurd and/or inexcusable during 2013, hence the titular worst of the worst. (In order to balance the negativity, though, I’ll be following it with a list of the best of the best.) It goes without saying that my selections are entirely subjective and reflect my opinion only – nobody else is implicated by my judgement, although I invite anyone so inclined to take issue with my selections or offer their contrary assessments in the comments. And with that, away we go:

1. Rex Sinquefield: Sinquefield is a retired billionaire financier whose hobby is buying up Missouri state government in order to provide a staging ground for his libertarian theology. He plays a long game, lavishing tons of dollars on politicians of every stripe as long as they show even some teeny-tiny signs of sympathy for a small sliver of his goals.  What does he want long-term? Just a Missouri with all the attractions of the brutish Randian paradise for wealthy Übermenschen that excites today’s conservatives.

But hey, perverting the political process for the benefit of the rich and powerful is nothing new and, on its own, wouldn’t merit more than an honorable mention among the worst of Missouri’s recent worst. Mr. Sinquefield has been taking full advantage of the Supreme Court’s destructive endorsement of the idea that money equals speech for a long time. This year, however, plantation master Sinquefield found it necessary to crack the whip; he quickly helped launch a lawsuit to stop a campaign finance reform bill that would have reduced the decibels of his green-backed free speech to a level more in line with that enjoyed by less wealthy citizens of the state. And what does he do with this free-speech? He lies – as in his recent Forbes Magazine op-ed, an overtly counterfactual apotheosis of Kansas Governor Brownback’s tax free policies.

2. The Missouri anti-Obamacare obstructionists: And by obstructionists I mean the Republicans who control the state legislature. Thanks to these jerks, 193,000 Missourians will be out in the healthcare cold. These are the people who don’t make enough money to qualify for subsidies on the Obamacare exchanges since those in their income range were were meant to to get coverage through an extension of Medicaid eligibility, an extension that the state’s GOP, taking advantage of another gift from our conservative Supreme Court, have refused to enact. The same folks have refused to set up Obamacare exchanges, tried to hinder use of the federal exchange and pushed one dishonest story after another about the imagined perils of the law. Talk all you want about the initial failures of the Obamacrare Website or Obama’s rather tame “lie of the year,” the folks who’ve done the real damage are quite simply the politicos who are busy patting themselves on the back because they have saved Missouri’s poor from the moral hazard represented by actual health care.

3. Members of the Missouri GOP congressional delegation: These folks, many of them multi-millionaires, came home to enjoy their cushy Christmas celebrations after refusing to extend benefits for unemployed American workers. As a result, last Saturday 21,329 jobless Missourians lost the meager stipend (averaging $242) that often meant keeping food on the table. If nothing is done, 35,400 more workers will lose this cushion in the first months of 2014. The people’s Republican representatives felt free to cut benefits off even though currently there are, according to some sources, three applicants for most jobs and over 4 million long-term unemployed nationally. Missouri’s current unemployment rate is 6.1%.

4. Rep. Ann Wagner (R-2): Wagner makes it onto this list due to her emergence as one of the aspiring leaders of the GOP House membership, in which role she stood behind the recent government shutdown, welcoming the “fight” on behalf of “the American people,” while simultaneously trying to lay the blame on the Democrats who, for some inexplicable reason, wouldn’t roll over and play dead after winning a major election. This shutdown cost taxpayers $24 billion at a conservative estimate. Thanks alot, Ann. If Wagner represents the new face of the GOP, the concept needs some work.

5. Governor Jay Nixon: Nixon arguably doesn’t belong on a list filled with boneheads and charlatans – but he landed here because I expect more of him when it comes to looking out for the long-term welfare of the state as opposed to selling us out for a short-term, politically attractive “get.” I’m talking about the Boeing giveaway here. There’s plenty of evidence that massive incentives such as those offered to Boeing are bad economic policy, particularly in a state that like Missouri is already starved for revenue. It leaves a particularly bad taste when one takes into account the sort of underhanded back-room deals that seem to have been required to bring it into being. But no matter how you cut it, $3.5 billion in tax breaks is a bit much to pay in order to buy bragging rights for a handful of jobs – especially when we’re talking about jobs that were probably never going to come  here in the first place. When politicians you have no choice but to trust are influenced by corrupt, corporatist thinking about the allocation of cost and benefit, it makes it just that much harder to believe that change will ever be possible. You want to know why Democrats don’t turn out in off-year elections, why there’s an enthusiasm gap? Look no further.

6. The Greater St. Louis Labor Council: This one hurts. It hurts because it’s more evidence of the demise of labor. It’s clear that Boeing’s effort to spike a bidding war for its 777X manufacturing facility, as the Kansas City Star’s Mary Sanchez noted, is “just leverage for Boeing Co. to go after the jugular of a labor union.”  Now, I’ve always believed that what made unions work was a little thing called solidarity – and that its exercise is not defined in regional terms. Yet not only were local unions willing to undercut their brothers and sisters in Washington, but they quickly squelched Gordon King, a representative of the  local Machinists District 837, when he attempted to stand up and do what union members are supposed to do for each other. When it becomes “my workers first” and not “all workers together,” unions have truly lost the war, and the unbecoming eagerness of the local labor council to kiss up to Boeing is just one more step along the way. I understand the desperation that has brought our local labor leaders to this point, but it still hurts.

7. Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-4): No list of worsts would be complete with the stench of hypocrisy – of which Hartzler is redolent. And make no mistake, it takes chutzpah to vote to cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), part of the safety net for the poor, wile keeping sacrosanct massive agricultural subsidies for rich farmers that Hartzler and her family continue to receive. Hartzler, author of a book titled Running God’s Way that is described as “a must-read for everyone interested in serving God through political involvement,” has shown herself again and again to be unwilling to put into practice Christ’s admonition in Matthew 25:34-36 to minister to those in need, and has, instead, allied herself with the wealthy about whom Christ declared “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God” (Mark 11:25).

8. Brian Nieves: In a state legislature filled with chuckleheads and bozos, if one had to single out one supreme example of the resentment-fueled, raging white doofus, it would have to be state Senator Brian “Mad Dog” Nieves. Sharia law, Agenda 21, drones spying on farmers, gold-buggery, tentherism, you name it, if it’s crazy Nieves is for it. Add to the mix his eagerness to physically and verbally attack opponents, constituents, you name it, and you’ve got a disaster ready to happen. He’s on this year’s list, though, because he’s one of the brains (and I use the term loosely) who responded to the Sandy Hook massacre by pushing a gun bill so irresponsible that even members of his own party ultimately refused to over-ride its veto by the Governor. In his own words:

… If we, as a nation, would collectively take a few short minutes, maybe even an hour, to actually research what our Founding Fathers said, in their own words, about gun ownership and gun control, we would see that what we arbitrarily refer to as “Assault Rifles” would fit squarely with what they wanted us to have! …

Now that constitutional scholar Nieves has devoted an hour or so to researching the issue, I should probably run out and buy my assault weapon today! Then I can wave it around and act tough just like “Mad Dog.” Just in case you’re worried, there’ll be lots more fun and games ahead. And like last year, very little attention to important business.

Slightly edited for clarity.

The recently enacted federal budget that everybody is regarding with relief but no hosannas failed to extend federal jobless benefits. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, about 5 million people currently  receivng these benfits stand to lose them if they are not extended. In Missouri, where one in every six people already struggle with hunger, 84,500 individuals will lose this vital support.

National unemployment currently hovers at around 7%. Lots of jobs were lost in the Bush recession; lots of them will never come back. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for every job opening there are three unemployed individuals. And these are the official numbers; if you count the people who aren’t actively looking for jobs, the number is much higher, by some estimates for every job opening there more than six jobless.

If you listen to Republican politicians, however, you will come away with the impression that doing away with unemployment benefits is the road to full employment.  According to far too many in this party of rabid extremists, it is the meager unemployment benefits on offer, acting as a “disincentive” to the unemployed, that are responsible for our high unemployment figures. This line of reasoning was expressed most pungently by those whom Greg Sargent dubbed the “Let Them Eat Want Ads Caucus” when the issue of extending benefits first came up in 2010, but it remains a favorite in the ongoing Republican War on the Poor, surfacing most recently in Rand Paul’s self-righteous declaration that unemployment benefits are doing a great disservice to those who can’t find work since it permits them to wait around until benefits expire before taking honest work, perhaps unfitting them to ever work again.

However, much like the claim of the parent who wants his misbehaving child to believe that punishment will “hurt me more than you,” it just isn’t so – as recent studies on work incentives make clear (see, for example, here, here and here). I’m not saying that you won’t be able to pull up an example of some poor sod whose expectations are so low that bare bones unemployment checks can compete with any paycheck he or she could hope to earn; I’m simply saying that analysis of research results shows that even in countries with generous benefits, such individuals are the exceptions and not the rule. Even many economists who buy into the disincentive theory are aware that the argument does not apply to today’s labor market. As the conservative National Review‘s Reihan Salam writes:

If you have something like five job seekers for every job listing, like we do today, you don’t need to worry about this very much. Let’s say that half of unemployed workers are eligible for UI, and half of those prefer to draw UI rather than return to work. You’re still left with several interested job seekers for every job listing, and so UI benefits should not have a big effect on unemployment rates.

The GOP disincentives doctrine, though, isn’t just wrong; it’s far more sinister. The absence of economic safety net features such as unemployment benefits combined with high levels of competition for jobs leaves those workers who are lucky enough to get a job powerless. They are unable to exert any influence over the conditions of their employment.There’s a reason that people flock to factories in third world countries where pay is barely sufficient to maintain life and working conditions are often lethal; it’s because they don’t have any choice. So is it any surprise that the very politicians who are also busy doing all that they can to weaken unions – the main mechanism for worker’s rights – also want to make sure that when it comes to a choice between the sweat shop or the boneyard, folks have no alternatives?

The conservative response to this concern is the old beggars can’t be choosers gambit; should people expect to have a choice if they’re living off the public dime? The answer, in short, is yes. We’re all the public and it’s our dime as much as anyone else’s. We don’t want to be like China or Indonesia, or, God forbid, Pakistan; we want jobs, yes, but good, well-paying jobs and a rational allocation of our human capital.

Nor do we need to worry if some of the unemployed hold out awhile, waiting for more suitable jobs. We, and the economy as a whole, are better off when people have the flexibility to secure jobs that use their skills appropriately. As the Editorial Board of the Los Angeles Times notes, when enough people “give up their skills, training and experience to take a job flipping burgers or operating a cash register just because those are the only ones available” it will “waste a lot of investment in human capital.”

On the one hand, we can go all in for the cheap and easy Republican jobs plan which depends on desperate people, ripe for exploitation by a monied elite – and which requires, paradoxically, keeping unemployment high. On the other, we can make the effort to sustain our citizens in such a way that prosperity is shared and we all benefit from economic growth. It’s a little harder, but I believe that it’s what leaders like John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan envisioned when they spoke about the “shining city on a hill.” As the Political Animal‘s Kathlees Geier puts it:

… it is well within the power of one of the richest societies the world has ever known to ensure that each one of its citizens has access to the resources she needs to live a decent life. And no, wingnuts, doing so will not undermine the moral character of poor people – though it might cast a harsh spotlight on your own.

(Cross posted to Daily Kos with a slight change in the 2nd sentence.)

That’s the rationale behind blaming Nixon if unemployed workers don’t get that extension to 99 weeks from the federal government. Four state senators–Lembke, Nieves, Schaaf, and Kraus–are filibustering to prevent Missouri from accepting free federal funds for the long-term jobless. If they succeed, we’ll be unique: the only state stupid enough to send its federal funds to some other state.

But the senators aren’t unreasonable. Oh no. If they can get Nixon to turn down other stimulus funds, they’ll give up the filibuster against jobless benefits. And if Nixon doesn’t kowtow, then:

“he’s more interested in paying for pet projects and pork than helping the families in Missouri that on Friday he said were his priority,” said Sen. Brian Nieves, R-Washington.

Republicans have a nasty habit of holding somebody’s kid at gunpoint and making ransom demands. That’s bad enough, but then they blame the kidnapping on the parents (or on Obama or on Nixon).  

And they ain’t honest in other ways as well. When a reporter asked them about their assertions that these workers are “gaming the system”, Nieves got hot. (Well, that’s Nieves.) “Which one of us have EVER said anything remotely similar to that?” Lembke, who was standing next to Nieves at the podium didn’t say a word about this published quotation of his: “‘People need to get off their backsides and get a job.'” Furthermore, the reporter quoted Schaaf, 13 minutes earlier, saying that it’s outrageous to take money from one worker and give to another who should be working.

I’m past being surprised at wingnuts being wingnuts.

No.

They argue that cutting off unemployment benefits at 79 weeks for Missourians could help the employment picture in the longterm because it would force those the idlers collecting it until 99 weeks to get off their bums and find a job.

Let me explain it one more time: One job = six applicants. It’s true even at Wal-Mart, so let’s not hear any more about PhDs who won’t work in nursing homes. Lembke can just drop the anecdotal nonsense:

Lembke said some employers–such as a home-health care company and a Jefferson County manufacturer–have told him they have trouble finding workers willing to take $10- to $15-an-hour jobs.

Every fifth grader, not just the smart ones, can tell you that if you give money to a person who is desperate for it, he will spend it. And store owners who are desperate for customers will be glad to see the poor man come in with cash. Thus, the economy gets happier.

That’s fifth grade economics. I don’t see Lembke qualifying this June for a promotion from fourth grade.

Previously: Of cigars, port wine, and arrogant state senators