Hullabaloo

Wednesday, December 05, 2012

 
It's Not True Until A Republican Accepts It

 by tristero

Marco Rubio, the currently touted Next Best Hope for Republicans, has condescended, very grudgingly, to dip a sliver of a toenail into the reality-based community:

After dabbling in creationism earlier this month, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., clarified that he does believe that scientists know the Earth is “at least 4.5 billion years old.” 

“There is no scientific debate on the age of the earth. I mean, it’s established pretty definitively, it’s at least 4.5 billion years old,” Rubio told Mike Allen of Politico. ”I was referring to a theological debate, which is a pretty healthy debate. 

“The theological debate is, how do you reconcile with what science has definitively established with what you may think your faith teaches,” Rubio continued. “Now for me, actually, when it comes to the age of the earth, there is no conflict.”

Did you catch all the hedging? The "pretty healthy""theological debate?" (There isn't one, of course, any more than there is a scientific one, just yawping from some rightwing religious loons, ) And check out that "for me," as if the age of the earth is Marco's very own personal opinion - and views can legitimately differ.

It is a measure of how bizarre the Republican worldview has become that,  in order to not to offend the base, Marco Rubio feels he has to qualify his acceptance of one of the most established scientific facts of our time.
tristero 12/05/2012 06:00:00 PM

 
Fiscal cliff notes 12/5

by digby

Brian Beutler at TPM reports on the latest "fiscal cliff" maneuvering. If this is all true, it would appear that they're going to split the Grand Bargain into two parts: Boehner may not have any choice but to go over the cliff and then sign on for the new tax cuts (and remember, Norquist gave the thumbs up on the latter plan) but if that happens, is that the end of the story? I'm afraid not. The Democrats may find themselves in the same position the GOP is in now, in that they will then be "forced" to do the thing their base is adamantly against:

House Republicans are privately contemplating a quiet surrender in the fight over Bush tax rates for top earners, and a quick pivot to a new fight over raising the debt limit, in which they’d demand steep cuts to programs like Medicare and Social Security.

The White House’s official position on this plan is: cram it. Officials say they will not negotiate, or pay a ransom. Congress has to raise the debt limit, period.

“I will not play that game,” Obama told the Business Roundtable on Wednesday. “We are not going to play that game next year. We’ve got to break that habit before it starts.”

But privately, Obama and Democratic leaders have sought to weave a debt limit increase into ongoing negotiations to avert automatic tax increases and spending cuts at the end of the year. Their clear preference is to defuse that bomb now, in a bipartisan way, rather than to stare down the House GOP pointing a gun at the country’s economy.

And recent remarks by Democratic leaders and interviews with top congressional aides suggest Democrats have no consensus plan to execute if the debt ceiling isn’t increased before the end of the year.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and other Dem leaders say that once the long fight over Bush tax cuts for the rich is resolved, the playing field will be evened, and the parties can negotiate further deficit reduction next year.

“If we can take the middle-income tax cuts off the table, then we end the hostage taking that the Republicans have been engaged in,” Pelosi said at a Wednesday media availability when asked about the Democrats’ debt limit contingency plan. “We’re not going to do that unless you give tax cuts to the wealthy. I think that clears the debate to find areas of agreement as we go forward.

Her No.2, Steny Hoyer (D-MD), simply argued against using the debt limit for political leverage, without saying if or how Democrats could prevent Republicans from taking that tack.

“The debt limit ought not to be held hostage to anything,” Hoyer said. “It hurt our economy, we were downgraded for the first time in my career and I think in history by one of the rating agencies. The creditworthiness of America ought not to be put at risk, it ought not to be a negotiating item.”

Neither of those responses constitutes an answer to the GOP’s ongoing demand that new borrowing authority be matched dollar for dollar with cuts to federal spending.

The president was very tough today, saying that he refuses to play their game on the debt ceiling,  and maybe that will be enough to make the Republicans simply crawl away with their tails between their legs and agree to some perfunctory cuts to medicare providers and some defense cuts and call it a day. That would truly be a new day. However, I would guess that everyone is looking at this thing as a two (maybe three) part Grand Bargain in which the agreement is that they'll drive very carefully over the fiscal curb, cut taxes on the 98% (maybe even sweeten the pot a little) and then get down to some serious cutting.

Geithner on CNBC: Once Republicans agree to raise tax rates, White House will engage on spending cuts.

Obviously, we still don't know what they will be, but suffice to say that at some point in all this we're going to start talking about cuts. After all, just raising taxes on the rich wouldn't be a "balanced approach" would it? Even among the so-called reasonable Republicans, it must not only happen, it must hurt. A lot:

On Sunday, during an appearance on Meet the Press, Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) reiterated his call for restructuring entitlement programs like Medicare, highlighting the “very painful cuts” he has proposed as part of a package to avert the fiscal cliff. Corker 242-page plan calls for a Paul Ryan-like proposal to transform the guaranteed Medicare benefit into a voucher plan for beneficiaries. 

Host David Gregory seemed to agree with Corker’s characterization and pressed fellow panelist Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) to accept reforms that will shift health care costs to seniors in order to show that Democrats are “serious” about entitlements:

CORKER: Look, I laid out in great detail very painful cuts to Medicare. I just did it in a 242 page bill that I’ve shared with the White House [...]

GREGORY: Name some specific programs that ought to be cut that would cause pain in terms of the role of our government that Democrats are prepared to support.

McCASKILL: Well, I think you can see more cuts frankly and a lot of us voted for more cuts in the farm program…and defense. I spent a lot of times in the wings of the Pentagon. if you don’t think there’s more money to be cut in contracting at the pentagon, you don’t understand what has happened at the Pentagon. [...]

CORKER: David, as much as I love Claire, those are not the painful cuts that have to happen. We really have to look at much deeper reforms to the entitlements … I think the Speaker is frustrated right now because as you’ve mentioned, the White House keeps spiking the ball on tax increases for the wealthy. But has not yet been forthcoming on real entitlement reform. And without the two, there really is no deal.

Pelosi says no dice:

Those issues — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid — they should be in their own realm. Whatever adjustments would be made in Social Security should be there to strengthen Social Security, not to subsidize a tax cut for the wealthiest people in America and say that’s how we balance the budget. The same thing with Medicaid and Medicare…

I don't think she means "their own realm" part of the debt ceiling fight either, FWIW. So, she's taking a hard line.

On the other hand, her second in command is eagerly playing the bad cop:

Hoyer, the Democratic whip, warned that taking entitlement benefits off the table is a bad place to start the negotiations. Such entrenched positions are little different, he said, than the Republicans' refusal to consider hikes in tax rates — a central element of President Obama's deficit-reduction proposal.

Hoyer said GOP proposals to raise the Medicare eligibility age, make wealthier seniors pay higher Medicare rates and limit the cost-of-living increases for some federal programs are legitimate ones, even as he warned he might not support them.

“They clearly are on the table,” Hoyer said of the Medicare changes during his weekly press briefing in the Capitol. “They were on the table in the Boehner-Obama talks. They've been on the table for some period of time. That does not mean that I'd be prepared to adopt them now, but they're clearly, I think, on the table.”

Hoyer said the GOP's proposal to reduce the cost-of-living increases to certain federal programs – the so-called chained consumer price index (CPI) – should also be considered as part of the fiscal cliff talks.

“We have many Republicans say 'absolutely not' ... on [higher] rates or revenues,” he said. “There are Democrats on our side who say 'absolutely not' if they do A or they do B or they do C. … You've got to put everything on the table.”

So, who knows?

Obviously the White House wants to get their tax hikes on the rich above all else, but from where I sit, a "deal" to do that just doesn't look very promising. So, I still think the Republicans need to go over the cliff so they can be reborn as tax cutters. But if that happens I cannot see why they will give up their leverage in the debt ceiling to get some cuts and inflict some pain, particularly since they know that there are plenty of Democrats eager to sign on. They like pain.

Update:

I'm watching Chris Matthews, Ed Rendell and Alex Wagner game this out right now and they apparently think that spending cuts are completely irrelevant to all this deal making and that even if the Republicans bite the bullet on the Bush tax cuts, they'll only use their debt ceiling leverage to try to get some goodies back for the 1%. Let's hope they're right about that.

But I have to point out that every time I see a Republican on TV talking about this they are hammering on "entitlement cuts." (And, by the way, so are quite a few Democrats.) So, while I think there's a good chance we're either going over the cliff ---- not the end of the world --- or that the Republicans will throw in the towel on the hikes and agree to Obama's proposal to extend the middle class tax cuts before the end of the lame duck, I still have a strong feeling that the Grand Bargain is still in the ether.

But as I always say, every day we go without slashing vital programs for average people for no reason is a good day. The more they put it off, the better chance it won't happen.

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digby 12/05/2012 04:30:00 PM

 
Pelosi says no to raising Medicare eligibility age

by David Atkins

This is a good sign:

It’s a perennial fear among liberals: In the quest for a fiscal cliff deal, the White House and Democrats will ultimately acquiesce to GOP demands to raise the Medicare eligibility age. But one Democrat is drawing a line against this possibility: Nancy Pelosi.

“I am very much against that, and I think most of my members are,” Pelosi said in an interview with me today. “I don’t see any reason why that should be in any agreement.”

The argument against raising the eligibility age is that it would leave hundreds of thousands of seniors without health coverage and wouldn’t raise that much money for deficit reduction, since many of those seniors would go into Medicaid or the Obamacare exchanges, offsetting savings. The Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that it would save $125 billion over 10 years.

Pelosi echoed this complaint succinctly, saying: “Show me the money.” She also said flatly that she didn’t believe raising the eligibility age would be in the final deal, despite GOP demands: “I don’t anticipate that it will be in it.”

If Democrats in Congress and enough anti-tax extremist Republicans can inadvertently join forces against Boehner, we may well have a great chance of scuttling this Grand Bargain after all.


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thereisnospoon 12/05/2012 03:01:00 PM

 
Econ 4 On Housing

by tristero

Econ 4, a group of liberal economists, have posted an excellent statement and video on housing issues.

We oppose treating the nation's housing as a bundle of assets to be sliced, diced, flipped, and bailed out in pursuit of inflated profits and bonuses. 

We call for reality-based, ethically grounded housing policies that restore stability to families and sanity to markets. 

We call for mandatory partial reductions of mortgage principal whenever this can keep a family in its home. We call for America's best run housing non-profits to be paid to provide the counsel required to determine when such modifications will work. We call for civil and, when necessary, criminal sanctions on banks and loan-servicing companies whose employees intentionally obstruct implementation of mandated loan modifications. 

We call for amending bankruptcy laws to restore pre-2005 rules that protected families and communities from bank depredations. 

We call for immediate return to the rule of law by requiring those who seek to foreclose to demonstrate they have the proper title and rights to do so – with stiff legal penalties if they ignore the law. 

In response to recent moves by the top 1% to buy distressed housing and convert it to rental stock as absentee landlords, we call for local, state and national standards to protect families from predatory rental practices. 

We extend our support to all who are working in the private, non-profit, and public sectors to promote access to affordable and stable housing as a human right of families and an asset for communities.

tristero 12/05/2012 01:30:00 PM

 
Freedom's just another word for doing what they want

by digby

Wait. The anti-sex crusader and attorney general of Virginia is really referred to as "the cooch"? And he says stuff like this?

In 2005, a pro-choice student group at George Mason University organized its inaugural “Sextravaganza” event — a campus sexuality and health fair aimed at teaching attendees about practicing safer sex and preventing unplanned pregnancy. For this event, the group organized 15 booths to provide “information on abstinence, condoms and self-help exams, as well as sexual orientation.” An array of views were presented to approximately 500 attendees: a minister from the Campus Catholic Ministry staffed one of the tables promoting abstinence and opposing abortion, while others promoted abortion rights and provided information about safer sex.

Sen. Cuccinelli, however, was outraged that his alma mater — a public state university — would host an event he believed “really just designed to push sex and sexual libertine behavior as far, fast and furiously as possibly.” Among Cuccinelli’s objections to the event:

Upset that information about sexuality — other than abstinence only — would be presented to adult college students, he said it was symptomatic of the “moral depravity that has crept across this commonwealth and this country.”

Upset that the event was sponsored by the Pro-Choice Patriots, he said, “They’re selling their product. They are selling abortions.“

Upset that the GMU Pride Alliance presented information on sexual orientation, he said, “You can’t have safe homosexual sex. There is no such thing and yet one of the sponsoring groups is the homosexual group on campus.”

Upset about an (ultimately scrapped) plan to raffle off sex toys at the fair, he said the event would “push every form of sexual promiscuity there is out there.”
Upset that some of the advertising for the event was paid for out of student activity fees, he said, “”This is a how-to fun fair for sex. This isn’t education. This is pushing sex. It’s encouraging it… It doesn’t swell me with pride to see my alma mater putting on a soft porn show.”

Yes, "the Cooch" actually said "swell me with pride."

In case you were wondering how a tea partying, liberty lover (and oh how he loves it) rationalizes censoring talk about sex with his freedom agenda, the Cooch" explains:

He told Bacon’s Rebellion, a Virginia blog, “in the realm of morality, freedom is not the right to do whatever you want (license), it is, in fact, the ability to do as you ought (self control).”

I've always thought that when right wingers talked about freedom it meant "free to do exactly what we want you to do" but it's nice to see it validated.

By the way, "the Cooch" is being talked about as a possible national candidate. Someone needs to tell the Republicans that this won't fool voters into thinking they've softened their position in the War on Women.

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digby 12/05/2012 12:00:00 PM

 
Broken Logic

by tristero

I read the news today, oh boy:

Citigroup announced on Wednesday that it would cut 11,000 jobs, reducing its work force by roughly 4 percent in an effort to cut costs. 

The bank said it would take a pretax charge of roughly $1 billion for the cuts.

Under the reduction, 1,900 jobs will be eliminated in the institutional clients division.

Another 6,200 positions will be removed from the bank’s consumer banking business, along with 2,600 jobs in the operations and technology group. 

The bank’s shares rose about 4 percent in early morning trading.

Sure. I understand exactly why Citigroup's stock would rise when it announced that it would seriously harm, and, in some cases, ruin the livelihoods of 11,000 employees and their families.

It still strikes me as deeply sick.

Yes there is a twisted sense to the decision - destroy the economic value of 11,000 people to save the larger company. But it is the logic of an economic system so perverse that it blithely re-assigns the self-evident rights of human beings - such as sheer survival -  to corporations.

And denies the exact same rights to people.
tristero 12/05/2012 10:30:00 AM

 
Dispatch from torture nation

by digby

The good news is that we are so very, very exceptional:

The warden of a North Carolina prison has been suspended pending the outcome of an investigation into allegations that inmates were forced to rub hot sauce on their genitals, officials said Tuesday.

Department of Public Safety spokeswoman Pamela Walker said that Sampson Correctional Institution administrator Lafayette Hall has been put on paid leave while the State Bureau of Investigation reviews what happened at the Clinton facility.

A correctional officer, David P. Jones, has also been put on leave, officials said.
In July, six inmates from Sampson sent a hand-written letter to the U.S. District Court in Greensboro complaining that staff had forced them to perform numerous humiliating acts for the entertainment of guards, including stripping nude and pretending to have sex. The medium-security facility houses about 500 male inmates in Clinton, which is about 60 miles southeast of Raleigh.

The inmates also reported being forced to gulp a super-hot "Exotic Hot Sauce" purchased off the Internet and slather it on their testicles, as well as being forced to grab and kiss wild snakes while working on a road crew and throwing captured bunnies in to oncoming traffic.

Those who performed for the guards were rewarded with preferential work assignments, food, cigarettes and beer, the inmates alleged. Both tobacco and alcohol are banned in North Carolina's prisons.

It's just some bad apples, not to worry.

You do have to wonder about those guards though. They could have entertained themselves for hours by tasering the inmates and everyone would think it was just good clean fun.

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digby 12/05/2012 09:00:00 AM

 
Boehner: If Republicans can't break the Senate, we'll break the Congress

by David Atkins

John Boehner, obstructionist:

House Speaker John Boehner, Ohio Republican, made it clear that any bill that came to the House from the upper chamber as a result of Senate Democrats changing the rules on the filibuster would be "dead on arrival." In a statement released from Speaker Boehner's office, the Ohio GOP'er remarked:

“Senate Democrats’ attempt to break Senate rules in order to change Senate rules is clearly designed to marginalize Senate Republicans and their constituents while greasing the skids for controversial partisan measures. I question the wisdom of this maneuver, especially at a time when cooperation on Capitol Hill is critical, and fully support Leader McConnell’s efforts to protect minority rights, which are an essential part of our constitutional tradition. Any bill that reaches a Republican-led House based on Senate Democrats’ heavy-handed power play would be dead on arrival.”

In other words, any bill that passes the Senate with at least forty Senate Republicans/Conservadems voting against it would automatically die in Boehner's House.

Republicans seem quite chastened by the election, wouldn't you say? Ready to compromise any time now.


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thereisnospoon 12/05/2012 07:30:00 AM

Tuesday, December 04, 2012

 
And justice for all

by digby

Oh God:

A former death row inmate with intellectual disabilities has languished in the Texas prison system for over 30 years despite having no valid criminal conviction. Jerry Hartfield, an illiterate man with an IQ of 51, had his capital conviction overturned in 1980 because the jury at his trial had been improperly selected. A Texas appeals court ordered a new trial for Hartfield, but that trial has never happened. In 1983, then-Governor Mark White attempted to commute Hartfield's former death sentence to life without parole. However, a federal court has recently ruled that the commutation was irrelevant since Hartfield was not convicted of a crime. No action had been taken on the case until 2006, when another inmate helped Hartfield file a handwritten motion, asking that he be either retried or set free.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rejected the petition, but a federal judge agreed with Hartfield, saying the decision overturning his conviction still stands. U.S. District Court Judge Lynn Hughes said, "Hartfield's position is as straightforward and subtle as a freight train....The court's mandate was never recalled, its decision never overturned, the conviction never reinstated; yet Hartfield never received the 'entirely new trial' ordered by the court." The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit called the state's defense of Hartfield's incarceration "disturbingly unprofessional" and returned the case to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals for further action. Given the Sixth Amendment's right to a speedy trial, it is not clear that Hartfield could be re-tried.

And the real joke is that there are many people who will tell you that the fact this poor man hasn't been executed proves that our death penalty system is perfect.

At this point I think it's fairly obvious that Texas is an authoritarian police state. Which makes the US an authoritarian police state as well. How any country that even calls itself civilized can allow this is beyond me. It literally makes me ill.


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digby 12/04/2012 06:00:00 PM

 
"Rupert’s after me as well"

by digby

I always thought the Republicans had visions of "President Petraeus" dancing in their heads. Apparently, their most impressive propagandist was quite serious about it:

In spring 2011, Ailes asked a Fox News analyst headed to Afghanistan to pass on his thoughts to Petraeus, who was then the commander of U.S. and coalition forces there. Petraeus, Ailes advised, should turn down an expected offer from President Obama to become CIA director and accept nothing less than the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top military post. If Obama did not offer the Joint Chiefs post, Petraeus should resign from the military and run for president, Ailes suggested.

The Fox News chairman’s message was delivered to Petraeus by Kathleen T. McFarland, a Fox News national security analyst and former national security and Pentagon aide in three Republican administrations. She did so at the end of a 90-minute, unfiltered conversation with Petraeus that touched on the general’s future, his relationship with the media and his political aspirations — or lack thereof. The Washington Post has obtained a digital recording from the meeting, which took place in Petraeus’s office in Kabul.

McFarland also said that Ailes — who had a decades-long career as a Republican political consultant, advising Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush — might resign as head of Fox to run a Petraeus presidential campaign. At one point, McFarland and Petraeus spoke about the possibility that Rupert Murdoch, the head of News Corp., which owns Fox News, would “bankroll” the campaign.

“Rupert’s after me as well,” Petraeus told McFarland.

McFarland said she had spoken “directly” to the Fox News chairman and the “advice to you from Roger Ailes is. . . . He says that if you’re offered [JCS] chairman, take it. If you’re offered anything else, don’t take it; resign in six months and run for president.”

Petraeus demurred, saying he would consider the CIA directorship if Obama offered it, as the president did several weeks later. Petraeus was confirmed and sworn in as director on Sept. 6, 2011. He resigned a year later, on Nov. 9, after the disclosure of an extramarital affair with his biographer.

In a telephone interview Monday, the wily and sharp-tongued Ailes said he did indeed ask McFarland to make the pitch to Petraeus. “It was more of a joke, a wiseass way I have,” he said. “I thought the Republican field [in the primaries] needed to be shaken up and Petraeus might be a good candidate.”

Ailes added, “It sounds like she thought she was on a secret mission in the Reagan administration. . . . She was way out of line. . . . It’s someone’s fantasy to make me a kingmaker. It’s not my job.” He said that McFarland was not an employee of Fox but a contributor paid less than $75,000 a year.

Naturally he dismisses the reporter as a low level grunt with delusions of grandeur. he's just that much of an ass.

But I absolutely believe he was serious. When Ailes says he isn't a kingmaker you have to laugh. Of course he is, and he was instrumental in creating The Man Called Petraeus. And to be honest, I think he could have been a formidable candidate in 2008 if he showed any retail political skill at all:

-David Petraeus has a 44/30 favorability rating nationally and is seen much more favorably by Democrats (47/25) at this point than Republicans (38/36).

There are the usual partisan reason for this, of course, and the little matter of his wandering eye. But the fact is that there have always been plenty of Democrats who worshiped TMCP and who knows how many of them would cross over if he proved to be a decent candidate? (I would have thought he would have had a better chance in 2016, but maybe Ailes was believing his own hype too and thought Obama was seriously vulnerable in 2012.)

In any case, that's over now. The only thing Petraeus had going for him was The Man Called Petraeus myth but unless you're as politically skilled as Bill Clinton (and virtually nobody is) you can't get away with a tawdry affair like that anyway. But his mystique was all about rectitude and brilliance and I don't think he can claim that anymore. After all, General Betrayus has a whole different meaning now. And he certainly didn't behave in a very disciplined or intelligent manner.

Buh bye, TMCP, we hardly knew ye.

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digby 12/04/2012 04:30:00 PM

 
ACORN stole the election, we want to secede, and we control the Republican primary

by David Atkins

PPP does a poll, Tom Jensen reports:

PPP's first post election national poll finds that Republicans are taking the results pretty hard...and also declining in numbers.

49% of GOP voters nationally say they think that ACORN stole the election for President Obama. We found that 52% of Republicans thought that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama, so this is a modest decline, but perhaps smaller than might have been expected given that ACORN doesn't exist anymore.

Some GOP voters are so unhappy with the outcome that they no longer care to be a part of the United States. 25% of Republicans say they would like their state to secede from the union compared to 56% who want to stay and 19% who aren't sure.

One reason that such a high percentage of Republicans are holding what could be seen as extreme views is that their numbers are declining. Our final poll before the election, which hit the final outcome almost on the head, found 39% of voters identifying themselves as Democrats and 37% as Republicans. Since the election we've seen a 5 point increase in Democratic identification to 44%, and a 5 point decrease in Republican identification to 32%.

And yet we're supposed to believe that a chastened Republican Party will tack to the center to solve its demographic problem and become competitive in 2016? Hardly. Their base is filled with voters who still believe it's 1976 and they have a "silent majority" that is only being disenfranchised because of millions of fraudulent inner city votes. A great many of these older white exurban and rural voters haven't even seen the inside of a big city in years, and have no idea what 18-35 year olds really think except for their wayward liberal grandchildren and that weird hippie with purple hair who works at the neighborhood grocery store.

Their leaders will bank on total gridlock and dysfunction leading to electoral apathy in 2014 to keep their House majority and pick up Senate seats, becoming even more extreme in their gerrymandered pockets of the country. Then they'll nominate one of the more radical conservatives they can find, or force one of their more "acceptable" candidates to tack so far right to win the primary that like Mitt Romney they'll be hard pressed to win the general election.

This GOP isn't coming back to reality land anytime soon.

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thereisnospoon 12/04/2012 03:03:00 PM

 
Going Galt all the way

by digby

Patriots understand that an epic storm is coming to America.

Economic collapse is imminent. Disruptions of Just-in-Time supply lines will lead America into chaos. Violence along racial, ethnic, religious and economic class lines will bring forth famine, disease and a fundamental reset of life in America.

A group of Patriots have decided to build a community off the most likely lines of peril, a bastion of Jefferson's Rightful Liberty where we may remain safe, warm, healthy and comfortable while American society suffers the inevitable destruction that must accompany the decades of degenerating morality of our Countrymen.

The cornerstone of the Citadel is III Arms Company, an industry to support the first wave of Patriots who will become modern American Pioneers. We will build Fighting Arms and ammunition for Patriots and around us a town will begin to grow. Other revenue streams are already in the works. Our intent is to purchase at least one thousand acres, and construct a walled town of at least one square mile to withstand any potential violence from hungry, diseased Souls. Obviously the Citadel is not being built to defy any laws of the United States or the State of Idaho, or to withstand any .gov or .mil attack. Our fortifications are merely defensive for a SHTF world.

The Citadel will have between 3,500 and 5,000 households within the walls, with a single gate permitting access. The Citadel is not to be a closed society, instead a refuge for genuine Patriots who wish to live without neighbors who are Liberals and Establishment political ideologues, open for tourists who will be welcomed into our town to visit our planned Firearms Museum, shop in our Town Center, stay in a B&B; or hotel while vacationing and exploring the wonderful skiing, hunting and fishing opportunities in the area, and many other attractions we will offer.

If you are a patriotic American who believes in Jefferson's Rightful Liberty, who believes in the Constitution as written, who believes in the Declaration of Independence, and who wishes to live in a beautiful, secure mountain town that bans Liberals from living among us, consider exploring the Citadel as we evolve and build. If you need to escape your suburban life and the vulnerabilities your family faces, consider the Citadel.

Ours is a community of Riflemen and Patriots. Living in a house, townhome or condo within the Citadel requires residents to voluntarily assume responsibilities for the common defense. Our community is not for everyone. But if you think you and your family would like to live among real Patriots and to be prepared for an America when the SHTF, consider the Citadel.

If you are looking for a fresh start, a place to open your dream business in a community where Free Enterprise reigns, a home in a place that will be safe when the rest of America begins to suffer from the long train of abuses endured for several generations, consider the Citadel.

There have been lots of citadels in history, used for all kinds of purposes. I wonder if they know that it doesn't always work out quite they way they think it will.

h/t to JS
digby 12/04/2012 01:30:00 PM

 
These zealots can find a controversy anywhere

by digby

In case you were wondering who are the biggest jackasses in the Senate, here's a handy list:

Alexander (R-TN) Blunt (R-MO) Boozman (R-AR) Burr (R-NC) Chambliss (R-GA) Coats (R-IN) Coburn (R-OK) Cochran (R-MS) Corker (R-TN) Cornyn (R-TX) Crapo (R-ID) DeMint (R-SC) Enzi (R-WY)

Graham (R-SC) Grassley (R-IA) Hatch (R-UT) Heller (R-NV) Hoeven (R-ND) Hutchison (R-TX) Inhofe (R-OK) Isakson (R-GA) Johanns (R-NE) Johnson (R-WI) Kyl (R-AZ) Lee (R-UT) McConnell (R-KY)

Moran (R-KS) Paul (R-KY) Portman (R-OH) Risch (R-ID) Roberts (R-KS) Rubio (R-FL) Sessions (R-AL) Shelby (R-AL) Thune (R-SD) Toomey (R-PA) Vitter (R-LA) Wicker (R-MS)

They all voted against the UN Convention on Persons with Disabilities. And it came up three short because of it.

Why? Well, I'm guessing it's mostly because they are empty, soulless people who care nothing for those who are vulnerable and relish the opportunity to punish sick and disabled people whenever possible. But the ostensible reason was because the treaty calls for access to reproductive health for disabled people and this lunatic fringe equates "reproductive health" with abortion. (That's what kooky Ricky was going on about yesterday.)

What was that I heard about the right being neutered after the last election? I keep forgetting.

I must say that I'm particularly impressed that Kay Bailey Hutchison, the only woman in the group, managed to explicitly slap disabled women across the face in one of her last acts as a Senator. That's quite legacy you have there, Kay. You must be so proud.

Here's more on the treaty from UN dispatch.

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digby 12/04/2012 12:00:00 PM

 
Heckling by homeboys

Heh:

Buzzfeed:

Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) was shouted down by a large group of demonstrators Tuesday, temporarily preventing him from delivering an address at a "Campaign to Fix the Debt" roundtable in Washington, D.C.

BuzzFeed reports that Portman had prepared a speech about the importance of following Republican-backed plans to reform the tax code in order to bring about a longer-term solution to prevent deficit reduction measures, such as the fiscal cliff, from becoming commonplace. As he stood before the crowd however, four protesters took turns touting the importance of Medicare and Social Security and arguing against steps to slash the programs.

As additional hecklers stood up to tell their stories, authorities reportedly came forward to remove the dissenters from the event, which spurred a mass exodus among demonstrators chanting,"We want to grow, not slow, the economy!"

This is the good part:

After they vacated the hall, Portman reportedly resumed his speech. According to BuzzFeed, Portman was later seen meeting with four of the protesters, all Ohio constituents who spoke with the senator for nearly 20 minutes.

That's getting them where they hurt. They really don't like being heckled by their own constituents. Congratulations to the organizers.

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digby 12/04/2012 11:00:00 AM

 
QOTD: Sperling

By digby

We certainly have just seen that there is no shortage of passion on this issue, and it is a reminder that for all of the metrics we will discuss today, that go into this or that as a percentage of GDP, the ultimate metric, the ultimate end, the ultimate test for all we do in economic policy is whether it meets the fundamental values that make this country great — which are (1) are we nation in which the accident of your birth does not overly determine the outcome of your life, where everyone has an opportunity to rise; (2) are we a nation where the economic growth strengthens the middle class and creates more room for the poor and others who want to work their way up; and (3) are we creating an economy where those who work hard and take responsibility can raise their children with dignity, work with dignity, retire with dignity. That’s the ultimate test; that’s the ultimate metric for all we do.

That was from his speech today to "Fix the Debt." I like it.

Aside from the use of counter-productive framing a rhetoric, the rest was pretty good too:

I believe there is no reason we should not be able to find common ground for a balanced, fair and pro-jobs and pro-growth budget agreement. No one – on any side – should ever aspire to go over the cliff or in any other way to do harm to our economy as a budget tactic or political strategy. Those of us in positions of responsibility have an obligation to work together to find common ground – or at least painful but acceptable compromise – that moves our nation forward.

If we can pass the type of balanced agreement the President has advocated, we can beat the low expectations for those of us in Washington that exist for us and provide a spark of confidence to growth, investment and jobs. That type of agreement means balance between high-income revenues and mandatory spending; balance in terms of protecting the poor and the vulnerable, strengthening the middle class and asking the most from those who can contribute the most; and balance in terms of finding the fiscal sweet spot where we both create long-term confidence from showing we are bringing down and stabilizing our debt as a percentage of our economy, but also by including measures like infrastructure and emergency unemployment insurance to ensure we are giving our recovery and working families the strength and momentum they need in the immediate term. All of those are important components of balance, and I am happy that so many of the fiscal commissions, and I heard the reference from Senator Portman, understand that a strong agreement has to make sure that we strengthen the recovery, not contract the recovery in the short term. We don’t need to do that. We can design an intelligent long-term deficit reduction package that gives momentum and strength to jobs in the immediate term as we create more confidence that we will get our debt and deficits under control in the long term.

Make no mistake about it: no budget agreement – however robust – will provide the economic certainty and confidence we aspire to if job creators, investors and working families believe that, after we reach that agreement, just months down the road, we will start the next round of debt limit debacles. As both economist and business leaders have told us, only the greatest national tragedies have competed with the debt limit debacle of 2011 in terms of damaging consumer confidence. So let’s be clear: if we want to see the economic benefit of a bipartisan budget agreement we need to agree that the era of threatening the default of the United States as a budget tactic is over. The full faith and credit of the United States of America is something we should cherish and never use as a bargaining tool by any side. This should be beyond question at this moment.

Second, to the contrary to the claims of some, President Obama has put forward specific and detailed mandatory savings on the table and is deeply committed to leading on passing a balanced plan that includes tough, but smart, entitlement reform. Those of you, and there are many of you who are budget experts, will back be up on the following: it is only the President’s budget – not the House Republican budget – that has specific, detailed, and scorable savings in the first 10 years on Medicare. Those measures include not only provider savings designed to increase value for health services, but increases on high-income premiums in Medicare, and Medigap reform for new beneficiaries that is designed to discourage excess utilization. And I could go on and on. The President has specific proposals for indirect payment for farmers, federal workforce retirement savings, among many others. We understand that others, including people on these panels, will have other ideas – but so far we are still waiting to hear a clear and detailed definition of how those who disagree with us would propose do things differently.

Third, it is important that all those who care about our country reaching a balanced and robust deficit reduction agreement understand that it cannot come together without rates going up on income over $250K. As my colleague Jason Furman and I recently wrote, while the headline number that can technically be reached through simply limiting deduction on high income earners might seem in the ball park, such estimates quickly fall apart with the most minimal scrutiny. To take one proposal, the one to limit deductions to $25,000, it is often described as raising over $1 trillion. Yet, that estimate relies on tax increases on 17 million taxpayers making under $250K. If you remove the tax on those middle class families – and have a proper phase in, which we would all agree you should – the savings number comes down to $650 billion. But even at this point there is a fundamental flaw because the$25K deduction cap means that the charitable deduction for all high income people will essentially be eliminated. It is hard to design a better way to unite the most-well off Americans and those representing the poorest Americans, non-profits, churches, universities and hospitals against a single idea than proposing to completely eliminate the charitable deduction. If you then decide to make an exception for charitable deductions, your savings go down to anywhere from $350 billion to $450 billion.

That means if the President were to take the position that rates could not go up and he then found that so called high-income deduction savings max out at around $400 billion, then to get a robust and balanced deficit agreement, the President would have to be willing to agree to over $1 trillion in revenues through taxes that fall mostly on the middle class – something he definitively will not do. Even worse, such a plan would be asking these middle class Americans to face higher taxes simply to afford lower taxes on the most well-off.

That is why the President has made clear he cannot sign, and will not sign, any bill that does not raise rates or one that seeks to extend the Bush high income tax cuts at their current levels. Of course, tax reform on high income deductions should be part of the package. The President himself has, in his budget proposal for more than one year, has a 28 percent cap on tax expenditure for high income Americans. So the President has not only shown willingness to support that type of reform on tax expenditure reductions, he has led on the issue and put forward as specific and detailed of a proposal to raise over $500 billion as any as I’ve seen.

That is why the letter that came to the President from the House Republican leadership yesterday was so disappointing. It not only failed to recognize the necessity of raising rates; it actually called for lowering rates for the highest earners, which inevitably means a worse deal for the middle class. This is very unfortunate because recognition that we must raise rates on the highest income Americans stands today as the critical key to unlocking the door to a bipartisan budget agreement.

The letter also was disappointing because it failed to acknowledge what virtually every business leader today recognizes: that we must, for the sake of economic confidence and certainty, end the self-inflicted economic wound of sporadic debt fights that threaten default and tarnish the full faith and credit of the United States.

Again, there is no reason for us to approach — no less go over — the cliff. If our colleagues on the other side of the aisle will work in good faith with us, I am confident that we can reach a balanced, fair, pro-growth and pro-jobs agreement in the spirit of good faith and compromise. Thank you, and I’m sure everyone is looking forward to the discussion from the very impressive group of experts, Maya, that you have gathered today. So thank you.

I doubt that Grover Norquist, Pete Peterson or Paul Ryan much cared for that. I would imagine Cokie Roberts would be disappointed that it didn't prescribe the necessary pain for the old and sick. (And needless to say I think we need to be vigilant about all this "balance" talk.) But that was a principled statement that didn't give away the future security of average Americans. I'm mildly optimistic.

Update: Also too, this:

When the well-being of millions of Americans is at stake — as it is with major changes in Medicare and Medicaid — that shouldn’t be acceptable. If policymakers want to propose $600 billion in health care entitlement savings, as they have every right to do, they should show us the specific changes they would make to get there. Until they do, such proposals shouldn’t receive much credibility.
(Some news accounts report the House Republican leaders would raise the Medicare eligibility age to 67 and increase Medicare premiums for more affluent beneficiaries, although those items are not mentioned anywhere in the new offer. But if so, those measures would raise only about one quarter of the $600 billion and raise questions as to whether House Republicans have an answer for what would happen to many 65 and 66 year olds in states that turn down the health reform law’s Medicaid expansion or whether they are willing to turn back the clock nearly 50 years and let ours be the only Western democracy where significant numbers of poor elderly people can go uninsured.)

President Obama’s budget has over $300 billion in specific health entitlement savings. BowlesSimpson detailed its specific health entitlement savings as well. Only with specific proposals can we assess what level of cuts is reasonable and what is not.

For example, analysis shows that, although this wasn’t Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson’s intention, several of their specific health care cut proposals would likely harm vulnerable low-income elderly and disabled people. In response to such analysis, Bowles has expressed openness to modifying some of his proposals.

Other parts of the Republican offer — its $300 billion in cuts in non-health mandatory programs and its $300 billion in additional cuts in discretionary programs — have the same problem: no specifics. The proposal is an exercise in “look Ma, no hands” budgeting.

Take non-health mandatory programs. In the negotiations that Vice President Biden chaired in the spring of 2011 and the subsequent negotiations between President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner that summer, the two parties tentatively agreed on $240 billion to $250 billion in nonhealth mandatory savings. But though a sizeable share of those savings has since been enacted, the new Republican offer calls for $300 billion in savings here. Where would the tens of billions of dollars in additional savings come from? The offer doesn’t say. Consequently, we can’t assess this part of the proposal, either.

We can assess the proposal for $300 billion in additional cuts in discretionary programs. It likely would pose significant risks to investments in areas from education to scientific research to food safety to border security to children’s programs such as child care, WIC, and Head Start. Consider the following.

 The discretionary funding caps set by last year’s Budget Control Act (BCA) will cut
discretionary spending of $1.5 trillion over the next ten years [see this CBPP paper], compared to the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) baseline at the end of 2010 — when Bowles and Simpson issued their report.
 And, the existing BCA caps are so austere that, by 2017, non-defense discretionary
spending will be at its lowest level on record as a share of the economy, with data going back to 1962.
 Making the squeeze tighter, some essential non-defense discretionary programs will
require large increases in the years ahead. As an analysis that we will issue shortly shows, spending for veterans’ health care will need to rise by several hundred billion dollars over the coming decade, as more Vietnam veterans reach old age (when health care costs climb) and the number of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans grows. To meet these costs for our veterans, which we will surely do, policymakers will have to cut other nondefense discretionary programs even more deeply to remain within the tough BCA caps.

Adding large further cuts on top of the steep cuts that the BCA requires would be most unwise, as former Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete Domenici and former CBO
and Office of Management and Budget director Alice Rivlin have warned.

The Republican offer poses these problems for one main reason: its revenues are inadequate. At $800 billion, they don’t even offset the cost of extending President Bush’s tax cuts for the most affluent 2 percent of Americans and extending the current extravagant estate-tax break for the heirs of the richest 0.3 percent of Americans — as the Republican plan apparently does.

In short, people with low incomes or serious disabilities, and elderly people of modest means, would face substantial cuts — but people at the top would get to keep a significant share of their munificent tax cuts.

I have an idea. Why don't we just tax the rich, stimulate the economy and then come back and reassess in a few years? Bueller? Anybody?


h/t to Dan Froomkin
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digby 12/04/2012 09:17:00 AM

 
The economy needs stimulus, not deficit obsession

by David Atkins

Rachel Maddow, national treasure, tells it like it is:


The key part starts about three minutes into the video. That this is so obvious to reasonable people outside the bubble but not to the Village elites bespeaks an extraordinary level of either greed or stupidity on their part. In all likelihood, some of both. I have no doubt that Cokie Roberts and friends actually believe we have a deficit crisis. I've seen very well educated, well-meaning people in politics at the local level insist the exact same thing. It's partly cultural, in fact: to be neoliberal and obsessed with deficits is to prove that one has graduated from the petty partisan politics of lesser mortals and into the realm of the truly educated few who see the big picture and have a concern for macroeconomics. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course, but such things stand out as an aspirational cultural badge of merit.

Cultic hysteria and groupthink affect everyone, no matter how smart they believe they are. Doubly so when said groupthink is convenient for the pocketbooks of those in question, and triply so when it becomes a unifying cultural symbol of the "in" crowd.


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thereisnospoon 12/04/2012 07:30:00 AM

Monday, December 03, 2012

 
"Cliff" notes 12/3

by digby

In case you were wondering about what's in the "Bowles Plan" (as opposed to the Simpson-Bowles proposal) Talking Points Memo lays it out:

Bowles called for $800 billion in new revenue, without resorting to using “dynamic scoring,” but not specifically from raising tax rates. He proposed raising the Medicare eligibility age, and changing government tax and spending formulas to use so-called chained CPI, reducing benefits in programs like Social Security and raising tax revenues over time by hastening workers ascent into higher tax brackets as they climb the income ladder. He proposed $300 billion in further cuts to discretionary spending, $600 billion in cuts to health care programs, and $300 billion in other mandatory spending programs, but did not spell out entirely how the cuts should be designed.

The GOP’s offer provides no further specificity about those cuts either. It is silent on how to raise $800 billion in revenue, other than to call for closing loopholes and lowering marginal rates. It says nothing about when the higher taxes would kick in.

“This is by no means an adequate long-term solution, as resolving our long-term fiscal crisis will require fundamental entitlement reform,” the letter reads. “Indeed, the Bowles plan is exactly the kind of imperfect, but fair middle ground that allows us to avert the fiscal cliff without hurting our economy and destroying jobs. We believe it warrants immediate consideration.”

This comes from a congressional hearing in the fall of 2011 in which Bowles testified that he thought the above was a "balanced approach." At the time the Republicans scoffed at the idea they would ever agree to raise taxes any way, any how, but they've cleverly evoked Bowles' name (a name that's repeatedly been floated to replace Geithner as Treasury Secretary )as cover for their proposal to cut the living crap out of well ... everything.

It's true that Bowles proposed this --- he was among a whole bunch of Very Serious Democrats (including the president) who put these cuts on the table repeatedly in 2011. But he disavowed his proposal today, saying circumstances have changed. (I'm hopeful he's talking about the circumstances of Democrats winning the election, but who knows?)

He explained at the time that cutting Medicare was logical since we now have Obamacare. A lot of people seem to think this makes good sense, but I honestly cannot believe that anyone would talk about raising the age for Medicare eligibility because an untried, untested, hugely controversial new program will supposedly make it all ok. That's just daft in my opinion. And from what we're seeing with states rejecting Medicaid dollars and refusing to create the exchanges, it should be unequivocally off the table for the foreseeable future. It's not as if it will ever be easy to lower the age again and even that would come on the heels of a hell of a lot of suffering among people who worked their whole lives in anticipation of having their medical care covered once they got old and sick. It's appalling that anyone would play and experiment with them before anyone has the vaguest idea if Obamacare is going to work. You simply cannot take health care away from people, particularly at this age, without knowing that the replacement will be adequate. And we do not know if it will be adequate.

The White House responded to the GOP offer with this:

“The Republican letter released today does not meet the test of balance. In fact, it actually promises to lower rates for the wealthy and sticks the middle class with the bill. Their plan includes nothing new and provides no details on which deductions they would eliminate, which loopholes they will close or which Medicare savings they would achieve. Independent analysts who have looked at plans like this one have concluded that middle class taxes will have to go up to pay for lower rates for millionaires and billionaires. While the President is willing to compromise to get a significant, balanced deal and believes that compromise is readily available to Congress, he is not willing to compromise on the principles of fairness and balance that include asking the wealthiest to pay higher rates. President Obama believes – and the American people agree – that the economy works best when it is grown from the middle out, not from the top down. Until the Republicans in Congress are willing to get serious about asking the wealthiest to pay slightly higher tax rates, we won’t be able to achieve a significant, balanced approach to reduce our deficit our nation needs.”

So the public kabuki is still all about the taxes. Let's hope there's more discussion behind the scenes because as dday pointed out, it is about a lot more than that. He quoted this from Jonathan Karl about the so-called Republican Doomsday Secnario:

It’s quite simple: House Republicans would allow a vote on extending the Bush middle class tax cuts (the bill passed in August by the Senate) and offer the president nothing more – no extension of the debt ceiling, nothing on unemployment, nothing on closing loopholes. Congress would recess for the holidays and the president would face a big battle early in the year over the debt ceiling.

Dday adds:

Karl says that the sequester could get delayed for a year as part of the House GOP doomsday scenario. But either way, this would put Democrats in a tough spot. They would lose the tax leverage after having won that battle. They would see an economic slowdown from the end of extended unemployment benefits, the payroll tax cut and possibly the sequester. And they would have to battle over a debt limit increase without the tax rate discussion to fall back on.

This actually shows some recognition that the fiscal slope is not solely a tax discussion. Even if you solve the tax puzzle, there are lots of other moving parts. Republicans learned that the debt limit gives them real leverage as long as the President doesn’t resort to the Constitutional option, using the 14th Amendment to essentially render the debt limit moot. I’d almost guarantee articles of impeachment in the House in that event.

If the President doesn’t go that route, and he doesn’t direct his Treasury Secretary to mint a $1 trillion platinum coin, then you have a situation where House Republicans have the power to control events, and Democrats have serious needs – a debt limit increase, restoration of extended unemployment benefits, etc. The Republican position may be unpopular, but if they’re willing to press the issue, they can force through many of their priorities. The increase in top marginal rates will soon turn into a hollow victory on partisan grounds.

Yeah well, I've been screaming about that hollow victory for a couple of years now and I'm highly suspicious that there are people on the Democratic side who would be perfectly willing to be backed into this corner. They've demagogued the deficit into a crisis worthy of an invasion from a foreign planet at this point so whether the cuts come as a result of a Grand Bargain or a series of "showdowns" doesn't really matter. There is a tremendous amount of pressure to gut "entitlements" from a whole bunch of center and center right elites to do it. The biggest challenge for the White House would be how to frame this as a part of their vaunted "balanced approach" and I'm not sure it would be that easy. I'd be very interested to see if the Republicans are willing to give them that.

Anyway, grain of salt on all of this. They're posturing in public and dealing in private and we really can't know what's up from these reports. I continue to believe that the baseline for negotiations is the 2011 debt ceiling agreements, with the major hang up being the tax rates.  I still suspect that everything we're seeing is in service of making that happen in a way that the Republicans can stomach. Seriously hoping I'm wrong.


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digby 12/03/2012 04:30:00 PM

 
Let this sentence be enshrined in memory

by David Atkins

The Republican counteroffer:

Rejecting President Obama’s call to raise tax rates for the wealthy, House Republicans unveiled a counteroffer that would cut Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and other federal programs while raising new revenue by overhauling the tax code.

Just turn that into an ad and repeat it over and over again. The President needn't make any counter-counteroffer to that. Just let the GOP march right over that insanely unpopular and cold-hearted cliff. Mr. Potters, every one of them.

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thereisnospoon 12/03/2012 03:00:00 PM

 
Black helicopter child killers

by digby

I hate to break the news but they're just as looney as they ever were:

In keeping with the WND tradition of promoting various fringe conspiracies, Santorum’s debut column claimed that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has an objective of “ceding our sovereignty to the United Nations.”

Santorum warned that a United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities treaty adopted in 2006 “has much darker and more troubling implications” than to simply improve the treatment of disabled people in other countries.

The staunchly anti-abortion Republican worried that the treaty would “put the government, acting under U.N. authority, in the position to determine for all children with disabilities what is best for them.”

And taking that thought to its absurd conclusion, Santorum suggested that the U.N. treaty would have meant the death of his daughter, who has a rare genetic disorder.

“In the case of our 4-year-old daughter, Bella, who has Trisomy 18, a condition that the medical literature says is ‘incompatible with life,’ would her ‘best interest’ be that she be allowed to die?” he asked.

“Some would undoubtedly say so.”

Yes, "some" would, I'm sure: psychopaths who dwell in prisons and a few philosopher types who think in abstractions. But until they take over the world I'm guessing Santorum can relax about this. And then maybe he can find the time to worry about all the disabled kids all over the world who have little medical care and nothing to eat --- you know, the kind of thing to which the UN has been devoting itself for the past 50 years.

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digby 12/03/2012 01:30:00 PM

 
Douthat, Freaky 

by tristero

Douthat is one weird white dude:

In 1990, 65 percent of Americans told Pew that children were “very important” to a successful marriage; in 2007, just before the current baby bust, only 41 percent agreed. (That trend goes a long way toward explaining why gay marriage, which formally severs wedlock from sex differences and procreation, has gone from a nonstarter to a no-brainer for so many people.)

I'm sure this reasoning makes logical sense to someone, somewhere. But I'm not seeing the causation in the correlation.

I would suspect that the reason why same-sex marriage has become a "no-brainer for so many people" is not because children are now seen as less important for a successful marriage. Instead it's probably because once "so many people" started to think about gay marriage for, I dunno, like five seconds, they realized there was no earthly reason why two people who love each other should be prohibited from marrying - and also, by the way, from raising children if they wanted to.

As for Douthat's comments on decadence and cultural exhaustion, I'll refrain from comment... Okay, you twisted my arm,  I'll say something:

Unless you're talking about really good chocolate cakes,  "decadence"is just a feelgood word with no real meaning. It just makes the person bruiting it about feel oh-so-morally-superior.

And if anything could be said to be decadent, it's that smug, obnoxious, attitude.


tristero 12/03/2012 12:00:00 PM

 
"It may be about to get worse"

by digby

This seems to me that this should be an important story:

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

"For many states that had to resort to truly deep cuts and blunt instruments to balance their budgets over the last few years, it may be about to get worse."

No, America isn't Greece and neither is Mississippi. But we do have these distinct government entities which are locked into austerity and they are a drag on the country as a whole so the situation isn't completely different from Europe. And that's another very good reason why the federal government should be stimulating not cutting (and why it shouldn't be selling off the future security of its citizens for appearances sake either.) I'm sorry that everyone is irrational about budget cutting (thanks to bipartisan propaganda that implies it will be good for an ailing economy -- the leeches theory.) But that doesn't change the fact that we do not need austerity right now at the federal level, largely because many of our states are dying from it already. Just in case everyone's forgotten what's been happening in Europe due to our endlessly exciting cheerleading for tax hikes on rich people, here's a reminder from Krugman from just a couple of months ago:

Just a few days ago, the conventional wisdom was that Europe finally had things under control. The European Central Bank, by promising to buy the bonds of troubled governments if necessary, had soothed markets. All that debtor nations had to do, the story went, was agree to more and deeper austerity — the condition for central bank loans — and all would be well. 

But the purveyors of conventional wisdom forgot that people were involved. Suddenly, Spain and Greece are being racked by strikes and huge demonstrations. The public in these countries is, in effect, saying that it has reached its limit: With unemployment at Great Depression levels and with erstwhile middle-class workers reduced to picking through garbage in search of food, austerity has already gone too far. And this means that there may not be a deal after all. 

Much commentary suggests that the citizens of Spain and Greece are just delaying the inevitable, protesting against sacrifices that must, in fact, be made. But the truth is that the protesters are right. More austerity serves no useful purpose; the truly irrational players here are the allegedly serious politicians and officials demanding ever more pain. Consider Spain’s woes. What is the real economic problem? Basically, Spain is suffering the hangover from a huge housing bubble, which caused both an economic boom and a period of inflation that left Spanish industry uncompetitive with the rest of Europe. When the bubble burst, Spain was left with the difficult problem of regaining competitiveness, a painful process that will take years. Unless Spain leaves the euro — a step nobody wants to take — it is condemned to years of high unemployment. But this arguably inevitable suffering is being greatly magnified by harsh spending cuts; and these spending cuts are a case of inflicting pain for the sake of inflicting pain.  

First of all, Spain didn’t get into trouble because its government was profligate. On the contrary, on the eve of the crisis, Spain actually had a budget surplus and low debt. Large deficits emerged when the economy tanked, taking revenues with it, but, even so, Spain doesn’t appear to have all that high a debt burden. It’s true that Spain is now having trouble borrowing to finance its deficits. That trouble is, however, mainly because of fears about the nation’s broader difficulties — not least the fear of political turmoil in the face of very high unemployment. And shaving a few points off the budget deficit won’t resolve those fears. In fact, research by the International Monetary Fund suggests that spending cuts in deeply depressed economies may actually reduce investor confidence because they accelerate the pace of economic decline.

Again, I'm emphatically not saying that Europe's woes are exactly like ours. But logic says that if you have austerity in one part of the union, any union, it's going to be a drag on the rest. Ignoring that isn't going to change it.

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digby 12/03/2012 10:30:00 AM

 
The public negotiations grind on

by digby

I would take the time to parse all the "fiscal cliff" blather on the Sunday shows but it's a big waste of time. They are publicly posturing for the negotiations and none of it really means much. All we know is that the Democrats are standing fast in their demands for tax hikes on the rich and the Republicans are trying to find their footing.

This morning Greg Sargent reports:

I have just confirmed that ... Obama is willing, albeit very reluctant, to go over the cliff.

He would be extremely stupid to say otherwise at this point in the negotiations, but I am happy they are, at least, saying it. There is no good reason for them to be politically worried at this point and the market high priests have been naysaying so long that they sound like the boy who cried wolf, so perhaps the administration isn't listening to them anymore. And the truth is that it's the best way to get those tax rates back up without throwing the sick and the old over the cliff in the process, so I've always been in favor. Just let it happen.

Also, keep in mind that Grover "Nobody" Norquist already gave his dispensation to allowing the tax cuts to expire:

“Not continuing a tax cut is not technically a tax increase,” Norquist said.

Asked if it would violate his Americans for Tax Reform’s anti-tax pledge, Norquist said: “We wouldn’t hold it that way.”

Norquist explained that he doesn't want them to expire, but he clearly gave his signers wiggle room on this one.

So, this is the way to go. But it isn't a simple as we might want with the silly sequester nonsense still out there and the debt ceiling hanging over everyone's heads, which the Republicans will use to extract their pound of flesh and we still don't know what that will be. (Geithner took SS off the table on the Sunday Shows but was very careful to explain that they were more than willing to deal with it down the road.)

In fact, it would appear that the Grand Bargain is being broken up into a series of negotiations (also called "kicking the can down the road") so vigilance is necessary. I'm fairly sure that the White House being in constant talks with the Republicans about cutting spending isn't good. (But then neither is this high stakes cliff diving, so pick your poison.) But I have long taken the position that any programs that aren't cut today is a good thing, so that's probably the best we can hope for.

I have no way of knowing what's ally going on in these negotiations and neither does anyone else. The administration is taking a public hard line on taxes and the Republicans are fumbling around on cuts, which is as Greg points out a turn around from the last negotations. If they can hold the line, we might get out of this first round of negotiations without too much sick and elderly skin in the game.

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digby 12/03/2012 09:00:00 AM

 
Lindsay Graham's nesting dolls of lies

by David Atkins

Senator Lindsay Graham, the same one being stupidly celebrated by some liberals for sticking it to Grover Norquist, makes a statement of breathtaking dishonesty:

“I think we’re going over the cliff. It’s pretty clear to me they made a political calculation. This offer doesn’t remotely deal with entitlement reform in a way to save Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security from imminent bankruptcy. It raises $1.6 trillion on job creators that will destroy the economy and there are no spending controls,” Graham said on CBS’s “Face The Nation.”

Let's see how many lies are nested in this neat little statement.

1) The White House has bent over backward to compromise with Republicans at every opportunity. The fact that we're even talking about deficits at all, to say nothing of cuts to basic social services at a time of multi-year recession and high unemployment is itself an extraordinary compromise. The fact that the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy haven't already been rescinded after two presidential elections in which the winning side made its position clear on them is itself a huge compromise already. If there's any political calculation at all, it's the Obama Administration's foolish calculation that voters will celebrate deficit reduction and the "adult in the room", rather than punish whatever political party is perceived to have cut Medicare in 2014 and 2016.

2) Social Security isn't broke. It's funded for 40 years even without raising the caps, which is the easy "fix." Bankruptcy for Social Security certainly isn't "imminent." To lump it in with Medicare is either madness or gross deceit.

3) Medicaid isn't broke. There is no such thing as Medicaid going broke. Rising Medicaid costs may, like any other budgetary item, put a crimp in state and federal budgets. But since it's not a program funded by beneficiaries on a dollar-to-dollar level like Medicare and Social Security, Medicaid can't "go broke" unless the federal government itself goes broke. Which is impossible since we have a sovereign currency. The very worst that can happen is an inflationary spiral. But Medicaid can't go broke.

4) Medicare isn't broke, either. It's funded for eight years, which is quite a long time as projections go given rising healthcare costs. The best way to extend the life of Medicare in the short term is to create cost savings from providers in the program. The best way to do it long-term is to extend the Medicare pool to younger and healthier patients. Another good fix would be allowing the federal government to negotiate drug prices. And even if Medicare did "go broke" at the end of eight years, all it would mean is a shortfall requiring some cuts to benefits. So in order to prevent the supposed disaster of benefit cuts eight years from now, we're proposing to cut them in advance?

To say nothing of the fact that it's insane to demand that Medicare "pay for itself," anyway, particularly as the population ages. We don't demand that our wars pay for themselves, or that oil subsidies do, or that farm subsidies do, or that tax cuts for the wealthy do. And those are the bad things. On the good side, we don't demand that NASA pay for itself or that AIDS prevention in Africa pay for itself. Some things are worth doing for their own sake, and funding from the federal treasury. Why in the world such health insurance for the elderly be any different?

5) Going back to the Clinton tax rates certainly wouldn't "destroy the economy." Forget the fact that rich people aren't actually job creators (consumers are, of course.) Most independent analysts believe it would have a minimal impact--especially the taxes on the wealthy. Recall that when we talk about going back to Clinton rates on the wealthy, we're talking about people who make $21,000 every month whining about paying a 4% higher rate on their last couple of thousand dollars. We're talking about people who rake in $50,000 every month paying a 4% higher rate on only the second half of that money. It's preposterous to believe that that would have much economic impact at all.

6) Spending controls? Is this a citizen initiative process? Senator Graham may not realize that he's a legislator in the U.S. Congress. Congress controls how the money is spent, with some minor input from the Executive Branch. That Senator Graham doesn't seem to understand that he and his fellow 534 fellow legislators on Capitol Hill are the spending controls, we're in bigger trouble he realizes.

The only part of Senator Graham's statement that isn't an obvious, easily refuted lie is the notion that we're actually going over the fiscal cliff. Good.

I hope he's right about that one. Glory hallelujah.


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thereisnospoon 12/03/2012 07:30:00 AM

Sunday, December 02, 2012

 
Ah, Socialism!

by tristero

If corporations are people, then people can be corporations. How about throwing a few bucks my way, Texas?

The guest of honor was Gov. Rick Perry, but the man behind the event was not one of the enclave’s boldface names. He was a tax consultant named G. Brint Ryan.
Mr. Ryan’s specialty is helping clients like ExxonMobil and Neiman Marcus secure state and local tax breaks and other business incentives. It is a good line of work in Texas.
Mr. Perry, Texas gives out more of the incentives than any other state, around $19 billion a year, an examination by The New York Times has found.
**
“While economic development is the mantra of most officials, there’s a question of when does economic development end and corporate welfare begin,” said Dale Craymer, the president of the Texas Taxpayers and Research Association, a group supported by business that favors incentives programs.

tristero 12/02/2012 08:00:00 PM

 
Lying for Life

by digby

You know what the most consistent characteristic of self-professed Christian anti-abortion zealots is? They are blatant liars:

Michigan lawmakers are considering legislation that would let parents claim a tax deduction for fetuses, extending them the same benefits as children.

House bills 5684 and 5685 would amend the state's tax code to include fetuses that have completed at least 12 weeks gestation as of the last day of the tax year as "dependents." Doing so would allow the fetus' tax-paying parents-to-be to save an estimated $160 on their taxes. Critics of the bill, which had its first hearing in the House Tax Policy Committee on November 20, say that such a law is just another way to make it harder for women in Michigan to get abortions.

"It is a backdoor attempt to get personhood for a fetus," said Shelli Weisberg, legislative director for the ACLU of Michigan. "These are just ways to begin to build the record, so one day they can say there's enough in our legislative history to say that the intent is to say that a fetus is a person."

Dan Jarvis, research and policy director for Michigan Family Forum, a conservative, Christian public policy organization, said the bill was an idea that his group had discussed with "a number of lawmakers" since 2008. "It does cost money when you're pregnant," said Jarvis. "We thought it was a good thing for young families in particular to get that added tax credit a few months earlier."

Jarvis says that endowing "personhood" to the unborn was not the intent of the measure—the goal was to encourage women to seek prenatal care, and to decrease the tax burden on young families. "To be perfectly honest we were totally caught off guard by that," said Jarvis. "We had never talked about that with the sponsors. When it came up in committee we were all floored."

I'm sorry, that's 100% unadulterated bullshit. This has been the strategy for many years and everyone knows it. I'm pretty sure that one of the Ten Commandments says "thou shalt not bear false witness" but I guess that's flexible when it comes to lying for "life."

Here's a little video from the Michigan Family Forum just so you know what they're really all about. Let's just say it isn't tax policy.

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digby 12/02/2012 06:00:00 PM

 
Self-awareness watch

by digby

Fox News had this headline today:

Par For The Course: Obama Plays Another Round Of Golf

A twitterer reminds me of this:

I still don't miss him.


h/t to @dragoncalf
digby 12/02/2012 04:30:00 PM

 
One journalist has a Howard Beale moment

by David Atkins

There's a reason that Howard Beale is on the Hullabaloo mast. He represents the willingness of someone in a time of small minds and universal deceit to betray the conventions of their profession and loudly proclaim they're "not going to take it anymore." The fiction in the film Network (and Bulworth and many others) is that the simple act of doing so by a highly placed individual will lead millions of others to protest as well. Perhaps, perhaps not. But one can hope.

Given the rotten state of journalism in this country, it's nice to see not only cheetos-eating bloggers like me and Digby, but someone on the inside of the Village stand up and tell the emperor they have no clothes as well. Case in point: Michael Grunwald, senior editor of Time Magazine, calling out the not only the fiscal cliff fiction, but also journalists' role in perpetuating it:

Fiscal Cliff Fictions: Let’s All Agree to Pretend the GOP Isn’t Full of It

It’s really amazing to see political reporters dutifully passing along Republican complaints that President Obama’s opening offer in the fiscal cliff talks is just a recycled version of his old plan, when those same reporters spent the last year dutifully passing along Republican complaints that Obama had no plan. It’s even more amazing to see them pass along Republican outrage that Obama isn’t cutting Medicare enough, in the same matter-of-fact tone they used during the campaign to pass along Republican outrage that Obama was cutting Medicare.

This isn’t just cognitive dissonance. It’s irresponsible reporting. Mainstream media outlets don’t want to look partisan, so they ignore the BS hidden in plain sight, the hypocrisy and dishonesty that defines the modern Republican Party. I’m old enough to remember when Republicans insisted that anyone who said they wanted to cut Medicare was a demagogue, because I’m more than three weeks old.

I’ve written a lot about the GOP’s defiance of reality–its denial of climate science, its simultaneous denunciations of Medicare cuts and government health care, its insistence that debt-exploding tax cuts will somehow reduce the debt—so I often get accused of partisanship. But it’s simply a fact that Republicans controlled Washington during the fiscally irresponsible era when President Clinton’s budget surpluses were transformed into the trillion-dollar deficit that President Bush bequeathed to President Obama. (The deficit is now shrinking.) It’s simply a fact that the fiscal cliff was created in response to GOP threats to force the U.S. government to default on its obligations. The press can’t figure out how to weave those facts into the current narrative without sounding like it’s taking sides, so it simply pretends that yesterday never happened...

Whatever. I realize that the GOP’s up-is-downism puts news reporters in an awkward position. It would seem tendentious to point out Republican hypocrisy on deficits and Medicare and stimulus every time it comes up, because these days it comes up almost every time a Republican leader opens his mouth. But we’re not supposed to be stenographers. As long as the media let an entire political party invent a new reality every day, it will keep on doing it. Every day.

I've left out quite a bit. Be sure to read the whole thing. It's great.

When the facts are so clearly on one side, it's not biased or irresponsible journalism to point that out. It's just good journalism.


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thereisnospoon 12/02/2012 03:00:00 PM

 
Human decency

by digby

The image above was taken recently on a cold evening in Times Square, right in the middle of New York City. According to a New York Times article, a New York Police Department officer named Lawrence DePrimo was working a counterterrorism post when he spotted a homeless, shoeless man. He brought the man a new pair of boots, and a tourist snapped this image of DePrimo helping the man put on the shoes.

It was rapidly shared around the Internet on social media sites -- a little reminder to all of the importance of the holiday season. DePrimo mentioned in an interview that it was a very cold night, and he dipped into a nearby shoe store to purchase the boots with his own money.

I don't know if that's some kind of a set-up (I'm waaay too cynical these days) but I really hope it's for real. In fact, I choose to believe it is real. For all the criticism I give police who overstep their bounds I'm sure there are a million acts of kindness that we never see.

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digby 12/02/2012 01:30:00 PM

 
A simple tale of elite privilege

by digby

... with a surprise ending:

Six days after a trooper ticketed him for speeding in February and refused to cut him a break, Assemblyman Nelson Albano wrote a scathing letter to the head of the State Police.

The lawmaker claimed the trooper, Randy Pangborn, targeted him on his way to the Statehouse, refused to accept his temporary vehicle registration, requested backup, and had other troopers box in his car. He said he was "humiliated, embarrassed and disrespected as a legislator."

"There was absolutely no reason to treat me like a criminal and detain two other troopers from public safety while trooper Pangborn conducted his charade," Albano wrote from his Assembly office to State Police Superintendent Col. Rick Fuentes, requesting an internal investigation.

Normally, I would be sympathetic to any citizen being treated disrespectfully by the police. But this is a little bit different, isn't it? He was disrespected as a legislator. ("Don't you know who I am?") So the lesson here isn't that citizens deserve respectful treatment, but that one should never treat a powerful person like a criminal.

In fact, average citizens are routinely treated much worse than that, even to the point of being shot full of electricity for failing to immediately and unquestioningly comply with a police officer's orders. But then, they aren't as important as this fine fellow, are they?

Here's the kicker:

But a video of the traffic stop, captured by a camera inside the trooper’s patrol car and recently obtained by The Star-Ledger, tells a different story from the one Albano described.

The trooper was respectful, calm, never raised his voice and had the lawmaker on his way in just eight minutes. Pangborn never rejected the temporary registration, and even apologized for writing the ticket. When Albano asked for a break, he politely told him to call the court.

A spokesman for the State Police, Lt. Stephen Jones, said dispatch records indicated Pangborn did not request backup. Two other patrol cars were at the scene, the video shows, but they stayed only briefly.

So it wasn't even the mild rousting originally described but rather the simple failure to be corrupt in the face of power. The trooper should be given medal.

You might also be interested to know that the police resisted releasing the tape which would have exonerated their own officer, however, and only did so in response to a FOIA request from the newspaper. Apparently, power has some privileges after all.


*In case you were wondering, the assemblyman is a Democrat. But that's no surprise. This phenomenon isn't partisan, by any means.

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digby 12/02/2012 11:37:00 AM