Tag: wapo

On the budget, by contrast, it’s hard to know what the president’s bottom line is, what deals he would regard as reasonable or when he will even join the fray.

The White House is so determined to keep the president antiseptically distant from the untidy wrangling on the budget that it will not even allow its allies in Congress to cite the administration’s own analyses of how harmful some of the Republican cuts would be. They can use the facts but not let on that the administration put them together. What’s up with this?

E.J. Dionne, remaining blissfully unaware of The Third Thing.
Seriously, I’d enjoy living in the dimension inhabited by Our Beltway Punditocracy. Must be really nice in there.
Newsflash, E.J., if Obama came out to the Rose Garden this PM in favor of cutting the non-military discretionary budget to $0, the GOP would immediately balk and say it’s not enough. Just how is he supposed to get involved in a “debate” on those terms? Furthermore, such a step would still not solve the budgetary issues the GOP claims to be so very concerned about. For that, we’d need the thing of which nobody speaks: revenue.
That the GOP systematically and categorically ignores revenue proves that they are not serious about deficits. Never have been. Never will be. You’d think a serious person would start to pick up on this at some point.
But, far be it from me to talk. I’m shrill and out here on drugs with the rest of the pajama wearing naysayers who know nothing of your dimension and its needs.
Source: Washington Post

There Is No Third Thing

Ezra Klein, on the tepid reaction to the President’s energy policy:

This brings up one of the toughest questions in punditry: What is the right thing for the president to do on an issue that’s 1) morally urgent and 2) absolutely dead on arrival in Congress?

He forgets one thing:

3) and which his political opposition will be allowed to argue both sides of?

Libya is only the latest example, but there are many, many others. As soon as the President is for it, the GOP is categorically and irrevocably against it regardless of where they stood in the millisecond before Obama made a decision. This is how Obama went from “dangerously disengaged” or “timid” on Libya and missing his big chance to remake the region to dangerously over-aggressive and missing his big chance for peace in our time in the course of approximately 36 hours.

This is precisely why Obama needs to start inveighing against the perils of windpower, the tyranny of train-based transportation, and making demands that every US citizen above the age of 14 be required to carry at least one gun with its safety off at all times.
I’m only half-joking here. Any rational policy decision will have to be couched in, at best, seeming disinterest on the part of Obama. And this is why many issues are currently hung with the “why isn’t Obama saying anything about…” rubric. Once he takes up a position, even if it is the GOP position, you’re going to face instant and intransigent opposition to whatever Obama says. Even if they were the ones promoting it yesterday. On really sticky issues like Libya, you’ll have the Serious Person dream situation: categorical GOP opposition coupled with strong attacks “from the President’s left.” And just how it’s possible to be “to the left” of a radical socialist community organizer is left as an exercise for the student, as these are questions that the MSM simply will not ask. Shrill.
Progressives angry that their pet issue isn’t receiving enough facetime from Obama should frankly count their lucky stars. Once he weighs in, your issue is over. It is only in the face of Presidential disinterest that even incremental policy progress can actually be made in this environment.

Until such time as the GOP gets significant push-back on this form of rampant and entirely political flip-floppery, it will remain the only game in town. Since such push-back would require research and preparation on the part of the MSM, I wouldn’t hold my breath. That this cycle happens to be a game that is measurably and inexorably killing the country is yet another of those facts that do not matter.

Not Equal to the Challenge

John McCain, 2008: We stand warned by serious and credible scientists across the world that time is short and the dangers [of climate change] are great. The most relevant question now is whether our own government is equal to the challenge.
John McCain, 2010: It’s an inexact science.
Ezra Klein, 2011: I take that as an exact answer to McCain’s original question: No, our government is not equal to the challenge.
Lemkin: The moment people are even one one hundredth as irrationally terrified of carbon emissions as they are of dread “radiation” (regardless of source, quantity, exposure, time, distance, shielding, or any other mitigating factor: sweet merciful Flying Spaghetti Monster, it’s RADIATION!!!!!) then we’ll be getting somewhere on the issue. Until then: Al Gore is fat. It snowed today. And etc… The fact is: carbon emissions (and the associated other outputs of fossil fuel use) have a real, daily, and quantifiable health impact upon us all over and above the impacts on the broader global environment. That’s a collective impact that is almost certainly immeasurably greater in terms of real damage to lives, lifespan, and property than that of all nuclear accidents everywhere and forever combined. But, hey: Charlie Sheen everyone!

Shared Sacrifice

Just in case you thought the Social Security stinger on this post was unsupported, EJ Dionne provides:

Lori Montgomery reported in The Post last week that a bipartisan group of senators thinks a sensible deficit reduction package would involve lifting the Social Security retirement age to 69 and reforming taxes, purportedly to raise revenue, in a way that would cut the top income tax rate for the wealthy from 35 percent to 29 percent.

Only a body dominated by millionaires could define “shared sacrifice” as telling nurses’ aides and coal miners they have to work until age 69 while sharply cutting tax rates on wealthy people. I see why conservative Republicans like this. I honestly don’t get why Democrats – “the party of the people,” I’ve heard – would come near such an idea.

Absolutely right. I’d only quarrel with the title: “The Tea Party is Winning.” Nope. It is the plutocrats and banksters that invented the Tea Party out of whole cloth to gather useful drones to advance their preferred distraction campaign that are winning. The folks that make up the broader Tea Party itself are losing right along with the rest of us filthy proles. And once they undermine the entire non-military discretionary budget to their own detriment, then they hope to get serious and finally eliminate their own Social Security, after which they will go lie down in the streets to die, free from all unnecessary governmental inconveniences.

Shared Sacrifice

Ezra Explains Wisconsin

The best way to understand Walker’s proposal is as a multi-part attack on the state’s labor unions. In part one, their ability to bargain benefits for their members is reduced. In part two, their ability to collect dues, and thus spend money organizing members or lobbying the legislature, is undercut. And in part three, workers have to vote the union back into existence every single year. Put it all together and it looks like this: Wisconsin’s unions can’t deliver value to their members, they’re deprived of the resources to change the rules so they can start delivering value to their members again, and because of that, their members eventually give in to employer pressure and shut the union down in one of the annual certification elections.

What is it with this glut of cogent explanations in the media today? More, please. After all, something has to offset the emerging right-wing and MSM meme that this is primarily about budget cuts and that’s why Democrats have gone missing…

Ezra Explains Wisconsin

Social Security

The size of that fix [required to keep Social Security fully funded] is significant, but not astonishing. Over the next 75 years, the shortfall will be equal to about 0.7 percent of gross domestic product. How much is 0.7 percent of GDP? To put that in perspective, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculates that it’s about as much as George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich will cost over the same period. Saying we can afford those cuts – which is the consensus Republican position – but not Social Security’s outlay is nonsensical. Coming up with 0.7 percent of GDP isn’t a crisis. It’s a question of priorities.

And this is precisely how it should be talked about every single time a microphone is turned on. Clear, simple terms that highlight the basic stability of the program, the relative ease of fixing it (as opposed to, say, Medicare), and its critical position as the only thing between catfood and dying in the streets for millions of elderly individuals who have by and large paid into it, fair and square. Oh, but now your deal has to change and you have to keep working at your labors until you’re 70. Just makes perfect sense.

The parallels to Wisconsin are striking: A group and the government enter into a deal. Now the government wants to change the deal ex post facto, and uses a bludgeon of “dread Unions” to paper over the fact that they the government are the one dealing in underhanded fashion. And, of course, the media blissfully reports it from the government perspective. This is why we fail.

But, if a few million folks show up on the doorstep of said government, well, things can change.

Social Security

Radical as this seems to Americans, the rest of the world has figured this out and gotten it right. We keep getting it wrong, and we’re paying for it.

Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin, talking to Ezra Klein about his plans to make Vermont the first all single payer healthcare state in the Union.
I eagerly await the “why this instance isn’t actually states’ rights” argument from the GOP.
Source: Washington Post

Is It Time to Rein In the Super Bowl?

Lots of good stuff in this article:

The last great building binge in the NFL was from 1995 through 2003, when 21 stadiums were built or refurbished in order to create more luxury boxes, at cost of $6.4 billion. Know how much of that the public paid for? $4.4 billion.

The richest people in the richest, most popular sport in America. And you and I foot the bill for almost all of it in the name of “economic impact” that those eight home games a year supposedly have on a stadium neighborhood that’s inevitably parking lots as far as the eye can see. Hell, we’re even on the hook for the half-million dollar flyover. Absolute lunacy. Sally, the Superbowl, and the mega-arenas built to host it, can be any scale the NFL (and the owners running it) want it to be. Just so long as they are willing to pay for it.

But let’s not leave this quote on the floor:

the state of Texas [spent] $31 million to host the Super Bowl, even as deficits force public school cuts

Says it all.

(reblogged from wanderingreveries)

Is It Time to Rein In the Super Bowl?

Status Quo, Everyone!

In one of the great surprises of the era, meaningful filibuster reform is going nowhere and Ezra Klein reports that:

…this process kicked off because Democrats were furious at Republican abuse of the filibuster. It’s ended with Democrats and Republicans agreeing that the filibuster is here to stay.[…] Both parties are more committed to being able to obstruct than they are to being able to govern. That fundamental preference, as much as any particular rule, is why the Senate is dysfunctional.

Indeed. Under the agreement we do get a few nice things, in that secret holds will apparently go away, there’s a big cut in the total number of appointees that the Senate must approve, and there will be no more of this “read the bill” nonsense.

Anyone that believes that the next time the GOP has the Senate and the Presidency and but also lacks a 61 vote majority, whether or not McConnell himself is still around and running the GOP Senate, that they won’t instantly eliminate the filibuster using a simple majority vote at the start of a new Congress is smoking something. And nary a peep will be made on that day about today’s “agreement.” That would be shrill.

It would do nothing to the august nature of the Senate to require actual debate take place to uphold a filibuster, and furthermore to put the onus of that continuing operation on the minority. Instead, we punish the majority, and often times the vast majority, on whom today rests the need to fight off constant quorum calls and schedule the entire legislative year around various “marination” periods that automatically and interminably ensue any time any actual action starts to happen. It is just incredible that this malignant process, one that arose by chance and error in the first place, was deemed “too good to do away with.”

Incredible, but all too indicative of the era.

Status Quo, Everyone!