Tag: wapo

The Inherent Foolishness of “War Powers”

Pity the poor War Powers act:

If nothing happens, history will say that the War Powers Act was condemned to a quiet death by a president who had solemnly pledged, on the campaign trail, to put an end to indiscriminate warmaking.

The President has the unilateral authority to end life on Earth at any moment of his choosing with our nuclear arsenal. Unless and until Congress takes that authority away and ties it to normal, Constitutionally regulated war declaration mechanisms then none of the other details really matters (and this is why even the GOP House doesn’t get too worked up about it: War Powers stuff (60 day limits and etc…) is, in essence, a meaningless distraction and Congress knows it). It also seems likely to be unconstitutional, or, at the very least of questionable legality.

Whatever their reasoning on the War Powers Act and its applicability and/or enforcement is, Congress has a simple recourse that’s clearly enumerated in the Constitution: defund Libyan operations and demand the President request a formal declaration of war if he wants to continue. Same goes for Iraq and Afghanistan. There should have been just such a declaration on or about September 12, 2001.

Either hold the country to formal declarations of war in all cases or don’t; but let’s be consistent and honest and admit that holding to a strict Constitutional standard means removing “The Button” from the Oval Office once and for all.
As a bonus, doing so also gives you an excuse to clean up the rampant classification of everything that is currently carried out under the same “imminent and existential nuclear disaster” model of national security. This plainly anti-democratic power, again, was conferred as some sort of necessary evil in Our Nuclear Age. End it now and forever; make the President and anyone else have to prove to a judge or some similar panel that something should be classified because it poses a clear and measurable risk to National Security if revealed, and even then only classify it for a short time period with regular review for declassification.

The Inherent Foolishness of “War Powers”

It’s just sort of sitting there. Given the high price it is now, and the tremendous debt problem we now have, by all means, sell at the peak.

Ron Utt, senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation working hard every day and putting the “think” in think-tank on selling the gold in Fort Knox.
I’m quite sure gold would stay at peak prices from the first ounce to the 147 millionth ounce. There is absolutely nothing that can go wrong with this brilliant plan. We should begin immediately at solving all Our National Problems.
Heritage is made up of serious people with courageous ideas.

Former attorney general Michael Mukasey recently claimed that “the intelligence that led to bin Laden . . . began with a disclosure from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who broke like a dam under the pressure of harsh interrogation techniques that included waterboarding. He loosed a torrent of information — including eventually the nickname of a trusted courier of bin Laden.” That is false.

I asked CIA Director Leon Panetta for the facts, and he told me the following: The trail to bin Laden did not begin with a disclosure from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times. The first mention of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti — the nickname of the al-Qaeda courier who ultimately led us to bin Laden — as well as a description of him as an important member of al-Qaeda, came from a detainee held in another country, who we believe was not tortured. None of the three detainees who were waterboarded provided Abu Ahmed’s real name, his whereabouts or an accurate description of his role in al-Qaeda.

In fact, the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on Khalid Sheik Mohammed produced false and misleading information. He specifically told his interrogators that Abu Ahmed had moved to Peshawar, got married and ceased his role as an al-Qaeda facilitator — none of which was true. According to the staff of the Senate intelligence committee, the best intelligence gained from a CIA detainee — information describing Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti’s real role in al-Qaeda and his true relationship to bin Laden — was obtained through standard, noncoercive means. […]

As we debate how the United States can best influence the course of the Arab Spring, can’t we all agree that the most obvious thing we can do is stand as an example of a nation that holds an individual’s human rights as superior to the will of the majority or the wishes of government? Individuals might forfeit their life as punishment for breaking laws, but even then, as recognized in our Constitution’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, they are still entitled to respect for their basic human dignity, even if they have denied that respect to others.

John McCain, The Washington Post, May 12, 2011

Good thing this guy never ran for President. Would’ve been a tough out against all Democratic comers.

h/t: kohenari

(via politicalprof)

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

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

The Shinning

In which Matt Miller channels The Shining:

The House Republican budget adds $6 trillion to the debt in the next decade yet the GOP is balking at raising the debt limit. The House Republican budget adds $6 trillion to the debt in the next decade yet the GOP is balking at raising the debt limit.

[…]

“The spending spree is over,” Ryan said the other day, after the House passed his blueprint. “We cannot keep spending money we don’t have.” Except that by his own reckoning Ryan is planning to spend $6 trillion we don’t have in the next decade alone.

[…]

If I were Barack Obama, my mantra on this week’s debt tour and in the months ahead would be that we should lift the debt limit only by as much debt as is needed to accommodate Paul Ryan’s budget.

The Shinning

On Dana Milbank

First they came for the welfare mothers, but I did not speak out, because I was a member of Skull & Bones.

Then they came for middle-class manufacturing unions, but I did not speak out, because I had to get to a party at Marty Peretz’s.

Then they came for the upper middle class people who didn’t have columns in the Washington Post, but I did not speak out, because Dennis Kucinich is short.

And then they came for me…and I was STILL so fucking stupid that I spent my time making fun of the House Progressive Caucus.

On Dana Milbank

Rightward Lurch

And so it begins:

Obama will not blaze a fresh path when he delivers a much-anticipated speech Wednesday afternoon at George Washington University. Instead, he is expected to offer support for the commission’s work and a related effort underway in the Senate to develop a strategy for curbing borrowing. Obama will frame the approach as a responsible alternative to the 2012 plan unveiled last week by House Republicans, according to people briefed by the White House.

Just as we predicted a few days ago, your choices, the entire extent of the debate will be between a center-right proposal (Simpson-Bowles) and a far-right proposal (Ryan plan). Where do you think the Serious Person “sensible middle ground” will be in that fight? Left unsaid will be any discussion of the true driver of deficits: individual healthcare costs. Left unsaid will be: if we had individual health costs of any other Western democracy we’d be facing surpluses and not deficits. Limit rate of growth in healthcare and you fix everything we’re currently fighting over, and without doing it on the backs of the poorest.

It’s now down to just how much of Medicare we will eliminate (er: “privatize”) and what percent of older Americans still get access to it. Then, a couple of years down the road: fewer. In a few more years: gone, because it only serves the poor and they don’t vote. Legislative inertia is literally the only chance that program has for survival.

The old will kindly go die in the streets.

As Ezra Klein suggests, all economic conversations should begin (and end) with this graph. If we do nothing, the budget comes basically into balance:

But nothing is hard to do. This nothing, for instance, includes three crucial elements: (1) All the Bush tax cuts expire, as they’re currently scheduled to do; (2) The Medicare doc fix is either implemented or its repeal is paid for over the next 70 years; and (3) the Affordable Care Act is implemented, and all of its spending targets are met and all of its taxes are collected.

I’ll wager 1 million dollars that this topic or any discussion even remotely resembling it comes up exactly zero times in Obama’s Wednesday remarks.

It’s short, it’s simple, it’s understandable, and it’s true. All good reasons it won’t be used to bludgeon the GOP in the run-up to 2012.

Welcome the Responsibility

E.J. Dionne posits that the coming “Ryancare” enforced destruction of Medicare will either be Obama’s defining moment or the final end of progressive government in America:

Americans are about to learn how much is at stake in our larger budget fight, how radical the new conservatives in Washington are, and the extent to which some politicians would transfer even more resources from the have-nots and have-a-littles to the have-a-lots.

And you wonder: Will President Obama welcome the responsibility of engaging the country in this big argument, or will he shrink from it? Will his political advisers remain robotically obsessed with poll results about the 2012 election, or will they embrace Obama’s historic obligation — and opportunity — to win the most important struggle over the role of government since the New Deal?

And that’s exactly what this is. If you “privatize” Medicare, you are in effect creating a real live death panel for those individuals who cannot afford to pay the difference between the arbitrarily low payments (pegged to the dollar circa 2010) that will be made in the name of “cost containment.” Scare quotes there because such a move is categorically not cost containment; it is payment containment, or total government outlay containment, if you will. Costs will still rise, whether that rise is at the rate of inflation or at some other rate doesn’t really matter: the payments are locked, now and forever, to roughly today’s value. It is therefore only that fraction of individuals that are capable of paying the difference between real cost and subsidized value that will be “contained.” This number of individuals will, of course, be diminished day by day, year after year after year, as the subsidy represents lower and lower actual healthcare buying power. This is how Ryancare “works.” Hope you’ve been rather aggressive and uniformly successful with your by then privatized “Social Security” 401(k). Because you’re going to need it. Cat food doesn’t buy itself, after all. Otherwise, kindly go die in the streets.

In a decade or two, yes, even the very wealthy will begin to feel that pinch and there might be some movement to address the issue. But, by then, assuming all goes to Ryan’s master plan, tax revenue will have ratcheted to such historic lows (the other part of this “plan” is to limit next year’s spending to a fractional percent of the previous year’s, regardless of inflation and actual vs. projected economic output or overall economic conditions) that the federal government will have drowned itself in a teacup and will be laughably incapable and plainly impotent relative to doing anything about it. Problem solved! Think of how free we’ll all feel on that wonderful day!

And but so: do I think Obama will rise to this particular challenge? No I do not. Nothing coming out of the administration leads me to believe he or his advisers have any interest whatever in fighting for the future of Medicare, much less Social Security (which, having its own funding source, is utterly secure for decades to come: so Serious People all know that we must act now to destroy it because otherwise it won’t be there! This makes sense to our Beltway Punditocracy.). The administration and, by and large, The Body Democrat will remain in their defensive crouch, trying not to “screw up” 2012 with a lot of progressive mumbo-jumbo, because, as any Serious Person can tell you, those dozens of Tea Partiers that showed up in DC the other day are the ones that run the country, now and forever, without any regard to election results, polling data, or the stated wishes of the American People at large. Those 100k that showed up in the tundra of Wisconsin? Just out of town Union thugs. No reason to pay attention to them at all. They’ll only win in 2012 if ACORN steals the election for them.

Welcome the Responsibility