Dana Milbank is facing his Palin problem:
And so I pledge to you: Sarah Palin’s name will not cross my lips – or my keyboard – for the entire month of February. Who’s with me?
Lemkin is with you all the way, baby, and have been since 1/11/2011; that was a post that marked an unofficial end to Palin around here. So: Goodbye to all that.
Ezra Klein points out what should be obvious, that all the folks screaming about deficit implications and the Affordable Care Act are, in fact, screaming about positive deficit implications (see: PPACA and red column) and, even if we simply take it on costs alone (as separate from any deficit impact), the ACA amounts to a rounding error when compared to the GOP’s tax proposals.
But it is best not speak of any of this. Ever.
Senior Judge Pat Priest sentenced him to the three-year term on the conspiracy charge. He also sentenced him to five years in prison on the money laundering charge but allowed DeLay to accept 10 years of probation instead of more prison time.
The former Houston-area congressman had faced up to life in prison. His attorneys asked for probation.
As one who assumed he’d never be convicted, much less sentenced to actual time… I guess I still say I’ll believe it when the bars slam shut behind him. If and when they do: Good riddance.
Steven Pearlstein writes about the GOP’s latest tick: adding “job-killing” to the front of basically any Democrat-related noun. He finds just one teensy problem with the practice:
Repealing health-care reform, for instance, would inevitably lead to thousands of unnecessary deaths each year because of an inability to get medical care.
Although lack of effective regulation led directly to the deaths of 78 coal miners last year in West Virginia, Republicans continue to insist that any reform of mine safety laws is bad for miners’ employment.
Republicans also continue to oppose food safety legislation that could save the lives of hundreds of Americans killed each year by contaminated food, just as they oppose any regulation that would effectively keep assault weapons out of the hands of convicted criminals and narco-terrorists who kill thousands of innocent victims on both sides of the Rio Grande.
Indeed. Read the whole thing.
Well, I guess at least the GOP’s rampant and immediate hypocrisy is becoming something of a narrative over to the WaPo:
For two years, Cantor and his colleagues campaigned against high deficits. Now, in the new majority’s first major act, they plan to vote to increase the deficit by $143 billion as part of a repeal of health-care reform.
For two years, Cantor and his colleagues bemoaned the Democrats’ abuse of House rules to circumvent committees and to prevent Republicans from offering amendments. Now, Cantor confirmed on Tuesday, Republicans will employ the very same abuses as they attempt the repeal.
For two years, the Republicans complained about unrelenting Democratic partisanship. Now they’re planning no fewer than 10 investigations of the Obama administration, and the man leading most of those has already branded Obama’s “one of the most corrupt administrations” in history.
For two years, the Republican minority vowed to return power to the people. Now the House Republican majority is asking lobbyists which regulations to repeal, hiring lobbyists to key staff positions and hobnobbing with lobbyists at big-ticket Washington fundraisers.
Now, of course, Dana just can’t resist larding on a lot of straw man false-equivalency crap about being “just as arrogant and overreaching” as the recent Democrat Majority that was so clearly operated by and for Lord Satan. But I’ll take what I can get. The A|B comparison stuff runs first after all. And Lord Jesus and the MSM knows the innernets are making us stoopid and shortly as measured by span of attentions.
The Washington Post Editorial Board is beginning, beginning mind-you, to think that maybe the GOP isn’t quite so serious about deficits after all:
Deficit financing is fine, it seems, when it comes to tax cuts. But that’s not all. Under the new rules, not only are tax cuts exempted from the pay-go concept, but the only way to pay for spending increases is with spending cuts elsewhere. No tax increases allowed – not even in the form of eliminating loopholes or cutting back on tax breaks. Of course, if you wanted to expand the loopholes, no problem. No need to pay for that.
Having made clear that no tax cuts need be paid for, the rules then take the extra step of specifying which deficit-busting tax cuts the new majority has in mind. They assume the continuation of all the Bush tax cuts; extension of the new version of the estate tax; and the creation of a big tax break to let “small businesses,” which can be expansively defined, take a deduction equal to 20 percent of their gross income.
Tax cuts for the wealthiest are fully protected. But tax help for those at the other end of the income spectrum? Forget it.
Shocking stuff. Can’t be right…Seems like I read something, somewhere about this, a while back…but that must have been all wrong.
At any rate, that $4T can easily be made up by trimming waste, fraud, and abuse inherent in the discretionary, non-defense budget…which totals around$1.4T for 2010. So, cutting four times that amount (over 10 years, solely to pay for new deficit spending to protect tax cuts for the richest 2%, and most definitely not current levels which would also require similarly scaled cuts in the very same time-frame) shouldn’t be any big deal. And, of course, Boehner’s ~$30M cuts in the House member’s own budgets gets us 0.75% of the way there already.
Bill Daly, potential Obama Chief of Staff: [The Obama administration] miscalculated on health care. The election of ’08 sent a message that after 30 years of center-right governing, we had moved to center left — not left.
Ezra Klein: The health-care law the president signed was modeled off of the health-care law the Republican governor of Massachusetts had signed, which was in turn modeled off of the health-care law the Republicans in Congress had proposed in 1993. That’s “left”? And meanwhile, Daley thinks the country had moved substantially leftward over that period — “after 30 years of center-right governing, we had moved to center left” — but that even a compromise bill based on Republican ideas was too far left for the country, which would imply that the administration he served in the early-’90s, which pushed a more ambitious health-care bill when the country was further to the right, bordered on communist.
Lemkin: Yep, and do we really want anyone who has ever been quoted peddling that particular brand of horseshit running the President’s days in the inevitable “Eliminate ACA or we destroy the economy of the United States of America now and forever through default!” battle that will be coming on in, oh, five or six weeks? I say no, but then I’m less than skilled in multi-dimensional chess…
Mitch McConnell plans to filibuster an omnibus spending bill because of the earmarks larded onto it. Worth noting that he personally added several of these earmarks to the bill. Your 2010 GOP, staunch earmark opponents as recently as a week ago:
the legislation includes provisions requested this year by McConnell, including $650,000 for a genetic technology center at the University of Kentucky, according to an analysis of the bill by Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan watchdog.
[…]
But McConnell, like other new earmark opponents, stopped short of asking for his projects to be removed from the bill.
Rest assured, we shall never speak of this again. Or now, really. Just forget any of this happened.
Devastating secondary punchline.
Good roundup of the Bush tax cut extension negotiations by Ezra Klein:
When the deal was cut, the president took an oblique shot at their preferences, saying “the American people didn’t send us here to wage symbolic battles or win symbolic victories.” And this came a mere week or two after the White House announced a federal pay freeze. The pattern, for progressives, seems clear: The White House uses them during elections, but doesn’t listen to, or consult them, while governing. In fact, it insults them, and then tells them to quiet down, they got the best bargain possible, even if it wasn’t the one they’d asked for, or been promised.
[…]That the Obama administration has turned out to be fairly good at the inside Washington game of negotiations and legislative compromise and quite bad at communicating to the public and keeping their base excited is not what most would have predicted during the 2008 campaign. But it’s true.
Lemkin 