They Approve?

It surprises me not at all that the latest polls show 84% disapproval of the job Congress is doing. What's a shocker is that 14% actually approve. What can it possibly be that they find satisfying; and who the hell are these people?

Debt

[Click image to enlarge.]

Never hurts to be reminded.

A guy who sends me the occasional email, and who I've generally thought reasonably smart about the economy, recently wrote that the debt is so huge there's no way to solve it. All the gold in Fort Knox, he said among other things, would barely make a dent.

But that's not relevant, seems to me. The point is that if we were to achieve a balanced budget -- you know, like Clinton did -- we'd pay off the debt eventually. If you owe $500K on your house, but can't scrape together the cash to pay it off all at once, it doesn't mean it's impossible to pay it off. All you need to do is keep making payments and avoid taking out second and third mortgages.

In the case of the US, it's not quite that simple, of course, because obligations will continue to increase (mostly because of old guys like me -- although I don't plan to partake of Medicare. I have my own solution to illness). Which is why everyone but teabaggRs and a few Democrats know that long-term balance will have to include cuts that change the slope of rising costs of entitlements and defense, and will have to include revenue unless we really do want to remove all hope of future survival. To achieve balance with cuts alone -- and not even Paul Ryan's draconian plan gets near balance -- would mean the end of education, environmental protection, infrastructure, and, most social programs. About that there's really no argument.

The mathematics of balance are simple; it's because of the politics that solution seems impossible, especially as long as teabaggRs have the corner on stupidity and the rest of the Rs have abandoned all pretense of respecting the rules of democracy.

It's a fair assumption that voters, too steeped in selfishness and willfully stupefied by the RW scream machine, won't give the Senate back to Democrats in numbers to defeat filibuster; and won't return the House majority to them. I look forward (in the way one looks forward to disease and torment) to seeing if Democrats, when they become minorities in both houses, will resort to the destructive tactics the Rs have used. And, of course, to the screams from Rs if they do.

Kudos

Credit to Gov Christie not only for nominating a Muslim judge, but for defending him from "the crazy" despite a barrage of outrage from his fellow right-wingers. His position is the true conservative one.

Meanwhile, I gotta admit Sarah Palin got off a good one over Joe Biden's comparing the behavior of teabaggRs to that of terrorists. Within a not-necessarily-broad definition of terrorism -- holding an entity hostage under threat of destruction in order to get their way -- Biden is right. I've said so here, and so have others.

Better, though, for us crazies to have pointed out the truth than the Veep. Can't say anything bad about the opposition, dontcha know. Unless you're a RWS™.

News Item

For some reason I hadn't heard this. Maybe it's because I get all my news from Fox.

Hege Dalen and Toril Hansen have rightly become national heroes in Norway after they rescued 40 fleeing teens from the massacre on Utoya Island. Using their boat, they made multiple trips into the waters around Utoya where Anders Breivik was murdering 69 people and ferried as many as they could to safety. Bullet holes later discovered in their boat indicate Breivik fired upon them. There's been some concern among the gay community that their story hasn't received the attention it should because they are a married lesbian couple.

Those who oppose gay marriage do so on religious grounds, so they claim. It goes like this: being gay is a choice. The(ir) bible says homosexuality is a sin. Therefore...

Implicit is the corollary that since these people are choosing to affront god, they are godless. And to those same people who make such arguments, people who are without god have no basis for morality.

So I wonder what explains this behavior. For that matter, I wonder what explains the silence of the press...

The More Things Stay The Same

Can't improve on that. I particularly relate to his comments about wanting people dumb, so they'll vote against their own interests; not noticing what's going on. It's what I've been saying every way I can think of. Not only is it true, but the cynical effectiveness of it is seen everywhere; most especially in teabaggers. Carlin would have loved those guys.

Yeah, Right

I can see why it took him ten years to come up with this one:

(Reuters) - Former President George W. Bush says his apparent lack of reaction to the first news of the September 11 2001 attacks was a conscious decision to project an aura of calm in a crisis.

[...]

Bush was visiting a Florida classroom and the incident, which was caught on TV film, and has often been used by critics to ridicule his apparently blank face.

"My first reaction was anger. Who the hell would do that to America? Then I immediately focused on the children, and the contrast between the attack and the innocence of children," Bush says in an excerpt of the interview shown to television writers on Thursday.

Well, sure. When the shit hits the fan, you sit still. That's what any President would do, right? Project calm.

Except for the fact that at that point, as far as the kids knew, there was no crisis over which to project calm. He was spraying calm all over the place for no apparent reason. Makes sense to me.

Some cynics might suggest that another way to accomplish what he's decided, ten year later, he was thinking, would have been to excuse himself gently, saying, "It's been wonderful being with you, children, but sometimes the president has to handle important things, so I'm going to have to go. Have fun, and keep reading." Some might even say that the people who needed to be covered in cool calm were the ones who actually knew what was going on, watching it on TV, freaking out. Not Mr Bush. Sit there blinking and dumb-faced, in front of perhaps the only people in the US at that point who had no idea.

Rewriting history one episode at a time. Blatantly, if laughably; following the example of teabaggRs in Congress and across the land.

What Might Have Been

Second only to President Obama, Nancy Pelosi is the Democrat Republicans are sworn to hate. Reflexively. In that context, this article presents an interesting comparison between what she accomplished, how she acted in her job as Speaker of The House of Representatives, and how John Boehner has been performing in the same role.

When Nancy Pelosi served as Speaker of the House, her job was conditioning her members for disappointment. It was Pelosi who had to bring them around to a Senate-designed health-care law that lacked a public option, a cap-and-trade bill that gave away most of its permits, a stimulus that did too little, a bank bailout that endangered their careers. Pelosi had to do that because, well, that’s what the speaker of the House has to do. To govern is to compromise. And when you’re in charge, you have to govern.

Lately, Boehner has not been governing. After he failed to pass a conservative resolution to the debt crisis without Democratic votes, he should have begun cutting the deals and making the concessions necessary to gain Democratic votes. That, after all, is what he will ultimately have to do. It’s what all this is supposed to be leading up to.

But Boehner went in the opposite direction. He made his bill more conservative. He indulged his members in the fantasy that they wouldn’t have to make compromises. It’s as if Pelosi, facing criticism for dropping the public option, had tried to shore up her support by bringing a single-payer health-care bill to the floor. Even if that would have pleased her left wing, what good would it have done her? Her job was to prepare her members to take a vote that could lead to a successful outcome.

It's amazing how dramatically the election of a relative handful of political jihadists to Congress has changed the dynamic of a system that had been working pretty well for over a couple hundred years. A system founded in and based on good faith cannot, evidently, function at all in the face of a minority to whom the term has no meaning.

Meditations For A Sunday

Unexpectedly, I found myself near tears toward the end, in sadness, I think, for the absence of such thoughtfulness in our national discourse; in longing for the quiet pleasure of observing intelligence at work, gentleness, comparing ideas such as these to those we hear daily, hourly, incessantly leaking like toxic waste from our political leaders and their enablers on talk radio, on propaganda television. Shouting, stupefying, destructive, mindless.

And it's not really about the message per se. It's about the sense of loss, the realization, by its absence, of the pleasure of hearing thoughtful people talk. About anything.

Drowned out are people like this, by the din of fear and destruction and needfulness and stupidity and hate and magical thinking as they overtake our country. Thence the tears. For the damage being done by choosing irrationality over reason at a time when we need it most.

Hot Stuff

When I first read this article the other day, titled "New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism," I had a couple of thoughts. The central claim was:

NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth’s atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.

Among my thoughts were, 1) Well, this is in Forbes Magazine, hardly a bastion of scientific realism. 2) I wonder who this Spencer guy is (the author of the reported study. 3) If it's true, it's significant. 4) Either way, the right-wing scream machine will be all over it. 5) Given what I've read for the past decades, I'm betting it's not what it seems. 6) If I'm wrong -- if it's all wrong --I'll be really at sea.

So -- hang onto your hats! -- it turns out author Spencer has a bit of a credibility problem:

The first author of this work is Roy Spencer — one of the extremely few climate scientists who denies human-caused climate change, so more on him in a moment — and his work has been shown to be thoroughly wrong by mainstream climate scientists.

Stephanie Pappas at LiveScience contacted several climate scientists about Spencer’s paper, and their conclusions were quite harsh. They say Spencer’s model is "unrealistic", "flawed", and "incorrect". As ThinkProgress points out, a geochemist has shown that Spencer’s models are irretrievably flawed, "don’t make any physical sense", and that Spencer has a track record in using such flawed analysis to draw any conclusion he wants.

[UPDATE: RealClimate now has a post tearing apart the science and methodology of Spencer's paper as well.]

And given the above, the following was predictable:

... Spencer is a big supporter of Intelligent Design. ... Heck, even a conservative judge ruled it to be [bogus] in the now-famous Dover lawsuit. Anyone who dumps all of biological science in favor of provably wrong antiscience should raise alarm bells in your head, and their claims should be examined with an even more skeptical eye.

Guess we'll be seeing the admissions of error on the right-wing blogs and Fox "news" any minute now.

Bruce!!

I've mentioned him several times: former economic adviser to both Reagan and Bush the First. Even if you find Chris Matthews annoying (I do), what Mr Bartlett says is so obvious as to be unremarkable, if not for the fact that all the Republicans in Congress refuse to unlock their brains and let in the light.

Stating The Obvious (x2)

Tom Friedman, while not a complete stranger to bloviation, is often right. In his latest, he says, with but a small oversight, more or less exactly what I've been saying for a long time:

[The formula for past American success] is built on five basic pillars: educating the work force up to and beyond whatever technology demands; building the world’s best infrastructure of ports, roads and telecommunications; attracting the world’s most dynamic and high-I.Q. immigrants to enrich our universities and start new businesses; putting together the best regulations to incentivize risk-taking while curbing recklessness (not always perfectly); and funding research ...

[...]

After all, “we don’t just need a plan for regaining American solvency. We need a plan for maintaining American greatness and sustaining the American dream for another generation,” argues Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert...

...

.. Anyone who says that either entitlement reform or tax increases are off the table does not have a plan for sustaining American greatness and passing on the American dream to the next generation.

Alas, that is the Tea Party. It is so lacking in any aspiration for American greatness, so dominated by the narrowest visions for our country and so ignorant of the fact that it was not tax cuts that made America great but our unique public-private partnerships across the generations. If sane Republicans do not stand up to this Hezbollah faction in their midst, the Tea Party will take the G.O.P. on a suicide mission. ...

His small oversight is that we have in The White House exactly that person, who sees what's needed absolutely clearly. And it's his party that, while not particularly happy about it, has been willing to move in the needed direction. Friedman also seems to miss the obvious point that it's not just the Republican party that teabaggers are destroying. It's our country.

Otherwise, his characterization of teabaggers is exactly correct. Since they'll never see it themselves -- clarity is hardly a defining characteristic -- the only hope is that enough voters might figure it out before it's too late. But, as I've also said many times, a critical mass of the electorate has been carefully molded by Rovian cynicism into a bunch of credulous, gullible true believers, unable to see where their (and the country's) real interests lie, happy to buy into the hatreds and falsehoods that Foxrovobeckians have so deliberately and effectively nurtured.

[As long as I'm leaning heavily on the NYT, everyone ought to read this swan-song article, by David Leonhardt, an excellent economic writer, leaving that desk to become their Washington bureau chief:

... The malaise obviously has several causes, some of which are beyond our control. One major cause, however, is entirely our doing. We do not spend enough time focusing on our actual economic problems....

... One of the tricky things about the subject is that almost nothing is certain in the way that, say, two plus two equals four. Economics — which is at root a study of human behavior — tends to be messier. Because it’s messier, it can be tempting to think that all uncertainty is equal and that we don’t really know anything.

But we do...

When it comes to economics, we know that a market economy with a significant government role is the only proven model of success. ... On the other hand, unencumbered market forces often lead to disaster, as 1929 and 2008 made clear. ...

We also know that ever-rising levels of education are crucial to a country’s success. ... The next time you hear naysayers poormouth college, ask them if they plan to send their own children.

...

We know that the federal government has promised more benefits than it can currently afford. The only way out of this problem involves some combination of tax increases and cuts to Medicare, Social Security and the military. Anyone who won’t get specific about which ones they favor is not a fiscal conservative...

The bottom 50 percent of households, based on pretax income, make less combined than the top 1 percent. Only three decades ago, the bottom half made more than twice as much. The middle class has also received a much smaller tax cut in recent decades than the affluent...

The real problem with so many of these issues is that the political system is not even trying to find solutions. ...

...

... Some of the world’s most talented people — students and would-be entrepreneurs who would like nothing more than to remain in this country — are told they are not welcome. Amazingly, Congress may be about to create a whole new economic problem by voluntarily defaulting on the national debt...

Perhaps the last refuge for optimists is Churchill’s reputed line: “In the long run, Americans will always do the right thing — after exploring all other alternatives.” The sentiment is nice. It would be comforting to have a little more reason to believe that history was going to repeat itself.

Count me as one who doesn't think so. Or, if they do, it'll be too late. Because it already is.]

Ultimate Irony

As I responded to a lengthy comment on this post, something occurred to me. Probably not an original thought, because it's fairly obvious. Still, the irony meter is pegged (in more than one sense of the word):

Teabaggers continuously claim sole proprietorship of patriotism and love of country. Simultaneously, led by such bright lights as Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, and everyone at Fox "news" and all the rest of the RWS™, they are non-stop in their assertions that liberals hate America and are trying to destroy it. That those are their claims is irrefutable.

And yet at some level, in their threats to bring down the country over the debt ceiling, they are assuming that they can threaten to kill their hostage -- America -- and ultimately get their way for the very reason that they know liberals are, in fact, more patriotic than they are and would never let the hostage die. While calling liberals the vilest of names, they understand that it's only they -- teabaggers -- who are willing to destroy the country, hands on the trigger to get their way. They are by any definition terrorists; and they count on the fact that Democrats are not.

Amusing, isn't it? Except for the fact that it's really horrifyingly dangerous and depressing and destructive of everything we once were; and that, given teabagger anarchy and liberal conscience, there's no solution. Out of concern for our future not shared by teabaggRs, I expect Obama to throw in the towel momentarily.

Crucified

I was going to make a couple of obvious comments about the Fox-propelled outrage that some have characterized the self-described Christian Norway killer as a Christian. No need. Jon Stewart did it perfectly. And then some.

(Here's a more serious discussion of the man's Christianity.)

Dancing On The Ceiling

Now, I don't know why we have a debt ceiling law, and I don't know what having one is supposed to accomplish. I can't say whether it's good or bad, should remain or be removed from the books. But it doesn't take a genius, nor an econ major, nor a person with a kindergarten education to understand that if the US defaults on its debt for the first time in history, it will have repercussions around the world, will ruin our standing, and (this part takes some level of understanding, I guess) immediately add 100 billion to our annual deficits. (That could happen without default, if credit ratings go down as people see our fundamental inability to govern ourselves.)

So the fact that enough Congressional Rs (and that expert at bankruptcy, Donald Trump) think causing default is perfectly fine leads to an obvious conclusion: the country is at the mercy of idiots. Of people who are too dumb to understand and too hidebound to care. In that sad reality, the rules of negotiation simply don't apply. A piece in the NYT by a psych professor says as much:

DESPITE all the bluster about an impending default on the government’s debt, most observers in Washington and on Wall Street still believe the two parties will reach a crisis-averting agreement.

That’s because the practice of American politics assumes that all players will negotiate according to predictable patterns — that they will realize they can get more from compromise than by demanding everything and winning nothing.

Under that assumption, President Obama is right to keep pressing for a compromise, because eventually the Republicans will fall in line. But as two wildly different fields — game theory and the study of elephant mating patterns — show, there are limits to the usual assumptions: sometimes players simply refuse to play the game, and when that happens, the best advice for their opponents is to do the same....

Unfortunately, even the author can't come up with a sensible solution. His mind, it seems (and not unlike mine), is blown. Tossing his hands in the air, he concludes:

In the 1983 movie “WarGames,” an errant military supercomputer has a final moment of lucidity in which it notes, “The only winning move is not to play.” The president is best advised to do the same: declare that the other side has foregone all pretense at rational legitimacy, and simply proceed to govern as best he can for the good of the country.

Sort of says it all, really. "As best he can." How? Facing these guys in Congress, and, unlike them, recognizing there's a Constitution and there are certain assumptions about governance in a democracy, what's a president to do?

And that's the point: one side is beholden to a group of people with whom negotiation makes no sense, to whom the very essence of democracy is meaningless. In our system, with a divided government, all options are gone when one party is literally insane.

The only solution is for people to wise up and vote to put Democrats back in control. Failing that, of course, they could find and elect reasonable Republicans. Slight problems, though: first, there are damn few reasonable ones left, and, second, Republican voters will never elect them. Not until, in concert with their global warming denial, hell freezes over.

One thing the president could have done, however, is, in his recent speech to the public, laid out much more clearly what the competing visions for our country are, what the consequences to our future would be were Republican cuts with no revenue increases to become law; and to have demonstrated the level of detachment from reality being shown by congressional teabaggRs. In asking the American people to let their representatives know what they think, he was still operating on the assumption that someone on that side of the aisle actually gives a shit.

Meeting In The Middle

So let's see if I understand: Conservative NYT columnist David Brooks, who recently made waves across the intertubes by saying Republicans were being ridiculous, now says both sides are being intransigent, and it's Obama's fault. (So no one could mistake his argument for coherent, in the same column that takes Obama to task for "losing his cool" and speaking to the American people, he also says that speech got Congressional leaders to start doing their jobs. You can work on that one. My point is merely what's obvious.

To review: way back when, so-called budget negotiations began with each side staking their positions. For Ds, it was no cuts in social programs, and raising taxes on the wealthy. For Rs, it was no taxes, no closing of loopholes, and drastic cuts in social programs.

Time passed. People "negotiated." President Obama offered significant cuts in social programs, enough to piss off his constituency, and agreed not to raise taxes, but only to close egregious loopholes. In response, Republicans agreed to.... nothing. Their position changed from no taxes, big cuts, keep the loopholes, to no taxes, big cuts, keep the loopholes.

And the pundit class (trying hard not to be, you know, factual and therefore "liberal") manages a straight face while saying both sides are unwilling to budge.

Whatever else is true about the parties to the debate -- and who the hell knows what's true any more? -- it's only Democrats who've been willing to compromise. Sure, Rs have offered varying levels of cuts. But's it's always been cuts only. It's always been an approach which will coddle the wealthy, and will screw the non-wealthy, the environment, the future. It's Ds who, in the spirit of America, have actually conceded ground. Maybe they should, maybe they shouldn't. But they have, and Rs have not (while lying about the reasons). To argue otherwise is to see that which is not there.

Imagine that: making stuff up and calling it an argument.