Last Call

Republicans forget (or cannot care enough to grasp) that Americans are not the only people affected by childish GOP intransigence towards President Obama's New START treaty.  Daniel Larison:

One of the things that that has not received very much attention in connection with New START is the probable reaction to the treaty’s failure in Europe. European governments support U.S. and Russian arms reduction, and as the quote from August indicates it did not seem possible to them that the treaty might not succeed. The treaty was particularly important to non-nuclear European states that want to remove remaining U.S. nuclear weapons from their countries. As Bruno Lete’s report for the German Marshall Fund explained:

Any U.S.-Russian arms control agreement brings new opportunities to denuclearize the European continent. The strongest advocates of this idea are the European “non-nuclear weapon states” who are hosting U.S. warheads under a NATO flag. These countries—Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and Turkey—together host an estimated total of 150 to 220 U.S. tactical nuclear weapons. In 2006, the Belgian Senate passed a bill to remove U.S. weapons from Kleine Brogel Air Force Base. Last year, German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle singled out the issue of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in Germany during his first visits to NATO and the United States. Parliamentarians of all host countries have urged Obama to withdraw U.S. warheads from Europe, and foreign ministers have written to NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen asking for the issue to be placed higher on the alliance’s agenda. These European “abolitionists” fear that, without New START, Russia will be more reluctant to negotiate further arms limitations, giving fewer reasons for Washington to remove its weapons from Europe.

The news that U.S. tactical nuclear weapons will remain in Europe means that relations with these governments are about to become more difficult. The leaked document ahead of the Lisbon summit means that the Europeans that had hoped New START would lead to the withdrawal of these weapons would have been disappointed no matter what happened in the Senate here. 

But it's made all the worse by Republicans acting like fools.   Their nihilism has a price, ladies and gentlemen.

Played For A Fool

If Richard Wolffe's account of the health care battle is accurate, Obama really does need to fire his entire brain trust.  Sen. Chuck Grassley showed his hand early:

Just before [Grassley] returned to Iowa, he met with [Nancy] DeParle for another strategy session.
"If we do everything and resolve all the policy issues the way you want, with no public plan, do you think you'll be able to support the bill?"

Grassley looked away. "I don't know."

Grassley went to the Oval Office for a similar conversation with the president and his fellow Republican and Democratic negotiators. He asked Obama to say publicly that he would sign a bill without a public option of a government-run plan. Grassley believed this would be a reasonable, minimal demonstration of Obama's desire for a bipartisan deal. But the president declined to confront his own party base so explicitly. Obama asked Grassley the same question DeParle had posed: With every concession he wanted, could he support the bill?

"Probably not."

"Why not?" asked an exasperated Obama.

"Because I'd have to have a number of Republicans," said Grassley. "I'm not going to be the third of three Republicans. I've defined a bipartisan bill as broad-based support."

To recap, Chuck Grassley was never going to vote for health care reform, ever.  Obama spent months chasing Grassley's vote anyway.  The rest of the President's agenda fell by the wayside.  Obama let himself get played by the Republicans...and Obama's advisers let Obama get played too.  Literally, maybe a third of America is happy with the bill.  I'm not.  It could be better.  Knowing Obama wasted time pretending the GOP was ever going to accept the bill makes me all the more angry.

For God's sakes, man.  Wake up.  They want to expunge you from history.  There's no compromising with that.

Mister Eleven Of Thirteen

Democratic Rep. Charlie Rangel has been found guilty of 11 of the 13 ethics violations he faced, along with an uncertain future.

An eight-member congressional panel found Rangel, 80, guilty of 11 counts, including failing to report rental income, improper use of a rent-stabilized apartment and soliciting charitable donations from people with business before Congress.

The House of Representatives ethics committee will now consider punishment, which will likely be a public denunciation by the full House, possibly this week.

Rangel, of New York, resigned in March as chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee after being admonished for corporate-sponsored trips in violation of House gift rules.

Before giving up the gavel, he helped craft President Barack Obama's overhaul of the U.S. healthcare system.

Despite his ethical problems, Rangel's constituents want to keep their popular congressman, a former U.S. prosecutor and a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus first elected to the House in 1970.

He won a 21st two-year term with 80 percent of the vote in the November 2 election -- even as his fellow Democrats lost control of the House to Republicans.

Stranger things have happened.  It depends on what the ethics committee decides should be his punishment.  I think after 40 years however it's time for him to go...but I doubt he's going much of anywhere.

Black Ink, Red Ink, And Grey Ink

America's seniors voted overwhelmingly for "fiscal and social conservatism" from the Tea Party.  Well, it turns out the generation that stuck us with a bunch of Republican revanchists plans on leaving us a lot of other things too:  like their bills.

Retired Americans are racking up credit-card debt like never before, be it for vacations or medical expenses, and a surprising number have no intention of paying it off before they die.

Nearly 40 percent of retired Americans said they’ve accumulated credit-card debt in their twilight years — and aren’t worried about paying it off in their lifetime, according to a survey released by CESI Debt Solutions.

“At the end of the day, some people of a certain age say, ‘It’s too late in the game for me to do anything about it. I can’t win. So I’m just going to stop playing the game,’” said Neil Ellington, executive vice president at CESI.

This may come as a surprise to younger generations who thought their parents, the so-called Greatest Generation, were more responsible than youngsters raised in an era of easy money, a culture of credit. 

Why would this come as a surprise?  A bunch of people puttering around in their Medicare scooters screaming "Hands off my government checks!" and voting for Tea Party Republicans, and anyone's surprised that two in five of them plan to stick their kids with the bills?

That's the American Way, baby.

Hard Core GOP Economics

This month's core inflation numbers show -- surprise! -- continued deflation on big ticket items despite QE2.

The producer price index climbed 0.4 percent from the prior month, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington. Economists projected a 0.8 percent rise in October, according to the median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey. The so-called core measure, which excludes volatile food and energy costs, decreased 0.6 percent, the most since July 2006.

Companies have little scope to raise prices to recoup higher commodity costs as the expansion has cooled from the first half of 2010 and unemployment is stuck near 10 percent. The figures underscore the Federal Reserve’s decision this month to purchase another $600 billion in assets to help spur growth and reduce the risk of deflation, or a prolonged drop in prices.

“Wage pressure is very little and this has only limited potential for boosting price levels,” said Robert Dye, a senior economist at PNC Financial Services Group Inc. in Pittsburgh, who correctly forecast the gain in the PPI. “If you look at specific sectors like commodities, we are seeing some inflation.”

Producer prices were projected to rise 0.8 percent, according to the median of 76 forecasts in a Bloomberg News survey. Estimates ranged from gains of 0.4 percent to 1.4 percent, after a 0.4 percent rise in September.

Excluding volatile food and energy costs, economists in the survey had forecast a 0.1 percent gain for a third month. 

People aren't buying.  Demand will only be created by lowering unemployment and creating jobs.  And jobs will only be created if there's demand for products.  We're stuck in a spiral and the government's not going to be allowed to do much more of anything.

But think where prices would be without stimulus right now.  We'd be sliding down a deflationary slope if it wasn't for the additional money we've spent.  Meanwhile, companies continue to hoard cash.  Something's got to give, and soon.

So what does this mean politically?  There's no inflation.  There's plenty of speculation in commodities right now, just like 2 years ago (Remember $4 a gallon gas?) but that's being kept in check by the lousy economy.

Most importantly, it reveals what the GOP jobs plan is.

Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) is so displeased, in fact, that he plans to introduce legislation today that would entirely remove the Fed’s mandate to ensure full employment:

Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, a top House Republican, said he plans to introduce legislation Tuesday to end the Federal Reserve’s dual mandate, which requires the central bank to balance both employment and inflation concerns in its monetary policy…“The Fed’s dual mandate policy has failed,” Pence said in a statement. “For a record 18th straight month the nation’s unemployment rate is at or above 9.4 percent. It’s time for the Fed to be solely focused on price stability and not the recently announced QE2 which will monetize our debt and trigger inflation.”

Pence is joined in his push by Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), who released a statement today saying, “It is time that we work to clarify the mandate of the Federal Reserve. Providing our central bank with a clear and explicit focus on keeping inflation low will serve America better than the broader mandate approach we have today.”

The problem is inflation is so low that we're risking deflation, so the GOP argument is failing on its own numbers.  The argument is that inflation risk means we can't do anything for the unemployed...but there's no inflation.

Republicans just don't want to spend money on jobs.  That's their jobs program:  do nothing.  Refuse to do anything in Congress about unemployment, tie the Fed's hands so they can't do anything about unemployment, and then blame Democrats when unemployment fails to improve.

Keep that in mind.  No monetary policy, no fiscal policy, just tax cuts for the rich.  That'll solve everything.

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

So, not a couple days after authoring a controversial op-ed piece with the crazy advice to Obama that he should just refuse to run for re-election and "transcend partisan politics" by giving the Republicans 100% of what they want, Doug Schoen's polling outfit just happens to have a poll showing that only 26% of people think Obama will win re-election, prompting yet another op-ed from his partner Mark Penn that implores Obama to give Republicans 100% of what they want.

Funny how that little self-fulfilling narrative is shaping up there with the op-ed coming first, then the poll backing up their conclusions.  How convenient for them.

Great Murrow's Ghost!

Keith Olbermann's special comment in response to Ted Koppel is actually one of his better rants.

And therein lies the final irony to what Mr. Koppel wrote yesterday. We got here organically in large part because of Mr. Koppel. His prominence, you will recall, came when ABC News and Sports president Roone Arledge who never permitted business or show-business to interfere in his judgments and journalistic pledge of allegiance - when Arledge made the subjective, and eminently correct, decision that the hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy in Teheran merited half an hour or more each night of the network's time in 1979.

Advertisement | ad info

This was not the no-brainer retrospect may suggest. CBS and NBC and PBS certainly did not do it. Even when CNN signed-on in the middle of the next year, it did not do it. Arledge made his decision just four days after the hostages were seized, and stuck with the story until it ended, defying the conventional television wisdom and constantly pressing the government and questioning the official line.

And even after those hostages were freed more than a year later, the half an hour of news, now called "Nightline," continued. And each night, for 26 years, Mr. Koppel and his producers and his employers subjectively selected which, out of a million stories, would get the attention of his slice of American television for as much as half an hour at a time. Which story would be elevated and amplified, and which piles upon piles of stories would be postponed, or tabled, or discarded, or ignored.

Just as the story of Mr. Murrow's career emphasizes McCarthy but not the fact that the aftermath of McCarthy buried Murrow's career, the stories of Mr. Koppel's career will emphasize the light he so admirably shone on the Irahn hostages. Those stories will probably not emphasize that in 2002 and 2003 and 2004 and 2005 Mr. Koppel did not shine that same light on the decreasingly coherent excuses presented by the government of this nation for the war in Iraq.

Fourteen consecutive months of nightly half-hours on the travesty and tragedy of 52 hostages in Iran, but the utter falsehood and dishonesty of the process by which this country was committed to the wrong war, by which this country was committed to dishonesty, by which this country was committed to torture — about that Mr. Koppel, and everybody else in the dead "objective" television news business he so laments, about that Mr. Koppel could not be bothered to speak out. Where were they?

Worshiping before the false god of utter objectivity. The bitter irony that must some day occur to Mr. Koppel and the others of his time was that their choice to not look too deeply into Iraq, before or after it began, was itself just as evaluative, just as analytically-based, just as subjective as anything I say or do here each night.

I may ultimately be judged to have been wrong in what I am doing. Mr. Koppel does not have to wait. The kind of television journalism he eulogizes, failed this country because when truth was needed, all we got were facts most of which were lies anyway. The journalism failed, and those who practiced it failed, and Mr. Koppel failed.

I don't know that I'm doing it exactly right here. I'm trying. I have to. Because whatever that television news was before we now have to fix it.

Not too many journalists would have called Koppel out like this, and Olbermann is right about it being self-serving.  But Olbermann is certainly one who qualifies as being able to do so, especially on Iraq.  Using "We were just reporting the facts" as cover for Iraq is not anything that can be allowed to be repeated.

Just a little reminder about the Village.

Turn On The Lights, Watch The Roaches Scatter, Part 40

Hey Congress?  Welcome to 40 posts ago in this series.  Glad you could join us.

The Congressional Oversight Panel reports that the effects of the current foreclosure documentation crisis may have been underestimated.

In a new study entitled “Examining the Consequences of Mortgage Irregularities for Financial Stability and Foreclosure Mitigation” the panel states that “companies servicing $6.4 trillion in American mortgages may in some cases have bypassed legally required steps to foreclose on a home. The implications of these irregularities remain unclear, but it is possible that `robo-signing’ may have concealed deeper problems in the mortgage market that could potentially threaten financial stability and undermine foreclosure prevention efforts.”

The panel believes that the trouble may be even worse than that. “The risk stems from the possibility that the rapid growth of mortgage securitization in recent years may have outpaced the ability of the legal and financial system to track mortgage loan ownership. In essence, banks may be unable to prove that they own the mortgage loans they claim to own.”

The Congressional Oversight Panel has been known to be harsh in its analysis, but that does not mean that its analysis is not accurate. The group says as many as 33 million mortgages could be affected, an avalanche almost beyond imagination.

Well gosh, no foolin' boys?  You reckon ya'll might want to do something about this problem I've been going on about for the last couple of months now?  A whole third of mortgages in this country have questionable paperwork and nobody's sure who owns the note on the house, gee that might cause some problems down the road.

However, the larger point is if Congress has finally gotten it through their thick skulls that something is badly wrong here and it's a time bomb waiting to wipe out the banks (and not to mention screw tens of millions of American homeowners), it means that what Congress is doing will get a lot of scrutiny, making it less likely they sneak a bill through.

Obama and company are going to have to tackle this one head on.  Trillions in mortgages are at stake here. And the solution needs to be rather elegant.

Good luck with that.

Microcosm Of Madness

Meet freshman GOP Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland, who sums up the Tea Party movement better than I could ever do.

Maryland physician Andy Harris (R) just soundly defeated Frank Kratovil, one of the most endangered Democrats on Capitol Hill going into the November election. And he did it in large part by railing against 'Obamacare' and pledging to repeal Health Care Reform. But when he showed on Capitol Hill today for an orientation for incoming members of Congress and their staffs, he had a different question: Where's my government health care?

According to Glenn Thrush of Politico, Harris created a stir at the orientation meeting by demanding to know why he had to wait a month after he was sworn in in January for his government-subsidized health care to kick in. After responding in a huff, he even asked if there was some way he could buy into the government care in advance, seemingly thinking there might be a government program similar to the so-called 'public option' championed by progressive Democrats in 2009.

According to an unnamed congressional staffer quoted by Thrush, Harris stood up at the meeting "and asked the two ladies who were answering questions why it had to take so long, what he would do without 28 days of health care." 

And I'm sure he has plenty of constituents who haven't had affordable health care in 28 months, or much longer.  The guy who ran against Obamacare has no problem with government health care if he gets it.  He's a Congressman, after all.  The rest of his constituents are just stupid schmucks, and health care is their own problem.

Andy Harris got his.  The rest of you?  Tighten your belts more.  We've got health care for Congress to pay for.  And that's your entire Tea Party mindset right there.  We hate government!  Now where's our entitlement money, Medicare, and monthly check?

No Longer Wearing The Pants In The Family

Seems my state's Senior National Embarrassment Of A Senator, Mitch McConnell, is finding out he's no longer in charge of Senate Republicans or even really in the leadership anymore.

Almost immediately after the midterms, a contingent of Senate Republicans, led by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), set out to prohibit GOP members from using earmarks in the next Congress. Leading the other side was none other than Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).


Publicly, McConnell was insisting (accurately, by the way) that eliminating earmarks would be a meaningless gesture that wouldn't actually save any money. He called the very debate "exasperating." Privately, McConnell was "maneuvering behind the scenes" to defeat DeMint's gambit.

This afternoon, McConnell, apparently unable to persuade the caucus he ostensibly leads, threw in the towel.

The earmarks thing is pointless theater.  But it's pointless theater that Mitch McConnell lost within two weeks of the elections.  And it's pretty clear that he's no longer calling the shots.  If the Senate Republicans can buck McConnell on this, he's got no control over anyone over there.

My question is of course how the Republicans are going to get around this.  They'll find a way, and pretending that earmarks are more than chump change in the grand scheme of things is funny.  Republicans will still find a way to earmarks done, they'll just call it something else.

StupidiNews!

• Are the Beatles coming to iTunes in today's surprise Apple announcement?
• Scientists saying going to Mars could be relatively inexpensive as long as the trip is one-way.
• Some 50 million Americans had trouble getting food in 2009 and required some food assistance.
• Rising cotton prices may mean rising clothing prices at the store very soon.
• Hollywood studios are laying into resellers turning hit movies into "family friendly fare".

Last Call

This open letter to Helicopter Ben from the Wall Street Journal has been signed by a number of economists and would actually have some sort of merit if it wasn't from the All-Star team of conservative nincompoops who got us into this mess in the first place.

The Kroog opens up a can of whoopass...

Who knew that William Kristol was an expert on monetary policy? And who thought they’d gain credibility by adding someone who declared in 2005 that we needn’t worry about low savings, because Americans were doing fine thanks to rising home prices, then declared in 2007 that there was no reason to worry about the credit market?

And Invictus over at Barry's place levels an entire 55-gallon drum at the crowd.

Of course, one might level the same charge at another of the letter’s signers, former Bear Stearns economist David Malpass. BR has taken down Malpass here and here (to cite but two), but I don’t think Barry ever got to this one, in January 2008 (what we now know was the second month of the worst recession since the Great Depression):

Malpass’s message minimized the impact of both the ongoing U.S. housing recession and the credit crunch.

To an audience of guests representing top French financial institutions like BNP Paribas, Calyon and Natixis — all of which have been singed by the subprime crisis — Malpass sided with what appears to be a majority of U.S. economists in predicting that the U.S. economy would skirt the current crisis without falling into a formal recession.

“We will have a slowdown month by month for the next six months,” Malpass said. “But we will look back and we will say there was not a material recession.”

And here’s open letter co-author Kevin Hassett from the American Enterprise Institute (June 2008) in an article titled Seeing Recession When There’s None to Be Found, displaying near perfect partisan hackery, the lede of which was:

Are we in a recession? Despite what the media has led the public to believe, director of economic policy studies Kevin A. Hassett compares today’s economy to past recessions and finds that the current situation does not seem all that dire.

If a Democratic-leaning press can convince everyone that the economy is in recession, then it can influence the election. [...] The politically motivated pessimism, like the computer virus, can have real consequences.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t also note that Mr. Hassett was co-author of the timely (November 2000) howler Dow 36,000.

These guys got the last 4 years so incredibly wrong they shouldn't be allowed to ever handle a cash register again, and yet here they are with a group scolding of the Fed.

My niece has better macroeconomics skills.  Instead they fail upward to the WSJ.

Doing The People's Serious Business By Seriously Giving People The Business

Our new super-serious Republican Patriots controlling the House do not have time for touchy-feely non-serious liberal resolutions for post offices and National Whatever Awareness Days and congratulating sports teams!

Republicans might not pursue as many of the symbolic resolutions that traditionally dominate the congressional schedule, the No. 2 House Republican said Monday.

Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the likely incoming House majority leader, criticized many of the symbolic resolutions congratulating sports teams and other items as something in which the new Republican majority has no interest.

"The Republicans who make up our new majority did not run for Congress to provide a subsidy to a particular industry or interest; to continue the same federal programs and agencies that are failing our citizens and bankrupting our children and grandchildren; or to spend our time congratulating collegiate basketball teams for having a good season — even if we happened to be a fan," Cantor wrote Monday in an op-ed for AOL News.

The elimination of many of the symbolic votes could significantly free up the House schedule. Votes on those resolutions are fairly routine, and in the first day of the lame-duck Congress, the House has scheduled three such measures for a vote: "Recognizing Gail Abarbanel and the Rape Treatment Center," "Honoring the 30th Anniversary of the Bayh-Dole Act," and "Recognizing and honoring the 50th anniversary of Ruby Bridges desegregating a previously all-white public elementary school."

They want to focus on jobs, you see.  All they have to do is eliminate as much government spending as possible and this will somehow create millions of private sector jobs.  They're not exactly sure how that works yet, but this is why they need the extra time saved by not dealing with silly resolutions.  To recap, the GOP House Plan:

1) Eliminate resolutions congratulating sports teams.

2) ????

3)  Jobs!

Hey, it's what you voted for, remember?  They guys are serious, yo.  Serious enough to get the Fed out of the maximizing employment business.  Serious Republicans (and possible Presidential candidates) like Rep. Mike Pence:

""I appreciate the independence of the Fed, but I think it might be time to reconsider the dual mandate of the Fed, that was established in 1977. I think we ought to get the Fed back in the business of focusing on price stability and preventing inflation and not also on this dual mandate of full employment for the country. It's creating confusion here. Printing money is no substitute for sound fiscal policy. That's all we are really doing here and I think the reason you are seeing leaders across the country, and leaders across the world denouncing this action by the Fed is because they know it's going to be inflationary, and it seems to be an effort to monetize our debt."

We have to take the Fed out of the employment game so that Congress can step in and create jobs using that plan I outlined above. You know, so that Republicans can fix the economy. They'll get you the details on that just as soon as they can. In fact, they'll tell you after you vote the GOP into controlling all of Congress and the White House.

But it's a great plan. They've got top men working on it.

Top. Men.

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

Steven D reads the writing on the wall on Howie Kurtz's hit piece on Keith Olbermann:

Guess what I predict happens when the Comcast merger goes through. Keith will get fired or backed into another "confrontation" with "management" in which he will be sorely tempted to resign rather than change his show. They'll find some excuse, any excuse. Lawyer up now Keith. When network executives start leaking this crap to Kurtz it means the fix is in. 

Damn right.  Second Phill Griffin gets his excuse to axe Keith, he's gone.    But to what other "liberal cable news channel" does Olbermann go for his new show?

Not So Broadband

One wouldn't expect to think of the United States falling behind in technology, but Slate illustrates how easy it is to manipulate numbers and give two very different stories about where we stand.

Basically, what we have here is a gross misunderstanding about where the US stands in comparison to other countries with Internet access. If you look at the numbers and factor in citizens who don't have access or have extremely low access as the best available, we are 15th (27 broadband subscribers per 100 people). There are a lot of things that can skew these numbers, but the bottom line is we are not as equipped as one might think. Because of my own work-related knowledge, I know there are many people begging for broadband and cannot get it. Granted, we do have a far bigger area to cover than most countries, this is something we should watch and consider.

What I found most interesting was the author's mention of "broadband nutrition labels" that allow us to compare aspects of a service the the public is mostly ignorant about. Also, he suggests that the FCC should routinely collect data on this industry now, so we can have numbers to fall back on when trying solutions and scenarios. Right now it is mostly guesswork. I'm actually surprised, because I assumed that on some level this was already being done. It's time to at least collect the data, so we can look at trends and areas and prioritize where we can get the most benefit from expansion. But there is more to the Internet than YouTube, and access is only going to become more important to people as time passes. In another five to ten years, this gap will be much more damaging for the have-nots.