And now for something completely local

Former Prince George's County Executive Jack Johnson has now pled guilty to charges of corruption (i.e. bribery and developer shakedowns) and appears to be headed to 11-13 years in prison. Johnson, who just finished serving two terms as County Executive, was arrested, along with his wife, on bribery charges at the end of last year.

Johnson is apparently "sorry for what happened" but wants to remind PG residents that "all have sinned..."

So what did Johnson's bribery yield for residents of PG County? Apperently not more or sufficient grocery stores:

What a luxury for the residents of Washington’s Cleveland Park neighborhood to fight over the redesign of a Giant grocery store. Not long ago, the Safeway serving the Landover Hills area in Prince George’s County fled. Quite recently the nearby Giant packed up; the company said that the footprint was too small for its current business model.

While I’m grateful that an Aldi’s is slated to move into that location in the fall, its stores don’t accept WIC payments — a real drawback for the low-
income residents who have walked to that location for the past 30 years.

Ah, to get into a snit over whether the new Giant will maintain the historic integrity of the building it will occupy, or whether the addition of mixed-use development there would cause traffic problems. In Prince George’s, we’re facing what’s closer to a food desert rather than the glut of Cleveland Park, which has at least five supermarkets less than two miles from the Wisconsin Avenue Giant.

“The Cleveland Park community is going to have a bright new supermarket,” says Giant’s public relations office. If its residents can’t agree on that new supermarket, please send it to the Landover area. We’ll take it.

Jolene Ivey, Cheverly

The writer is a member of the Maryland House of Delegates (D-Prince George’s).

While many will be glad Johnson is finally getting his due, as rumors and allegations of corruption surrounded him for years, it's the people of PG County who will bear the brunt of Johnson's "sins".

Behold the Awesomeness of Voucherized Medicare

I wonder, though, how and when did voucherized Medicare become the GOP’s, or anyone’s, health care gospel? All during the HCR debate progressives were all over the place complaining (with some justification) of the inadequacy of the plan, the need for something more progressive, for something less wedded to prior GOP ideas (like the individual mandate). But every Repub except the Newtster is suddenly all on board with a proposal that got no campaign attention—because it didn’t exist—and was unveiled and passed (“rammed down our throats”) with lightening speed as soon as Boner got the gavel.

If It's Wednesday, It Must Be

Anti-Chavez Day at the Washington Post, special front-page, below-the-fold edition.

Since Chavez is well-known to be planning a united Latin/South America world government and invasion of the U.S. to impose Soshulism and Shariah Law on us, this is indeed a most important report from the Post.

Seriously, the American media’s decade long Chavez-hate and military coup-amnesia has truly been a sight to behold.

It's Daniels-mania!!!

The NYT has a front-page item on the former Bush OMB director who helped balloon the nation's debt after Clintonian taxes brought finally brought the budget back into balance in 1999.

The Wash Post relegates coverage of its hero to the Style section, which is more appropriate given the aspect of Daniels' life it's referencing, but unfortunately includes an obligatory mention of Daniels' supposed Fiscal Seriousness:

The governor’s political enemies — those who are eager to box out a promising contender with a reputation for fiscal seriousness, establishment backing and intellectual heft — are taking him at his word.

Fiscal seriousness!!!! Not like the current WH occupant who crashed the economy and exploded the national debt all by himself!

And intellectual heft!! Apparently the Post thinks this is a great trait for a Republican to have, but for the current WH occupant, "intellectual heft" is too "distant", too "Mr. Cool", too "analytical", too "reserved".

I Can't Believe We're Losing To These People

Republicans still hate consumers:

Republican senators vowed Thursday to block any nominee to lead the fledgling Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unless stronger limits are put on its power, in the latest blow in a long-running battle to rein in the watchdog agency before it officially launches this summer.

In a letter to President Obama, 44 lawmakers called for a board of directors to run the agency, rather than a single leader. The letter also demanded tougher oversight of the CFPB by existing banking regulators, such as the Financial Stability Oversight Council, and that the new agency be funded by congressional appropriations. Under the current structure, the CFPB’s budget is carved from the Federal Reserve.

“How the CFPB director exercises his or her authority . . . will have a profound influence on the future of our economy and job creation,” the letter said. Lead signatories were Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Richard C. Shelby (Ala.), ranking Republican on the Senate banking committee.

The proposals mirror three bills passed by the House Financial Services Committee a day earlier. Rep. Sean P. Duffy (R-Wis.), who sponsored one of the bills, said he believed that “the movement here on both sides of the aisle is to make sure we have a system that’s going to work for our consumers.”

But consumer advocacy groups lashed out at the proposals, arguing that they would give banks undue influence over the CFPB and jeopardize its independence.

“Enactment of these measures would virtually guarantee that the CFPB would be a weak and timid agency,” said Travis Plunkett, legislative director for the Consumer Federation of America.

Courting Disaster!

Obama not keeping us safe! Time for some golden oldies:

White House speechwriter Marc Thiessen was locked in a secure room and given access to the most sensitive intelligence when he was tasked to write President George W. Bush’s 2006 speech explaining the CIA’s interrogation program and why Congress should authorize it. Few know more about these CIA operations than Thiessen, and in his new book, Courting Disaster, he documents just how effective the CIA’s interrogations were in foiling attacks on America, penetrating al-Qaeda’s high command, and providing our military with actionable intelligence. Thiessen also shows how reckless President Obama has been in shutting down the CIA’s program and releasing secret documents that have aided our enemies.

Courting Disaster proves: (PROVES!!--ed)

How the CIA program thwarted specific deadly attacks against the U.S.
Why “enhanced interrogation” was not torture by any reasonable legal or moral standard
How the information gained by “enhanced interrogation” could not have been acquired any other way
How President Obama’s actions since taking office have left America much more vulnerable to attack

In chilling detail, Thiessen reveals how close the terrorists came to striking again, how intelligence gained from “enhanced interrogation” repeatedly stymied their plots, and how President Obama’s dismantling of this CIA program is inviting disaster for America.

Thiessen is among the Bush-torture apologists trying to claim now that their torture helped catch and kill OBL. Sully links to Jane Meyer who writes from the New Yorker:

You would think that if the C.I.A.’s interrogation of high-value detainees was all it took, the U.S. government would have succeeded in locating bin Laden before 2006, which is when the C.I.A.’s custody of so-called “high-value detainees” ended. Instead, after the Supreme Court ruled that year that prisoners needed to be treated humanely in compliance with the Geneva Conventions, the C.I.A. was forced to turn its special detainees over to the military for detention and interrogation using more lawful tactics in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It took five more years before all the dots could be adequately connected.

(snip)

This timeline doesn’t seem to provide a lot of support for the pro-torture narrative. One would think that if so-called “enhanced interrogations” provided the magic silver bullet, and if the courier was a protégé of K.S.M.’s, then the C.I.A. might have wrapped this up back in 2003, while they were waterboarding the 9/11 mastermind a hundred and eighty-three times.

A Fitting End

Well, I really regret turning off the TV before 11 pm last night.

I'll confess that one of the first thoughts I had this morning upon learning of the killing of OBL was one of suspicion about his being buried at sea. As more details of the raid and killing have come in my suspicions have been put to rest. Obviously it goes without saying, Great job, Mr. President and thank you, Navy Seals.

It's particularly fitting that his killing was accomplished by a Democratic president and by this Democratic president especially. Part of the trauma associated with the events of 9/11 was the three year period or so afterwards when both liberals and political dissent were treated as treasononous. Beyond the tragedy and devastation of that day was the hysteria that gripped much of the media and common man alike. The first few years after 9/11 were nothing short of toxic, for many Americans and for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi's in particular.

But the killing of OBL helps put the final stake into that period. There are obvious signs before last night's heroics that the nation has, with at least some awareness, started to move on. But getting OBL "dead or alive" preferably dead, was an important piece of the healing puzzle.

Who Will Protect The Animals?

Amidst all the birther nonsense, not to mention deathly serious issues like abolishing Medicare, some of our "labratories of democracy" are hell-bent on making life more miserable for our animal friends:

Getting caught is a drag.

Just ask Kirt Espenson, whose employees at E6 Cattle Company in Southwest Texas were videotaped bashing cows’ heads in with pickaxes and hammers and performing other acts of unspeakably sickening cruelty.

Yet if some state legislators have their way, horrific but valuable videos like that one will never be made.

But, first, the story: Espenson, who comes off on the phone as sincere and contrite, explained to me that he’d made a “catastrophic error in a very difficult situation,” when ultracold weather caused frostbite in some of his 20,000 cattle. He was short-staffed and had his best employees saving the endangered but viable cows while new workers were asked to “euthanize” those who were near death. Out came the hammers. “We just didn’t have the protocol to deal with it,” he told me. “I made a mistake and take full responsibility.”

The offending employees have been terminated. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Nothing like this will ever happen again.

Much as I’d like to believe Espenson, this sounds like too many other horror stories of animal cruelty, and frankly — without belittling either situation — the excuses echo Abu Ghraib. And this is far from an isolated incident. Remember the four Iowa factory farmers who pleaded guilty in 2009 to sexually abusing and beating pigs, and the abuses of downed cattle exposed by the Humane Society of the United States in 2008 at the Hallmark slaughterhouse in California, which led to the country’s biggest ever recall of meat.

The root problem is not Espenson or his company, any more than the root problem at Abu Ghraib was Lynndie England. The problem is the system that enables cruelty and a lack not just of law enforcement but actual laws. Because the only federal laws governing animal cruelty apply to slaughterhouses, where animals may spend only minutes before being dispatched. None apply to farms, where animals are protected only by state laws.

And these may be moving in the wrong direction. In their infinite wisdom the legislatures of Iowa, Minnesota, Florida and others are considering measures that would punish heroic videographers like the one who spent two weeks as an E6 employee, who was clearly traumatized by the experience. (I spoke to him on the phone Saturday, with a guarantee of anonymity.)

Minnesota’s “ag-gag” law — isn’t that a great name? — would seek to punish not only photographers and videographers but those who distribute their work, which means organizations like the Humane Society of the United States and Mercy for Animals, which contracted the videographer for the E6 investigation. “It’s so sweeping,” says Nathan Runkle, the executive director of Mercy for Animals, “that if you took a picture of a dog at a pet shop and texted it to someone, that could be a crime.” Unconstitutional? Probably, but there it is.

Videotaping at factory farms wouldn’t be necessary if the industry were properly regulated. But it isn’t. And the public knows this; the one poll about the Iowa ag-gag law shows a mere 21 percent of people supporting it. And poll after poll finds that almost everyone believes that even if it costs more, farm animals should be treated humanely.

That is not the norm on factory farms. Espenson insists that it was a coincidence that the investigator for Mercy for Animals showed up just when his workers were hammering cows’ heads; the videographer believes it was routine. And, while the farmer claims that extreme weather had hurt the cows, Weather Underground recorded that the weather was far from extreme during the period in question. The investigator theorizes that weaker, less desirable animals were sickened by living in their own feces.

We can’t know. What we can know is that organizations like the Humane Society and Mercy for Animals need to be allowed to do the work that the federal and state governments are not: documenting the kind of behavior most of us abhor. Indeed, the independent investigators should be supported. As Runkle says, “The industry should be teaming up with organizations like ours to put cameras in these facilities, to advocate for mandatory training and have real euthanasia policies, things that would allow the public to trust these operations rather than fear them.”

The biggest problem of all is that we’ve created a system in which standard factory-farming practices are inhumane, and the kinds of abuses documented at E6 are really just reminders of that. If you’re raising and killing 10 billion animals every year, some abuse is pretty much guaranteed.

There is, of course, the argument that domesticating animals in order to kill them is essentially immoral; those of us who eat meat choose not to believe this. But in “Bengal Tiger,” a Broadway play set at Baghdad Zoo, the tiger — played by Robin Williams — wonders: “What if my every meal has been an act of cruelty?” The way most animals are handled in the United States right now has to have all of us omnivores wondering the same thing.

 

This sh$t is starting to really p#ss me off. First there was the anti-puppy mill referendum in Missouri last year, which the voters passed by a small margin, but which is in the process of being undone by the state legislature. Now this crap. WTF?

Mercy For Animal's website is here and you can make a one-time or regular donation.

The NYT editorial page also includes a short editorial, rightfully denouncing Iowa, Minnesota and Florida's pending legislation.

I'd also love to hear some presidential bully-pulpiting on this.

Richard Cohen blasts "Cult of Lee"

Every once in a while, Richard Cohen erupts into some very shrill:

It has taken a while, but it’s about time Robert E. Lee lost the Civil War. The South, of course, was defeated on the battlefield in 1865, yet the Lee legend — swaddled in myth, kitsch and racism — has endured even past the civil rights era when it became both urgent and right to finally tell the “Lost Cause” to get lost. Now it should be Lee’s turn. He was loyal to slavery and disloyal to his country — not worthy, even he might now admit, of the honors accorded him.

I confess to always being puzzled by the cult of Lee. Whatever his personal or military virtues, he offered himself and his sword to the cause of slavery. He owned slaves himself and fought tenaciously in the courts to keep them. He commanded a vast army that, had it won, would have secured the independence of a nation dedicated to the proposition that white people could own black people and sell them off, husband from wife, child from parent, as the owner saw fit. Such a man cannot be admired.

But he is. All over the South, particularly in his native Virginia, the cult of Lee is manifested in streets, highways and schools named for him. When I first moved to the Washington area, I used to marvel at these homages to the man. What was being honored? Slavery? Treason? Or maybe, for this is how I perceive him, no sense of humor? (Often, that is mistaken for wisdom.) I also wondered what a black person was supposed to think or, maybe more to the point, feel. Chagrin or rage would be perfectly appropriate.

I'm pretty puzzled by it, too.

I suspect the admiration of Lee probably stems from the 100+ years of grace awarded the South upon their military defeat, when a morally exhausted but commercially ambitious country turned its attention from war and bloodshed (and racial justice) to reconciliation among Whites and expansion. More specifically, Lee, being a "warrior", is more apt to be seen as "above the fray" and given reverence not afforded to other, more political Confederates such as Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens.

The nation's turn from war to reconciliation, at the expense of racial justice, is addressed in David Blight's Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. I'm a few chapters into it and recommend it heartily.

If anything, I find the respect afforded Lee by professional historians more puzzling than that of average citizens, particularly those in Virginia, who could be expected to be more generous to one of their state's ancestors.

At the same time, I'm not as irritated by the various signs and other monuments to Lee and other Confederates as I once was. The respect granted to "losers" in American history is in its own way, appropriate. I think it largely serves the interest of a pluralist society to allow for a wide range of "heros". For example, there are monuments and tributes, commercial and otherwise, to the various Native American leaders of the Old West (Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, etc) in places such as South Dakota, that serve to help educate Ameicans living long after of their lives and causes, leading us to question our own country's treatment, past and present, of the continent's native inhabitants. Many Americans living today no doubt have little sympathy for Indians or the historical preservation of their leaders. Nonetheless, we appropriately remind ourselves of these representatives of American life.

In the case of Lee in particular, it must be said that Lee was not tried for treason (nor really was anyone else from the Southern Confederacy). General Grant, among others, didn't wish to see Lee imprisoned or suffer politically or otherwise for his course of action, despite having fought against him for more than a year. So that his name adorns highways doesn't concern me too much. But it is high time that among our professional class that a more critical appraisal of the Confederal general is provided.

Very grim stuff in Mexico

Hard to know what to say about this, other than I was almost shocked to read it this morning. And given the carnage around the globe, it isn't always easy to be shocked. This reads like it was Afghanistan:

SAN FERNANDO, Mexico — At the largest mass grave site ever found in Mexico, where 177 bodies have been pulled from deep pits, authorities say they have recovered few bullet casings and little evidence that the dead were killed with a gun.

Instead, most died of blunt force trauma to the head, and a sledgehammer found at the crime scene this month is believed to have been used in the executions, according to Mexican investigators and state officials. The search continued Sunday, with state officials warning they expect the count to rise.

They say as many as 122 of the victims were passengers dragged off buses at drug cartel roadblocks on the major highway to the United States.

The mass killings of civilians at isolated ranches 90 minutes south of the Texas border mark a new level of barbarity in Mexico’s four-year U.S.-backed drug war.

As forensic teams and Mexican marines dig through deeper and darker layers here, the buried secrets in San Fernando are challenging President Felipe Calderon’s assertions that his government is winning the war and is in control of Mexico’s cities and roads.

In the past four years, more than 35,000 people have been killed and thousands more have simply disappeared, since Calderon sent the military to battle Mexican organized crime with $1.6 billion in U.S. support. U.S. officials in Mexico worry that criminal gangs are taking over sections of the vital border region not by overwhelming firepower but sheer terror.

On Thursday, cartel gunmen sacked the city of Miguel Aleman, across the river from Roma, Texas, tossing grenades and burning down three car dealerships, an auto parts outlet, a furniture store and a gas station. Three buses were strafed with gunfire Saturday in separate attacks, wounding three people.

The U.S. State Department issued new warnings Friday advising Americans to defer nonessential travel to the entire border state of Tamaulipas and large swaths of Mexico because of the threat of armed robbery, carjacking, kidnapping and murder by organized crime.

In the red dirt tombs of San Fernando, almost all the bodies were stripped of identification, meaning no licenses, bus ticket stubs or photographs of loved ones, according to interviews with local and state officials, making the job of notifying next of kin especially difficult.

Forensic photographs shown to The Washington Post depict mummified bodies caked in dirt and badly decomposed, with signs of extreme cranial trauma. In the largest two graves, holding 43 and 45 bodies, the corpses were piled atop one another in a 10-foot-deep pit dug by a backhoe, that criminals filled over in the past four months.

A Taxing Problem, not a spending problem

I know Faux's Republican bosses are telling them to whine about how our deficit/debt is a "spending problem, not a taxing problem", but if 45% of American households don't have any federal income tax liability, it what sense can that be a "spending problem, not a taxing problem"?

Also, too, it turns out that the average federal income tax rate for "taxed enough already" American households is a staggering 9.3%. Taxed enough already indeed.

The next teabag person who wants to complain about the deficit/debt being a "spending problem, not a taxing problem" and wants to whine out about being "taxed enough already" should be compelled to provide the rest of us a copy of their federal tax return. Or else shut up.

Where are Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell when you need them?

Unable to substantively answer Obama's budget challenge from Wednesday, Republicans are left flailing for the fainting couches:

The three Republican congressmen saw it as a rare ray of sunshine in Washington’s stormy budget battle: an invitation from the White House to hear President Obama lay out his ideas for taming the national debt.

They expected a peace offering, a gesture of goodwill aimed at smoothing a path toward compromise. But soon after taking their seats at George Washington University on Wednesday, they found themselves under fire for plotting “a fundamentally different America” from the one most Americans know and love.

“What came to my mind was: Why did he invite us?” Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.) said in an interview Thursday. “It’s just a wasted opportunity."

Whaaah. Sounds like these Very Manly Republican Randians need to "man-up".

Then the Post writer adds this:

The situation was all the more perplexing because Obama has to work with these guys: Camp is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, responsible for trade, taxes and urgent legislation to raise the legal limit on government borrowing. Rep. Jeb Hensarling (Tex.) chairs the House Republican Conference. And Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is House Budget Committee chairman and the author of the spending blueprint Obama lacerated as “deeply pessimistic” during his 44-minute address.

Have you ventured over to the House Ways & Means Committee website lately? Let's just say it's not full of bipartisany warm and fuzzies.

But I'm sure our Beltway Media will waste no time making Republican hurt fee-fees their obsession for the next few weeks.

A Fairness Doctrine To Believe In

In a very, very shrill and totally unBrave and Not Serious column today, Steven Pearlstein lays into Ryan:

Thursday morning, before a friendly crowd on Capitol Hill, I listened as Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Budget Committee, his voice dripping with moral indignation, declared that by bringing up the issue of fairness in his budget speech this week, President Obama had stooped to “political demagoguery.”

Political demagoguery? In Washington? We’re shocked, shocked. Certainly we haven’t heard any demagoguery from Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) or Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) or Ryan himself? Of course not. The budget crisis is much too serious for that.

News flash for Ryan: In deciding what to spend and whom to tax, lawmakers’ fights over budgets are always fights about values and priorities in which fairness has as rightful a place as fiscal rectitude and economic efficiency.

If it’s legitimate to decry the immorality of leaving our grandchildren a legacy of crushing debt, which Ryan and the Republicans do ad nauseam, then it is no less legitimate to talk about the immorality of reducing deficits by cutting nutritional support for pregnant women and infants rather than raising taxes on millionaires.

As Balloon Juice commenter J notes:

One of the signs of the wrong turn we’ve taken as a society, is the near total disappearance of the word ‘fairness’ from our public discourse and, it seems, of the corresponding idea from our thinking. It should be front and center. I’d like to hear Democrats use it far more often than they do and far more often than the mealy-mouthed terms they tend to favor.

Truer words never spoken.

Not Taxed Enough Already (No Tea)

This is the time of year when we are treated to the dual and obviously contradictory claims that (1) Taxes are too damn high and (2) Half the country is a bunch of moochers because they don't pay any damn taxes at all. Whaaaah.

How can these two claims both be true? We know, if we didn't know before, that members of the Republican Party just hate taxes. "They kill jobs." Raising them, even to reduce a debt and deficit that is bankrupting the country, is a "non-starter." And we don't have a "taxing problem" we have a "spending problem".

Except, apparently maybe we do have a taxing problem:

On his August 30, 2010, Fox News show, Sean Hannity said, "If half of Americans now don't pay taxes, and the other half are the beneficiaries of the tax that the other half pay, at some point you say, OK, you got a full voting block and it seems like the Democratic Party ... caters to that." Hannity has repeatedly claimed that 50 percent of Americans don't pay taxes.

So, taxes are job killers, can never be raised on anyone ever, and unfairly rob from the productive in our society. But at the same time, half the country that consists of Democrats don't pay any damn federal income taxes at all!

But maybe the Taxed Enough Already party is hedging their bets a bit:

KILMEADE: I just want to go through some things. Before people raise taxes on the somewhat so-called fortunate people in this country, because that's how they were labeled over the weekend, let's take a look at this chart: 97.11 percent of the taxes comes from 50 percent of the wage earners. There's a lot of people not paying taxes. And also, about who pays taxes, only 2.7 percent of taxes come from the bottom 50 percent of wage earners. So of course they're not -- the burden's not going to be on them. It's going to be on the people that are paying most of it anyway. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 4/12/11]

The "bottom 50 percent of wage earners" sure are some serious deadweights, not paying their share. I wonder if any of these below-the-median hammock-laying Others are Taxed Enough Already teabag people? Are we to believe that all members of the TEA people's front of liberty are above-the-median John Galts, providing for all the rest of us?

Well, I kinda suspect that at least a few of these TEA bags belong to that despicable class of non to too low tax paying good for nothing wage earners.

I wonder when someone will point this out?

Aside: No, of course I don't believe the lower half of the wage earning distribution is a glot of no good bums. I do happen to think that even though low earners pay Social Security and Medicare taxes at the federal level and sales, income, property and other taxes at the state and local levels, that every wage earner should incur at least some post-tax-refund federal tax liability for things such as defense, national parks, food safety regulation, etc. We're all in this together. Let's just not let the reichwing, especially its supposed taxed enough already teabagging fringe continue to talk out of boths sides of its collective mouth. The country is not taxed enough already. And some of you teabaggers are lying.

Appropriations Fallout

Steve Benen notes a "pattern" that is "hard to miss":

At the time, this seemed, at least to me, like a plausible defense. Obama wanted an extension of unemployment benefits and to prevent a middle-class tax increase. With an imposing deadline, Republicans wouldn't budge on either point, so the White House struck a deal. These were "unique circumstances."

Except, the circumstances may not have been unique at all. We saw a situation in which Republicans were prepared to shut down the government, forcing the president to strike a deal he didn't want to make. We see Republicans poised to create a global crisis by blocking a debt-ceiling increase, pushing the president again into a situation where he may have to strike another deal. We see the next fiscal year's budget fight coming down the pike, and another shutdown threat.

The pattern is hard to miss -- a broad threat emerges, Republicans exploit through a hostage strategy, and the president, playing the role of responsible grown-up, takes steps to protect those who'd be "directly and immediately damaged."

Matt Yglesias has a good idea about how to approach the upcoming Armageddon over raising the debt ceiling:

It’s a two pronged strategy. The first one is a credible, repeated commitment not to surrender anything in exchange for getting congress to agree to the debt ceiling being increased. After all, why should anything be given up. Everyone knows that increasing the debt ceiling is the right thing to do. If the government were operating under uniform Republican control, the GOP would be increasing the debt ceiling. There’s nothing to bargain over. If some members of congress genuinely think that no increase in the debt ceiling is a superior options to raising it, then they’re entitled to be wrong. But there’s no reason that Obama should be trading votes with guys like John Boehner who know perfectly well that an increase is in order. This frames the issue correctly as one of whether or not Republicans who think an increase is warranted will nonetheless refuse to allow one in order to extract unrelated concessions.

The second prong, important for credibility, is to move to thinking about what happens as we reach the ceiling.

Moral Absolutes

Ruth Marcus:

Nothing justifies spending nearly $700 billion to extend tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans while cutting even more, $771 billion, of health care for the poorest.

Ruth Marcus is so silly. Why does she want all those Medicaid recipients driving around in their caddies and lounging on their hammocks?

Deep thought

I hadn't realized the last election was fought over funding for non-abortion related services of Planned Parenthood.

"No Compromise"

This is what the teabags want:

“I know they all go up there and want to compromise,” said Phil Spence, vice chairman of the 2nd Tuesday Constitution Group in Roanoke. “I’m against compromise. Either we have principle, or we don’t have principle.”

No compromise. The teabags cannot deign to negotiate with The Enemy. The views of Other Americans cannot be considered. We are not worthy of their "democracy".

Let the gushing begin

Paul Ryan, House Budget Committee Chair, and Ayn Rand lunatic, is proposing to phase out Medicare and Medicaid as we know it. To the tune of $5 trillion or so over the next 10 years, give or take. But our "liberal" media is pretty nonplussed about all of this at best, practically orgasmic at worst (see David Brooks today).

This NYT article by Robert Pear this morning is a case in point, although I'll admit it read a little better the second time than the first. Still, Pear refers to the whacking of these important programs and social safety-net pillars of our economy as merely a "fundamental rethinking of how the two programs work", excused as the need to "address the nation's fiscal challenges". As to the scope of the cuts, Pear understatedly reports that

the proposals on Medicaid and Medicare could shift some costs to beneficiaries and to the states.

Later, Pear discusses the plan's Medicaid component:

The Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that a Medicaid block grant, of the type proposed by Mr. Ryan and Ms. Rivlin, could save $180 billion over 10 years. House Republicans could save an additional $434 billion by eliminating the expansion in Medicaid eligibility scheduled to take place in 2014 under the new health care law.

Just think of it--if we could just whack that rather silly expansion in Medicaid provided by Obamacare we could save a whole nuther $434 bill. Wouldn't that be great?

The whole thing is a radical, drastic proposal to increase poverty, misery and economic inequality (as the plan also includes further cuts in the highest marginal tax rates).

Of course, if President Obama had not given away the store already in agreeing that "middle class" taxes can never be raised by any amount, ever, there might be the basis for offering an alternative to this nihilism. In the absence of that, in the "fierce urgency of now", our medial villagers will likely work double-overtime to assure us all how wonderful this fabulous budget blue print is.

Signs that the apocalypse is upon us, #801

Reality television star Donald Trump, still moving forward with presidential campaign plans, will headline a major Republican dinner in Iowa this June.

Maybe The Donald is jealous that that pizza company guy is getting all the attention.