Santorum upset that Obama wants an educated America

Wow, he's just flailing at this point. Who doesn't want to encourage education for the population?

Rick Santorum called President Barack Obama's education goals an agenda of "hubris" on Saturday, saying he is "outraged" that the president thinks "every child in America should go to college." "The hubris of this president to think that he knows what's best for you [...] This is the kind of snobbery that we see from those that think they know how to run our lives," the former Pennsylvania senator said in a forum at St. Anselm's New Hampshire Institute of Politics.

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Obama’s defense policy riles the establishment

Military spending by the United States accounts for over half of global military spending and will remain so after the very modest cuts Obama proposes. But that still isn't enough for the Washington establishment. The WaPost response:

To be sure, if hard budget choices must be made, it is probably wiser to reduce troop levels than to curtail investments in new planes and ships or in new weapons technology. But this raises the question of whether the scale of the defense cuts the president is considering is appropriate. According to Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, under Mr. Obama’s plan “ you have over the next four years a reduction in total defense spending as rapid as any we experienced after Vietnam or after the Cold War.” Both those drawdowns are now almost universally regarded as having been unsustainable and shortsighted.

The Post claim is simply not true.  The US defeated the Taliban in Afghanistan in a few months. the only reason that Al Qaeda was not eliminated back in 2002 is that The Bush Administration simply did not want to. Their priority was to use the threat of Al Qaeda as a pretext to start a war with Iraq. The whole point of the Iraq war was to demonstrate US hegemony, that the US was a hyperpower capable of destroying any foe at will.

The claim that the post Vietnam drawdown was a mistake is even more bizarre. The Warsaw Pact collapsed in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed a few years later without the US firing a shot. If the US wanted to claim credit for bringing down the Soviet Union they would have to show that Carter had somehow tricked the Soviets into invading Afghanistan in 1979.

One of the chief cheerleaders of the deficit scolds, the WaPost is worried that the administration might not give in to the result of the deficit ceiling blackmail they enabled:

Moreover, another $500 billion in across-the-board “sequestration” cuts will take effect in 2013 unless Congress repeals them. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and the Joint Chiefs have said that such a fiscal hit would be a catastrophe for U.S. defense. But Mr. Obama did not speak against it Thursday. In fact, he has vowed to veto any bill that is limited to repealing the Pentagon sequestration. He seems to be trying to bluff Republicans into accepting other spending reductions or tax increases. But for the commander in chief to toy with measures that would materially damage U.S. national security hardly seems responsible.

Got that? All the blame for the consequences of any cuts would lie with Obama for refusing to gut your pension to pay for more wars. No blame would be on the GOP which engineered the debt ceiling crisis demanding $1.2T cuts in spending. Quite likely the WaPost suspects as I do that the administration would be much less upset at being forced to make the additional cuts than they claim and that they maneuvered a rather dim GOP caucus into this position. But even so, the GOP can end the threat to the military budget by simply agreeing to raise taxes to pay for the spending they demand. Read the rest of this post...

Sasha, my Yorkie-Bichon, gets very upset with my comforter

Sasha is a burrower.  She likes to be under stuff when she sleeps, and even then prefers to have it be some kind of fabric that she can make into a bed, and then dive under it to sleep.  Well, this afternoon she apparently met her match in the form of my comforter.  I had it on the floor, and while I was working in the other room, I hear the tell-tale sounds of Sasha's unhappiness.  She has this thing about vocalizing every emotion, including frustration.  Well, Sasha's frustration vocals were in full on mode.  So I walked into my room, and this is what I saw. (The lighting wasn't great, but I didn't want to let her know I was there.)  Basically she was inside the comforter, trying to dig at it to get it to roll into a ball the way she likes, but because the thing is huge, it wasn't budging.  Thus the angry whines and the jumping of the comforter.

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Santorum’s corruption problem

Don't just think of Santorum as a frothy anti-abortion, anti-contraception, anti-sex religious bigot (link). A major reason he failed to be re-elected was his corruption problem.

There was the $500,000 loan he got from a private bank that did not lend to members of the public. And then there was the multi-billion dollar handout to some of his friends that he slipped into the Katrina disaster relief bill.

Buried in the huge budget-reconciliation bill, on which House and Senate conferees are putting the final touches right now, are a few paragraphs that accomplish an extraordinary feat. They roll back the price of a barrel of crude oil to what it sold for two years ago. They create this pretend price for the benefit of a small group of the politically well connected. You still won't be able to buy gasoline for $1.73 per gal. as you did then, instead of today's $2.28. You still won't be able to buy home heating oil for $1.60 per gal., in place of today's $2.39. But a select group of investors and companies will walk away with billions of dollars in tax subsidies, not from oil but from the marketing of a dubious concoction of synthetic fuel produced from coal and dependent on government tax credits tied to the price of oil.

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Elizabeth Warren shows how elections are won

Via Mother Jones:

A little more than two years ago to the day, while locked in a tight race with Republican Scott Brown for the vacant Massachusetts Senate seat, Martha Coakley, the state attorney general, offered up the quote that no number of foreclosure fraud lawsuits will be able to wipe from her obituary. Asked about her hands-off campaign style, she pushed back: "As opposed to standing outside Fenway Park? In the cold? Shaking hands?"

On Saturday, Elizabeth Warren, the Democrat who's challenging Brown in November, tweeted this photo:

A lot of progressives were upset that Obama did not appoint Warren to the Consumer Protection agency. With the strong likelihood that it would have to be a recess appointment, running against Scott Brown looks like a much better option for Warren. Read the rest of this post...

Goldman partner pay expected to crash to less than $10 million for 2011

Oh the humanity. How will they survive with such chump change? Do you know how much money it costs to fuel a Ferrari or to keep up the house in the Hamptons? Their children may not be able to go to summer camp on private jets if this keeps up. Let's just hope there is still room in first class so they don't need to mix with the dirty masses in coach.

Some employees in Goldman Sachs' fixed-income trading business will see their pay shrink by 60 percent, with some workers not getting a bonus, the report said. For the typical Goldman partner, pay for 2011, including base salary and bonus, is likely to range from $3 million to $6.5 million, compared to at least twice that much in better years, the report said, citing sources.

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Is Pat Buchanan finally out at MSNBC?

It seems MSNBC's president, while conceding that "Pat's a good guy," may have finally had it with Buchanan's sometimes subtle "put on a happy (black)face" style of racism. What fascinates me about Buchanan is how expertly he flirts with bigotry. Take the latest controversial Buchanan musings:

For what is a nation?

Is it not a people of a common ancestry, culture, and language whoworship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays, share the same music, poetry, art, literature, held together, in Lincoln’s words, by “bonds of affection. . . . mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to everyliving heart and hearth-stone”?

If that is what a nation is, can we truly say America is still a nation? The European and Christian core of our country is shrinking. The birth rate of our native born has been below replacement level for decades. By 2020, deaths among white Americans will exceed births, while mass immigration is altering forever the face of America.

On its face, America is more racially, religiously, and culturally pluralist than it was before.  So that's a true statement.  But one does get the sense that Buchanan's problem isn't just that he feels the country is falling apart, but rather that the dark people did it.  And therein lies the problem, and his racism. Read the rest of this post...

Romney flip-flops on whether he’s seen SuperPAC ads attacking Gingrich

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Romney: "I like being able to fire people"

The full quote is slightly different in meaning, but remember, Romney has reserved the right to attribute quotes to President Obama that he didn't even say, so this one is fair game by the Romney "Lying for the Lord" standard of veracity. Read the rest of this post...

In French, the words "myth" and "Mitt" are pronounced the same

Did you hear the one about Mitt Romney lying?  Again.

From the Boston Globe:

Mitt Romney told a New Hampshire crowd Sunday afternoon that he knows what it’s like to fear a pink slip — but so far, his campaign has not been able to provide any examples of a time when Mr. Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts who spent more than two decades in the private sector, truly feared for his job.

This the same Mitt Romney who claims he's "unemployed" when he's actually worth a quarter of a billion and thus doesn't need to work.  The same Romney who says he lived in near poverty while in France, when in fact he spent nearly a year living in a mansion in Paris, with servants.

Romney is quickly segueing from flip-flopper to liar. Read the rest of this post...

Krugman on jobs: We’re a decade away from full recovery

Despite understandable optimism regarding the latest jobs report, the Professor is not pleased.

Here's why (my emphasis):

First, note that there are still about 6 million fewer jobs than there were at the end of 2007 — and that we would normally have expected to have added around 5 million jobs over a four-year period. So we’re 11 million jobs down — and we need at least 100,000 jobs a month just to keep up with working-age population growth. Do the math, and you’ll see that it would take 9 or 10 years of growth at this rate to restore full employment.

Alternatively, note that during the Clinton years — all 8 of them — the economy added around 230,000 jobs a month [and] the unemployment rate fell about 3 1/2 percentage points — which is about what we’d need from here to get back to something that felt like full employment. ... [T]his suggests that we’re looking at something like a decade-long haul to have full recovery.

So yes, this is better news than we’ve been having. But it’s still vastly inadequate.

The "decade away" part isn't much in dispute by those who are truly looking, like our Professor. The real question is, Why aren't the political types looking with the same good eyes?

Of course, a cynical person might answer that:

     (1) The bipartisan elites (Our Betters) have decided that high unemployment is "the new normal".

     (2) Billionaire Beneficiaries of the modern tax code really are the true "job creators" and nothing should damage them:

[A] fair number of people who consider themselves centrist [say] that high-income individuals are “job creators” who must be cherished for the good they do.

     (3) It's too bad really, sad but necessary, that lowered expectations be therefore sold to the Rubes. (So look out Trust Fund.)

     (4) That's just the task at hand (and why they get the big bucks — from said Beneficiaries).

Might I be that cynical person? Not me; I'd never say such a thing.

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Arab League to continue Syrian mission

As bad as they've been to date, it's possible that they can only get better. Stopping the killings by Assad might be a good place to start. Al Jazeera:

"Certainly, the mission will continue," said Hanna. "We understand that the number of monitors will be increased, but very strongly, from the Arab League, that this mission can only succeed if there is full cooperation from Syria/" The first report by Arab League observers in Syria recommends the controversial mission continue and says monitors were subjected to "harassment" by the government and the opposition. The report recommends "the mission continue its work" with more technological assistance and "calls on the opposition and the government to let the mission move freely," Arab League sources said on Sunday.

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UK tries again to target banker pay

Having real votes and not the ridiculous non-binding votes that Obama supported is better, but still not the answer. Of course, it's all a bit off when you think that the UK is looking at their own quantitative easing program which would only stuff more cash into the wallets of the bankers. Cutting the banks off from their free rides and having real consequences for failure makes a lot more sense. The Guardian:

As David Cameron set out proposals to give shareholders a binding vote on executive pay deals, data compiled by a leading advisory body, Pensions & Investment Research Consultants (Pirc), showed how few remuneration votes had more than 50% of votes cast against them since investors were granted an advisory vote in 2003. "We would be in favour of exploring a binding vote on pay, but the problem at the moment is that too few shareholders are willing to use the rights they have, as demonstrated by the low number of remuneration reports that have been voted down," a Pirc spokesman said. Increasing numbers of shares in companies listed on the stock market are no longer owned by traditional institutional investors – such as pension funds – but by hedge funds and other overseas investors, which makes it more difficult to galvanise rebellions against pay deals.

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