If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed. -- Benjamin Franklin
Newt Gingrich slammed the House GOP budget on Meet The Press this morning, telling interviewer David Gregory that replacing Medicare with a voucher system was too "radical" an approach. His words were by far the harshest of any major presidential candidate towards Paul Ryan's proposal on entitlements.
"I don't think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering," Gingrich said, calling the plan "too big a jump" for the country. "I don't think imposing radical change from the right or the left is a very good way for a free society to operate."
Gingrich has distanced himself from the Ryan plan in recent weeks, calling instead for a system that would preserve the current Medicare program alongside a voluntary, privatized version. But nothing he has said came close to the full frontal assault he unleashed on his own party's top priority in Congress.
He later went on to agree with the individual mandate for health care featured in both the Romney and Obama plans, coming not 36 hours or so after suggesting poll tests for voters and calling Obama the "food stamp President".
So is he appealing to the Tea Party or is he telling them to screw off? Because it seems like he's trying to have his cake and eat it too, trying to be a racist nutjob and a serious Washington candidate. You can't be both, Newton.
Whatever the policy debates, households at President Obama’s dividing line might be wealthy, but that doesn’t mean they feel wealthy.
On a Yahoo message board, a poster named Mason, who lives in Manhattan with two young children, said his household income was $262,000. “I understand the need to raise taxes,” he wrote, “but I don’t understand why people like us are lumped in with millionaires and billionaires.”
Andrew Ross Sorkin spends the entire article shaming you for thinking we can raise taxes on the rich. People making $250,000 a year aren't rich. Not at all. We can't increase their tax burden! Mean old Obama would make Mason pay higher taxes. That's theft! Throw the bum ou...oh wait.
The poster child for this story is a person named Mason, who live in Manhattan with 2 young children and reportedly makes $262,000 a year. Since the 3 percentage point increase in the tax rate would only apply to income above $250,000, or $12,000 of his income, Mason would have to pay an additional $400 a year in taxes.
This comes to approximately 0.16 percent of Mason's income. If he gets his entire income from working a 2000 hour year, then Mason will have to work about 3 more hours a year to cover this tax increase.
The tax cut extension means big bucks for the super-rich. LeBron James, who makes $14.5 million each year, will save more than $600,000 in taxes for this year. A family making $100,000 per year will pay about $6,000 less in taxes than if the tax cuts had expired. The average savings for all Americans, according to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, is about $2,800.
But if we make Mason pay $400 more after we cut his taxes by over $10,000, Mason will go Galt and withhold his productivity and America will disintegrate overnight. As a financial reporter, Sorkin should know better. But that's not the point of the article, now is it?
"Isn't it great that we live in a country where destroying the American economy is merely socially and morally horrific rather than actually illegal? Here's a long list of the truly awful things the main figures in the financial crisis did, and they cost this great country trillions of dollars and now you little people will have to spend the rest of your lives paying for it as we demand you must bear the brunt of the coming austerity cuts. But really, if we had criminalized any of this, what kind of democracy could we call ourselves?"
To prosecute white-collar crime is right and proper, and a necessary aspect of deterrence. But trials are meant to deter crime -- not to deter home foreclosures or economic downturns. And to look for criminality as the supposed source of the crisis is to misread its origins badly.
Taking an apple is illegal. Taking an entire economy is free market capitalism at its finest.
It appears that Bugs Bunny is about to be rebooted. In a new project airing on Cartoon Network, Bugs and friends will be coming out in what is described as a "Seinfeld-like" sitcom. Instead of shorts, there will be continuing storylines and (gasp) character development over a long curve. Full episodes will cover a huge spread of characters, but center around the main cast.
This could be an epic fail, but I am intrigued. It's taking a classic and putting a fresh spin on it, which can be the most epic failure ever. However, it has the potential to be great stuff, and I miss my childhood pal. I am cautiously optimistic, and will blog an immediate review as soon as I catch the debut
NBC took a pass on the Wonder Woman pilot. There was some serious criticism of the choice for the leading role, and her costume. The vinyl atrocity was bad, and I continue to hope that a future attempt brings Diana to life so we can enjoy her, not mock her. It would take a lot to make a convincing story, but because she is a personal favorite of mine, I always feel a little excited when I hear of an attempt.
I promise not to do this every Sunday morning — it only seems like I will — but take a look at today’s guest lists for the five major Sunday shows.
* NBC’s “Meet the Press”: Disgraced former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.)
* CBS’s “Face the Nation”: House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio)
* ABC’s “This Week”: South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R)
* Fox News’ “Fox News Sunday”: Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.)
* CNN’s “State of the Union”: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), former Bush administration officials Dennis Blair and John Negroponte
For those keeping score at home, that’s two Republican presidential candidates, two House Republican leaders, two Senate Republican leaders, one Republican governor, two Bush administration officials, and one Democrat.
Liberal media, indeed.
And I'm honestly surprised it's not another John McCain appearance. It's not like the Sunday shows are going out of their way to represent the minority party view in Washington, either...because when Republicans controlled both Congress and the White House, Democrats were equally as ignored week after week. Even in 2009 and 2010, when Democrats controlled Congress and the White House, it was still Republicans all over the Sunday airwaves. The same is clearly true now.
A 8-1 ratio for any party is just ridiculous, but it's become the norm now. You wonder why Paul Ryan and Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich are considered "serious" politicos in 2011? This is why.
The Kroog makes the case for Obama resisting the Republican blackmail on the debt ceiling, but doesn't see a way out of not defaulting.
In that case, however, what should Obama do? My answer is that despite all that, he must not let himself be blackmailed.
Partly that’s because once he gives in the first time, the blackmail will never stop. Once the crazies know that they can get whatever they want by threatening to blow up the economy, they’ll just keep demanding more and more. Obama just can’t let that dynamic get started without setting up an even worse crash down the road.
Plus, the hard right may claim that it’s worried about deficits, but it’s actually deeply fiscally irresponsible. Realistically, the Ryan plan would sharply increase the deficit — because its spending cuts are in many cases impossible, and its supposed revenue neutrality is a sham. So giving in to the right would be just as much a signal of banana-republic-hood as a temporary default.
This is going to be very ugly. But I don’t think there’s any way to avoid taking it all the way to the edge, and possibly over it.
And he's right. The Tea Party has made it clear that any Republican who votes for raising the debt ceiling for any reason will be the first up against the wall come primary season. I was convinced that the Powers That Be would never allow the Republicans to wreck the treasury bond market. But it looks like they're now more than happy to do so if it means finishing the transfer of the rest of the country's wealth to the top 1%.
And here's the problem: we are a banana republic. We have a higher instance of income inequality than two-thirds of the countries on earth, ranking us with Cameroon and Uganda. America has worse income inequality than countries like Greece, Ireland, or Spain. It's higher than India or Kenya. Hell, it's higher than Tunisia, Ivory Coast, or Egypt. Double hell, we have a far more unequal income distribution than Iran or China.
And now Republicans are convincing us that our economy is unsustainable. The only reason it is is because we refuse to make the wealthy pay taxes on their wealth OR their income. We lowered both on the wealthy almost ten years ago. What happened to our economy as a result? The Gini index for the US is higher now than it was during the Great Depression.
Think about that. We live in the New Gilded Age. The wealthiest Americans live lives we can't even dream of. The other 300 million of us? We exist to put money in their pockets. And now the Republicans are convincing us that the only solution is that we have to make crushing cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security or else the country will collapse.
These are the same people who said cutting taxes would be a rising tide that lifted all boats. Instead we got the worst financial crisis in generations. So why would we believe the Republicans now? Because FOX News tells us to?
Nope. I was wrong. He's not running. The one guy that actually could have survived the primary and beaten Obama (granted, he had the best chance of the various snowballs in hell) is not going to run after all.
Although Huckabee did not tip his hand as to his final decision, an email obtained by Time's Mark Halperin asked his friends: "Please be patient if I don't respond immediately to an email because I expect that once I pull the trigger Saturday night, things will get even crazier, as if that's possible."
The former Arkansas governor frequently leads in national polls of Republican primary voters and, with Haley Barbour not running, would be the only candidate with a strong claim to the Southern voters that form the backbone of the party. Despite being significantly outspent in 2008, he won an upset victory in the Iowa caucuses and won large shares of the vote in a number of other states, including South Carolina.
Huckabee's top advisor, Ed Rollins, told ABC News that he does not believe he Huckabee will enter the race. But he added that "if he announced tomorrow night, on Monday I could push the button and the campaign would start to unfold."
In his e-mail, Huckabee said that he had only come to his final decision, whatever it may be, at the last minute.
LeBron Huckabee? Really? He's not fooling anyone of course he's going to run. All he has to do is keep his mouth shut until the competition self-immolates, and he wins by default. Of course that won't be hard with Newt Gingrich immediately blowing himself up by calling Obama "the most successful food stamp President ever" competing with Ron Paul for the title of "biggest racist asshole in the Republican Party". Mitt will get zapped for MassCare, and that pretty much leaves Huckabee by default.
As I mentioned Friday, Google Blogger blew the hell up and tons of us lost everything between Wednesday afternoon and Friday morning. Google restored nearly all of it, and the blog here is back to normal.
Ann Althouse wasn't so lucky. As annoying as I find her, her blog is completely gone right now, and nobody deserves that kind of horrible luck. As an IT professional for a Fortune 500 company, I understand the problems of rolling out upgrades in an enterprise environment and watching them completely foul things up, then having to roll things back. Data gets damaged and has to be restored, and it takes a while...I know, it's my job to deal with things like that. Google is working to restore her blog. It happens and it sucks, but if anybody on Earth would have good data recovery/disaster recovery protocols, it's freaking Google.
You know, I'm beginning to suspect that there's some behind-the-scenes campaign to report my blog as abusive. People who hate/fear the Althouse blog could make a loud noise to Google.
Moe Lane at Redstate declares it's now the new Right Wing Poutrage Of The Weekend.
Well, isn’t this interesting: apparently Blogger/Google has decided to remove Ann Althouse’s blog. They’re also being neither particularly helpful in either explaining why, nor sounding particularly sympathetic that it’s been taken down, either.
Wonder if this has anything to do with Ann’s objective (and thus, anti-administration) coverage of the Wisconsin protests? I certainly hope that it has nothing to do with that…
See, now it was deliberate. No mention of the massive crash that took down all blogs for 30 hours. Instapotatohead goes from there:
See, now it was deliberate because "Google thought it was a spam blog". And now the Right Wing Noise Machine has gone fully automatic into "Google: Evil, Incompetent, Or Both?"...
And so, yet another RWNJ meme is born. Only the interference of these brave legal eagles stopped Google from secretly killing Althouse's blog. Conservatives have defeated Obama's techno-thug minions at Google with Real Ultimate Power or something. I'm sure the campaign to go Galt and abandon Blogger and "put them out of business" is already underway...
Paranoia is awesome. And the right? Man, they are swimming in it. Ann Althouse is the single most important voice in conservative blogging ever, so of course Google would mastermind a huge system outage to provide cover to remove her blog by "accident" because she's SO GODDAMN POWERFUL. She's been mentioned in the NY Times.
The role of Oklahoma GOP Sen. Tom Coburn in the John Ensign scandal may be the most interesting part of the story. As I explained yesterday, Ensign ran for the hills and resigned barely ahead of the release of the ethics report that recommended his expulsion from the US Senate. But, as Rachel Maddow explains, Coburn is still in the Senate even after doing crazy nonsense like this:
Sen. Coburn denied vehemently on a number of occasions that he played any role in this when the scandal broke. Then he turned state's evidence against Ensign and cooperated with the FBI and the ethics investigation. He swore that as an ordained minister and doctor (he's a OB/GYN) that he would never talk about "privileged" information. Then he spilled his guts to the Feds.
And he admitted to the Feds that he was the negotiator between Ensign and the Hamptons, negotiating how much money it would take to make the Hamptons go away.
So my question is this: Why is Sen. Tom Coburn still senator? If you're an Oklahoman, is this the guy you want representing your state?
Ron, like his son, said that his statement about the Civil Rights Act has nothing to do with the law's intentions -- i.e. ending institutionalized discrimination in a wide swath of American life, including in the public accommodations where African Americans were denied service at the height of the Jim Crow era. Paul said he would vote against the law because it imposed unfair rules on what private business owners can and can't do on their own property. Essentially, they should be free to discriminate if they wish, Paul says, however distasteful that may be.
Paul:
I believe that property rights should be protected. Your right to be on TV is protected by property rights because somebody owns that station. I can't walk into your station. So right of freedom of speech is protected by property. The right of your church is protected by property. So people should honor and protect it. This gimmick, Chris, it's off the wall when you say I'm for property rights and states rights therefore I'm a racist. That's just outlandish.
Paul added that any talk of the segregated South that the Civil Rights Act aimed to reform is too old to be relevant anyway, saying the specter of Whites Only signs is "ancient history."
Besides, Paul says that the Jim Crow laws would have ended without the Civil Rights Act anyway, a view held by many libertarians who believe the free markets solve social problems.
Such an eerily clinical dismissal of the struggle of minorities in this country. The problem is not that Ron Paul is for property rights. It's that he's for property rights trumping civil rights, free speech rights, and pretty much the entire Bill of Rights as well.
But as awful as that is, it's Ron Paul presuming to tell me that the trials and tribulations throughout history of black folk like myself make him too damn uncomfortable and that he wants me to just get over it already that really seals the deal for me. Oh, and that I should be enlightened enough to accept that the right to be a racist supersedes my right not to put up with racist assholes, should I be on the piece of property the racist asshole in question owns.
Well, this blog is my intellectual property, so Ron Paul shouldn't have too much of a problem with me calling him a racist asshole on my own blog. Except you know, he's too busy going on the teevee and saying he's not a racist for promoting the idea that it's okay to be racist.
But the best part is if the entire rest of the known universe says "Ron Paul, you're a racist asshole" then we are enslaving Ron Paul because we're impinging on his right to be a racist asshole (who is magically not a racist because SHUT UP THAT'S WHY. Oy.)
I've said before that Ron Paul is 30% makes sense and 70% crazy asshole. Forget the 30%. He's just a crazy asshole. Start the clown car.
Me? I'm carrying around a square yard of turf from now on so I can unroll it, stand on it, declare it my property, and then tell any Paultards in earshot that I win all arguments because my property rights defeat anything else they have.
That's what former Reagan OMB John Cogan believes Social Security and Medicare have created in America: a country of senior-citizen millionaire welfare queens driving Cadillacs at 20 MPH and really, really old bucks gumming T-bone steaks. His solution to this horrible socialism? The Ryan Unicorn Plan, of course. But Cogan's screed reveals the deeper pathology of the conservative mind...
To fix Social Security, Congress should start by limiting the increase in benefits of future retirees to the rate of inflation. Congress should then gradually raise Social Security's normal retirement age. Congress should also allow younger workers to invest a portion of their payroll taxes—and create more incentives for them to invest their earnings—in safe, broadly-diversified, stock and bond funds. This would allow younger workers to become millionaires through their own hard work and thrift.
To fix Medicare, we must move away from the current system of fee-for-services and low copayments. First and foremost, copayments should be increased significantly. Medicare recipients need to have more skin in the game if they are to become cost-conscious medical consumers.
The higher copayments can be offset by reducing Medicare premiums and offering more Medicare health plan choices. Rep. Paul Ryan's proposal—to provide fixed annual grants to enable Medicare recipients to buy an affordable private insurance plan—is a fiscally sound way to achieve this outcome. Competition among providers, not government-administered prices and government boards of experts to determine coverage, is the best way to ensure high quality and reasonably priced health care.
So that's the first half of the plan: privatize Social Security, cut future benefits, and jack up the retirement age to 70, 72, 75 and then privatize Medicare, cut benefits, and jack up co-payments. No more guarantees, seniors. You're on your own. Death panels? more like Death giant committees. But that's standard, boilerplate Conservative stuff. Pay attention to the reasons why Cogan says we need to cut off seniors:
Many of the million-dollar couples believe they rightfully deserve the benefits they have been promised. They have, after all, spent all of their working years paying into Social Security and Medicare. And true enough, the typical 66-year old couple and their employers, on their behalf, have contributed nearly $500,000 in payroll taxes (in today's dollars) toward these benefits during their working careers.
But regardless of how much they have contributed, the hard reality is that the federal government has already spent it. No matter how deserving they are, it is younger generations of workers who have to come up with the money.
So today's seniors need to consider how they want the script for "The Millionaire" sequel to be written: There's a knock at the door. We now know that on the other side there's a check for a million dollars. When the door opens, do we really want to see our children, under the commanding gaze of Uncle Sam, presenting us with that check?
The shame and guilt of being on welfare, that's the weapon of choice here. Cogan wants you to feel awful that the benefits the government promised you when it took taxes out of your paycheck for 45 years might actually get paid back, because if you take them, you hate America's children. Conservatives are rushing to attach as much stigma as possible to Social Security and Medicare as evil welfare that "Real Americans" would never take.
Seniors and especially baby boomers heading into retirement, like people my parents' age, are the new Welfare Queens. And the Republicans have declared all out war on them, in an effort to split the country and have us at each other's throats while they loot the country with more tax breaks for the richest Americans. They hope you're stupid enough not to notice.
Louisiana residents are being warned today: The Army Corps of Engineers will open the Morganza spillway along the Mississippi River by Sunday, flooding millions of acres of rural farmland and sparing big cities like Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
"This is a historic amount of water," Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said.
"Some people may think, 'Well, the house is not underwater yet,'" Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said. "But they don't know the road is closed, may become closed. So if in doubt, people should get out. We want people to evacuated, not have to be rescued."
As much as 25 feet of water will spill out over 100 miles, displacing 2,500 people. In addition, 22,500 people and 11,000 structures in the backwater areas could be flooded.
If the gates remained closed and the levees along the Mississippi failed, Baton Rouge and New Orleans could both be flooded -- leaving a disaster worse than Katrina.
The bigger problem (well, for the people who aren't in Louisiana anyway) is that there are a number of major oil refineries along the river from New Orleans to Baton Rouge. If the Morganza spillway isn't enough to stop the flooding, then here in the Midwest, gas prices will quickly end up north of $5, if not $6 or more a gallon. As it is, there are plenty of smaller refineries in the area south of Baton Rouge, as well as thousands of people and Morgan City, Louisiana.
And all that water is heading right down their streets. It's being done to spare Baton Rouge and NOLA. But the reality is this is a 100-year plus flood, folks. We're talking 25 feet of water into a pair of cities that are below sea level. If the levees fail anywhere on the east bank of the main river, it's going to make Katrina's flooding look like a pool party in comparison.
Next week is going to be bad, folks. If you thought the flooding so far was gruesome, just wait a few days.
Even with the Biden Administration adults in charge and Democrats in control on Congress (barely), there remains an increasingly crumbling global economy imperiling the world, rising nationalism and deadly racism across Europe and Asia, a seemingly endless war against terror, a federal government nobody trusts or believes in, global climate change putting us on the brink of destruction and a Village media that barely does its job on even the best day.
Needless to say there's a lot of Stupid out there when we need solutions. Dangerous levels of Stupid.
Into the fray, dear Reader. Tray tables, crash helmets, arms inside blog at all times.
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