So What's The Progressive Answer To The Catfood Commission?

Glad you asked.  We've seen the conservative plans and the Catfood Commission.  What do liberals want to do to fix our problems?  Not one but two plans will be unveiled over the next two days.

On Monday, the progressive policy organizations Demos, the Economic Policy Institute and the Century Foundation will unveil a liberal blueprint. Their report says that unlike the centrist plans, this version “stabilizes debt as a share of the economy without demanding draconian cuts to national investments or to vital safety net programs.” It would, however, leave the debt at a higher level as a share of the economy than the centrist plans.

On Tuesday, a separate coalition of liberal groups, economists and labor leaders — the Citizens’ Commission on Jobs, Deficits and America’s Economic Future — will release a similar outline.

Both plans are comparable to one recently proposed by Representative Jan Schakowsky, a liberal Democrat from Illinois who is a member of the Bowles-Simpson commission. Ms. Schakowsky opposed the chairmen’s draft as too hard on the middle class. 

There are a number of points to the plans:

• Cuts wouldn't start until 2015, with near-term stimulus in 2012 and increased spending in infrastructure to directly attack unemployment.
• Deeper military spending cuts after 2015.
• Long-term savings from health care reform, including the public option to lower costs.
• Raise the cap on Social Security taxable income to 90%.
• Closing tax loopholes, a new surcharge on incomes above $1 million, cap and trade and a gas tax, and taxing financial transactions.

It wouldn't lower the deficit as quickly of course, but it would begin to do so by a combination of lower military spending and higher taxes.  It also accomplishes all this without Social Security benefit cuts too, but the gas tax is troubling.  Still, all the plans so far have called for raising the federal gas tax, so it's not like that won't happen.

I'm not excited about the plan (public option is nice however) but it's better than what we've seen so far.  Too bad the plan has zero chance.

Any Portugal In A Storm, Part 2

Roubini says Portugal should make a bailout deal now while the mechanism is in place, and the costs of doing so are lower than waiting to drag out the process out of pride.

Roubini, a professor of economics at New York University who predicted the financial crisis, told daily paper Diario Economico it is "increasingly likely" Portugal will require international assistance.

He said in an interview published Monday there are ample funds to shore up Portugal, one of the euro zone's smaller countries which contributes less than 2 percent to the 16-nation bloc's gross domestic product.

Roubini said Portugal is approaching "a critical point" due to it high debt load and weak growth.

All those Greek and Irish protestations and assurances that everything was fine ended up being pointless.  Portugal is clearly next on the list and moving to get ahead of the bond traders can get the country a better deal now rather than dragging it out and causing chaos.

Of course, Portugal won't do that.  They'll deny needing a bailout right up until the point they take it anyway.

StupidiNews!

• South Korea has deployed more artillery and rocket positions on Yeonpyeong Island and is vowing a "firm" response to North Korean belligerence.
• Ahead of an international scientific conference on climate change tomorrow, scientists are warning three billion people could lose access to water worldwide due to climate change.
• Haiti's elections yesterday continue to be marred by allegations of massive fraud and large protests.
• Ireland has agreed to a $113 billion bailout deal and has been given seven years to repay.
• Scientists continue to study Antarctic ice sheets to determine why the variance in local sea levels when a sheet breaks off.

Last Call

The 2012 field may have just gotten a bit more crowded.

John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said Sunday he's "considering" a run.

"Yes, I am considering it," Bolton told conservative radio show host Aaron Klein's on WABC in New York. "If I did run, and I haven't made a decision, I have never run for office one way or the other, so it would be a pretty big decision to do it."

Bolton, who serves as a Fox News commentator, said he's concerned that the national discourse does not include talk of foreign policy.

"I'm very concerned about the direction of national security policy," Bolton said. "I'm concerned that we hardly talk about it at national-level debates in the mainstream media."

That's because we have much larger national problems right now with our economy.  Perhaps Bolton's Mustache will handle the domestic policy.  To his credit, Bolton can find Iraq and Iran on a world map, but he would have to be immediately considered to be the candidate most likely to get us into a third war with Iran within milliseconds after taking office.

I would have to wonder if any of the WikiLeaks cables have anything to do with Bolton.  Certainly at least some of the documents would have to involve our one-time UN Ambassador.

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

White House on TSA patdowns: 

"Our goal must to be maximize protection and security and minimize inconvenience and invasiveness.  It's not an easy task."

White House on WikiLeaks diplomatic cable leaks:

"These cables could compromise private discussions with foreign governments and opposition leaders, and when the substance of private conversations is printed on the front pages of newspapers across the world, it can deeply impact not only U.S. foreign policy interests, but those of our allies and friends around the world."

Our privacy doesn't matter so much so you shouldn't expect it.  White House's privacy?  How dare anyone disrespect that?

Wheelin', Dealin', and Leakin'

The NY Times has launched its WikiLeaks "Cablegate" story, and there's quite a bit of international silliness going on that reads more like high school than high diplomacy.  It's the kind of stuff you'd expect:  the US throwing its weight around with Germany on human rights, various strongmen dictators acting like spoiled brats, an odd friendship between Russia's Putin and Italy's Berlusconi, Syria selling weapons to Hezbollah, China trying to hack everybody, corruption in Afghanistan's government, and this little piece of well-timed face-palmage:

Gaming out an eventual collapse of North Korea: American and South Korean officials have discussed the prospects for a unified Korea, should the North’s economic troubles and political transition lead the state to implode. The South Koreans even considered commercial inducements to China, according to the American ambassador to Seoul. She told Washington in February that South Korean officials believe that the right business deals would “help salve” China’s “concerns about living with a reunified Korea” that is in a “benign alliance” with the United States. 

Hey, there's even stuff in there about pre-revolution Tehran in '79 and Noriega before the US invasion of Panama in '89.  Best part so far that needs to end up in a James Bond film:

In a 2006 account, a wide-eyed American diplomat describes the lavish wedding of a well-connected couple in Dagestan, in Russia’s Caucasus, where one guest is the strongman who runs the war-ravaged Russian republic of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov.

The diplomat tells of drunken guests throwing $100 bills at child dancers, and nighttime water-scooter jaunts on the Caspian Sea.

“The dancers probably picked upwards of USD 5000 off the cobblestones,” the diplomat wrote. The host later tells him that Ramzan Kadyrov “had brought the happy couple ‘a five-kilo lump of gold’ as his wedding present.” 

Beats an envelope of cash and a bread machine.

Turning The Other Cheek

So glad we could show as a country that we are above the attempted barbarism of Islamic extremism by not resorting to petty revenge and recriminating violence, and that the terrorists have failed to win because we refuse to give into their escalating spiral of fear and anger.

Oh wait.  What the hell am I talking about.  Of course we're a bunch of violent idiots.

Arson caused a fire at an Islamic center on Sunday that was the occasional place of worship for a Somali-born teen who two days ago was arrested on charges of plotting a terror attack in Portland, authorities said.


Carla Pusateri, a fire prevention officer for the Corvallis Fire Department, said the fire at the Salman Al-Farisi Islamic Center was set early Sunday morning. She says "quite a bit of evidence" was left at the scene, which led her to believe the fire was intentionally set.

No injuries have been reported.

The Islamic center was frequented by Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a 19-year-old held on charges of plotting to carry out a terror attack at a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland on Friday.

Yosof Wanly, imam at the center, said 80 percent of the center's office was burned, but the worship areas were untouched.

Wanly said he has been advised by friends to take his family out of their home, and is debating whether to do so.

I know, I know, it's all an AQ plot to make us look like a bunch of frothing, rabid nutjobs because nobody would ever plan to take out their anger on the entire Muslim community in Oregon or elsewhere in the US, right?  They torched the center on purpose, it was a George Soros false flag operation to hurt the Tea Party, yadda yadda.

God this stuff makes my head hurt.

A Stimulating Debate

The CBO's latest numbers on the stimulus are out, and the fact it is worked:

ABC News reports that the Congressional Budget Office this week released its latest report on the effects of the Recovery Act and found that it “raised the GDP, lowered unemployment, and increased the number of people with jobs.” According to the report, CBO estimates that the Recovery Act’s policies in the third quarter of the calendar year 2010 had the following effects (emphasis added):

– They raised real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) by between 1.4 percent and 4.1 percent,

– Lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.8 percentage points and 2.0 percentage points,

– Increased the number of people employed by between 1.4 million and 3.6 million, and,

– Increased the number of full-time-equivalent jobs by 2.0 million to 5.2 million compared with what would have occurred otherwise (see Table 1). (Increases in FTE jobs include shifts from part-time to full-time work or overtime and are thus generally larger than increases in the number of employed workers).

But I know, I know, CBO numbers don't count unless there's a Republican in the White House because it might produce figures that don't support the Republican narrative of reality.  The reality is however that the stimulus is wearing off and winding down as we head into 2011, and the GOP is more than happy to make sure nothing further is done and to blame Obama once the economy gets worse next year (as it most certainly will.)

They're counting on you buying the argument that we can't have any additional water to put out the fire now because it might hurt crops later.

Shop Till The Numbers Drop

Preliminary Black Friday spending numbers are in, and they're virtually no improvement over last year.

Preliminary reports of Black Friday sales are starting to come in. The verdict so far: The crowds were bigger and people walked away with arms full of goodies, but shoppers spent only modestly more this year.

With shoppers scooping up discounted items, total sales rose a slight 0.3% over last year to $10.7 billion, while customer traffic increased 2.2%, according to ShopperTrak, which records sales and customer traffic at more than 70,000 stores and malls.

That's about the same annual sales increase in Black Friday sales as stores saw in 2009.

Stores may have cannibalized some Black Friday sales by prodding shoppers with doorbuster-like deals weeks in advance, said ShopperTrak founder Bill Martin.

Indeed, in the first two weeks of November, sales were up 6.1% and 6.2%, according to ShopperTrak.

"Retailers were very conscious of driving traffic early in November, and in doing so some might have thinned Black Friday spending a bit," Martin said in a statement.

So monthly numbers were up, especially for the first two weeks of November.  But Black Friday numbers went nowhere.  People are expecting great deals outside of the day after Thanksgiving, and retailers are providing them, extending deals to early November and even Thanksgiving Day itself.  Those numbers aren't very encouraging.  What it means is that there's heavy pressure on retailers to lower prices because people aren't buying otherwise, and that shoppers are expecting retailers to discount further.

Not a good sign for economic recovery.

Correlation Does Not Equal Causation

Texas House Republican Lamar Smith takes to the Washington Post to argue that because Democrats didn't quite capture the same level of the Latino vote as they did in 2006 and 2008, that Latinos are now solidly in the R column come election time.

What about the much-trumpeted victories of Reid, Boxer, Gov.-elect Jerry Brown (D-Calif.) and Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.)? Their Republican opponents lost not because they underperformed among Hispanic voters but because they underperformed among white voters. National exit polls reported by CNN indicated that Republican U.S. House candidates received 60 percent of the white vote overall. But Fiorina and Angle won only 52 percent of the white vote, Ken Buck in Colorado won only 51 percent and California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman won only 50 percent of the white vote. Had each received 60 percent of the white vote, they all would have won.


There was a story in the 2010 midterms that many in the media missed. Dalmia found that "one of the hugely under-reported stories of this election is that Republicans fielded far more minority candidates than Democrats - and they won by touting a restrictionist agenda, proof positive that skin color - and even immigration status - are not always correlated with [illegal] immigration views."

Univision anchor Jorge Ramos, one of the most trusted commentators on Spanish-language television, concluded that "the United States moved to the right, and Latino politicians did so too - among them, a new generation of Hispanic Republicans who support policies that are essentially opposed to the undocumented immigrants in this country." 

And yes, Latino voters did slide towards the right in 2010, along with nearly every other group, by a few percentage points.  But not even Jennifer Rubin is buying Rep. Smith's theory.

But we should add a couple of caveats. First, Smith notes that Gov. Jan Brewer got 28 percent of the vote, a good result, he suggests, since in 2006 the GOP candidate got 26 percent. Umm … I don’t think barely exceeding the vote totals for 2006, a wipe-out year for the Republicans, should be the goal for the GOP. (Moreover, the percentage of voters who are Hispanic has been increasing in each election, so Republicans will need to do better with each election if they are to retain that share of the general electorate.) And while Rick Perry got 38 percent of the Hispanic vote, he got 55 percent of the overall electorate, suggesting that a huge gap still remains in the GOP’s appeal to Hispanics.

Second, Smith ignores the real issues: tone, rhetoric, and position on legal immigration. Marco Rubio believes in border control, but his life story is built around the immigrant experience, and he eschews inflammatory language that has plagued Republicans like Tom Tancredo. As Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell pointed out to me a few years ago, if the Republicans want to continue to make progress among Hispanic voters, they need to object to the “illegal” part, not the “immigration” part, of the equation.

Now both Smith and Rubin declare that the small rightward slide has to be a product of Republican policies on immigration.  What hasn't occurred to either one of them is that Occam's Razor suggests the far more likely causation for the rightward shift is that some Latino voters that backed the Dems in 2006 and especially 2008 stayed home in 2010 and did not vote at all because the Democrats failed to deliver on comprehensive national immigration legislation.

The Democrats did deliver on a number of things over the last two years.  But even I freely admit Obama over-promised and underperformed, and even then it was the Senate that became the graveyard of so much legislation that got through the House, shepherded by the wildly effective Nancy Pelosi.  She did her job.  She passed legislation in the House.  Literally hundreds of House bills will die in the Senate in six weeks.  Maybe a handful of them will be passed in lame duck.

But Pelosi failed to get immigration reform even through the House during the 111th Congress.  Rep Luis Gutierrez's bill was dead by July, and the DREAM Act that would give immigrants a path to citizenship by serving our country in the military is being tied up by Republicans.  The DREAM Act does have a shot and passing it would go a long way towards reversing the slide of Latino voters to the Republican party, which is exactly why it's being tied up by Republicans.

They know that if they can kill it in the lame duck, it will never pass with a Republican-controlled House.  Democrats are asking Latino voters to take the long view to stick with them, but it's increasingly difficult to do that when Republicans at the state level are making things worse for Latinos in the absence of a national immigration bill...oh, and there's the economy where Latino and African-American minorities in general are facing far higher unemployment rates than the national average.  Surely that is contributing to the slide towards the GOP as well.

Unless the Dems can deliver on the DREAM Act in the lame duck, Smith is right that the slide will continue towards the Republicans, despite not actually naming the reason why.

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

If Obama does not constantly mention his Christianity and chooses to stay above the pernicious rumors about his faith, nearly 1 in 5 Americans choose to believe he is a Muslim. 

These are the unanswered, possibly unanswerable, questions in a new report released today based on surveys analyzing the mid-term elections by the Public Religion Research Institute and The Brookings Institution.

Religion was not a major factor in the economics-dominated vote but views on God, faith, politics, moral issues in the public square and on Islam still have significant impact. And for President Obama, the results track a potentially troubling faith-gap between him and most Americans, a "religion dilemma," the report says.

Most Americans (51%) say President Obama has religious beliefs somewhat or very different than their own while 40% say their views are somewhat or very similar, according to the American Values Survey of 1,494 Americans by the PRRI.

If he does mention his strong Christian faith, he is attacked for being arrogant because a "real Christian" has "no need" to proclaim his faith to others, or people simply don't believe him.

Obama has been dogged by criticism about his faith since he took office. A poll released in late August showed that a growing number of Americans — one in five, up from one in ten in March — say he is a Muslim.

When asked if he prays himself, the president said: "I do. Every night."


He also says that he reads the Bible, and, asked to explain why so many Americans deny that he is a Christian, blamed the internet.

"Well, you know, the Internet has a powerful effect these days, and so, the way rumors can take on a life of their own ends up being very powerful," he said.

Millions of our friends and neighbors will hate Obama no matter what he does.  I honestly don't understand how he copes with it, and I'm a large African-American man who has seen more than his fair share of irrational hatred growing up in North Carolina.  When before has our President ever, every had his faith so openly questioned as being the enemy?  Even our first Catholic President, John F Kennedy, was able to put aside criticisms of his faith.

People keep telling me Obama's race has nothing to do with it.  And no offense, but every person I've heard that from happens to be white.

Irish Eyes Are Crying, Part 9

Meanwhile, Ireland's got a few problems with that whole austerity thing leading to national riots.

After a week that brought Ireland a pledge of a $114 billion international rescue package and the toughest austerity program of any country in Europe, tens of thousands of demonstrators took to Dublin’s streets on Saturday to protest wide cuts in the country’s welfare programs and in public-sector jobs.


The protests centered on a milelong march along the banks of the River Liffey in central Dublin to the General Post Office building on O’Connell Street, the site of the battle between Irish republican rebels and British troops in the Easter Uprising in 1916 — an iconic event that many in Ireland regard as the tipping point in Ireland’s long struggle for independence.

The choice of venue for the protests by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, coordinating the march through the city, reflected the mood of anger, dismay and recrimination in the wake of the economic shocks of the past 10 days. Those shocks have been the culmination of two years in which the economy has shrunk by about 15 percent, faster than any other European economy.

Before that, Ireland enjoyed more than a decade of unprecedented prosperity, so the rescue package being worked out by the International Monetary Fund and the European Union and the austerity program the Dublin government has been forced to adopt to secure the bailout loans have come as a deep jolt.

Among other things, the austerity package will involve the loss of about 25,000 public-sector jobs, equivalent to 10 percent of the government work force, as well as a four-year, $20 billion program of tax increases and spending cuts like sharp reductions in state pensions and the minimum wage. One Dublin newspaper, the Irish Independent, estimated that the cost of the measures for a typical middle-class family earning $67,000 a year would be about $5,800 a year. 

Again, this is the kind of pain that the Village centrist say we must go through in order to "regain our country".  The problem is this Irish bailout is literally jacking up taxes and killing social spending in order to save the country's bankers.   Remember, it wasn't public debt that was Ireland's problem, it was debt created by the Irish banks to fund their own version of Big Casino.

Before the bank bust, Ireland had little public debt. But with taxpayers suddenly on the hook for gigantic bank losses, even as revenues plunged, the nation’s creditworthiness was put in doubt. So Ireland tried to reassure the markets with a harsh program of spending cuts.

Step back for a minute and think about that. These debts were incurred, not to pay for public programs, but by private wheeler-dealers seeking nothing but their own profit. Yet ordinary Irish citizens are now bearing the burden of those debts.

Or to be more accurate, they’re bearing a burden much larger than the debt — because those spending cuts have caused a severe recession so that in addition to taking on the banks’ debts, the Irish are suffering from plunging incomes and high unemployment.

But there is no alternative, say the serious people: all of this is necessary to restore confidence. 

No wonder Irish are taking to the streets, some 50,000 in Dublin alone.  Their entire economy was screwed over to support the bankers, and the Irish taxpayer is being put on the hook to pay for it.  So not only do they have a recession thanks to the banks exploding, they now have to pay for the banks' mistakes on top of everything else.

Yeah, I'd be pissed too.  And remember...our own political class is expecting us to do the same thing.

Korean-ning Off The Rails

So while we were busy over here with mock bombs, TSA groping, basketball injuries and iPads, certainly Korea has found a way to calm down after last week's artillery incident, right?  The business of Asia is business, and my friend Asariel has his own econ blog, The Great Redoubt taking a hard numbers look at the world of finance and politics from a practical perspective.  So is it business as usual over there this weekend?

Not...really.

Well, at least there's some good news. North Korea apparently expressed regret for the civilian deaths. In this regard, a spokesman for the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea released a statement on Friday.

The recent military provocation by the puppet group is a product of the deliberate and premeditated plot hatched by it to save its smear confrontational campaign from total bankruptcy, tarnish the daily rising might of the DPRK, scuttle the efforts for improving the north-south relations and tide over the domestic and international isolation and crisis, it points out, and says: 

The group perpetrated the recent provocation prompted by a sinister calculation that in case the DPRK did not make any reaction it would take it as "a tacit recognition" of the illegal "northern limit line" and make it a fait accompli and in case the DPRK took a military counter-action, it would use it as a pretext for kicking up anti-DPRK smear campaign.

I give up. Watch for the Asian markets to tank on Monday.

Yeah.  Agreed.  This is thirteen flavors of bad right here folks, and with Asia and Europe all going haywire (like myself, Asariel believes all eyes should be on Portugal next) it's not going to be good for us over here.  Not to mention as Asariel reminds me "The Korean War never officially ended."

StupidiNews Focus: A Tree-Mendous Effort

We're already hearing how "Obama got lucky again" stopping last night's attempted car bomb at a tree lighting ceremony in Oregon.  Luck had nothing to do with it.  The FBI had this guy cold and the public was never in danger.  Procedure triumphed here.

Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Somalia, was arrested on suspicion of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. He is a resident of Corvallis, Oregon, and a student at Oregon State University, according to the FBI.

Mohamud was arrested by the FBI and Portland Police Bureau after he attempted to detonate what he believed to be an explosives-laden van that was parked near the tree-lighting ceremony in Portland's Pioneer Courthouse Square, the Justice Department said in a written statement. However, "the materials were not explosive," said Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd, who called the device a "mock bomb."

"The threat was very real. Our investigation shows that Mohamud was absolutely committed to carrying out an attack on a very grand scale," said Arthur Balizan, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI in Oregon. "At the same time, I want to reassure the people of this community that, at every turn, we denied him the ability to actually carry out the attack."

The arrest was the culmination of a long-term undercover operation during which Mohamud had been monitored closely as his alleged bomb plot developed, the Justice Department said. Officials said the public was never in danger from the device.

Law enforcement worked here.  The FBI should be commended for doing its job admirably and gathering overwhelming undercover evidence at every step of the way.  Hopefully this guy will go away for a very, very long time and this will send a message that yes, we know we're onto people who would harm Americans this way.  I have zero sympathy for these terrorist bastards or their agenda, but the point here is that our existing law enforcement procedures worked perfectly here.

That's something we should all be proud of.  Government worked to protect us as it should.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• The FBI has stopped a plot to detonate a car bomb at a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon, arresting a 19-year-old Somalian man.
• Homeland Security has shut down dozens of file sharing and at least one torrent search web site, causing concern among digital rights activists.
• Police had to break up a Black Friday crowd at a Wal-Mart in Sacramento, but nobody was injured.
• Ireland is working out the final details of its bailout this weekend as tens of thousands took to the streets in Dublin.
• Recession or not, kids are asking Santa for an iPad this holiday season.