Senator Grassley: S&P; downgrade a "wake-up call," but has not read it

Sheesh, at least try and make an effort to follow the issue, Chuck. This is from the same brilliant senator who thinks that Americans living abroad should pay taxes in the US because they're getting a free ride, somehow (even though we're already paying taxes in the country we live in). ThinkProgress:

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) piled on the following day, calling S&P’s move a “wake-up call for Congress and the President to take meaningful action to reduce deficit spending and the resulting debt.”

ThinkProgress spoke with Grassley at the Iowa State Fair on Thursday to get his further thoughts on S&P’s criticism of Republican stubbornness. However, before we were able to ask the Iowa senator about S&P’s recommendations regarding our nation’s fiscal dilemma, Grassley made a startling revelation: he has not even read the report.

Read the rest of this post...

The Economist on the "American idiocracy"

It's the political class, stupid.

The civil war is creating two obvious problems for American business: paralysis and uncertainty. The Obama administration is still pockmarked with vacancies because Congress refuses to approve routine appointments. Important trade deals have been languishing for months. The Republicans are fighting a war of attrition against Barack Obama’s health-care reforms and his new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

All this has immediate consequences for business. The federal government not only runs basic services such as the Federal Aviation Authority (where thousands of workers were briefly laid off because Congress refused to renew the FAA’s authority). It also accounts for a quarter of the economy. Scott Davis, the boss of UPS, the world’s largest package-delivery company, recently complained that FAA funding disputes made him unsure how many of his aeroplanes to fit with new air-traffic-control gear, while the failure to ratify a trade pact with South Korea weakened the case for expanding his fleet of aircraft and lorries.

The direst consequences of all this lie in the future, however. America’s health-care system consumes a sixth of GDP but produces only mediocre results. America’s schools produce run-of-the-mill results despite generous funding. The immigration system leaves 11m people in the shadows and condemns many of the brightest graduates of American universities to years of grovelling before bureaucrats if they want to stay in America. Many give up and take their skills back to India or China.

Read the rest of this post...

The 98 year old woman who challenged long-time sexism in Judo

Not a very long video, and very neat.

Read the rest of this post...

Most experts agree, spending cuts are a bad idea right now

NYT:

The prospect of further reductions worries forecasters. Jerry Webman, chief economist of OppenheimerFunds, wrote in an analysis that while the cuts were not huge this year or next, “they are nonetheless contrary to what would be expected in a fragile economic environment.”

In separate interviews, Joel Prakken, chairman of Macroeconomic Advisers, a forecasting firm, and Laurence H. Meyer, its co-founder and a former Federal Reserve governor, called the reductions “job-killing spending cuts” — playing on Republicans’ mantra against “job-killing tax increases.”

“At the very least,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, Congress should renew for another year two measures that expire after 2011 — payroll tax relief for employees and extended unemployment compensation — as Mr. Obama has proposed. If either expired, Mr. Zandi said, that could shave roughly a half-percentage point from economic growth next year.

Republicans are resistant. And Democrats are too cowed to counter much, given polls that show many Americans believe Mr. Obama’s 2009-10 stimulus package did not work, despite studies to the contrary.

A Democratic Congressional adviser, granted anonymity to discuss party deliberations, said: “We’re at a loss to figure out a way to articulate the argument in a way that doesn’t get us pegged as tax-and-spenders.”

Democrats have been at a loss, message-wise, for at 12 years now. Nor do they know how to fight, nor wish to, which goes along with not being able to articulate a message. The Netroots knows how to fight, and we do pretty well getting our message disseminated and picked up, but the Democratic party has always kept the Netroots at arm's length.  And, at the same time, the President's own inability/unwillingness to message effectively, or fight, only compounds the problem that Democrats already had pre-Obama.

I'm not sure what the solution is, other than a serious purge of the party and a serious intervention at the White House. Read the rest of this post...

How do we take control of the agenda from the GOP?

Just for a handful of silver he left us,
Just for a ribbon to stick in his coat

Going a bit too far? Well perhaps. The GOP has abandoned the center ground of US politics and, like Tony Blair before him, Obama has apparently decided that all he needs to do is raise his colors on the center-right, and the Democratic Party can expect to hold office for a decade or more until the GOP finally comes to their senses.

As a political strategy for an office-seeker it is pretty much unbeatable. For those of us who care about policy outcomes rather than political outcomes, and who care about what is achieved rather than who gets to be driven around in the big car with a flag in front, it sucks.

In the midst of a recession with interest rates at zero the Washington policy debate is centered on the question of the long term deficit. At this point in the business cycle the sane economic approach for a government is to print and spend money until demand has caught up with capacity. Instead we are discussing the long term issue of the deficit because that is what the GOP wants to discuss.

Ideology provides a bracing experience for party members. Who would not want to be part of a movement that has discovered a supreme and absolute political truth? Office seekers for one: Ideology is more usually than not electoral poison. To get elected, an ideological party usually has to disguise their ideology, wait for the pragmatic party to make a mess, or convince the electorate that their opponents are even more ideological. and thus even more unelectable. than they are.

Until very recently, US political parties had been based on interests and causes rather than ideology. The difference is significant.  Ending slavery is a cause, but the belief that lowering tax rates causes revenues to rise is an ideology, and a pretty nonsensical one at that. Individual politicians have been ideologues, but it has been only on very rare occasions that a Williams Jennings Bryant has been able to bring a whole party around to their ideological positions.

The consolation of ideology is that it provides the power to set the agenda. Blair had ten years in office but governed on terms set by the Tories. Above all, the establishment media is lazy. The ideological party offers an intellectual framework that claims to explain and solve every problem. The pragmatic party offers up nuances and complexities, and in reply the ideological party offers the clarity of a fool. The establishment media picks the one that is easiest to explain.

The challenge for the Netroots is to find a way to break this cycle: How do we take control of the agenda from the GOP? If we can do that, then everything else that we want will follow. If we can't, we will continue to win all the battles but lose the wars (and even then, are we really  winning the battles?) Read the rest of this post...

NBC’s David Gregory equates Perry’s secession talk to Obama’s push for national health care

Yesterday, we saw a stunning example of how the traditional media types equate the views of Democrats and Republicans, even when the GOP idea is so extreme it would undermine the stability of the United States. NBC's David Gregory equated Rick Perry's treasonous call for secession with Obama's effort to provide national health care. Perry first talked secession back in April of 2009. Gregory seems to think they're equally extreme. This conversation occurred yesterday on MSNBC following the announcements that Michele Bachmann won the Ames Straw Poll and Rick Perry had entered the race. It's painful enough to watch Chuck Todd and David Gregory. But, this analysis from Gregory really shows how warped the media is:

Chuck Todd: Perry-Obama would be a picture of sharp contrasts.

David Gregory: You know, Perry talked about potentially seceding from the union. You think that's extreme. Well people on the other side think that introducing health care reform for the whole country is akin to European Socialism.

WTF? Pushing secession somehow equals national health care? No. Not even close. But, that's the way our elite pundits think. They create an equivalency between Democrats and Republicans, as if the right wing's extremism is somehow, well, normal. It's not. Yet, Gregory legitimized Perry's secession talk.

So, 2012 could become a battle between secession and health care. And, the traditional media and pundits will consider that a legitimate debate.

The exchange happens at the 4:30 mark:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Read the rest of this post...

Pawlenty drops out of the GOP race

Matt Browner Hamlin has the details at AMERICAblog Elections, noting:

The national press gave Tim Pawlenty their stamp of approval as a serious, viable candidate. But the national press corps is not picking the GOP nominee. It's more and more clear that it's going to be the Tea Party who picks the Republican nominee and Tea Party Republicans were just not buying Tim Pawlenty - a fairly moderate governor of a fairly liberal state - as one of them. This is the modern Republican Party and it's dramatically different from the Republican Party of 2000 or even 2008. It's changed and with it have their candidates for President. The press needs to accept this and start aligning their coverage in a way that tells the story of what is actually happening in this race and not what they'd like to have happen in this race.

Read the rest of this post...

Mitt Romney defends class warfare against middle class and poor

There used to be a time when we were all in this together, but those days were long ago. Certainly they won't come back if Romney has anything to say about it. Read the rest of this post...