Legislation to cut welfare benefits of parents with children performing poorly in school has cleared committees of both the House and Senate after being revised to give the parents several ways to avoid the reductions. …

The bill … calls for a 30 percent reduction in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits to parents whose children are not making satisfactory progress in school.

Tennessee Democrats point out the obvious to their ideologically blinded opponents:

House Democratic Caucus Chairman Mike Turner of Nashville said parents of children with “undiagnosed learning disabilities” could suffer because of the bill and, even if a child is performing poorly in school, “the kid still has to eat.”

Turner also said the bill apparently does not apply to home-schooled children and, “I guess a person who wants to get around this just can say ‘I’m home schooling my children’.”

Market fundamentalism has infected Republican heads:

“Nothing motivates people like money,” [State Senator Stacey] Campfield said. “We have done very little to hold parents accountable for their child’s performance. It’s unacceptable to have this generational cycle of poverty continue.”

Sen. Campfield, by the way, does not have children.  One might also add that the maximum benefit, the maximum, is $185 per month, one of the lowest in the country. In Utah and North Dakota, that number is above $400 per month. In Massachusetts, it is $565.

Cardinal Keith O’Brien said countries which legalise gay marriage are “shaming themselves” by going against the “natural law,” and should not consider their actions “progress”.

He claimed same sex unions were the “thin end of the wedge” and would lead to the “further degeneration of society into immorality.”

In a series of controversial comments, he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that if same sex marriage were legalised, “further aberrations would take place and society would be degenerating even further than it already has into immorality.”

-Erick Erickson on RedState

We have received another call to condemn one of our own, this time from Kirsten Hughes of the Massachusetts GOP. They are disgusted that Rep. Markey is attending a fundraising at the home of Eliott Spitzer’s sister, with Eliot Spitzer there.  Rob Eno has heeded the call and condemned the misogyny involved. Mr. Eno and his audience at RedMassGroup are fairly new at the misogyny condemning business however. With a post titled, “Hughes: Markey shows ‘disgusting judgement in mysoginistic fundraiser host Eliott Spitzer”, it’s clear he can’t even spell it.

Now that’s putting the faux in faux outrage!

♦

From Gabriel Gomez’ letter to supporters we get a promising line:

Out of touch career politicians in Washington won’t solve our crushing debt crisis.  We need new ideas.

Well, first off, it’s pretty “out of touch” to be complaining about the debt crisis which affects people in their everyday lives how exactly?  So what are Mr Gomez’ new ideas? From the Fiscal Responsibility section of his issues page we read:

God’s word is true. I’ve come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell. And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior. You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I’ve found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I don’t believe that the Earth’s but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says.

And what I’ve come to learn is that it’s the manufacturer’s handbook, is what I call it. It teaches us how to run our lives individually, how to run our families, how to run our churches. But it teaches us how to run all of public policy and everything in society. And that’s the reason as your congressman I hold the Holy Bible as being the major directions to me of how I vote in Washington, D.C., and I’ll continue to do that.

Paul Ryan has just SIX per cent body fat thanks to extreme fitness regime P90X…

And at 1:13 of this video, you can hear Ryan claim he keeps his body fat between 6% and 8%.

Bill Gifford of Salon offers us a reality check:

Here’s who else maintains 6 to 8 percent body fat: Olympic 100-meter sprinters, that’s who. Also, world-class boxers, wrestlers, and marathoners, according to this study of elite American athletes. Top collegiate swimmers look pretty fit, right? Well, they average out at a plump 9.5 percent, at least according to another study. Positively porky, compared to Ryan. (For some perspective, the average man has body fat of 17 to 24 percent, and most women a bit more.)

If his claim is to be believed—a Ryan spokesman did not respond to questions—he’s more along the lines of Tour de France cyclists who also get down around 8 or 9 percent to prepare for major races. According to Iñigo San Millan, a veteran cycling physiologist who has worked with numerous Tour de France teams, the lowest body fat he’s ever measured on a cyclist was 8.3 percent. That’s at peak fitness, racing shape.

Also Ross Douthat, a conservative op ed writer for the New York Times, suggests that Realpolitik may have played a bigger role in these protests than some kind of uncontrollable rage.

That is why every president since the Great Depression who came before the American people asking for a second term could look back at the last four years and say with satisfaction: “you are better off today than you were four years ago.”

Except Jimmy Carter. And except this president.

HH: Are you still running?

PR: Yeah, I hurt a disc in my back, so I don’t run marathons anymore. I just run ten miles or yes.

HH: But you did run marathons at some point?

PR: Yeah, but I can’t do it anymore, because my back is just not that great.

HH: I’ve just gotta ask, what’s your personal best?

PR: Under three, high twos. I had a two hour and fifty-something.

HH: Holy smokes. All right, now you go down to Miami University…

PR: I was fast when I was younger, yeah.

That’s fast. Runner’s World followed up:

It turns out Paul Ryan has not run a marathon in less than three hours—or even less than four hours.

A spokesman confirmed late Friday that the Republican vice presidential candidate has run one marathon. That was the 1990 Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth, Minnesota, where Ryan, then 20, is listed as having finished in 4 hours, 1 minute, and 25 seconds.

Ryan had said in a radio interview last week that his personal best was “Under three, high twos. I had a two hour and fifty-something.”

Perhaps he has a varsity letter in mendacity, too.

Google paid Paypal co-founder Max Levchin $200 million for a company that made things like electronic-pet apps for Facebook, but wrote off most of its investment a few years later. Or more consequentially, the financial industry’s love affair with credit-default swaps, which played a big role in bringing down the world economy. For that matter, in just a few weeks of playing with other peoples’ money, a rogue trader for JP Morgan Chase lost about four times as much as the Obama administration invested in Solyndra.

At the same time, Congressman Ryan’s 2007 vote in favor of the Employment Nondiscrimination Act and his consistent willingness to engage with Log Cabin on a range of issues speaks to his record as a fair-minded policymaker. Overall, while Log Cabin Republicans have not completed the endorsement process for the 2012 presidential election, this is a choice that all Republicans can be excited about, and which sends a good message about the kind of campaign Governor Romney wants to run, and the kind of president Governor Romney wants to be.

Human Rights Campaign: Score for Mr Ryan on LGBT issues: 0%.

William Saletan of Slate:

Ryan is a real fiscal conservative. He isn’t just another Tea-Party ideologue spouting dogma about less government and the magic of free enterprise. He has actually crunched the numbers and laid out long-term budget proposals.
…The party of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, the party of spite and bloviating and recklessness and extremism, isn’t for me. I’m voting for Obama. But four years from now? In a stronger economy, with a runaway debt? And Ryan at the top of the ticket? That’s awfully tempting.

Nate Silver:

Various statistical measures of Mr. Ryan peg him as being quite conservative. Based on his Congressional voting record, for instance, the statistical system DW-Nominate evaluates him as being roughly as conservative as Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota.

By this measure, in fact, which rates members of the House and Senate throughout different time periods on a common ideology scale, Mr. Ryan is the most conservative Republican member of Congress to be picked for the vice-presidential slot since at least 1900. He is also more conservative than any Democratic nominee was liberal, meaning that he is the furthest from the center.

1. Tax shelter promoter sets up two companies, Company A and Company B and funds each company with $50. Company A buys a briefcase for the $50.
2. Client comes to promoter and says, “I have a $1.0 million capital gain.”
3. Promoter says, “No problem, I can eliminate that gain for you by generating a $1.0 million loss to offset your gain.” Promoter devises the following plan:
   1. Client purchases the $50 briefcase from Company A by paying Company A $1,000,050!
   2. Client pays $50 in cash. In addition (here’s the tax shelter part), Client “pays” another $1.0 million by signing a promissory note (a promise to pay) payable to Company A for $1.0 million in 30 years . For tax purposes, Client purchased the briefcase for the cash payment and the promissory note, so the tax cost for Client’s briefcase is $1,000,050.
   3. Client then sells the briefcase to Company B for $50. Thus, economically, Client is made whole; Client paid $50 for the briefcase and sold the briefcase for $50. However, Client’s tax basis in the briefcase was $1,000,050 and by selling the briefcase for $50, Client incurred a $1.0 million loss! That loss will then be used to offset Client’s $1.0 million capital gain, effectively zeroing out his tax liability.
   4. Assume that Company B then sold the briefcase back to Company A for $50. Promoter is ready for his next client now that Company A has the briefcase and Company B has $50, and the pattern can be repeated.

Guess who tried to carry this off? Why Mitt Romney in the 1990s, that’s who. Mr Romney was brought in to head Marriott’s audit committee:

In his key role as chairman of the Marriott board’s audit committee, Romney approved the firm’s reporting of fictional tax losses exceeding $70 million generated by its Son of Boss transaction.

So let’s look again at a man who likes to use technicalities and reread this carefully constructed sentence:

I have paid taxes every year, and a lot of taxes, so Harry is wrong.

What taxes were they exactly? He didn’t say federal taxes did he?

This guy is nothing more than a sleazebag with an honest face.

Widely quoted is this section. It is not from the Onion. It was what Republicans in Texas really want:

Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority. (p. 13)

You read that right. Texas Republicans want their precious prejudices carefully preserved and any attempt at education or critical thinking that might undermine the authority of their pre-set ideas had best face vigorous opposition. This is why red states tend not to be fountains of innovation.

Texas Republicans, it turns out, pride themselves on being uncivilized:

Classroom Discipline –We recommend that local school boards and classroom teachers be given more authority to deal with disciplinary problems. Corporal punishment is effective and legal in Texas. (p. 13)

Also ignorance about things sexual is beneficial:

Sex Education – We recognize parental responsibility and authority regarding sex education. We believe that parents must be given an opportunity to review the material prior to giving their consent. We oppose any sex education other than abstinence until marriage. (p. 13)

They hate the District of Columbia:

Washington D.C. – We strongly oppose making the District of Columbia a state or adding Congressional members. (p.3)

They also hate environmentalists. A lot:

Protection from Extreme Environmentalists – We strongly oppose all efforts of the extreme environmental groups that stymie legitimate business interests. We strongly oppose those efforts that attempt to use the environmental causes to purposefully disrupt and stop those interests within the oil and gas industry. We strongly support the immediate repeal of the Endangered Species Act. We strongly oppose the listing of the dune sage brush lizard either as a threatened or an endangered species. We believe the Environmental Protection Agency should be abolished.

Their hatred of regulation extends to the right to disobey traffic lights:

Banning the Use of Red Light Cameras – We oppose the manner in which alleged vehicle violations are documented and fines levied against individuals without proof of their having been the driver of the offending vehicle and we call for the ban on Red Light Cameras in the State of Texas

They also want to feast on genetically modified food:

Food Choice ― We support the right of individuals to make their own dietary decisions. We oppose any laws regarding the production, distribution or consumption of food. Government should not restrict non-genetically engineered seeds. (p.12)

On page 4, there is a section against Eminent Domain. That’s good, I suppose, if we don’t need anymore railroads or highways.

They have a few things to say about elections too:

Electoral College – We strongly support the Electoral College. (p. 5)

Voter Rights Act – We urge that the Voter Rights Act of 1965 codified and updated in 1973 be repealed and not reauthorized. (p. 5)

Campaign Finance Reform – We urge immediate repeal of the McCain-Feingold Act. (p. 6)

They have no embarrassment whatever about being ignorant homophobes:

Homosexuality ― We affirm that the practice of homosexuality tears at the fabric of society and contributes to the breakdown of the family unit. Homosexual behavior is contrary to the fundamental, unchanging truths that have been ordained by God, recognized by our country’s founders, and shared by the majority of Texans.

Homosexuality must not be presented as an acceptable “alternative” lifestyle, in public policy, nor should “family” be redefined to include homosexual “couples.” We believe there should be no granting of special legal entitlements or creation of special status for homosexual behavior, regardless of state of origin. Additionally, we oppose any criminal or civil penalties against those who oppose homosexuality out of faith, conviction or belief in traditional values. (pp 7-8)

Boy Scouts of America – We support the Boy Scouts of America and reject any attempt to undermine or fundamentally change the ideals of the organization. (p. 16)

Traditional Military Culture – To protect our serviceman and women and ensure that America’s Armed Forces remain the best in the world, we affirm the timelessness of those values, the benefits of traditional military culture and the incompatibility of homosexuality with military service. (p. 22)

No more safety net if the Texas Republicans get their way:

Social Security ― We support an immediate and orderly transition to a system of private pensions based on the concept of individual retirement accounts, and gradually phasing out the Social Security tax. We insist that Social Security benefits be non–taxable. To protect the Social Security System, its funds should not be co–mingled or spent with general revenues or invested in private or public corporate stock.

Perhaps because of their opposition to critical thinking, they are very happy with capital punishment:

Capital Punishment – Properly applied capital punishment is legitimate, is an effective deterrent, and should be swift and unencumbered.

On page 17 you will find an awkwardly worded but passionate section that advocates austerity. That’s okay because on page 18, they advocate the repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment and abolishing the IRS. On the state level, they want property taxes abolished.

They are truly the party to return to the McKinley Administration:

Federal Reserve System – We believe Congress should repeal the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. In the interim, we call for a complete audit of the Federal Reserve System and an immediate report to the American people.

Sound Money – Our founding fathers warned us of the dangers of allowing central bankers to control our currency because inflation equals taxation without representation. We support the return to the time tested precious metal standard for the U.S. dollar.

When was he born!

To win Michigan votes, Mr. Romney decided to change the date of his birth:

When Mitt Romney regaled a Michigan audience this week with childhood memories of a landmark moment in Detroit history, it was a rare instance of emotional candour.

And, perhaps, an even rarer example of time travel.

Romney recalled he was “probably 4 or something like that” the day of the Golden Jubilee, when three-quarters of a million people gathered to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the American automobile.

…

And it took place June 1, 1946 — fully nine months before Romney was born.

Money from his parents

Mr. Romney likes to sound as if he is just like everyone else — only more successful. This is how he could tell this to a debate in January:

[W]e need to send to Washington someone who has not lived in Washington, but someone who’s lived in the real streets of America…. We need to have someone outside Washington go to Washington.

During the debate in Charleston, S.C., Mitt Romney asserted that he did not inherit any money from his parents none.

When George Romney passed away in 1995, Mr. Romney had already accumulated substantial wealth. So he was able to donate all the money, as he told a C-SPAN interviewer in 2006. He certainly did receive money from his father though.

Nonetheless, Politifact and the Times tell us:

1. Romney’s allowance at Stanford enabled him to afford frequent plane tickets to Michigan to see his girlfriend.
2. His parents gave him a car as a wedding gift.
3. They loaned him $40k for his home in Belmont.

Life-long membership

During his 1994 Senate race, Mr Romney announced:

I don’t line up with the NRA.

That has changed recently as he has been telling people he is a lifelong member of NRA. That is because in 2006 he purchased a lifelong membership in the NRA. In other words, he has been a lifelong member only if you count the part of his life after 2006.

In 2008, he was mocked for claiming to be a lifelong hunter of “small varmints”.

The fear of pink slips

Sunday, January 8, Mr Romney told a crowd:

I know what it’s like to worry whether you’re going to get fired. There were a couple of times I wondered whether I was going to get a pink slip.

Mr. Perry provided a clever rejoinder:

“Now, I have no doubt Mitt Romney was worried about pink slips — whether he was going to have enough of them to hand out because his company, Bain Capital, of all the jobs that they killed,” Mr. Perry said. “I’m sure he was worried that he would run out of pink slips.”

As the New York Times noted, no one has found any evidence that Mr. Romney was ever in any danger.

When they entered Romney’s room, “and laid out on his bed was a Michigan State Trooper’s uniform.”

Apparently, Mr Romney had an interesting hobby while he was in college:

Said Madden in a recent interview, “He told us that he had gotten the uniform from his father,” George Romney, then the Governor of Michigan, whose security detail was staffed by uniformed troopers. “He told us that he was using it to pull over drivers on the road. He also had a red flashing light that he would attach to the top of his white Rambler.”

There’s an incident in The Real Romney that also involves Mr Romney posing as a police officer siren and all.

Romney had “put a siren on top of his car and chased two of his friends who were driving around with their dates.” The two friends were in on the scheme, but the girls were not. There was beer in the car trunk, according to a prearranged plan. Mitt told his two counterparts to get out of their vehicle and into his car. Then they drove off, leaving the girls behind.

Despite years of urging and oversight by American advisers, Mr. Karzai’s government has yet to prosecute a high-level corruption case. And now many American officials say that they have little expectation that Mr. Farnood’s case will prove to be the exception — or that Washington will try to do much about it…

As Americans pull back from Afghanistan, Mr. Farnood’s case exemplifies how the United States is leaving behind a problem it underwrote over the past decade with tens of billions of dollars of aid and logistical support: a narrow business and political elite defined by its corruption, and despised by most Afghans for it.

Mitt Romney’s web site:

[Mitt Romney] will review our transition to the Afghan military by holding discussions with our commanders in the field. He will order a full interagency assessment of our military and assistance presence in Afghanistan to determine the level required to secure our gains and to train Afghan forces to the point where they can protect the sovereignty of Afghanistan from the tyranny of the Taliban. Withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan under a Romney administration will be based on conditions on the ground as assessed by our military commanders.

To defeat the insurgency in Afghanistan, the United States will need the cooperation of both the Afghan and Pakistani governments.

Mr. Romney suffers from the misimpression that the principal problem with our Afghan strategy has been lack of listening to military leaders. In fact, it has been long clear that the Afghan government is structurally corrupt, cannot become otherwise, and no amount of “listening” to military leaders or making “interagency assessments” is going to make that government uncorrupt. The Times:

Still, the Obama administration has concluded that pressing the fight against corruption, as many American officials tried to do in recent years, could further alienate Mr. Karzai and others around him whom Washington is relying on as it tries to manage a graceful drawdown.

The article even points out a case in which Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster provided evidence to Pres. Karzai that Gen. Ahmad Zia Yaftali had stolen tens of millions of dollars worth of drugs (!) from the country’s main military hospital (!) and still no prosecution.

Unfortunately, I do not realistically expect the partisanship of recent years in the Senate to change over the short term.

There is a already a promising Democrat in the wings.

May 2011:

Even though my election is not for another year-and-a-half, the political machine is already gearing up against me. In the months to come, the special interest groups will run many more negative and personal attack ads, just like they did during my special election last year. 

A helpful video from the Brown campaign staff:

Let’s send a message to the mudslingers that their negative attacks won’t work, 

Fehrnstrom rising high above the fray:

It’s ironic that an organization [the League of Women Voters] that claims to want to elevate the debate would go into the gutter with a negative attack ad. 

First we get some confirmation of jkw’s post The Headline President:

Mr. Obama and his aides are skeptical that voters will reward bold proposals if those ideas do not pass Congress. It is their judgment that moderate voters want tangible results rather than speeches.

In other words, Mr. Obama will only advocate support for stuff that can pass Congress — and that includes the rather conservative House.

Next we learn that almost all the advisers who were economists have departed leaving amateurs dictating economic policy. Their specialty appears to be stupid economic policy:

Mr. Plouffe and Mr. Daley share the view that a focus on deficit reduction is an economic and political imperative, according to people who have spoken with them. Voters believe that paying down the debt will help the economy, and the White House agrees, although it wants to avoid cutting too much spending while the economy remains weak.

So instead of large job-killing spending cuts, we’ll have medium large job-killing spending cuts while unemployment hovers above 9%. Peachy!

This confirms much of what Elizabeth Drew reported in the New York Review of Books, namely that the Obama Administration has decided that winning over “centrists” is the key to winning re-election. They have also decided that centrists want to see deficit reduction.

But don’t centrists really want to see the economy improve? How will doing things that have a negative effect on the economy pull up Obama’s poll numbers?

Fellow liberals, please consider what an Obama second term would be like:

Administration officials … have concluded that the best thing Mr. Obama can do for the economy may be winning a second term, with a mandate to advance his ideas on deficit reduction, entitlement changes, housing policy and other issues.

Great! We can have medicare and social security cuts in his second term! Just what we wanted!

Obama 2012

In a rational world, the populace would be horrified that Congress would even consider not raising the debt ceiling — never mind playing chicken with it as the Republicans did. In such a world, Democrats could run against Republicans on these grounds;.  Apparently, we do not live in such a world.

This puts us in a situation achingly similar to the 2010 Special Election. The Affordable Care Act should have been popular. It should have been possible to run on it and win. But it wasn’t and the Democratic Party did little to make it popular. The Coakley campaign ran as if it were popular. Not a winning strategy it turns out.

I don’t understand how Democrats can possibly keep the Senate and White House if the stimulus and the Affordable Care Act remain unpopular and if the recent debt ceiling debacle becomes nothing more than a “both sides were intransigent” story.

Is Obama’s political apparatus insane?

Will you please support their effort? Here are some ActBlue pages:

• Support the Wisconsin Recall
  
• Recall the Republican 8
  
• Orange to Blue 2012
  
  

H/T Chris Bowers

Is it something to worry about?

Why or why not?

Worse, Mr. Hayward engages in a dishonest tactic I’ve seen a number of conservatives use: He skips all the substantiation that Krugman supplies — and Krugman supplies a lot of links. (They’re omitted from the first blockquote.) Instead, Hayward quotes the conclusions drawn from the factual material. He then acts as if Krugman had made those assertions without substantiation, that Krugman was making blind statements of opinion. In other words, by guiding the scissors to clip out all the facts, one can pretend that the column is just opinion pulled out of thin air.

1. Mr. Hayward, aka Dr. Zero has an irrational hatred of Mr. Krugman. I didn’t need to know this, but I do now. Thank you, Demolisher.
2. Demolisher should offer to help Mr. Hayward with his reading comprehension difficulties.
3. Argument by adjective is not convincing.

This is how Washington works right now.

The Austrians (so-called by they are followers of Friedrich Hayek) are widely regarded as crazy — even among conservatives. The other two views don’t seem like much of an improvement.

You’ll notice that the blue discussions below do tend to be much more policy-oriented.

But Mr. Brown has nobly decided to forgo all earmarks:

In the months ahead, I will work with the citizens of Massachusetts and my colleagues in the Senate to explore new ways to ensure that requests for projects are transparent, accountable and in the best interest of our state and the nation.

Apparently, Mr. Brown’s talking points are more important to him than the needs of the state.

“I can’t support it” Brown said in his strongest statement yet on the financial legislation that Democrats contend is essential to curb the reckless trading and lending practices that contributed to the economic meltdown in 2008.

And why can’t Senator Brown support a bill to prevent a repeat of the Savings and Loan Crisis and the Great Recession of 2008?

It’s going to be an extra layer of regulation, and it’s clearly being used by the [Obama] administration to drive a wedge and use it for political fodder — and I think that’s wrong.

Pressed for specifc areas to be fixed, Mr. Brown answered a question with a question:

Well, what areas do you think should be fixed? I mean, you know, tell me. And then I’ll get a team and go fix it.

The Republicans have been making the insane claim that the bill winding its way through Congress is going to continue to allow banks to be bailed out.

This is a thoroughly specious argument. When financial crises occur, some kind of bail out is inevitable. (Think of the FDIC taking over banks.) No sane national leadership would allow his or her country’s financial system to collapse.

Bankers know that. After the Savings and Loan crisis, all too well, apparently. The best policy is to make bank bail outs unnecessary not to promise to commit financial suicide should they fail.

If I get this straight, it’s a higher priority to Mr. Brown not to have the inconvenience of more regulation than it is to prevent another recession.

Have we elected Talking Point Dispenser when we need a Senator?

“If you don’t trust the mindset or the value system of the people running the system, you can’t even look at the facts anymore,” Mr. Grimes said.

And there you have it: a narrative-based reality unmoored from objective facts.

• The recent HCR Act is just like (just like!) the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 also pushed through by the Democrats — and it triggered the American Civil War!
• A 38 second YouTube clip of Alcee Hastings is all we need to know to accuse Democrats of making up rules as “we go along”.
• They’re full of happy anticipation about the effort to recall Senator Menendez
• They cannot quote ABC News directly but must quote Michelle Malkin quoting ABC News: It has to be vetted by a conservative before they can believe it! In any case, there’s an article from February on the ABC site that asserts that $2B of stimulus money has gone to Chinese wind energy firms.

Visiting Michelle Malkin directly we learn how disgusting Democratic gloating is. RMG has some of this sentiment. Taking a stand against gloating, Free Republic has a post encouraging their readers to sign the DCCC-sponsored thank you card to Nancy Pelosi.

At NRO, Bill Bennett is convinced that the HCR bill will affect the 2010 election which will be a “clearing of the jungle”. I think that phrase was meant to go with the complaint by Bill Burck and Dana Perino entitled “Hate Obamacare? You’re Probably Racist.” Or possibly Bennet was thinking of the jungles in Europe?

At Red State, newly anointed CNN commentator Erick Erickson is concerned that Mitch McConnell isn’t sufficiently vigorous in his opposition to the Democratic agenda. Per E.E., he’s too afraid of being the “Party of No”.

Squeezing the oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments. Quite the contrary: at the outset of the crisis, the oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government, such as preferential access to foreign currency, or maybe a nice tax break, or-here’s a classic Kremlin bailout technique-the assumption of private debt obligations by the government. Under duress, generosity toward old friends takes many innovative forms. Meanwhile, needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look first to ordinary working folk-at least until the riots grow too large.

The Tea Party Movement has it upon a grain a truth here and it is this:

[E]lite business interests-financiers, in the case of the U.S.-played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.

And piggybacking on bobswern’s Daily Kos diary:

• We are not going to get a Consumer Finance Protection Agency. (Source)
• A weak attempt at re-instituting some of the New Deal banking regulations, not going to happen.

The interlocking nature of Godman Sachs and our government has already been alarming for a year.

It’s no wonder we have a Tea Party Movement. Will progressives be able to mount a strong enough campaign to wrest our government from the oligarchs?

Brown supporters:

JoeTs: “Martha Coakley”

billxi: “Martha Chokeley”

demolisher: “Martha Clothespins”

JohnD: “Martha”

There are virtually no Pashtun troops from Helmand and Qandahar provinces, the centers of guerrilla opposition to the Karzai government and to the foreign troop presence.

Given the tribal nature of that country, that means that “turning over security” to the Afghan forces isn’t going to help much. American occupiers will be replaced by Tajik occupiers.

Many have noted that the police force is riddled with corruption. It’s also oddly small. Cole, again:

If there are considerable problems with the Afghanistan army, the police, numbering around 93,000, are considered much worse — trained, undisciplined and held to be highly corrupt. But the main problem is that there are not enough of them. The entire province of Qunduz north of the capital only has 800 police for a population of nearly a million. In contrast, the similarly sized San Francisco has over 2,000 police officers and rather fewer armed militants.

So if a surge does make the south of the country more secure, it sounds to me as if there is no one to turn over that security to. And if the Afghan military continues to be a Tajik operation, one can expect many years of insurgency.

The Washington Post has an interesting exchange of views on its op-ed page. The proponents of remaining in Afghanistan can define failure but they can’t define success — at least not concretely.

Some make a moral argument that we owe it to the Afghans, that allowing failure would be wrong. I think this runs up against the cost question. McChyrstal argues for troops getting out of vehicles more — this is necessary to reduce civilian casualties — but doing so will increase our casualties. Popular opinion is going to stiffen in opposition to this war if that should happen. To go that route is to plan for failure because we’ll turn back before we reach its distant, elusive goal.

This is certainly the experience of the more stable provinces in central Afghanistan, where leaders talk about the need to set off bombs to receive the assistance given to their wealthier but more dangerous neighbors.

In a post titled, The “Safe Haven” Myth, Professor of International Relastions at Harvard Stephen M. Walt suggests that a re-established Taliban government is  now less likely to want to offer Al Qaeda a safe haven. It would be like painting a huge target on them. He also points out that 9/11 was not planned in Afghanistan so much as in Hamburg, Germany. So maybe preventing bases in Afghanistan is not quite so important. (An answer to this opinion is available here.)

Greg Mills, a former adviser to NATO’s Afghanistan mission, while not opposing a continued involvement is very skeptical as to how the current mission is being conducted. In particular, he thinks the mission is unclear. About the safe haven danger, he writes:

If the West’s aim is to prevent the Taliban from taking power again in Afghanistan, then that might be achievable by its current actions. If, however, the aim is to prevent Al Qaeda terrorist acts in the West, then Afghanistan is probably the wrong target for three reasons: (1) Most of the terrorists in that region are “brewed” in Pakistan, (2) acts against the Taliban may incite further Muslim violence against the West, and (3) the greatest terrorist threat to most Western nations is from domestic cells.

On the left, Robert Greenwald has a documentary out Rethink Afghanistan that argues against the continuing U.S. policy in Afghanistan.

In an op-ed in today’s <a

href=”http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2009/08/17/2009-08-17_obama_must_learn_from_vietnam_gen_wesley_clark_gives_the_president_advice_for_af.html?page=0″>Daily News, General Wesley Clark warns about the growing similarities between Vietnam and Afghanistan. According to polling, our involvement in Afghanistan is now opposed by 54% of respondents.  We find ourselves supporting an unpopular, somewhat corrupt regime. What does he propose?

He proposes limiting our role to fighting Al Qaeda. This seems frankly incoherent to me.

• Our best knowledge is that Al Qaeda is not in Afghanistan anymore anyway. Yet he is not suggesting we just leave.
• The danger is that the current government of Afghanistan will fall to the Taliban who will in turn invite Al Qaeda back in.
• The current government, especially with its extraordinary level of corruption, commands little loyalty.
• Rooting out the corruption so that stability no longer depends on thugs like General Dostum requires a much larger commitment: there has to be very strong security to effect the necessary political changes.

Maybe we don’t need to see a perfect democracy in Afghanistan, but a weak kleptocracy does us no favors either.

Had the Bush Administration not abandoned Afghanistan in 2003 for its Iraq improvisation, things might have been a lot better. How are we going to get out of this one?

1. Waterboarding is torture pure and simple.
   
   1. International norms consistently classify waterboarding as torture, for example, the U.N..
      
   2. U.S. soldiers who engaged in something similar in the Pillippines after the Spanish American War were court-martialed. There are a number of cases where U.S. courts have recognized waterboarding as torture.
   3. The Japanese War Crimes Tribunal sentenced Yuikio Asano to 15 years hard labor for waterboarding.
      
   4. Before the Bush Administration bought into it, the military’s Joint Personnel Recovery Agency labeled it torture in 2002.
   5. The Bush Administration attempted to redefine torture in 2002.
      

2. No useful information was extracted from Abu Zubaydah by way of torture.
   
   1. All useful information was extracted from Abu Zubaydah using traditional interrogation methods. This included his identification of the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.
      
   2. Despite President Bush’s claims, “Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda’s go-to guy for minor logistics“.  In other words, he was unlikely to know anything about major attacks anyway.
      
   3. In a fit of futility and cruelty, he was waterborderd 83 times in August 2002.
      

3. The Bush Administration engaged in significant torture to justify an attack on Iraq and not to keep the country safe.
   
   1. Al Qaeda is militantly anti-secular. They wish to overthrow regimes that do not conform to their religious doctrines.
   2. Sadam Hussein and the Baathists were secular — precisely the sort of regmie Al Qaeda wished to destroy.
   3. It would be self-destructive for Sadam Hussein to arm Al Qaeda.
   4. Nonetheless, the Bush Administration believed there was a connection. Cheney and Rumsfeld pursued it despite contrary CIA reports.
   5. Detainees were needlessly tortured to establish that link, according to the Senate Armed Services report: Major Burney to the Army Inspector General:
      

      [T]his is my opinion, even though they were giving information and some of it was useful, while we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link … there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.

4. Waterboarding is an ineffective interrogation technique.
   
   1. Waterboarding became part of SERE training because the Chinese communists had used it to extract false confessions From the Senate report:
      

      Using those techniques for interrogating detainees was also inconsistent with the goal of collecting accurate intelligence information, as the purpose of SERE resistance training is to increase the ability of U.S. personnel to resist abusive interrogations and the techniques used were based, in part, on Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to elicit false confessions.

   2. Dr. James E. Mitchell, the psychologist with the SERE program who advocated the use of waterboarding, had never run interrogations, only mock interrogations.
      
   3. The CIA and military have personnel who are expert on interrogation. They were not consulted.
   4. Other SERE trainers warned Administration officials that this method would be ineffective.

Who are the recipients of such largesse? International

organizations and foreign aid recipients, including millions for reconstruction in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. Labor union bosses participating in a new “green jobs” program. The National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Americorps, Title X Family Planning, and a host of spending programs that will do nothing to help our economy recover. And even community organizers, such as ACORN, performing “neighborhood stabilization.” Hundreds of programs deemed ineffective by prior Administrations are funded, despite promises from the President to go “line by line” to examine each program’s effectiveness.

It’s so sloppy and ill-constructed that we have the illogical idea of labor union bosses (as opposed to actual unionized workers) participating in the green jobs programs. (Note scare quotes above, too.)

Delicious irony too from the Bush Administration sycophants:

Republicans believe that future generations should not be burdened by mountains of debt for the misguided choices made by Democrats today.

Their discussion of tax reductions on p. 10 takes no note whatever of the effect on government revenue. Is it sustainable or not? They don’t say, but there is a lot of sloganeering.

They express strong disapproval of even a cap-and-trade approach to carbon emissions. Their “proposals” make no mention of climate change.

On the economic crisis we get some breathtaking stupidity (again cast as electioneering):

Democrats assume that the free-market system has failed and that a more robust federal government must now rescue the nation. The American people reject that notion and know, as Republicans do, that government has failed and that this financial crisis is the result of decades of misguided government policies that interfered with the free-market. In addition to a loose monetary policy by the Federal Reserve that fueled a housing boom, government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and federal mandates that weakened lending standards contributed to a perfect storm of government-induced failure.

If Republicans think that “the American people” agree with that analysis, they are not looking at polls, are they?

They finish their economic section with a concern with inflation. Faced with the much worse risk of a deflation during a recession, the Republican budget pamphlet continues to fight yesterday’s battles.

Conclusion. This whole exercise shows Republicans are ready to campaign but they aren’t ready to govern.

What Jon Stewart needs is Jon Stewart. He could use a droll comedian to temper his ferocity and correct him when he’s wrong, as he was about the financial media, particularly CNBC and its excitable analyst Jim Cramer. They didn’t cover up the story of financial shenanigans. They didn’t even know it existed.

In other words, our press is no longer accountable for ferreting out the truth. It’s unfair to expect more than conventional wisdom. He goes on to argue that “no one could have known” about Lehman Brothers because its former chairman lost money on Lehman Brothers.

“No one could have known” is a defense we’ve heard from Richard Cohen before. During the Iraq War, he was a liberal hawk.

As long as we continue to accept such low standards, our country will suffer self-inflicted problems that “no one could have known” about.

Correction: March 11, 2009

An article on March 2 about President Obama’s plan to sign a $410 billion spending bill that included thousands of lawmakers’ pet projects misstated his campaign promise about projects of this type, known as earmarks. Mr. Obama promised to reform the earmark process, not to end it.

What did Obama say:

• He wanted to go line by line through the federal budget.
• Earmarks account for 0.5% of the federal budget, about $18 billion.
• The system needs reform and there are screwy things we spend money on.

You can watch what Obama actually said (as opposed to what Lou Dobbs and Fox News claim he said), here:

Someone promised to eliminate earmarks. Who was it? Why! It was Senator McCain, the guy who lost the election.

The Washington Post has some contributions (heavily weighted Republican, by the way) on earmarks. There are a lot of points to consider there:

1. Earmarks can be for useful projects.
2. Earmarks do not involve a competition for appropriations.
3. Congress’ role is not inappropriate:
   

   But someone is going to decide whether to allocate money for projects, contracts or programs. Simply put, who is better capable of making good decisions: bureaucrats with no connection to local areas, preferences or needs, or people whose livelihoods depend on keeping close ties to those areas and the people in them, who will be directly affected by the decisions?

   (Norman Orenstein, an AEI scholar)

4. Ron Paul thinks they can provide transparency into spending. Doing away with them might make the executive branch too powerful.
5. In a number of cases, earmark appropriations are a down payment on a project. They do not fund it completely, but commit the federal government to its more expensive completion.

And those banks should be nationalized.

At this point, they have no incentive to be prudent and the country is going to bail them out anyway.

Today we have four:

1. Because Rep. Barthold of the Joint Committee on Taxation cannot predict how many jobs the stimulus will create, we should ditch the stimulus.
2. TARP has not unfrozen the banks. Nationalization could discomfit important shareholders.
3. In trying to figure out who to blame for Palin’s bad press, a new culprit has been located, Nicolle Wallace whom McCain appointed.
4. Mean Republicans (including McConnell) are trying to get Senator Bunning (KY) to retire so the seat doesn’t go Democratic. Senator Bunning is awesome.

Result

Chapter 11 bandruptcy

Not possible with banks: no one will provide debtor-in-possession financing other than the U.S. government

Liquidation

A fire sale on a large bank’s assets would depress asset prices worldwide. It would trigger a depression.

Government purchase of toxic assets at market value

Bank remains insolvent. Does not help.

Government overpays for purchase of toxic assets

Opacity. Who else does one reward for bad assets?

Also moral hazard.  Further, this approach easily ends up equivalent to buying the bank

Government insurance of bad loans

Taxpayers get all the downside, none of the upside. Huge implicit subsidy of the bank. (More moral hazard.)

Guarantee unsecured liabilities but leave assets alone

Encourages risky behavior on the part of the banks (and its bondholders)

Nationalize

Crazy gambles minimized. Taxpayers get upside as well as downside.

]]> http://bluemassgroup.com/2009/01/why-nationalize-banks/feed/ 31 http://bluemassgroup.com/2009/01/obamas-speech-on-the-economy/ http://bluemassgroup.com/2009/01/obamas-speech-on-the-economy/#comments Thu, 08 Jan 2009 17:20:35 +0000 kbusch http://www.bluemassgroup.com/diary/14423/ here.

He begins by stressing the urgency of the moment and how past approaches will not work:

This crisis did not happen solely by some accident of history or normal turn of the business cycle, and we won't get out of it by simply waiting for a better day to come or relying on the worn-out dogmas of the past.

Next he talks about the role of government in addressing it:

It is true that we cannot depend on government alone to create jobs or long-term growth, but at this particular moment, only government can provide the short-term boost necessary to lift us from a recession this deep and severe.

Even before Colin Powell crossed party lines to endorse Obama, longtime Republican friends announced they were voting Democrat for the first time in their lives.

Republicans will not realign any time soon. Sure they lost in 2006 and 2008. I bet they’ll have to lose larger and bigger before they give up their dream of reliving 1980. The stress hasn’t been large enough for them to abandon Reaganism.

• No operational plans for response to disasters just a “framework” with principles. (p. 37)
• FEMA continues to be a mess. (p. 38 for details)
• At least $600 million in improper and potentially fraudulent disaster assistance payments.
• No coordination with the USDA on food safety (!)
• In a mismatch of missions, FEMA manages an insurance program.
• TSA hasn’t figured out its role in non-airplane modes of transportation.

There’s much, much more. Unfortunately.

Indian Muslims say they do not want the gunmen killed by the security forces during the attacks in Mumbai to be buried in Muslim graveyards.

Community leaders believe the militants cannot be called Muslims because they went against the teachings of Islam and killed innocent civilians.

…

Other Muslim groups have written to their local assembly representatives to say that if the authorities force the militants to be buried in a Muslim graveyard, they too will come out on the streets in protest.

Sadly, I think many Americans will find this news surprising.

But there can’t be much doubt that Palin has become the brightest star in the GOP firmament. A whopping 91 percent of Republicans have a favorable view of her, according to a recent Rasmussen poll, and she is the runaway favorite when they are asked to rank possible contenders for the party’s 2012 presidential nominee.

Later on, ironically thinking he is talking about the left, he writes:

Well, maybe; partisans and ideologues are good at seeing only what they want to see.

Now, I just need to figure out whether to subject geo999 to ridicule or moral outrage.

(h/t Daily Kos:ksh01)

I didn’t decide to run for President to start a national crusade for political reforms I believed in or to run a campaign as if it were some grand act of patriotism. In truth I wanted to be President because it had become my ambition to be President. I was sixty-two years old when I made the decision and I thought it was my one shot at the prize. … In truth, I’d had the ambition for a long time.

Senator John McCain, Worth the Fighting For, 2002

Country first, indeed!

By the time Palin pulled the plug on the Gravina bridge project in September 2007, much of the federal funding for the bridge had already been diverted to other transportation projects. The bridge would cost $398-million, Palin said then, and Alaska was $329-million short.

USA Today

While running for governor in 2006, though, Palin backed federal funding for the infamous bridge, which McCain helped make a symbol of pork barrel excess.

And as mayor of the small town of Wasilla from 1996 to 2002, Palin also hired a Washington lobbying firm that helped secure $8 million in congressionally directed spending projects, known as earmarks, according to public spending records compiled by the watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste and lobbying documents.

Associated Press

“I told the Congress ‘thanks but no thanks’ for that Bridge to Nowhere,” she said in her convention speech last week.

That’s not what she told Alaskans when she announced a year ago that she was ordering state transportation officials to ditch the project. Her explanation then was that it would be fruitless to try to persuade Congress to come up with the money.

Howard Kurtz, Washington Post

She endorsed the remote project while running for governor in 2006, claimed to be an opponent only after Congress killed its funding the next year and has used the $223 million provided for it for other state ventures. Far from being an opponent of earmarks, Palin hired lobbyists to try to capture more federal funding.

Media Matters researching the Anchorage Daily News

[I]n a questionnaire published in the October 22, 2006, Anchorage Daily News (accessed from the Nexis database), then-gubernatorial candidate Palin answered the question, “Would you continue state funding for the proposed Knik Arm and Gravina Island bridges?” by writing: “Yes. I would like to see Alaska’s infrastructure projects built sooner rather than later. The window is now — while our congressional delegation is in a strong position to assist.”

The Plank at The New Republic

So she was very much for the bridge and insisted that Alaska had to act quickly-the party of Ted Stevens and Don Young might soon lose its majority, after all. By that point, the project was endangered for reasons that had nothing to do with Palin-the bridge had become a national laughingstock, Congress had stripped away the offending earmark, shifting the money back to the state’s general fund, and future federal support seemed unlikely. True, after Palin was sworn into office that fall, her first budget didn’t allocate any money for the bridge. But when the Daily News asked on December 16, 2006, if she now opposed the project, Palin demurred and said she was just trying to figure out where the bridge fit on the state’s list of transportation priorities, given the lack of support from Congress. Finally, on September 19, 2007, she decided to redirect funds away from the project altogether…

These links all come from Think Progress. I thought I’d provide excerpts.

A reporter named Laura Mitchell Harris asks Palin about her intentions for a shake up. How would she effectively run a city without experienced leaders?

It’s not rocket science. It’s $6 million and 53 employees.

Source

Here’s one I find particularly moving. It points out how McCain has consistently been cheerleading the Iraq War but it does so not in a gotcha way but in a look-how-tragic-this-is way.
]]> http://bluemassgroup.com/2008/08/a-small-anti-mccain-video-gallery/feed/ 6 http://bluemassgroup.com/2008/07/mccains-dumb-plan-for-russia/ http://bluemassgroup.com/2008/07/mccains-dumb-plan-for-russia/#comments Fri, 25 Jul 2008 00:18:46 +0000 kbusch http://www.bluemassgroup.com/diary/12283/ Newsweek

The single most important security problem that the United States faces is securing loose nuclear materials. A terrorist group can pose an existential threat to the global order only by getting hold of such material. We also have an interest in stopping proliferation, particularly by rogue regimes like Iran and North Korea. To achieve both of these core objectives-which would make American safe and the world more secure-we need Russian cooperation.

We need a new Western approach to this revanchist Russia. We should start by ensuring that the G-8, the group of eight highly industrialized states, becomes again a club of leading market democracies: it should include Brazil and India but exclude Russia.

John McCain, in his own words:

P.S. He also has trouble telling the Sudan from Somalia.

Note that he also isn’t too clear on the Sunni/Shia distinction either.

• He wants to kick Russia out of the G8.
• He wants to rearm Europe with missiles

Boy, is foreign affairs expert McCain ever qualified to be President!

Coming soon: Foreign affairs expert McCain discovers the difference between Shia and Sunni Muslims.

The House seat recently vacated by former Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) is in danger of flipping to the Democrats in Saturday’s special election, according to a poll conducted this week for Roll Call.

The race is IL-14 and the Republican, Oberweis, is known for such bad campaign tactics that the Chicago Tribune has broken from long tradition and endorsed Foster the Democrat.

This occurs while the NRCC, already low on money, in part because some of it appears to have been stolen by a treasurer who forged audits, has been pouring what little remains into this race. For added schadenfreude, the NRCC is beset by leadership fights, too. If the Republicans lose this seat, it will be even more demoralizing for them — and their donors.

This is an occasion when your campaign contributions can go extra far! Consider donating today.

After more than a year of heated political wrangling, the Senate handed the White House a major victory Tuesday by voting to broaden the government’s spy powers and to give legal protection to phone companies that cooperated in President Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping program.

According to the comments, Obama opposed. Clinton punted. <<

The following Democratic Senators just voted for telecom immunity.

Jay Rockefeller	WV
Evan Bayh	IA
Daniel Inouye	HI
Tim Johnson	SD
Herb Kohl	WI
Mary Landrieu	LA
Claire McCaskill	MO
Mark Pryor	AR
Blanche Lincoln	AR
Dianne Feinstein	CA
Ken Salazar	CO
Tom Carper	DE
Barbara Mikulski	MD
Jim Webb	VA

That’s a huge block of moderate Democrats.

How do we fix this?

Resources include a recent article in Salon and two New York Times articles:

http://www.salon.com…

http://www.nytimes.c…

http://www.nytimes.c…

The Salon article also appears in The Nation:

http://www.thenation…

The Washington Post also has had a monthly series on climate change with two recent articles

http://www.washingto…

http://www.washingto…

Ankara’s reservoirs at 5%:

http://www.guardian….

On a global level, ominous stories are appearing about the rising price of food, e.g., in The Economist:

http://www.economist…

Speaking about Iran, he [Iraqi government's spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh] said that that government [Iran's] had helped to persuade the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr to ask his Mahdi militia to halt attacks. Mr. Sadr ordered his militia to stop using weapons in early September, and officials say that the militia’s relative restraint has helped improve stability. They say it also seems to have helped decrease the frequency of attacks with explosively formed penetrators, a powerful type of bomb that can pierce heavy armor.

The article goes on to note that “Mr. Dabbagh’s comments echoed those of the American military… .”

It appears that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s August visit to Iran at which he discussed such matters with Ayatollah Khamenei bore some fruit.

Securing fissile material floating around the former Soviet Union is massively important as is dealing with Khan’s shop in Pakistan. Neither has gotten much attention from Rice or Cheney.

I’m surprised at the emphasis he places on international crime. Is it more than just a problem in a few countries like Columbia?

Finally, pandemics are dangerous. AIDS is a kind of laboratory where other pathogens can mutate into ever more virulent strains (example: tuberculosis). Controlling AIDS is not just an act of altruism.