Deficit Reduction Ad Absurdum

Just a reminder that no, the deficit is not "exploding under Obama".

The federal budget deficit for fiscal 2013 was $680 billion, the Treasury Department reported Wednesday.

This is the first time that the deficit has fallen below $1 trillion during President Obama's time in the White House.

The monthly Treasury statement for September had been delayed by a government shutdown at the beginning of October. Fiscal 2013 ended on Sept. 30.

The deficit has dropped $409 billion from 2012, when it was $1.089 trillion.

Most of the change comes from higher tax receipts. Receipts rose to $2.77 trillion in 2013, up from $2.45 trillion in 2012. Spending was $3.45 trillion, down from $3.53 trillion in 2012.

White House Budget Director Sylvia Mathews Burwell hailed the deficit total, noting that the deficit is now less than half what it was in 2009, when it stood at $1.4 trillion in the wake of the recession.

So, yes, higher revenues and budget cuts have reduced the deficit.  Republicans of course want hundreds in billions in more cuts.  But higher revenues have kicked in, and the deficit has been cut in half.

You can, and should, make the argument that budget cuts continue to stifle growth.  We've been stuck in a weak recovery for years now recisely because we've cut so much spending at Republican insistence.

We've done what the GOP has demanded, cut, cut, cut the federal budget.  So where are the jobs and the economic growth they promised?

As yourself that as they demand more cuts.

Creative Destruction In Syria

The good news:  Syria's Asaad regime continues to hit deadlines for destroying their chemical weapons stockpile.

Syria has destroyed all its declared chemical weapons mixing, filling and production facilities, and all of the chemical weapons at inspected sites have been placed under seal, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said Thursday.

The watchdog body's announcement of the facilities' destruction means that the first deadline has been met in an ambitious program to eliminate the country's entire chemical weapons stockpile by the middle of next year.

The joint United Nations-OPCW mission visited 21 out of 23 sites, the OPCW statement said, and 39 of the 41 facilities at those sites.

The remaining two sites were too dangerous for the inspectors to go to, it said, but Syria had declared those sites as abandoned. The chemical weapons equipment there was moved to other sites, which were inspected.

The OPCW said it was "now satisfied that it has verified -- and seen destroyed -- all of Syria's declared critical production and mixing/filling equipment."

The bad news is the same regime is now blockading and starving out rebel-controlled areas of the country.

The Syrian government has been blocking food and medicine from entering and people from leaving besieged areas, in what one security official calls "starvation until submission campaign", according to a Reuters report.

Forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad have used partial sieges to root out rebel forces from residential areas during the civil war. But a recent tightening of blockades around areas near the capital Damascus is causing starvation and death, residents and medical staff told the news agency.

Food and medicine, which could be used by the warring parties, are rarely allowed to enter besieged areas and the movement of civilians in and out is restricted, Reuters said on Wednesday.

The UN says that more than one million Syrians remain trapped in areas where aid deliveries have stalled.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a report last month that half of those people are in rural Damascus and about 310,000 people more trapped in Homs, a province in central Syria.

So yes, the Assad regime is still pretty scumtastic.

StupidiNews!

• A new book on President Obama's 2012 campaign charges that advisers were considering replacing Vice-President Joe Biden with Hillary Clinton.
• A three-judge panel of 5th Circuit judges has overturned the injuction on Texas's HB2 anti-abortion laws, meaning that as many as a dozen clinics in the state could be shut down as early as today.
• Republicans have successfully filibustered the nomination of Democratic Rep. Mel Watt as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, setting up another possible battle over use of the filibuster.
• Watt's filibuster may have to do with Fannie Mae's new $800 million lawsuit against major US banks over rigging the Libor inter-bank lending rate last year.  
• Researchers now say invasive Asian carp have now made it into Lake Erie, as evidence of fish caught near the lake show signs of having been hatched there.

Last Call For The Austerity Monster Under The Kitchen Table

Tonight, keep in mind that the scariest story of Halloween is harsh, painful reality for millions of working-class and low-income Americans.  Starting tomorrow, Republican refusal to restore SNAP funding means 47 million of us will have even less to eat.  Bob Aiken of Feeding America:

In the last few weeks, the media has been ablaze with news of the government shutdown, the debt limit and health care reform. Missing from most public debate, however, is the cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits that will take place on November 1 and will affect every one of the more than 47 million Americans who depend on the program to help meet their basic nutritional needs. 

When the changes are implemented, everyone enrolled in the SNAP program will see their benefits cut. For example, a family of four that qualifies for the maximum monthly benefit will lose $36 a month -- that's a 5% reduction.

Sorry America, Republicans need that money for corporate welfare and subsidies for the energy giants. Feeding Americans? Not real high on Tea Party Jesus's to-do list.

Most families do not have enough to make it through the month already -- 90% of SNAP benefits are redeemed by the third week of the month and 58% of food bank clients currently receiving SNAP turn to food banks for help at least six months out of the year. 

The upcoming cuts will result in an increased need for food assistance at food pantries and soup kitchens across the nation when many are already stretched meeting sustained high need in the wake of the recession.

Healthy food is more expensive than super-processed industrial crap.  Sure, you can eat $1 cheeseburgers daily, but that's not exactly good for you.  Of course, the Republican argument is if you're on SNAP, you don't really get the choice, now do you?

In September, the House passed legislation cutting $40 billion in SNAP over the next 10 years, according to a Feeding America analysis. Together with this week's cuts, the pending legislation will result in a loss of nearly 3.4 billion meals for low-income Americans in 2014 alone, according to a Feeding America analysis. These are meals our most vulnerable citizens cannot afford to lose, and food banks and other charities simply cannot fill that gap.

"Hey waitaminute, are you saying Tea Party Jesus can't feed the poor, you godless commie?!?"  Yeah, that comes out to 72 meals a year for 47 million people going away if House Republicans get their way, but Republicans care about the poor.  If you eat less, maybe you scumbag poors will work harder, right?

Sometimes the monsters of Halloween are very real, and they stick around the morning after.  And the morning after that.  And on and on...

The Curious Kasich Of Ohio's Mystery Austerity

Ohio GOP Gov. John Kasich is shocked -- shocked I tell you! -- to discover that his own anti-choice, anti-growth, regressive sales-tax laden austerity budget is hurting poor people in the Buckeye State!

In his grand Statehouse office beneath a bust of Lincoln, Gov. John R. Kasich let loose on fellow Republicans in Washington.

“I’m concerned about the fact there seems to be a war on the poor,” he said, sitting at the head of a burnished table as members of his cabinet lingered after a meeting. “That if you’re poor, somehow you’re shiftless and lazy.”

“You know what?” he said. “The very people who complain ought to ask their grandparents if they worked at the W.P.A."

If you're wondering if Kasich is suffering from amnesia or something, the very next sentence in the article explains everything:

Ever since Republicans in Congress shut down the federal government in an attempt to remove funding for President Obama’s health care law, Republican governors have been trying to distance themselves from Washington.

Well, no foolin', Joe.

To some Ohio analysts, those moves are a reaction to the humiliating defeat Mr. Kasich suffered in 2011 when voters in a statewide referendum overturned a law stripping public employees of bargaining rights. Before the vote, Mr. Kasich’s approval in this quintessential swing state plunged.

Now, as the governor’s image has softened, his poll numbers have improved heading into a re-election race next year against the likely Democratic nominee, Ed FitzGerald, the executive of Cuyahoga County.

He still angers many on the left; he signed a budget in June that cut revenues to local governments and mandates that women seeking an abortion listen to the fetal heartbeat. Democrats see his centrist swing as mere calculation, a prelude to a tough re-election fight.

“This is someone who realized he had to get to the center and chose Medicaid as the issue,” said Danny Kanner, communications director of the Democratic Governors Association. “That doesn’t erase the first three years of his governorship when he pursued polices that rewarded the wealthy at the expense of the middle class.”

Ohio voters might want to remember that  Kasich is right:  there absolutely is a war on the poor in Ohio, and the leader of that war is none other than John Kasich himself.

The Ghosts 'N' Stuff Party

If you're wondering why glibertarians are so keen on guys like Rand Paul, Double G, and the Dudebro Defector, it's because they all kind of fit the same general profile of what a glibertarian is in a new survey.

Compared to the general population, libertarians are significantly more likely to be non-Hispanic white, male, and young. Nearly all libertarians are non-Hispanic whites (94%), more than two-thirds (68%) are men, and more than 6-in-10 (62%) are under the age of 50.

The party affiliation of libertarians skews significantly more Republican than Democratic. Close to half (45%) of libertarians identify as Republican, compared to only 5% who identify as Democrat. However, half of libertarians identify as politically independent (35%) or identify with a third political party (15%), including roughly 1-in-10 (8%) who identify with the Libertarian Party. Roughly 4-in-10 (39%) libertarians identify as part of the Tea Party movement, while 61% do not.

Libertarians are white, male, younger folks who identify with Republicans, and a healthy chunk are Tea Partiers.  I'm so very surprised by that, you know?  These are people whose economic views are strictly anti-government...

• Nearly two-thirds (65%) of libertarians oppose increasing the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10.00 an hour, as do 57% of Americans who identify with the Tea Party. By contrast, 57% of Republicans overall and 61% of white evangelical Protestants support raising the minimum wage.
• Nearly all (96%) libertarians have an unfavorable view of the 2010 health care law, compared to 83% of white evangelical Protestants, 78% of Tea Party members, and 89% of Republicans.
• On the issue of passing tougher environmental laws, libertarians and Tea Party members are generally aligned in their strong opposition (73% and 74% oppose), while white evangelical Protestants and Republicans overall are also opposed but with less intensity (62% each opposed).

...except when it comes to telling women and minorities what they need to be doing.

• Nearly 6-in-10 (57%) libertarians oppose making it more difficult for a woman to get an abortion, a proportion identical to the general population. By contrast, strong majorities of Republicans overall (58%), Americans affiliated with the Tea Party (58%), and white evangelical Protestants (68%) favor making it more difficult for a woman to get an abortion.
• Seven-in-ten (70%) libertarians favor allowing doctors to prescribe lethal drugs to help terminally ill patients end their lives. Americans who identify with the Tea Party are closely divided on this question (49% favor, 51% oppose). By contrast, strong majorities of Republicans (58%) and white evangelical Protestants (70%) oppose this policy.
• More than 7-in-10 (71%) libertarians favor legalizing marijuana. By contrast, approximately 6-in-10 Republicans (61%) and Tea Party members (59%), and nearly 7-in-10 (69%) white evangelical Protestants, oppose legalizing marijuana.
• Unlike most other social issues, libertarians remain socially conservative on same-sex marriage. While a majority (59%) of libertarians oppose same-sex marriage, they are significantly less opposed than Republicans overall (67%) and than other conservative-leaning groups such as Tea Party members (73%) and white evangelical Protestants (80%).

Freedom to smoke weed, but screw women and same-sex couples.  Dudebros all the way down, our glibertarian friends.  They may call themselves libertarians, but they're really the party of ghosts:  moaning about the past all the time, white as a sheet, and completely transparent...and reliable conservative GOP votes.

StupidiNews, Halloween Edition!

 We've got your Halloween news, boos, and views this morning, folks!

• The Boston Red Sox exorcised the ghosts of the past at Fenway Park with a 6-1 Game 6 win, clinching their third World Series in 10 seasons and the first at home in nearly 100 years.
• Marine archeologists have raised five cannons from the wreck of legendary pirate Blackbeard's flagship, the Queen Anne's Revenge, off the North Carolina coast.
• Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius faced monster questions from House Republicans over the gremlins in the federal health exchange website.
• Americans are spending a bit less this year on Halloween, but 3 in 4 Americans say the economy isn't scaring off any plans for the holiday.
• Dell says it's solved the spooky mystery of why some of its laptops smell like "cat pee", the manufacturing process used to make the device's palm rest.

And your frightening bonus, 8 political Halloween costumes for you last minute slackers.  

Have a good one, boils and ghouls!

Last Call For Team Cooch

Just how bad are things for the GOP in Virginia ahead of next Tuesday's gubernatorial election?  As Greg Sargent points out, it's somewhere between "horrific" and "Have Jeeves bring around the car, we're making a run for Switzerland."

With Democrat Terry McAuliffe taking a double digit lead in the Virginia gubernatorial contest, leading observers are increasingly looking at Virginia as an indicator of national political trends.

New Washington Post/SRBI polling in Virginia, which puts McAuliffe up 51-39, also demonstrates very clearly the dangers these trends pose to Republicans.

The crack Post polling team has produced a chart based on this poll that shows the GOP brand has collapsed among the very constituencies Republicans must improve their standing among in order to remain competitive in the future, both in Virginia and at the national level:

 


 Not a single one of those groups has an unfavorable opinion less than 69%, and it's 65% overall in a supposedly purple state.  You can put VA firmly in blue territory in 2016, I'm thinking.

Lindsey's Done Hucked Up

Monday:

Looks like Sen. Graham must have gotten a really dismal post-shutdown internal primary poll going into his 2014 race, because he's suddenly gone all Rand Paul on things.

Indeed, Huckleberry Graham went on to say this weekend that he'll block every single Obama appointment until he gets ANSWERS ON BENGHAZI.

Today:

His re-election campaign looming, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has seen his approval rating steadily decline in 2013, according to poll findings released Wednesday.

The survey from Winthrop University found 37 percent of South Carolina voters approve of the job Graham is doing, compared with about 48 percent who said they disapprove. Winthrop showed Graham with an approval rating of 48 percent in February, and 44 percent in April.

Perhaps even more disconcerting for Graham, who is staring at a GOP primary in 2014, is his steep drop among Republican voters in South Carolina. The latest survey from Winthrop showed 45 percent of Republican voters approving of Graham, compared with 40 percent who disapprove.

Those mediocre numbers represent a massive decline since February, when nearly 72 percent of GOP voters said they approved of Graham. In Winthrop's April survey, about 57 percent of Palmetto State Republicans approved of Graham.

Called it, 100%.  Like clockwork.

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

If The Atlantic's resident "reasonable conservative" Conor Friedersdorf had actually been paying attention to the emo left, he'd have figured out that this actually logical statement:

Hillary Clinton is poised to be the candidate of continuity. Like Bush and Obama, she would govern as an executive-power extremist, is implicated in the civil-liberties transgressions of recent years, and would almost certainly seek to expand rather than rein in post-9/11 powers given to the national-security state.

...has nothing to do with Clinton's policies or logic or continuity and everything to do with the fact the emo left loves her because she's not Obama.

StupidiNews!

• European Parliament officials will meet with the White House today over NSA monitoring of heads of state, with new revelations that some European countries were cooperating with the US.
• Israel will continue building new settlement homes in East Jerusalem as Palestinian officials deny any deal to increase Israeli building in occupied areas exists.
• The mother of slain Florida teenager Trayvon Martin testified Tuesday before a Senate panel on so-called "stand your ground" laws, urging lawmakers to amend the legislation.
• Retail giant Wal-Mart is scrambling to embrace solar panels on its stores, the company now generates more solar power than 38 US states.
• With assurances to Sen. Ted Cruz that tougher political ad disclosure rules are "not a priority", new FCC chairman Tom Wheeler was approved unanimously by the Senate.

Last Call For The Rise Of The Emoprogs

Jerome Armstrong, one of the founders of old school netroots blog MyDD, argues that progressive blogs have failed:  failed to get the kind of control the tea party has over the GOP, failed to get a much more progressive America, and most importantly, failed to stop the rise of Obama, who Armstrong sees as the mortal foe to progressives.

I didn’t see Lieberman’s 2006 win in quite as pinnacle a light at the time, and it certainly wouldn’t have been, had we followed it up more often, and won.

Yet I certainly peg the crux of lost movement with the rise of Obama’s campaign. It was an awful place to be in with Clinton vs. Obama, in the 2008 primary. My basic impulse (after Edwards –who had the populist message– imploded) was, like many bloggers (not the masses), to go with Clinton because she at least showed signs of being accountable to the netroots movement, unlike Obama. He didn’t need the netroots for his message and candidate-movement, he had places like Politico to push out of, and was basically an identity-politics cult for many new to politics that flooded the blogs.

Armstrong goes on for some length in this general vein, viewing Obama as nothing more than a Wall Street puppet and arguing that Clinton, while not much better, would have at least elevated Armstrong and his ilk to the level of courtiers.

BooMan has an important piece setting Armstrong straight on where the Netroots went wrong.

I just find it bizarre to be lectured by a man who first came to my attention as Mark Warner's agent to the blogosphere. I like Mark Warner and think he is a good man and a decent senator. But I would never confuse him with a progressive. And then Jerome jumped on the Clinton bandwagon, which may have seemed like a solid career move, but it wasn't where most progressives were going. And then he bailed out to work on Gary Johnson's libertarian campaign for president, which was definitely a move out of the DLC camp, but a move that traded agreement on some issues like the Drug War and surveillance for disagreement about just about everything else in the progressive playbook.

I have never thought of Jerome as a progressive, and insofar as he immersed himself in the progressive backlash against Obama's presidency, which was led by Jane Hamsher and Glenn Greenwald, I think he excommunicated himself from about 90% of progressives in this country.

It's telling that he still resents Barack Obama for not coming to him with his hat in his hand. 

And that's the real reason behind the emoprog rancor towards Obama:  he doesn't need them, because he plays a different game than the Clintons do.  Armstrong especially was in it for the money and the prestige, not for the advancement of progressive political goals.  Could we have done better than Obama, given our choices were Hillary and John Edwards?  I'm going to argue that at the time, no.  Clinton certainly knew how to play the game and gave rise to many of the attacks the right still uses against Obama today.  And Edwards?  We dodged a hail of bullets by not nominating him, his personal foibles would have given us President McCain and Vice President Moose Lady for sure.

But it's the fact that these same people refuse to give Obama credit for the progressive acts he does, or worse, take credit for "forcing" him into those acts.  They still believe they run the game, and they will never admit they don't. If they do, the game ends.

And I'm sick and tired of playing games with these fools.  I for one am glad the President ignores them.  They've earned that.

Rand Paul's War On Science

Sen. Rand Paul, hero of glibertarians everywhere, sure doesn't seem to mind massive new federal regulations when it comes to declaring science the enemy of humanity.

Tea party hero Rand Paul warned scientific advancements could lead to eugenics during a Monday visit at Liberty University, looking to boost the political fortunes of fellow Republican Ken Cuccinelli’s bid for governor.


During a visit to the Christian school founded by Jerry Falwell, Paul looked to energize conservative supporters by warning that genetic tests could identify those who are predisposed to be short, overweight or less intelligent so that they could be eliminated. With one week remaining before Election Day, Cuccinelli is hoping the joint appearance with the U.S. senator from Kentucky will encourage the far-right flank of his party to abandon third-party libertarian spoiler Robert Sarvis.

“In your lifetime, much of your potential - or lack thereof - can be known simply by swabbing the inside of your cheek,” Paul said to a packed sporting arena on Liberty’s campus. “Are we prepared to select out the imperfect among us?”

The GOP war on science has been going on for some time now, but Rand Paul is jumping on it as his new toy.  "You can't trust those scientists on global climate change or environmental issues or technology or anything, they're trying to kill you and your family!"

His dangerous neo-luddite nonsense is par for the course for the Republican party, and specifically the section of the tea party that rejects science as evil because it contradicts the teachings of a Christian God.  It's not like that particular battle is new in the history of humanity, but to see a sizable chunk of America continue to reject evolution for example in 2013 is depressing.

Of course the real reason for the GOP war on science is the fact that the overwhelming majority of scientists consider themselves liberal.  Keep that in mind when you ask why the Tea party is targeting them.

No More Shutdowns?

Once again, Mitch The Turtle is writing checks his shell can't cash.

Mitch McConnell isn’t going to have another government shutdown on his watch. 

The Kentucky Republican stood up over the weekend and said he wanted to address the “elephant in the room” at a fundraising retreat in Sea Island, Ga. Speaking before roughly 300 K Streeters and big donors, McConnell said Republicans will not come close to defaulting on the nation’s debts or shutting down the government early next year when stop-gap government funding and the debt ceiling are slated to be voted on again. 

His remarks echoed similar comments he made following the shutdown that it was “not conservative policy” and that he always believed “this strategy could not and would not work.” 

“He’s in fighting mode,” said one attendee of McConnell. “He didn’t get into specifics about what they are doing and how they are going to do it, but McConnell and (Texas Sen. John) Cornyn were particularly forceful.” 

The attendee said McConnell “said everything that needed to be said” to help tamp down growing concern among bundlers and donors over how the GOP continues to be paralyzed by anti-establishment members like Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Mike Lee (R-Utah). Neither lawmaker attended the event.

Considering McConnell and the GOP leadership did everything they could to encourage and then agree to the shutdown in the first place, why would anyone believe Mitch now?  If you believed it wasn't going to work, then why did you allow it to happen, Mitch?  If you actually had any clout over Ted Cruz or the Tea Party in the House, why didn't you use it to stop the shutdown earlier this month?

The answer is that this is a promise you can't keep, and Kentucky voters like me know it.

StupidINews!

• Los Angeles County police officials are searching for the identity of a woman whose remains were found in two separate water treatment plants over the weekend.
• A Brazilian judge has stopped work on the country's major Amazon river dam project over environmental reasons.
• With nearly six months since Democratic Rep. Mel Watt of North Carolina was nominated at head of HUD, President Obama and Senate majority leader Harry Reid are pushing for confirmation.
• A federal judge has blocked some provisions in Texas's HB2 anti-abortion law, Texas AG and gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott is vowing to take the matter to the Supreme Court.
• Google is offering beta testers of its Google Glass product an upgrade in November to fit prescription lenses and frames.