Keep Fighting, Dems: Obama-GOP Tax Deal Entrenches Plutocracy

Dennis Kucinich is not planning to challenge President Barack Obama in 2012. Maybe we can draft Robert Reich, who justifies efforts Kucinich and other rowdy Dems may make to beat the Obama-GOP tax-rate deal into better shape:

If the Democratic Party has stood for anything over the years it is to maintain and restore upward mobility for the majority of working Americans, ensure that the playing field isn’t tilted in the direction of the privileged, and limit the power of the richest among us to entrench themselves and their heirs into a semi-permanent plutocracy.

Continuing the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, including a sharp cut in the estate tax, violates these core principles. Doing so in the midst of an economic emergency that demands bold measures to rescue America’s vast middle and working class adds further insult. For President Obama and former President Clinton to tell America there’s “no other choice” or that “this is the best we can do” — when Democrats remain putatively in control of the House, Senate, and the presidency — is misleading [Robert Reich, "Why Democrats Should Disregard Bill Clinton's Endorsement of Obama's Tax Deal," blog, 2010.12.11].

Among the things I appreciate about Reich's call to principle is that he acknowledges that he admires his former boss and the current Commander-in-Chief as "good men." Yet he disagrees with them, civilly and passionately... just as we could in a good healthy primary. Hmmm... Reich-Kucinich 2012? Weiner-Paul?

Obama-GOP Tax Deal Hands $360K to Richest 0.1%

Harvard's Dr. Mankiw mostly likes the tax deal between President Obama and the still-minority Republicans. He also points to some useful number-crunching from the Tax Policy Center that breaks down who gets what from extending the Bush tax cuts for the next two years. Compared with current law—i.e., the taxes everyone would pay if we let all of the deficit-busting Bush tax cuts expire at the end of this year, as originally intended—the top 0.1% of income earners each get $360,469 more in their pockets each year.

$360,469. That's enough to cover the salaries of Kristi Noem and John Thune. Normal annual pay for members of Congress: $174,000.

The way I calculate it, the 259 richest Americans could take their gains from this tax deal and buy every member of Congress.

But they seem to have already done that.

Or let's slice that locally. About 400,000 South Dakotans file federal income tax returns. 0.1% of them would be 400 taxpayers. (South Dakota's own Fortune 400—that is a list I'd love to see.) 400 × $360,000 = $144,000,000.

$144 million more dollars staying in the richest South Dakotans' pockets... at the same time that Governor Rounds wants to cut $23 million from K-12 education. Hey Dennis! I think we just found our replacement for the stimulus dollars to fix the state budget deficit!

Four More Years: No One Beating Obama

My neighbors at Dakota War College love to soothe their nerves with gentle cooing that Barack Obama will be a one-term president. While the conservative bloggarazzi revel in the President's low poll numbers, they ignore one key fact: his potential GOP challengers' numbers are even lower:

Americans are pretty evenly divided on whether they'd rather have four more years of Barack Obama or replace him with a Republican in 2012, with 48% going for Obama and 47% with a generic Republican. But with the exception of Mitt Romney none of the actual top tier Republican candidates poll as well against the President as the hypothetical one.

Obama leads Romney 47-46, matching his generic ballot lead. Obama's lead expands to 48-45 over Mike Huckabee, 49-43 over Newt Gingrich, 51-42 over Sarah Palin, and 48-37 over Marco Rubio who PPP followers voted in as this month's 'wild card' candidate [Tom Jensen, "Obama Leads All Republicans," Public Policy Polling, 2010.11.29].

PPP also finds that Palin, the Celebritarian playing the press better than any regular Republican, is viewed as electable by only 28% of Americans. She can't even get a majority of Republicans to say they think she could beat the President in 2012.

One-term President? Go ahead, conservatives. Keep telling yourselves that, if it makes you happy. But you have yet to come up with someone who can make that happen.

Thanks, Barack: More Small Biz Offer Health Insurance

Repeal this, Kristi:

Some small businesses are benefiting from portions of the [health care reform] law, which includes a tax credit beginning this year that covers as much as 35% of a company's insurance premiums.

According to a report by Bernstein Research in New York, the percentage of employers with between three and nine workers and which are offering insurance has increased to 59% this year, up from 46% last year. The report relies on data from a September survey by the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation [Janet Adamy, "Health Benefits Appear on Rise," Wall Street Journal, 2010.11.02].

The tax credit isn't a full fix: health premiums are still going up, and small businesses have to do more paperwork to get Uncle Sam's help. But in a bad economy, shops with fewer than ten employees are exactly the businesses we would expect to have the hardest time offering benefits for their workers. Yet thanks to President Obama and health care reform, more of those smallest businesses are getting a tax credit that allows them offer their workers health insurance.

Go ahead, Kristi. Tell us why you don't like that. Tell us why reducing taxes and expanding small-biz health coverage is a bad idea.

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Health care reform hasn't cut into insurer profits yet. A new report from Health Care for America Now finds that the big six insurers are insuring fewer people but allocating more money toward administrative overhead and profit:

On average, each of the six now devotes 20 cents on the dollar to non-medical services, compared to 16.5 cents last year and, according to HCAN, 5 cents in 1993.

March's healthcare overhaul will require insurers to spend at least 85 cents of every premium dollar on patient care. Those changes take effect next year [Elise Viebeck, "Health Insurance Companies Likely to Break Profit Records for 2010," The Hill:Healthwatch, 2010.11.16].

Health care CEOs also have the highest median pay in the country, $10 million.

Health care reform can't come soon enough.

Historian: Obama Pragmatist, Not Socialist

Hey, all you gooney-birds who think President Barack Obama is a socialist: maybe you should study what the President actually thinks and reads and writes.

Harvard historian James T. Kloppenberg has. He has a book coming out on the President's intellectual evolution, Reading Obama: Dreams, Hopes, and the American Political Tradition. Kloppenberg finds our President is a classically American pragmatist, a "philosopher president" like Jefferson, Madison, both Adamses, Lincoln, and Wilson. He finds a man dedicated like our Founding fathers to promoting civic discourse.

He does not find a socialist:

Conservatives who argue that Mr. Obama is a socialist or an anti-colonialist (as Dinesh D’Souza does in his book “The Roots of Obama’s Rage”) are far off the mark, he said.

“Adams and Jefferson were the only anti-colonialists whom Obama has been affected by,” he told the audience in New York. “He has a profound love of America.”

And his opposition to inequality stems from Puritan preachers and the social gospel rather than socialism [Patricia Cohen, "In Writings of Obama, a City Is Unearthed," New York Times, 2010.10.27].

By Kloppenberg's analysis, President Barack Obama is not some outsider trying to disrupt the American Dream. President Obama is a product and proponent of the American Dream, trying to make America live up to its founding ideals.

Check Your Engine: FBI Attaching GPS Bugs Without Warrants

If President Obama wants me to keep shouting "Yes We Can!" he'd better let me say, "No You Can't!" to the G-men attaching GPS trackers to American citizens' cars. The FBI snuck a GPS device onto a 20-year-old California university student's car, apparently for no greater reason than that he's Arab-American and has relatives in Egypt.

President Obama, who ought to know better, given the grief he gets for his skin color and his overseas family connections, thinks this kind of warrantless search is just fine:

The federal appeals court based in Washington D.C. said in August that investigators must obtain a warrant for GPS in tossing out the conviction and life sentence of Antoine Jones, a nightclub owner convicted of operating a cocaine distribution ring. That court concluded that the accumulation of four-weeks worth of data collected from a GPS on Jones' Jeep amounted to a government "search" that required a search warrant.

Judge Douglas Ginsburg said watching Jones' Jeep for an entire month rather than trailing him on one trip made all the difference between surveilling a suspect on public property and a search needing court approval....

The Obama administration last month asked the D.C. federal appeals court to change its ruling, calling the decision "vague and unworkable" and arguing that investigators will lose access to a tool they now use "with great frequency" [Pual Elias, "Discovery of GPS Tracker Becomes Privacy Issue," AP via Yahoo News, 2010.10.16]

Think about it, Mr. President. You have teabaggers making the nutty claim that they are engaged in a noble crusade against a tyrannical government. If you're going to support warrantless GPS tracking, you make it that much harder to refute claims that Big Brother is in charge.

Of course, I'm still waiting for the teabaggers to get off Marxism and tackle the real tyranny in our midst.

Noem Advocates Obama Agenda on Medicare Fraud

Kristi Noem has updated her issues page, piling some new blurbs about her support for social programs at the top of her GOP talking points. Among the substanceless, specifics-less suggestions, Noem opines that we must "work harder" to curb fraud and abuse in Medicare.

Isn't that exactly what President Barack Obama is doing?

1. President Obama is spending $9 million to educate old folks to prevent fight Medicare fraud. (Hey! Where's South Dakota's piece of that pie?)
   
2. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will adopt new billing software that will catch fraud before the money leaves Uncle Sam's cash box. The software, much like what credit card companies use to protect you from unusual activity on your Mastercard, could save over $20 billion a year. This anti-fraud measure was part of the Small Business Lending Act, sponsored by Democrat Barney Frank, voted for by Democrat Nancy Pelosi, and signed into law by Democrat and President Barack Obama. Remarkably Democrat Stephanie Herseth Sandlin voted against this bill, along with Senator Thune and most Republicans.
   
3. President Obama's AG Holder and HHS Sec. Sebelius announced the Medicare Fraud Strike Force's biggest bust yet this summer when they announced charges against 94 tricky docs and other Medicare swindlers.
4. CMS is proposing a rule to classify Medicare providers by risk, do background checks and fingerprinting on the high-risk group, and suspend payment to providers upon credible allegation of fraud. But that rule proposal comes from President Obama's health care reform law, so surely Noem wants to repeal that anti-fraud effort.
   
5. President Obama also signed the Improper Payments Elimination and Recovery Act last July to fight fraud against all government agencies, including Medicare. Herseth Sandlin got with the program and voted with Pelosi on this one... as did everyone else in Congress.
   

"Work harder" to fight Medicare fraud, Mrs. Noem? Sounds like President Obama is already at least five policy steps ahead of you.
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Bonus Health Care Refudiation: Perhaps Noem could work harder to stop scaring seniors. The Kaiser Family Foundation's September 2010 Health Tracking Poll finds 30% of senior citizens still think the new law includes "a government panel to make decisions about end‐of‐life care for people on Medicare"—i.e., Sarah Palin's death panels. Health care reform includes no death panels. Senator Charles Grassley said so... last year.
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Update 2010.10.14: Obama's G-Men catch another 73 Armenian gangsters who allegedly set up a ring of at least 118 bogus clinics and tried cheating Medicare out of $163 million. President Obama keeps working harder....

Obama Presides over Smallest Executive Workforce in 50 Years

Hat tip to Ned Hodgman at Understanding Government!

The Tea Party and Kristi Noem are imagining things. Noem recites the standard GOP slogans about how government is getting too big.

However, the plain truth is that President Barack Obama currently manages an Executive Branch workforce that makes up the smallest fraction of the U.S. population in the last 50 years.

Federal Government Employment Levels Through the Years (including the U.S. Postal Service)

	Executive Branch civilians	Total U.S. population	Executive Branch employees per 1,000 population
1962 (Kennedy)	2.48 million	186.5 million	13.3
1964 (Johnson)	2.47 million	191.8 million	12.9
1970 (Nixon)	2.94 million*	205 million	14.4
1975 (Ford)	2.84 million	215.9 million	13.2
1978 (Carter)	2.87 million	222.5 million	12.9
1982 (Reagan)	2.77 million	232.1 million	11.9
1990 (Bush)	3.06 million*	249.6 million	12.3
1994 (Clinton)	2.9 million	263.1 million	11.1
2002 (Bush)	2.63 million	287.8 million	9.1
2010 (Obama)	2.65 million+	310.3 million+	8.4+

SOURCE: Office of Management and Budget, via Washington Post. *= Figure includes temporary Census Bureau workers. += Estimates by OMB and U.S. Census Bureau.

The Executive Branch currently has 2.65 million employees. That's only a 20K increase from George W. Bush's 2002 Executive Branch workforce. That's less than the 2.77 million who worked for Saint Ronald in 1982.

And President Obama's 8.4 Executive Branch workers per 1000 citizens is the smallest proportion on the modern chart. Under Obama, it's easier than ever for us to surround them.

But hey, why let facts stand in the way of a fun party? (By the way, still no commitment from Noem to appear with fellow radical conservative Ted Nugent to thrill her teabagger fans.)

Democrats, Be Democrats!

Dakota War College notices that Democratic consultant Paul Begala is telling Dems that trying to dissociate themselves from President Barack Obama won't work:



That's what I've been telling our state Democratic Party, particularly our Congresswoman, for some time. Our party rejected a resolution on George McGovern's Medicare for Everyone, for fear that the GOP would have a field day beating us up as big-spending socialists... even though the GOP has been waging that exact attack since Plumber Joe in October 2008. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin touts her independent Blue Dog status, but Republicans still paint her as a tool of the evil Pelosi-Obama agenda. SHS professes Clintonian triangulation in voting against significant Democratic legislation like health insurance reform, credit card reform, student loan reform, and climate change and energy security legislation, but the Republicans still tag her for supporting procedural votes and not convincing other Dems to kill those awful Marxist plots (Chris Nelson rolled out that strategy last November; R. Blake Curd followed in March; Kristi Noem is doing it now).

On party identity, too many Dems are showing their wienie-face when they should show their war-face. Even B-Thom can see through the absurdity of trying to call yourself an "Independent Democrat."

We are Democrats. The Republicans are going to brand us as Democrats. We should brand ourselves as Democrats. Bring Senator Al Franken back to say the priorities of Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats are actually better for South Dakota than the GOP's tax cuts for the rich (who don't live here!). Bring President Obama here to hammer on the first vote Kristi Noem would cast, for Speaker John Boehner. Remind everyone of the progress we Democrats have made with no help from Republicans.

Democrats, be Democrats. Own our party. Own our policies. Own our President. Be consistent and brave, and own November 2!

Obama Admin Easing Pipeline Regs

Yo, Barack, where's the green love?

Unlike the South Dakota press, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch continues to give well-researched coverage to mounting concerns over the integrity of the Keystone pipeline. Reporter Phillip O'Connor finds that the Obama Administration is going softer on pipeline companies than the Bush Administration did:

Pipeline safety officials first learned of problems with defective steel while conducting tests on several projects built during a pipeline construction boom from 2007 to 2009. An investigation revealed that several lines contained significant amounts of defective pipe that stretched under pressure. The problems were traced to defective steel produced by several mills, but mostly by Welspun Power and Steel, a manufacturer based in India.

Almost half of the steel in the 30-inch Keystone pipeline came from Welspun and was manufactured about the same time the company provided defective steel on several other pipeline projects.

In some cases, the Pipeline and Hazardous Material Safety Administration took remedial action.

In April 2009, for example, the agency ordered the Houston company, Boardwalk Pipeline Partners, to replace more than 300 sections of newly built 42-inch gas pipeline, about half of which had expanded by as little as 0.6 percent.

But then in October 2009, the pipeline agency issued new guidelines. From that point on, only pipe that expanded by at least 1.5 percent would need to be replaced. Companies were told they needed to notify the agency only of expansions of 1 percent or more [Phillip O'Connor, "Concern Mounts over Oil Pipeline Safety," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 2010.09.01].

October 2009. Nope, can't blame Bush for that one. Plains Justice rightly alerted all of us to the huge amount of Welspun steel in the Keystone pipeline. The Welspun steel now carrying 435,000 barrels of tar sands oil a day across eastern South Dakota clunked out of Indian foundries about the same time as the batches in which inspectors found hundreds of defects. The rules of the previous administration forced pipeliners to dig that bad steel up. Then President Obama's people changed the rules and said the same potential danger in a pipeline across South Dakota wasn't worth digging up.

TransCanada thanks you, I'm sure, Mr. President, but we're the ones whose votes you need... and who live atop hundreds of miles of potentially leaky Indian steel (not to mention pump stations blowing gaskets almost every month). Let's bring back the Bush-era rules and check out that pipeline!

Is Anyone You Know Really a Christian?

A new Pew Forum poll on the President's religion finds subjectivism and willful ignorance of facts running rampant among a majority of Americans. Pew asked, "Do you happen to know what Barack Obama's religion is? Is he Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist, agnostic, or something else?" The responses are alarming. 18% assert that President Obama is Muslim. 43% assert that they don't know.

A majority thus deny the reality supported by the statements and public actions of President Obama himself. Barack Hussein Obama is a Christian. He has said, "Jesus is the only way [to salvation] for me." He swore his Presidential oath on Abraham Lincoln's Bible. As I have stated previously, "Obama is not a Muslim... not that there's anything wrong with that. For those of you who groove to Jesus, Obama has more clearly and consistently articulated a vision of how his Christian faith motivates his practical social action."

Even Fox News says Obama is a Christian.

I really don't know what else a man can do to prove to the people around him that he follows a particular faith... not that a man should have to prove his faith to anyone, with perhaps the exception of the god(s) in whom he believes. If you can't believe that Barack Hussein Obama is a Christian, then how can you believe that the folks making their dutiful Sunday appearances in the pews behind you are Christians? How do you know Dennis Daugaard, Scott Heidepriem, Kristi Noem, or Stephanie Herseth Sandlin are Christians?

And how do you know I'm not?

There's an interesting question. Perhaps a poll is in order. Heck, maybe two polls....

Thune Barely Blipping on Iowa Presidential Radar

Peter Roff at U.S. News and World Report last month called Senator John Thune's deficit reduction plan a "compelling package" that "could launch a 2012 Presidential bid."

Thune had better hope his Iowa neighbors start feeling more compelled. Just as his plan made the news, TheIowaRepublican.com ("News for Republicans, by Republicans") polled 399 likely Republican voters about their 2012 GOP Presidential preference. The winner: Mike Huckabee. The numbers:

1. Mike Huckabee: 22%
2. Mitt Romney: 18%
3. Newt Gingrich: 14%
4. Sarah Palin: 11%
5. Ron Paul: 5%
6. John Thune and Tim Pawlenty: 1%
7. Rick Santorum: less than 1%
8. Haley Barbour and Rick Perry: 0%

Thune and Pawlenty score 1% in their backyard. That seems... less than encouraging. Let's compare Thune's current Iowa standing with the poll numbers of another lanky Midwestern basketball player considering a run for President a year-plus out from the Iowa caucuses.

1. In June 2006, a Des Moines Register poll showed John Edwards and Hillary Clinton on top at 30% and 26%, John Kerry at 12%, and Iowa's own Tom Vilsack at 10%. Low percenters were Mark Warner and Evan Bayh. Barack Obama is not mentioned.
2. In September 2006, Barack Obama made a big campaign trip to Iowa to boost Iowa Democrats on the 2006 ballot.
3. In an October 2006 Iowa poll, Obama placed third at 13%, behind Edwards at 36% and Clinton at 16%.
4. In a December 2006 Iowa poll, Barack Obama tied for first place. The one-percenters in that poll: Evan Bayh, Bill Richardson, and Joe Biden. (Gee: maybe Thune will be veep!)

Maybe Thune is planning to jump in relatively late, the way he did against Daschle in 2004. If he is, he's going to have a steep curve to climb to break out in Iowa. Maybe he should start lining up some campaign stops for Grassley, Branstad, et al.

VA on Medical Marijuana: Groovy, Man!

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs may be knocking the legs out from under South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley's position on medical marijuana. In his official ballot explanation for Initiated Measure 13, AG Jackley notes that the pot-related activities IM 13 would authorize remain illegal under federal law.

Enter the VA hospitals:

Patients treated at Veterans Affairs hospitals and clinics will be able to use medical marijuana in the 14 states where it's legal, according to new federal guidelines....

"If a veteran obtains and uses medical marijuana in a manner consistent with state law, testing positive for marijuana would not preclude the veteran from receiving opioids for pain management" in a VA facility, [V.A. Undersecretary for Health Dr. Robert A.] Petzel wrote. "The discretion to prescribe, or not prescribe, opioids in conjunction with medical marijuana, should be determined on clinical grounds" [Hope Yen, "Medical Marijuana to Be OK in Some VA Clinics," AP via Yahoo News, 2010.07.25].

This isn't the first time the Obama Administration has signaled a willingness to defer to states on medical marijuana. (Read that again, conservative friends: President Obama defers to states rights.) Of course, if President Obama believes marijuana laws aren't worth enforcing, he would do better for the rule of law by cowboying up and advocating outright abolition of those laws.

Jackley's ballot explanation may remain rechnically true, but if someone violates a federal law in the forest and the feds don't send agents to enforce it, does violation really make any noise?

Besides, why should Jackley make any noise about federal laws? He's all about states' rights—he should be defending South Dakotans' rights to challenge unjust federal laws, just as he's doing with his health care lawsuit... right?

President Obama Expanding Rights, Fixing Economy, Investing Wisely

With your breakfast, a side order of news on why President Obama is making your life better:

1. The new health insurance reform law creates a patient's bill of rights that increases your liberty when you go to the doctor. Taking effect this fall, those rights include the right to keep your health insurance when you get sick, choose your own doctor, and get emergency care without insurance companies restricting payment to only their chosen network of facilities. Of course, South Dakota's GOP House candidate, Kristi Noem, wants to take those rights away from you.
   
2. The Troubled Asset Relief Program is a moneymaker. So far, we're $10 billion in the black, with the 61 banks that have fully repaid our Depression-stopping loans giving us a 10% return on investment (10%—and how's your portfolio doing?). One big reason banks have hustled so hard to pay back our loans: executive salary caps! The sooner the banks pay their loans, the sooner their executives can get back to making millions more than the $500K cap we imposed as a condition of taxpayer largesse. I guess socialism can be an effective motivator.
3. President Obama also appears to be helming an economic recovery... or so says Warren Buffett, a fellow not known for economic wishful thinking. Buffett disputes Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman's contention that we are slipping into a Third Depression. Buffett says the stimulus was the right thing to do, has worked, and will keep working, producing a better economy over the next few years. He does agree that we need to check the debt as the crisis passes and confidence rises, but he also thinks making cuts on the backs of the unemployed is a bad idea.

In other words, keep on truckin', Mr. President!

Thune: DC Must Do More on Oil Safety, But Not SD

Senator John Thune has been making political hay out of the Executive Branch's response to the BP oil spill. The worst thing he could say about President Obama's address this past week on fixing the problem and holding BP accountable was that the speech "should have happened a lot earlier." He also insinuated that the President made his speech for purely political reasons... not that Senator Thune would ever do that.

Senator Thune says we (by we, I assume he means all of us, acting through government) need to do more to prevent disasters like the BP mess from happening:

I think an incident like this always reminds us of the importance of consistency and continually re-evaluating and re-assessing and looking at ways we can do things better, that we can do in a more safe way and make sure that incidents of this type of consequence and impact don't happen going forward [Senator John Thune, quoted by Amanda Weber, "Thune Says Incident in Gulf Shows Need for Precautions," KEVN, 2010.06.16].

So does this mean Senator Thune will be coming home for the South Dakota Republican convention next weekend to razz his eleven fellow Republicans, including Madison's Russell Olson, who killed the pipeline tax last winter?

Thune says his impression of the pipelines going through South Dakota is that all precautions have been taken to prevent a huge problem to our local ecosystem like what we've seen in the Gulf [Weber, 2010].

Ah. When President Obama gets BP to ante up $20 billion (a pittance from their corporate reserves), Thune grumbles the President should have acted sooner. When his home state Republicans block the establishment of a meager $30-million disaster response fund with a two-cent-per-barrel tax on TransCanada's Keystone oil pipelines, Thune says South Dakota is doing all it can.

In John Thune's world, slow action from the Democratic President is intolerable, but inaction from South Dakota Republicans on the same issue is just fine.

Obama Era Brings Smaller State and Local Government

Socialist power grab, or Bush-Norquist plot?

An eager reader forwards this CNN report that seems to turn conventional wisdom on its head: under President Barack Obama, government is getting smaller:

The layoff ax has hit public sector payrolls with force as states wrestle with massive budget shortfalls. Since August 2008, some 231,000 state and local government jobs have disappeared -- 22,000 last month alone, according to federal data.

The majority of the cuts are on the local level, which at 14.4 million workers is nearly three times the size of the state workforce. Plus, unlike at the federal level, most of these cuts come from the ranks of teachers, cops, firefighters and social service workers.

And more pain is coming down the pike. Some 19 states say they plan to implement layoffs to narrow budget gaps, according to a recent survey [Tami Luhby, "Endangered Species: Government Worker," CNN.com, 2010.06.18].

Remember, when you cut government at the state and local level, you're not striking a blow against tyranny. You're putting your local cops, the men and women in blue who stand between you and the real thugs in our society, out of work.

Note this report highlights cuts at the state and local level. Layoffs are not the case for the federal government workforce. Uncle Sam hired more people in 2008 and 2009:

(click image to enlarge)

Note that the last 50 years have not seen an enormous increase in the number of people working for the federal government. Since 1962, Uncle Sam's total workforce has shrunk 17%. That decline comes entirely from the Cold War peace dividend: the number of uniformed military personnel has dropped 44% since the pre-Vietnam surge. The executive branch has grown 12% since 1962, but compare that to a national population that has grown 64% over the same period, and that growth seems small. Plus, the current executive branch workforce, even with a 3% surge last year under Obama (and under President Bush's last budget, FY2009), is still just about 10% smaller than it was under its peak levels from 1985 to 1992 (remind me again: who ran the executive branch back then?).

For your weekend enjoyment, you can spin two opposing conspiracy theories from this data:

1. Conservative flavor: President Obama and his fellow travelers are weakening state and local governments to remove that check against their expansion of federal power, all the better to forward the Marxist revolution.
2. Liberal flavor: President Bush and VP Cheney used reckless deficit spending and tax cuts to drive government into such dire financial straits that it would collapse to bathtub-drownable size. The federal government has a little more power and wiggle room to continue deficit spending, so the axe is falling on the state and local governments first, but the trend will trickle up.

I'm actually not as confident about the latter: after all, how can neocons establish a global empire if they don't keep the imperial government big?

Democrat Angst: President Obama Not Radical Enough on BP

The announcer on NPR says President Barack Obama will use his first Oval Office address tonight to "challenge BP to do more" to clean up its Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Challenge them? Is this a self-help class? What happened to kick their asses?

Whenever the President makes an Oval Office address, I keep hoping he will offer some historic announcement, some unprecedented initiative. Instead, we seem likely to get "challenges" and compromises and a continuation of the status quo. Why, in the face of the biggest point-source ecological disaster in a decade, can the President not justify saying, "You want your socialism? I got your socialism right here."

Don't challenge BP: put it into receivership. Annul their corporate charter, mandate they spend every remaining asset in cleaning up their mess and compensating those harmed by their negligence, then liquidate the company. Don't wait for BP to send another tanker from the North Sea to collect oil. Invite every other oil company to send its tankers to the spill site, line up at the spigot, and haul away all the recovered oil they can carry, for free.

Instead I hear President Obama tell the press in Mississippi that the best thing we can do to help folks on the Gulf Coast is "enjoy the hospitality." Republican Governor Haley Barbour, who says we have more to fear from the fear of oil than oil itself, nods vigorously. That sounds an awful lot like President Bush's post-9/11 exhortation that the proper patriotic response to terrorism is to buy plane tickets and "get down to Disney World."

The standard narrative among my conservative neighbors is that President Barack Obama is a raging radical who is changing everything about the America we love. The folks along the Gulf Coast could stand to see some more radical change. Instead, we get a Democrat who is sounding more like the Republican he succeeded.

The Press You Don't Want: Chris Nelson Compared with Orly Taitz

If you want to be taken seriously as a politician, you do not want the press drwaing parallels between you and California birther-maniac Orly Taitz. But that's the press South Dakota Secretary of State Chris Nelson gets after losing his bid for the GOP House nomination. Conservative blogger David Weigel notes that conspiracy-theorist Taitz suffered a decisive loss in her primary bid to become California's secretary of state. He then compares her to our man Nelson:

Still, there was a less colorful defeat for believers in that conspiracy over in South Dakota. Chris Nelson, the GOP secretary of state, had speculated that Obama's citizenship might be a scam. He watched a huge early advantage crumble and lost handily to State Rep. Kristi Noem [David Weigel, "Plenty of hype, but a bad night for Orly Taitz and other birthers," Washington Post: Right Now, 2010.06.09].

Nelson's defeat likely had more to do with not campaigning hard enough than stoking the birther fires. But his weasel words on the fact of President Barack Obama's American citizenship left a memorable stain on the reputation he thought would let him coast to a primary victory.

Thune on BP Oil Spill: I Want Bigger Government!

Ah, sweet hypocrisy...

Political grandstanding is so fun that Republican Senators tend not to realize what they are saying. South Dakota's Republican Senator John Thune is "blasting" and "slamming" President Barack Obama for not doing more to cap BP's Deepwater Horizon oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico.

"The president ought to be pulling together the very best minds out there," the South Dakota Republican said. "He could be bringing people together and figuring out which are the best technologies, bringing in all the oil companies in to discuss this, all the scientists, all the people who have expertise in this area" [Ledyard King, "Thune Blasts Obama Response to Gulf Oil Leak," that Sioux Falls paper, 2010.05.27].

Compare the above comments to the pablum Senator Thune threw to the National Rifle Association a fortnight ago:

Sen. John Thune, R-South Dakota, told the crowd there are two competing visions about the future of the country.

"One consists of more government and less freedom, and one consists of less government and more freedom," he said. "And right now, unfortunately, the prevailing vision in Washington D.C. is that of government. More and more government" ["Speakers at NRA convention target Washington, midterms," CNN.com, 2010.05.14]

Does Senator Thune really want President Obama to nationalize the BP cleanup effort? Should Uncle Sam simply dissolve BP and take possession of all of its equipment? We'd have to: we can't exactly load a bunch of Army Corps of Engineers bulldozers and Madison's 211th National Guard company on a barge, ship them out of New Orleans, and toss them in the ocean to fix the problem. The President and his advisors have already assessed the expertise and equipment needed to fix this problem... and they've recognized that BP has it.

Even if we took the Russians' advice and nuked the broken wellhead, we'd probably still have to use equipment from BP or other industry players to drill into the sea floor and properly place the warhead.

My conservative friends tend to criticize the Obama Administration for Rahm Emanuel's oft-cited First Rule of Politics, "Never let a crisis go to waste." Those critics forget to read the rest of the quote: "They are opportunities to do big things."

Senator Thune is operating by the first half of Rahm's Rule, but I don't think trying to use this crisis as an opportunity to score political points against the man he might try to beat in 2012 counts as a "big thing." President Obama is willing to use this crisis as part of the argument to make big things like energy security legislation happen. The President is also moving ahead with preventive measures like extending a moratorium on deepwater exploration, a sensible, cautious step Thune explicitly rejects in the King article.

Government has its proper roles. What I find amusing is that Senator Thune is unwilling or unable to coherently explain those roles. He can apparently only lurch from shouting base-pleasing anti-government platitudes to crying for government actions when it suits his political agenda. Ugh.

WaPo Blog: Chris Nelson "Takes the Bait" on Birther Issue

I'm not the only one surprised that Chris Nelson sounds like the biggest birther on the block. Kevin Woster talked this noon on SDPB about our U.S. House candidates' responses to his question about whether they believe President Obama was born in the U.S.A. His comment section has some other folks raising eyebrows about Nelson's failure to acknowledge the obvious and preference instead for cowardly non-denial denial.

Woster noted that folks in Washington noticed Nelson's birther intonation. Says Washington Post's David Weigel:

Of course, most people have taken "at face value" Obama's certification of live birth from Hawaii, released by the campaign in 2008, as proof of where he was born. Interestingly, Nelson's less-well-established primary challengers don't take the bait, and blow off the question [David Weigel, "S.D. secretary of state: Obama's citizenship may be 'scam'," Washington Post: Right Now, 2010.05.10].

No word yet on whether Nelson's denialism will stir more embarrassment that the Legislature's denialism on climate science....