Category: Uncategorized

Shocking News about Gang of Six

A bipartisan effort to rein in the national debt stalled Tuesday, as members of the Senate’s so-called Gang of Six signaled that an agreement is unlikely to come this week in time for the start of White House-led budget talks.

Also unlikely to come in the weeks following the start of White House-led talks. And in the months and years after that. And, you know, forever. Just like the Baucus-led Gang of Whateveritwas on healthcare reform, these talks were never going anywhere. Ever. They were solely an attempt to get >50% of the Ryan plan and then stamp it with the Broder-approved Seal of Bipartisanship. And then demand another 20-30% on top of that “bipartisan” plan when the mess hit the floor. Period. That is all that was ever going on in there. All that is going on in there.

Though never mentioned in the mainstream media, there is one party, the GOP, that has categorically ruled out any revenue increase from any source and intends to “balance” the budget by eliminating Medicare, fundamentally ending Medicaid, and then passing those “savings” on to the very rich in the form of more tax cuts. And then, of course, raise the debt ceiling to pay for it by borrowing ever-more. This is their plan. Magically, they also plan to reduce all government spending to levels below what just the military consumes today. And this all seems likely to the Serious People. Sensible and courageous, even.

Notable that Tom Coburn, one of the vanishingly few people with ® after their name that actually accepts revenue probably has to increase, has suddenly left town. Shocking. I’m sure it’s truly pressing business back home.

Can we finally be done with time-wasting and air-sucking idiocies such as the Gang of Six and, for that matter, all these other “Gangs of” now and forever? I know Serious People love their Gangs, but there simply is no middle ground, or anything approaching “middle ground” between Ryan and the status quo. There just isn’t. And though Serious People will never, ever accept it, sometimes doing nothing is indisputably the best way forward when faced with intransigent and unthinking opposition such as that presented by the modern GOP.
In this case, doing nothing fixes at least half of our budget problem. But let’s not talk about that. Everyone knows that Medicare has to go away. Anything less would destroy America.

All I have to say is: All hail gridlock!

Shocking News about Gang of Six

In 2005, the Bush CIA actually closed its unit whose mission had been to hunt Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants. We don‘t know where Osama bin Laden was until 2005. But we do know that the home, that he was found in, was built for him in 2005. That same year that the CIA closed the unit that was hunting bin Laden.

Somehow that year, bin Laden got the feeling that he could settle down comfortably in a walled fortress in a Pakistan suburb.

Lawrence O’Donnell

So Bush really did lay the foundation for bin Laden’s eventual capture…

(via squee-gee)

I don’t know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don’t care. It’s not that important. It’s not our priority.

George W. Bush, speaking on March 13, 2002, whose policies are precisely why it took 10 years to track bin Laden down.
That Obama noted making this Job One for the CIA was no coincidence. He presumably mentioned this request so specifically because this was job 4,234,450 the day before he took office; Bush said as much. To Bush/Cheney, 9/11 was never anything other than a chance to pull some particularly exciting binders down off of Cheney’s darkside shelf.

We can only hope that their shortsighted and foolish “bogeyman approach” to bin Laden now nucleates into a national desire to put an end to everything that was rolled out in his name. Then, and only then, will this be a “victory” of any kind for America.

Otherwise you’re just changing the name and picture at the top of Our Forever-War Commemorative Playing Card Set.

We find that enhanced expenditures have been excessive: to be deemed cost-effective in analyses that substantially bias the consideration toward the opposite conclusion, they would have to deter, prevent, foil, or protect against 1,667 otherwise successful Times-Square type attacks per year, or more than four per day.

John Mueller and Mark Stewart report back after analyzing Homeland Security spending. Word.
Source: polisci.osu.edu

The Birther Disgrace | FrumForum

Yet even now, the racialist aspect of the anti-Obama movement has not subsided. Trump has moved from the birth certificate to questioning the president’s academic qualifications for the Harvard Law School. Trump himself was a troubled student (at one point he attended a military school) who nonetheless gained admission to Wharton. His father’s wealth and business success cannot have hurt with that application. Yet he feels himself qualified to pronounce on who is and who is not smart enough to attend Harvard Law. Barack Obama graduated magna cum laude. (And to anticipate a new line of attack – yes, Harvard Law School exams were blind-graded.) He was elected editor of the law review. And his classmates, left and right, universally admired his abilities.

Yep. I’d even leave aside Trump’s (or, for that matter, Obama’s) high school or undergraduate experience. One of them probably got a poor mark in first grade deportment too; that second semester is a killer in Mrs. Jones’ class. But I could truly care less whether either got a “gentleman’s C” in Introduction to Psychology or what-have-you. What happened overall? Where did they go with their respective opportunities, whether it was earned or given?

Obama took his chance and has, by and large, tried to use it for something bigger and better than simple personal achievement and made a tidy living along the way (people tend to forget he’s an entirely self-made millionaire, after all. Worked into a modicum of national prominence, took his chance and gave a killer speech at the DNC, and has basically milked that ever since. In the best sense of the term “milk,” of course.).
Trump, on the other hand, is something of a societal parasite. Bankrupt at least three times and generally in the swoop in and use somebody else’s money to capitalize on a given situation that may or may not turn a profit…ultimately producing nothing but worse architectural outcomes for cities like New York. Working only from this weirdly myopic perspective that Trump seems to be inviting, I think I take Obama without hesitation, thank you very much.

(via militantagnostic)

The Birther Disgrace | FrumForum

Yelling at Congresspeople

squashed:

The summer before last, Republican groups made huge political gains by showing up at Townhall meetings and acting atrociously. Now Democrats want to do the same thing.

They shouldn’t.

When I saw that MoveOn.org was organizing the same sort of events to target Republicans, I initially felt a certain glee. This will go well for the left. Then I remembered the August 2009 town halls meeting I attended. I am wholly in favor of constituents challenging their representatives—even if it makes the representatives uncomfortable. I have little use for any sense of propriety that gets in the way of a robust and honest political dialog—but what happened at that townhall meeting wasn’t political discourse.

It was base. It was incoherently mean, screamingly ugly. The same hateful energy responsible for every crime ever committed by a mob was on display. It was the sort of event that makes you wonder whether humanity was a mistake.

Now MoveOn.org will unleash the same sort of nastiness at the Republicans. It will capture a media narrative. It will be good for the Democrats in 2012. But it will be bad for the country. They shouldn’t do it.

Presumably it all depends on how it’s done. The reason the Tea Klan stuff was so ugly (to me, anyway) was the pure low-information spectacle of it all; the purest example of this being stuff like “keep your guvmint claws off my Medicare” and the like. If MoveOn shows up and just screams people attending and the House member running the thing down: then Squashed and I are in complete agreement, it will have been a bad idea and bad for long-term political discussion in the country.

But, if MoveOn shows up and states the case, calmly and upon a foundation of facts-based disagreement (e.g. the GOP plans to end Medicare in every meaningful way; however, a program called Medicare will still be there and here is a partial list of the reasons that move will be very, very bad deal for the elderly and infirmed…): then it is all for the good.

A Foolish Consistency…

Boehner: [Multi-billion dollar subsidies to oil companies are] certainly something we should be looking at. We’re in a time when the federal government’s short on revenues. [Oil companies] ought to be paying their fair share.
Obama: Dear Speaker Boehner, Senator Reid, Senator McConnell, and Representative Pelosi: I am writing to urge you to take immediate action to eliminate unwarranted tax breaks for the oil and gas industry, and to use those dollars to invest in clean energy to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. […] I was heartened that Speaker Boehner yesterday expressed openness to eliminating these tax subsidies for the oil and gas industry. Our political system has for too long avoided and ignored this important step, and I hope we can come together in a bipartisan manner to get it done.
Boehner through spokesman: Unfortunately, what the President has suggested so far would simply raise taxes and increase the price at the pump.

I think if you have mandatory carbon caps combined with a trading system, much like we did with sulfur, and if you have a tax-incentive program for investing in the solutions, that there’s a package there that’s very, very good. And frankly, it’s something I would strongly support.

[…] 

What we ought to be doing is inventing a whole series of breakthrough mechanisms that create incentives for people to have a better environmental outcome in an economically positive way, to accelerate the transition to better and cleaner technologies.

Disgraced former Speaker Newt Gingrich, speaking in 2007.
Source: Washington Post