Cave Story, Fiscal Slope Remix

And so it begins:  the Village pundits have heard Obama's going to cave on Medicare/SS, so it MUST BE TRUE AND IT'S TIME TO PANIC.  The guy leading the panicking?  Paul Krugman, go figure.

Ezra Klein says that the shape of a fiscal cliff deal is clear: only a 37 percent rate on top incomes, and a rise in the Medicare eligibility age.

I’m going to cross my fingers and hope that this is just a case of creeping Broderism, that it’s a VSP fantasy about how we’re going to resolve this in a bipartisan way. Because if Obama really does make this deal, there will be hell to pay.

Yes, this is a stupid deal.  It's a stupid deal that completely undermines and contradicts everything the President has said.

So this looks crazy to me; it looks like a deal that makes no sense either substantively or in terms of the actual bargaining strength of the parties. And if it does happen, the disillusionment on the Democratic side would be huge. All that effort to reelect Obama, and the first thing he does is give away two years of Medicare? How’s that going to play in future attempts to get out the vote?

If anyone in the White House is seriously thinking along these lines, please stop it right now.

Kroog at least hits on the point here.   Whoever leaked this deal sure wanted Democrats to panic.  Who benefits from that in the short run?  The Republicans.  How about the long run?  Depends on what Obama does.  If he says this "deal" is patently ridiculous, will anyone notice?

What about all the other times Obama was supposedly going to immediately cave on Medicare and SS?  It didn't happen then, did it?  But every time we get to this point in a Republican-created crisis, it's always the same people who swear Obama is the one who is going to cave.  When he doesn't, they congratulate themselves for being the sole reason Obama didn't cave, and remain ready at a moment's notice to brutally attack the President for something he has never done as soon as one of these rumors comes along again.

They've been 100% wrong so far.

What makes you think they are correct this time?

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• Former Florida Republican and recent Independent Charlie Crist has announced he's joining the Democratic party in the Sunshine State.
• Fifteen years after his death, LA law enforcement officials have released the autopsy of slain rapper Notorious B.I.G., killed by a bullet to the heart.
• UN chemical weapons monitors are skeptical that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad would unleash the country's stockpile of chemical weapons, even in a losing effort.
• As protests in Egypt continue, President Morsi is now considering delaying the country's scheduled constitutional referendum.
• Apple's key multi-touch patents have been invalidated by the US Patent Office, and Apple is vowing to fight the ruling.

Last Call

The US Supreme Court has decided to hear two massive same-sex marriage cases, first, a challenge to Section 3 of the federal Defense of Marriage Act at the national level:

The Court agreed to hear the Windsor v. United States case, which was brought by a lesbian widow. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals invalidated DOMA in a 2-1 decision finding that the federal government did not have a legitimate interest in treating same sex couples differently.

It’s another legacy-defining case for the Roberts Court and extraordinarily tricky one. The rapidly growing public support for same sex marriage in many parts of the country leaves little doubt that it will eventually be legalized in a substantial number of states. For gay marriage supporters, however, DOMA, signed by Bill Clinton, remains a political roadblock at least so long as Republicans control the House of Representatives. That leaves the federal courts as the best avenue for eliminating the law. The question is whether the justices will lead the way or leave the roadblock in place.

“I don’t think justices get in this position very often because everybody knows what the judgement of history is going to be,” Lucas Powe, a Supreme Court historian at the University of Texas-Austin School of Law, told TPM before the court’s announcement. “I don’t think think anybody doubts that gay marriage is coming — it’s only the issue of time. This is one of those times where no matter what you think you know you’re going to be wrong if you oppose it.”

Secondly, they will hear arguments on challenging California's Prop 8 banning same-sex marriage at the state level.

The Supreme Court announced on Friday that it will take up California’s Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot measure that amends the state’s Constitution to ban same sex marriage.

The Court will hear oral arguments in next spring and render a decision by the end of June. At issue is whether the U.S. Constitution prohibits a state from codifying a ban on recognizing same sex marriages.

Windsor is the big one, but the Prop 8 case also means that SCOTUS wants to decide the federal issues and the states' rights issues separately as Adam Serwer explains, and the stakes couldn't be higher.

The DOMA case asks the justices to strike down the federal law that dictates which marriages are valid. Even better for supporters of same-sex marriage: Of the several DOMA cases the court could have taken, it decided on Windsor v. United States, in which plaintiff Edith Windsor was unable to claim an estate-tax deduction after her female partner died. Between striking down part of a heavy-handed federal statute and helping someone get a tax cut, it's the kind of same-sex marriage case even a conservative justice could love. Most importantly, from the point of view of getting the requisite five votes, striking down DOMA would not prevent states from banning same-sex marriage.

The Prop. 8 case argues something much broader, however: It claims there is a fundamental right to same-sex marriage in the Constitution, and that any attempt to ban same-sex marriage violates the 14th Amendment. The Ninth Circuit's ruling was written so narrowly that if the Supreme Court had decided not to take the case, then the Ninth Circuit's decision would have affirmed the rights of same-sex couples in California alone. But if SCOTUS were to affirm the constitutionality of California's ban on same-sex marriage, the ruling could well apply to any such law nationwide.

Not only that, the American Prospect's Gabriel Arana wrote in 2009 that "defeat could legitimize such discrimination against LGBT Americans, making it far more difficult to sue for parental or housing rights." 

So the question is "Can discrimination against LGBT Americans be codified into law and still pass Constitutional muster?"  The courts have let stand such discrimination for ex-convicts for instance at the state level (denial of right to vote, sex offender registration), but not the national one. (Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act).

At least, so far.

It's in the hands of SCOTUS now, and this June should be rather exciting.  It's possible same-sex marriage could become a national right.  On the other hand, it could mean the annulment and end of current same-sex marriages across the country for generations.

If you had to ask me to hazard a guess, I'd say DOMA is struck down, but Prop 8 stays, meaning that states will have the right to ban same-sex marriage if they want to, but that the feds must agree to abide by treating those same-sex marriages in states that allow it as full marriage with all federal benefits.

In other words, punt to the states, go play golf.

We'll see.

"What Blue States?" He Said...

If Republicans can't win elections by getting people to vote for Republicans, change the rules so that Democratic votes count less.  MoJo's Nick Baumann:

In September, top Pennsylvania Republicans shocked the nation by proposing a change to the state's election rules that would have rigged the Electoral College in favor of Mitt Romney. Facing a nationwide backlash, the state's GOP backed down—but not before Wisconsin Republicans considered a similar plan. With the old rules still in place, President Barack Obama won a 332-206 electoral college victory over Romney.

But now that Romney has been defeated, prominent GOPers are once again mulling rule changes that could make it harder for Democrats to win the White House—and easier for Republicans to claim Electoral College votes in states where they lose the popular vote.

Remember, the presidential election isn't a nationwide contest, it's a state-by-state fight, with each state worth a certain number of electoral votes (the District of Columbia gets 3, too). There are 538 electoral votes total; if you win 270 or more, you're headed to the White House—even, as George W. Bush can assure you, if you don't win the popular vote. The Constitution allows each state to allocate electoral votes however it wants, but in every state except for Nebraska and Maine, the contest is winner-take-all. If you get the most votes in Pennsylvania, you get all of its electoral votes.

Republicans want to change that. On December 3, Dominic Pileggi, the powerful Republican majority leader of the Pennsylvania state Senate, announced that he plans to introduce legislation that would change how the state allocates its electoral votes. This shouldn't be a surprise: Pileggi was one of the Pennsylvania politicians behind the pre-election plan to change Electoral College rules.

Our old friend Ohio GOP Secretary of State Jon Husted wants in on this plan too, as does Scott Walker in Wisconsin...and notice that no Republicans in deep red states want to do this.  Could you imagine splitting Texas?  Of course not.  it's not about "fairness" it's about stealing 2016.

So of course the GOP wants to change the rules of voting.  Do that and you control the country.

It's the only way they can win now.

Go Filibuster Yourself, Mitch!

And my senator, GOP dipstick Mitch McConnell, only ended up outsmarting himself yesterday as he set out to embarrass Democrats and the President, and nearly ended the fiscal cliff and the debt ceiling drama by bringing both crashing down on his turtle shell.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) wanted to prove on Thursday that Democrats don’t have the votes to weaken Congress’ authority on the debt limit. Instead they called his bluff, and he ended up filibustering his own bill.

The legislation, modeled on a proposal McConnell offered last year as a “last-choice option” to avert a U.S. debt default, would permit the president to unilaterally lift the debt ceiling unless Congress mustered a two-thirds majority to stop him. President Obama has championed the idea.

McConnell brought up the legislation Thursday morning. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) initially objected, seemingly proving the Republican leader’s point that it cannot pass the Senate. But then Reid ran it by his members and, in the afternoon, agreed to hold that same vote. This time it was McConnell who objected.

“The Republican leader objects to his own idea,” Reid declared on the floor. “So I guess we have a filibuster of his own bill.”

Yep, you got it.  In his zeal to "prove" that the Democrats would hypocritically shoot down a permanent solution to the debt ceiling crisis by making the default scenario automatic raising of the ceiling dependent on a Presidential veto to stop it, ol' Mitch ended up filibustering himself in order to hypocritically shoot down his own legislation.

If that isn't a microcosm of the repeated fail of the GOP on these debt ceiling maneuvers, I don't know what is.

[UPDATE 1:58 PM]  Kevin Drum asks:

This puzzled me when I first read it, but I didn't bother blogging about it. So now I will. My question is this: why did McConnell think this in the first place? I can't think of any reasons that Dems would have balked at this. They certainly don't want a debt ceiling fight while Obama is president, and they've never used the debt ceiling to hold a Republican president hostage. That's purely a GOP gambit.

Gosh I dunno Kev, maybe he thought enough "liberals" couldn't resist taking cheap shots at the President to make the plan work.  Imagine that.

StupidiNews!

• A magnitude 7.3 earthquake shook Japan this morning, setting off a moderate tsunami warning for Miyagi prefecture, the area hardest hit by last year's deadly quake.
• The Washington Post becomes the latest newspaper website to limit free access to web content, putting up a "paywall" scheduled for mid-2013.
• Going over the fiscal cliff slope could cost 750,000 government jobs, according to the latest reports from the think tank Center For American Progress.
• Economic sanctions against Iran are taking its toll on the country's oil exports, with steep delays in oil shipments and idle oil tankers.
• The FCC wants aviation officials to relax the rules against using e-readers, tablets, and non-phone electronic devices during takeoff and landing.

Last Call

South Carolina GOP Senator Jim DeMint is DeParting for a cushy gig running the Heritage Foundation "think tank".  Dana Liebelson at MoJo reminds us just what Heritage is getting:

1. DeMint says gay people and unmarried women having sex shouldn't teach your children 
According to the Spartanburg Herald-Journal, DeMint said this at a South Carolina rally: "If someone is openly homosexual, they shouldn’t be teaching in the classroom and he holds the same position on an unmarried woman who’s sleeping with her boyfriend—she shouldn’t be in the classroom."

2. DeMint says God doesn't like big government
On a radio show in 2011, DeMint said: "I’ve said it often and I believe it – the bigger government gets, the smaller God gets. As people become more dependent on government, less dependent on God."

3. Jim DeMint doesn't want women talking about abortion on the Internet
In 2011, DeMint put an amendment into a totally non-related spending bill that attempted to ban discussion of abortion via satellite, video-conferencing, and the Internet (in other words, fully preventing women from speaking with their doctors remotely.)

4. DeMint says America turning into Iran after President Obama's election (or maybe Germany?)

"Probably the most heart-wrenching experiences I’ve had over the last several days is when naturalized American citizens who have immigrated here from Germany, Iran and other countries, they come up to me and they say why are we doing what so many have fled from?" DeMint told a conservative radio host in 2009 "Why don’t Americans see what we’re doing?"

5. DeMint puts hold on National Women's History Museum
In 2010, a proposed bill would have allowed a private group to buy property on Independence Avenue to build a women's history museum (without costing taxpayers any money). DeMint was one of the bill's chief opponents, and put a hold on it.

6. DeMint confuses Chicago teacher strike with violence in the Middle East
“On my way over, I was reading another story about a distant place where thugs had put 400,000 children out in the streets. And then I realized that was a story about the Chicago teachers strike," DeMint said at the 2012 Values Voters summit in September. "But we’ve got to think of good things.”

7. DeMint falsely accuses President Obama of taxing Christmas
On Fox News in 2011, DeMint said the government was "going to charge taxes on Christmas trees so they can start another government agency to promote Christmas trees. We don't need to do that at the federal level. We can't even afford to do what we're already doing. And to add another tax to something and say we're going to create a promotion agency, it just makes you want to pull your hair out." 

This statement was in response to a division of the Department of Agriculture proposing that tree importers and producers pay 15 cents per tree, to fund a promotional campaign for Christmas [the tax was tabled.] 

As far as his replacement, DeMint has apparently asked Gov. Nikki Haley to appoint Rep. Tim Scott to the seat.  As the lone black Republican in Congress, Scott would be a very high profile addition to the Senate (especially considering the most recent sole black Democratic senator was a fellow by the name of Barack Obama.)  The GOP, I'm sure, will say this proves they love black people and that we should vote for them.

We'll see how this goes.  But the larger issue is if the Tea party is so powerful, why is their most powerful Senator leaving the Senate?

Early In The Iowa Morning

If you want to know why Republicans did everything they could to end early voting in Ohio and Florida, take a look at the results from Iowa, where President Obama lost the vote on Election Day, but won the state due to early voting.

Overall, more than two in five Iowa voters (43%) cast early ballots. The figure was up sharply from the 31% who cast early votes in the state in 2008.

Michael McDonald, a George Mason University political scientist who studies early voting, said in an interview that when all the 2012 votes are finally counted, the share of votes cast early will rise to a record 35%, from about 30% in 2008.

The larger jump in Iowa is due primarily to the ferocity of early-vote competition between the campaigns there.

But there’s another potential factor:  Iowans have been spared a recent trend in American politics: a concerted effort by Republicans at the state level to restrict voting.

Unlike some other key states, government is divided in Iowa; Democrats control the state Senate; the GOP holds the House and the governorship. That split makes it impossible for Republicans to enact legislation that might undermine early voting, assuming they wanted to.

In Florida, they did. The Republican Legislature and governor succeeded in shrinking the early-vote window, and the number of early in-person votes fell this year from 2008 (even though the total number of votes cast increased). In Ohio, courts blocked a similar GOP effort to limit early voting.

In the end President Obama built up too much of a lead for Romney to catch up.

This time, the Republican “win” in ballots cast on election day (51% for Romney to 46% for Obama) wasn’t enough.  Obama took the early vote by 20 points (59% to 39%). And thanks to the size of the early vote, a state that many thought could go either way went for the president by a comfortable margin of nearly 6 percentage points.

That's the difference early voting makes for Democrats.  That's why Republicans will now work as hard as they can to end the practice in every state possible.  Republicans can't win on ideas, they have to win by limiting who can and cannot get to vote.

Always keep that in mind when you hear a GOP politician talk.

Methinks The Rand Doth Protest Too Much

Throw a bucket of cold water on a kennel and one dog will always bark.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) on Wednesday reacted to a possible Senate run by Ashley Judd by saying that the actress was so “damn liberal” that she did not even belong in the United States.

Earlier this week, Politico reported that Judd “is seriously exploring” a bid against Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) in 2014 or possibly waiting until 2016 to take on Paul.

Conservative WMAL radio hosts Brian Wilson and Larry O’Connor asked Paul to react to the news on Wednesday.

“I heard she lives in Scotland, I thought she was running for Parliament,” Paul quipped to the radio hosts delight. “I think she’d fit right in, in the English Parliament.”

“She’s way damn too liberal for our country, for our state,” he added. “She hates our biggest industry, which is coal. So, I say, good luck bringing the ‘I hate coal’ message to Kentucky.”

Boy, Rand here is almost taking this news personally, I'd have to say.   He's got a valid point about anyone even remotely environmental getting murdered at the polls here in Friends Of Coal license plate country, but I sure as hell would love to see her take on either Mitch or Rand.

But Rand here, well, he sure is making a lot of noise, isn't he.  What does it matter to him if Judd is planning on running in 2014 versus McConnell and Rand is supposedly leaving the Senate headed for the White House in 2016?

One has to wonder.

StupidiNews!

• In the wake of Super Typhoon Bopha, the Philippines are still assessing the massive damage from flooding and wind that killed over 300 last weekend.
• Canadian immigration officials are touting the end of a Romanian human smuggling ring and the arrests of dozens of people in connection.
• President Obama becomes the first US President to meet with native tribal leaders every year of his term, but many tribal leaders are worried about domestic spending cuts.
• Citigroup's 11,000 job cuts announced this week brings the total in the financial sector to more than 300,000 lost jobs in two years, and more cuts are expected.
• A rare unanimous vote in the House, 397-0, comes as lawmakers adamantly oppose UN efforts to regulate the internet.

Last Call

If you're still thinking that Republicans aren't somehow in pure revenge mode for November, think the hell again. NRO's Jim Geraghty:

Hmm. Joel Kotkin of Forbes lays out how the tax hikes envisioned by Obama and Congressional Democrats will hit blue states hardest.

From this, the GOP could conceivably propose a “tax Blue America” plan:

• Keep the tax rate on capital gains the same.
• Raise income taxes on the top income bracket for 2013, those making $398,350 and up (single filers, married joint filers, or head of household).
• Means-test, or eliminate entirely, the mortgage interest deduction (which benefits taxpayers in areas with the highest real estate values and mortgages – i.e., Hawaii, D.C., New York, California and Connecticut).
• Means-test or eliminate entirely the federal deduction of state and local taxes, which is disproportionately utilized by those in high-tax blue states: “In 2005, taxpayers in California and New York together made up 20 percent of those claiming the deduction and accounted for 30 percent of its value. Itemizers in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and California claimed on average over $12,000 per household.”

Jimmy thinks that would be a grand idea.  Let's punish all those blue states, guys!

Since the election, many conservatives have grumbled that they wish there was some way to raise taxes on only the 50.9 percent of Americans who voted for the president in November. This may be the option that comes closest to that.

Doesn't that make Romney voters the looters and moochers?   Oh wait...that's the way it is right now.

Mitt Romney was the overwhelming choice of voters in counties that receive the biggest federal farm subsidy payments, even as the Republican presidential candidate campaigned against dependence on government.

The BGOV Barometer shows nine of the 10 counties collecting the most in farm subsidies last year backed Romney, with Stoddard County, a rice, corn and cotton producer in southeast Missouri, voting for the Republican over President Barack Obama by the biggest margin, almost three-to-one. Farmers there got $13.5 million in farm subsidies in 2011, ranking seventh on the list. 

Oops.  Damn welfare queens.  It's all about revenge now, for the next four years.

Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

The Mayans were on to something.



We're all doomed.

Children Of The ACORN

If you think Republicans will come around to supporting the President on anything in his second term, you're as insane as the GOP is.  Half of them believe President Obama must have stolen the election in a massive national criminal conspiracy with the help of the long-defunct ACORN.

Nearly endless gobs of misinformation spewed from partisan media outlets in recent years had resulted in an astonishing achievement: 49 percent of Republicans now say that the disbanded community organizing group ACORN stole the 2012 presidential election for President Barack Obama, according to a survey by Public Policy Polling (PPP) released Tuesday.

The finding is especially stunning considering that ACORN, which stands for The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, filed for bankruptcy and disbanded in 2010. The group was targeted by conservative media prankster James O’Keefe in a series of intentionally misleading videos that purported to show employees explaining how to force children into prostitution. Then-Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) sponsored a bill in 2009 to pull all government funding of the group, which passed and led to their collapse.

Following Obama’s successful campaign against Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) in 2008, PPP found that a whopping 52 percent of Republicans said that the loss was ACORN’s doing — meaning 2012′s figures are only a marginal improvement.

The apoplectic response to Obama’s win over former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney doesn’t stop with feeling robbed. PPP also found that 25 percent of Republicans said they no longer want to be American and would rather their state to secede from the U.S. than take orders from President Obama. 

To recap, half of Republicans think the President is illegitimate, and a quarter want to renounce their citizenship rather than recognize him as America's leader.

So let's see it, Republicans.  That means there's tens of millions of you out there who want out.  Let's see you line up to burn your passports and IDs and leave.  Let's see which country will take you in when you go.  Let's see you take to the streets in that Second Civil War to fight for your country back.  Let's see you go all the way like Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy.  Let's do this thing.

No?

Then shut it and accept he won.  You have a choice, you know.

StupidiNews!

• The New York Post is taking heavy criticism from yesterday's front page picture of a fatally injured man trapped on the tracks in the path of an oncoming subway train.
• With a Republican supermajority in place for 2013, Indiana GOP lawmakers plan on introducing legislation to force public schools to teach creationism and intelligent design.
• The US is moving towards considering the Syrian rebel group Nusra Front as a terrorist organization due to its Al Qaeda links.
• UK grocery chain Tesco is considering pulling the plug on its US division, Fresh & Easy stores, as the California-based chain is deep in the red.
• Disney has cut a distribution deal with Netflix for exclusive rights to new films starting in 2016.

Last Call

And David Brooks loves him some middle class suffering, because he's basically evil and it builds character, or something.

So Republicans have to realize that they are going to cave on tax rates. The only question is what they get in return. What they should demand is this: That the year 2013 will be spent putting together a pro-growth tax and entitlement reform package that will put this country on a sound financial footing through 2040. 

Republicans should go to the White House and say they are willing to see top tax rates go up to 36 percent or 37 percent and they are willing to forgo a debt-ceiling fight for this year. 

This is a big political concession, but it’s not much of an economic one. President Obama needs rate increases to show the liberals he has won a “victory,” but the fact is that raising revenue by raising rates is not that much worse for the economy than raising revenue by closing loopholes, which Republicans have already conceded. 

In return, Republicans should also ask for some medium-size entitlement cuts as part of the fiscal cliff down payment. These could fit within the framework Speaker John Boehner sketched out Monday afternoon: chaining Social Security cost-of-living increases to price inflation and increasing the Medicare Part B premium to 35 percent of costs. 

But the big demand would be this: That on March 15, 2013, both parties would introduce leader-endorsed tax and entitlement reform bills in Congress that would bring the debt down to 60 percent of G.D.P. by 2024 and 40 percent by 2037, as scored by the Congressional Budget Office. Those bills would work their way through the normal legislative process, as the Constitution intended. If a Grand Bargain is not reached by Dec. 15, 2013, then there would be automatic defense and entitlement cuts and automatic tax increases. 

In other words, Bobo wants to make sure the middle class in America is destroyed, long after he's dead, and that it never rises again.

To get debt down to the levels we're not talking about trillions in spending cuts, we're talking about tens of trillions in spending cuts.  40 percent of GDP would be $6 trillion, from the $16 trillion we're at now, and it require not just balancing the budget and eliminating deficits, it means running up a surplus big enough to pay off the debt through either massive tax increases or massive spending cuts, or both.  At the very least, it would mean balanced budgets until at such time the GDP magically grew large enough so that $16 trillion WAS 40% of the GDP in 25 years.  Raise your hand if you think America's GDP is going to triple or so in 25 years with huge cuts on the menu in basic education and infrastructure.

Sure it will.  Laffer Curve!  

Bobo's just evil, and it sure doesn't matter to him if the middle class burns.  He's a rich snothead with a cushy columnist job.