More talk of Reid forcing vote on Ryan "kill Medicare" budget

Nifty.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s office confirmed reports on Tuesday that the Nevada Democrat is thinking of holding a vote on Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) budget. That would force moderate Republican senators to take an uncomfortable political stand.

“He's considering it,” Reid’s top spokesman Jon Summers told The Huffington Post.

The idea, first reported in The Hill newspaper, would be to build off the skeptical reaction that the Ryan budget has engendered at local town hall events this past week. After voting in near unanimity to pass the measure -- which would make drastic spending cuts, lower tax rates and fundamentally alter Medicare and Medicaid -- House Republicans have faced hostile receptions back home.

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19% of Americans have raided their retirement account this year

But at least the banker bonus money has been saved and Big Oil is raking in the bucks. That's all that matters, right? Bankrate:

Despite increasing signs of a stabilizing U.S. economy, 19 percent of Americans -- including 17 percent of full-time workers -- have been compelled to take money from their retirement savings in the last year to cover urgent financial needs, the Financial Security Index found.

Though 80 percent of full-time workers didn't dip into retirement funds, far too many consumers are ill-prepared for emergencies, says Kim McGrigg, manager of community and media relations at Money Management International, a credit counseling agency.

"Perhaps the most alarming thing about these numbers is that they suggest a lack of other options," she says. "Consumers generally consider using retirement funds only as a last resort."

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BREAKING: Obama admin. defends anti-gay DOMA lawyers, implicitly criticizes HRC for defending gay community

Never doubt the Obama administration's ability to screw things up, yet again, with a key Democratic constituency. Read the rest of this post...

Tepco staff agree to pay cuts following Fukushima nuclear disaster

It's ever so slightly different from the original plan at Transocean, when they handed out mega-bonuses based on their "best safety record" claim. But hey, we can't even get bankers to accept pay cuts following a global economic meltdown. Bloomberg:

Tokyo Electric Power Co. workers agreed to a management proposal to cut their pay by as much as 25 percent out of a sense of responsibility for the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, their union said.

“Most union members didn’t object to a pay cut, considering the situation at the company and the effect on society from the nuclear accident,” Koji Sakata, secretary- general of the Tokyo Electric Power Workers Union, said by telephone today.

The utility known as Tepco is battling radiation leaks at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi power plant north of Tokyo after a March 11 earthquake and tsunami knocked out its cooling systems, causing the biggest atomic accident in 25 years. More than 50,000 households were forced to evacuate, and Bank of America Corp.’s Merrill Lynch estimates Tepco may face compensation claims of as much as 11 trillion yen ($135 billion).

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Right wing upset that gays pressured law firm to drop DOMA case. How dare we be intolerant of their intolerance?

This means gays gave John Boehner a black eye. Read the rest of this post...

Conversation with a birther, why they're not going away

From Michelangelo Signorile:

This call to the show from Winston in Alabama confirms why the birther conspiracy will never go away, a fascinating look at why crazy beliefs endure. Even after all the facts were explained to Winston, and after he appeared to agree that the facts were right, he still held doubts that President Obama was born in this country. What's clear to me is that birthers have other reasons for which they dislike the president, even hate him -- and some of those reasons are too ugly, perhaps, for them to even admit to themselves. Hence, they cling to this conspiracy even after it's disproved.

Mike has the audio of the radio interview on his site. Read the rest of this post...

Boehner claims to be open to cutting oil company tax breaks

That'll be the day. You know that Big Oil lobbyists are calling congressmen as we speak, and letting them know how much money they'll be giving to their opponents if they dare do this. I don't trust that Boehner is sincere, or that he has the ability to pull this off even if he was. Read the rest of this post...

Ezra Klein: Obama is "a moderate Republican of the early 1990s"

Ezra Klein has an interesting (and well structured) piece about all the things that President Obama isn't (Muslim, socialist, birthless), and the one thing he is — a Republican. Mr. Klein (my emphasis throughout):

A reality-television star who can’t persuade anyone that his hair is real is alleging that the president of the United States was born in Kenya.

Perhaps this is just the logical endpoint of two years spent arguing over what Barack Obama is — or isn’t. Muslim. Socialist. Marxist. Anti-colonialist. Racial healer. We’ve obsessed over every answer except the right one: President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican of the early 1990s. And the Republican Party he’s facing has abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him.

Klein rests his case on three initiatives:

If you put aside the emergency measures required by the financial crisis, three major policy ideas have dominated American politics in recent years: a plan that uses an individual mandate and tax subsidies to achieve near-universal health care; a cap-and-trade plan that attempts to raise the prices of environmental pollutants to better account for their costs; and bringing tax rates up from their Bush-era lows as part of a bid to reduce the deficit. In each case, the position that Obama and the Democrats have staked out is the very position that moderate Republicans have staked out before.

The piece then details each of those three policy ideas, and closes by defending the sentence I italicized in his main paragraph above. A classic Writing 101 three-example essay with coda, and professionally done. High marks.

Just three quick points (a sort of codetta of my own): First, the "Obama is a Republican" meme is getting mainstreamed. Great news. Time to call it right, in the same way that Krugman is starting to call it right — out loud.

Second, Klein seems to be bending over to praise Republicans; either that, or he's an admirer himself, and sincerely so. We need to acknowledge that about Klein. (In that sense, this is a "state of the Klein" piece as much as a "state of the Obama" article.)

But either way, that italicized sentence is seriously quibblable. Is the privatized health insurance mandate really such a great idea? (Notice that Klein equates "good idea" with "successful idea.") Do we really want to hand over health care to an unregulated industry, independent of how low it reduces percentage of uninsured?

And if I may be so bold, I don't think it's a given that radical Republicanism, 2010-style, is just anti-Obamaism, as Klein asserts. Republicans have been moving the goalposts into the next county for most of our lives.

It's what they do. They're not going to stop until it's 1880 again, an era in which those nasty immigrants were, at the very least, appropriately hued. The next Democratic president could be to the left of Chairman Mao, and those Republican goalposts would still be to the right of the Atlantic seaboard.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Krugman: The goal of the Beltway deficit hawks is "to tear up our current social contract"

Not that the headline statement is new to progressives (in some cases, we've known it for a long while). But it's an awareness that's gaining some traction. So let's call this a "state of the Krugman" post; the Professor is now saying this out loud as well, and that's not small beans. Along the way, he links to an interesting graph.

Krugman starts by asking the key question: If the deficit is so big and scary, why aren't the deficit hawks raising taxes, instead of lowering them as the Ryan plan would do?

Then he takes a professorial side trip. He notes here, as he has done elsewhere, that the U.S. is one of the lowest-tax nations in the first world. And then he presents the only Beltway plan that seriously addresses the deficit — the Congressional Progressive Caucus plan:

[T]he only major budget proposal out there offering a plausible path to balancing the budget is the one that includes significant tax increases: the “People’s Budget” from the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which — unlike the Ryan plan, which was just right-wing orthodoxy with an added dose of magical thinking — is genuinely courageous because it calls for shared sacrifice.

True, it increases revenue partly by imposing substantially higher taxes on the wealthy, which is popular everywhere except inside the Beltway. But it also calls for a rise in the Social Security cap, significantly raising taxes on around 6 percent of workers. ... All of this, combined with spending cuts mostly focused on defense, is projected to yield a balanced budget by 2021. And the proposal achieves this without dismantling the legacy of the New Deal, which gave us Social Security, and the Great Society, which gave us Medicare and Medicaid.

Great to see the Progressive Plan getting some mainstream attention for a change. You'd think it was the ugly stepchild in a Grimm Brothers fable. Then Krugman gets to his main point. The reason you're not hearing about that plan is simple — deficit reduction isn't really the Beltway goal (my emphasis):

The [reason the Progressive Plan isn't getting real attention] is the insincerity of many if not most self-proclaimed deficit hawks. To the extent that they care about the deficit at all, it takes second place to their desire to do precisely what the People’s Budget avoids doing, namely, tear up our current social contract, turning the clock back 80 years under the guise of necessity.

I suspect he's known this for some time, just as we all have, and some sense of collegiality has prevented him from saying so out loud. No more. These tea leaves (Krugman's bluntness) suggests that the rhetoric resisting the "hawks" has entered a new, more truthful phase. Good.

By the way, that faux-hawkery (shades of Amy Winehouse) is a bi-partisan thing.

Oh, and that graph I promised? Krugman links to this article by David Leonhardt, which details the path that taxes have taken over the last fifty years, with a focus on the top .01%, the very high earners. You need at least $8.6 million per year to get into that group. Here's the graph:


Compare the drop in the tax rates of the top two groups (the top 1% and .01%) against the drop in the rates of all other groups. Note that is is all taxes, not just income taxes. Even under Clinton, folks, that top rate just kept falling after the initial bump up.

This is the story of our generation in a bitter nutshell. Needless to say, we won't get that money back by asking nicely.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Manchin wants spending caps. How about WV giving back its earmarks?

Manchin is such a hypocrite and a fraud:

Freshman Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) on Tuesday will announce his support for strict spending caps that put him at odds with his party's leadership and President Obama.

Manchin is expected to give a speech in his home state where he will endorse the "CAP Act," which sets a tighter spending limit than the president's budget calls for, as well as a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution.

Here's what I say to Manchin: If you're serious, have West Virginia pay back to the federal treasury all the earmarks that Robert Byrd secured for the state. Close the federal facilities that Byrd moved to West Virginia, too:

“As part of Sen. Byrd’s interest in diversification, he has seen fit and worked through the Senate to locate federal facilities in West Virginia including the FBI fingerprinting center in Clarksburg, the Coast Guard and the first Homeland Security Training Ground in Harpers Ferry, which helped diversify the state’s economy.”

Byrd really delivered for his state -- with tax dollars. Here's a report from January of 2008:

At age 90, Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia has been in the Senate longer than anybody else. And he's spent much of that time as head of the most powerful spending committee, with extraordinary control over earmarks - grants of your tax dollars without the normal public review, CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson reports for Follow the Money.

Byrd was the first senator to rack up a total of $1 billion in earmarks for his home state.

That was in 1999. Today he's past the $3 billion mark.

Make the check payable to the U.S. Treasury. Read the rest of this post...

Prop. 8 lawyers want decision overturned because Judge Walker has a boyfriend

The lawyers for California's Prop. 8, who lost in federal court last summer when Judge Vaughn Walker ruled the measure was found unconstitutional, have waged an ongoing effort to thwart the rights of same-sex couples. In the real world, we know the American people are increasingly supportive of marriage equality -- and opponents are in the minority. The trendline is moving in the right direction.

As the American people have become more supportive, the homophobes have become increasingly desperate. Now, they've crossed over to absurdity.

Yesterday, the pro-Prop. 8 side's lawyer, Charles Cooper, filed a motion to overturn last summer's ruling because, get this, Judge Walker has a boyfriend. It's not that Judge Walker's boyfriend is an advocate or was working on the case or was somehow involved in the case. No. Their motion is based on the simple fact that Judge Walker is in a same-sex relationship.

We have more at AMERICAblog Gay. But, the best words to describe this latest effort are desperate and absurd. Read the rest of this post...

Death toll climbs again in Syria follow armored assault by Assad

Other sources are claiming a higher death toll following the attack on Deraa. Al Jazeera:

Syrian troops backed by tanks and heavy armour have stormed the southern town of Deraa and also Douma, a suburb of the capital Damascus, resulting in many deaths and dozens of arrests.

Security forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad, the country's president, have also continued a crackdown in the coastal town of Jableh for a second day.

An activist said late on Monday that 18 people had been killed in Deraa alone.

However, the government insists the army was invited in to rid the town of gunmen.

Al Jazeera's Rula Amin, reporting from Damascus, said the troop deployment was an "unprecedented" offensive against the wave of dissent that has swept the country since the uprising began on March 15.

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London bankers: Bonuses down, salary up

Heads they win, tails they win. The game is fixed and all global economic sins are forgiven. This only happens because it's allowed to happen by political leadership that's in bed with this industry.

Workers in the City of London who have seen contentious bonus payouts shrink by 8% over the last 12 months have more than made up for their loss through a permanent 7% rise in basic salaries, according to a study published today.

Bonuses paid to City workers fell from £7.3bn to £6.7bn for the year to April, the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) says, but these purported performance-linked payouts remain a step above levels recorded in 2009, when the worst banking crisis since the 1930s saw the City's bonus pool dip to £5.3bn.

However, more than offsetting the impact of shrinking City bonuses, basic salaries in the Square Mile – which still make up the lion's share of pay deals for most City workers – jumped 7%, according to CEBR's analysis of official data from the Office for National Statistics.

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Border-free Europe to disappear

And here many thought that the euro currency would be the first thing to fail rather than this. Ridiculous moments like this makes one wonder about the future of the European Union. The Guardian:

The French president and the Italian prime minister are meeting in Rome after weeks of tension between their two countries over how to cope with an influx of more than 25,000 immigrants fleeing revolutions in north Africa. The migrants, mostly Tunisian, reached the EU by way of Italian islands such as Lampedusa, but many hoped to get work in France where they have relatives and friends.

Earlier this month, Berlusconi's government outraged several EU governments, including France, by offering the migrants temporary residence permits which, in principle, allowed them to travel to other member states under the Schengen agreement. An Italian junior minister said on Sunday that Rome had so far issued some 8,000 permits and expected the number would rise to 11,000.

Launched in 1995, Schengen allows passport-free travel in most of the EU, Switzerland, Norway and Iceland. But the documents issued by the Italian authorities are only valid if the holders can show they have the means to support themselves, and French police have rounded up or turned back an unknown number of migrants in recent days.

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