Yes, I think that about 90%, maybe more, of classified material is classified because it would be embarrassing to let out. One thing is, we really don’t know what leak this is. Maybe it’s the leak about the underpants bomb. More likely it’s something else, that AP didn’t actually publish. I’ve seen several comments in different threads suggesting that this operation was meant to intimidate AP into not publishing something. Since their normal preference is not to publish anything the government asks them not to, this would have to be something really explosive. If it is, we’ll hear eventually. Nobody can keep the Villagers from gossiping. If it’s just another Benghazi, Benghazi, BENGHAZI! we probably won’t.

I dunno. I could see him giving up on attempts to, say, cut or cap the home mortgage deduction. He certainly isn’t going to go for the carried interest transfer to the wealthy, or capital gains tax rates. He surely isn’t going to try to get more on the estate tax. I think, though, he’s going to keep trying to impose Chained CPI. He’s said since January 2009 that he believes Social Security benefits must be cut. It’s a basic principle with him. No matter how much the Republicans have thrown the proposal back in his face he keeps offering it to them. The Republicans want to run against the Democrats for cutting Social Security, they don’t want to be seen as the reason for Chained CPI, and they don’t even want to be seen as accepting it. They want it to be a Democrat project pure and simple so they can take the Senate in 2014. I believe this is one thing Obama won’t let go.

This dynamic is likely going to render the sequester completely ineffective as a tool to spur a big deficit plan.

Good! What the f*ck do we want a “big deficit plan” for anyway? You know what their “big deficit plan” is? End all Social Security benefits but continue the tax. You know where that starts? With Chained CPI. Probably you’re too young to remember after World War II when the Soviet Union was consolidating control over Eastern Europe. In many places the local Communists used what was called “the Salami Technique.” Don’t try to take the whole salami at once, just take a little slice from the end, nobody will mind. The John Birch Society (Koch Brothers’ father) advocated using Communist tactics to achieve their own agenda. The Grand Bargain is really the Great Betrayal.

“Senior administration officials who briefed reporters on budget details said Mr. Obama would shield low-income senior, veterans and the very elderly from the change in Social Security inflation adjustments.” Very interesting. Where can I learn more, and why is this being kept so secret? Is it just because that’s the Obama default? Most secretive administration ever? Whistle-blowers are the greatest threat to our national security? Seriously, with all the outrage from all sides about how Chained CPI is actually a cut to benefits, why isn’t anyone in the administration explaining how they’re really protecting the “most vulnerable”? Where’s Nancy Pelosi on this? Where’s Axelrod, Plouffe, Valerie Jarrett? This is just like 2010 when they made it a point not to tell people the good things (if there are any) about the PPACA. Look how well that worked out.

“I’d rather go out with a bang than a whimper.” Yeah, well in some jurisdictions already you might get your wish as a S.W.A.T. team with armored vehicle smash down your doors and shoot up everyone inside. I expect this will become more widespread as time passes. You’ll be safer if you don’t have an AR-15-style weapon, and don’t make any move to defend yourself or your family, but we see all the time that it doesn’t really matter. If they feel like blowing you away they can always say, “Gee, I could have sworn he had a gun.” and the courts will hold them harmless.

Well, I largely agree with your analysis, but I’m doubtful that the CIA is making a lot of money off marijuana. They probably are off of Afghan opium, that was their product of choice back in the 70s, in the Golden Triangle where they had remnants of Chiang Kai Shek’s army to do the work for them. They’re still there, still doing the same thing, but they’ve been cut back a lot because the generals in Myanmar weren’t satisfied with the cut they were getting. The story I remember about why we’re in Afghanistan goes like this: fter 9/11 Bush and Cheney decided from opinions in the 16 intelligence agencies that probably Osama Bin Laden’s organization had been behind the attack. They then peremprorily demanded that Mullah Omar arrest Bin Laden and ship him to the U.S. for a fair trial before we executed him. Now Mullah Omar felt that Afghanistan, having beaten the Russian, was a sovereign nation, and they had a functioning courts system. Besides, Bin Laden was his son-in-law. So he said that we could send our evidence over and he would try Bin Laden in and Afghan court, and if Bin Laden was convicted the court would determine his punishment in accordance with their laws. Of course this was completely unacceptable to the Americans because, of course, they had no evidence against Bin Laden, and besides who were these uppity wogs to be denying the demands of The Emperoe Palpatine… I mean the President of the United States. Now as it happened there was a low-level infurrection going on against the Taliban in Afghanistan, so the Americans started sending huge amounts of weapons and some “advisers” to help them and that’s how we are where we are now. Of course preventing the Chinese pipeline is important, too, but many conservative deny it. We had a different pipeline almost agreed on before the unpleasantness, and conservatives deny that, too.

I don’t get why the Chained CPI would constitute a tax increase. I understand how the tax rates are adjusted for changes in the CPI, and I suppose the changes are currently based on the CPI-W, just as Social Security is. What I don’t get is why the connection couldn’t/wouldn’t be severed if CCPI was used for Social Security. Congress could specify anything it wants. There are many “official” indexes: CPI-W, CPI-U, C-CPI, CPI-E, etc. Congress could simply say, “We’re gonna use CCPI for Social Security, CPI-W for tax rates, and something else for whatever.” Can someone explain why they can’t/won’t do that?

“No one is above the law” is quaint.

I didn’t keep the title of his book, but Al Franken spotted a quote from Barbara Tuchman that I missed:

In her book A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, Barbara Tuchman writes about a peasant revolt in 1358 that began in the village of St. Leu and spread throughout the Oise Valley. At one estate, the serfs sacked the manor house, killed the knight, and roasted him on a spit in front of his wife and kids. Then, after ten or twelve peasants violated the lady, with the children still watching, they forced her to eat the roasted flesh of her dead husband and then killed her. That is class warfare. Arguing over the optimum marginal tax rate for the top 1 percent is not.

– Al Franken

I was a personnel sergeant, and while stationed in Vietnam I was involved in casualty reporting. Generally there weren’t any; I was assigned to a signal battalion in Pleiku province and after 3d Infantry Division relocated to Nha Trang our area was pretty quiet except for some rocket attacks from January to about April 1970. We had one guy killed by enemy action, shrapnel from a 122mm rocket penetrated the back of his flak jacket. We had two suicides, and I’ve been thinking about them because of the hysteria over Banghazi. One of them I don’t remember anything about. The other I recall because the kid switched his M-16 to full auto before he shot himself and a stray round hit his room-mate (we were in a really comfortable base but nothing like what they have now). Within half an hour after the initial report was submitted we started getting questions from higher and higher in the chain of command. It turned out not many people knew the kid very well, he was about half way through his 12 month tour, and the people who did know him were out on their jobs throughout the province, so it took about a day before we could talk to them all. Just like with the Benghazi reporting, we weren’t able to answer all the questions immediately, and I can tell you we were under trememdous pressure to try. Eventually, IIRC we even had a Congressional inquiry about it, and those require IMMEDIATE response from the battalion commander. We never did come up with any satisfactory answer as to why.

Sorry if I’m going off-topic. We had suicide problems back then, but nowhere near what they have now. I was interested by the datum that most of the suicides have never deployed. I wonder what that means. I don’t intend to disrespect Cdr. Price, but I wonder if his team has been involved in night raids or prisoner interrogation. I’m an agnostic, but I pray on a daily basis to give thanks for the good things in my life — after all, I don’t really know whether or not there’s a god who cares, but it doesn’t cost me anything, it can’t hurt, and it seems to make my life better. I think I’ll include a prayer for him tonight.

I’ve been inclined to just go over the Gentle Fiscal Incline, too, but I keep thinking about the extension to unemployment insurance. If that gets trashed on January 1 I don’t think they’re going to rush to reinstate it in the first week, or the first month, and maybe not even in the first three months. And that’s a serious hurt on people who’ve been hurting too much for too long already. I’m fine with the defense cuts. I’m retired military and I have a good idea of how much waste there is in R&D and procurement. But that UI, that’s a bummer.

Yeah, I remember too. Mao Tse Tung. This is another one of the atrocities the dirty commies committed after 1949 by imposing the Pinyin system in place of the Wade-Giles system of romanization.

I can’t agree. Obama is not nutless or gutless. He proved it with his decision to go ahead with the operation to kill (or capture, maybe) Bin Laden. Remember, even after more than a year of constant sophisticated surveillance, nobody had actually seen Bin Laden in that compound. The political risk was enormous. Remember the results of Desert One, the failed attempt to rescue the hostages in Iran? It could have been far worse in Abbottabad if a helicopter had crashed and killed civilians or any of dozens of other things had gone wrong. He chose to take that risk, so I don’t believe he’s without courage. It’s just that in this case the game he’s playing is to fool his base, because he REALLY WANTS to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Notwithstanding that Medicaid was extended in Obamacare. It makes me sick at heart that I was bamboozled because I was so hopeful for something better than W.

OK, I’ll bite. Why would “they” want to weaken the Democratic Party? Oh, the Republicans want to, so that resources now going to Democrats will go to them instead? But if the Dems are weakened, the people with money won’t have to give so much to the Repubs. And the music goes ’round and ’round and it comes out here.

“I always knew labor didn’t have any power, unless the unemp rate got so low (as it did briefly in Clinton prez) that employers were forced to bid workers away from each other, roughly 4%.” Ah, yes, the guy in the gorilla suit that nobody sees while watching the film of people passing a basketball. I’ve been wondering for a couple of years now why nobody has been pointing out that the reason the Fed doesn’t do anything to end this depression is because they want to reinforce the anxiety that all workers must feel. Same with Paul Volcker back in 1979-83; one of his purposes was to traumatize workers to destroy the unions and reduce pay. It has really puzzled me that this is never mentioned when economists discuss why the Fed sits on its hands. I’m also puzzled that nobody points out that one of the things Marx got tight was that Capitalism requires a vast army of starving unemployed so they can exploit under-compensated workers. I think they plan to take us a lot further toward “starving” than we are at now.

The thing I find hilarious, I was just reading that Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, and Rush Limbaugh all gush about how much them LOVE Bob Dylan, and “Born In The U.S.A.” Limbaugh even openly claimed to know the lyrics! New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is hurt because Dylan won’t even speak to him. I guess not all conservatives love him.

“Ambinder says we “shouldn’t expect the president to come out in favor of legalizing marijuana,” but there is no reason he can’t.”

Of course there are reasons he can’t. Same reasons John Brennan is his “security” “adviser”. Look, few people talk about it, but there are tens of thousands of people who make their living off the “War On Drugs.” Some of them make very good livings indeed. There’s the whole Prison-Industrial Complex, the Prison Guards Unions, the thousands of police who haven’t been downsized because the wingnuts want to keep them locking up the dreaded “addicts.” Besides, I get the strong impression that Obama really believes in that bullsh*t. Did you see what his people sent out in reply to the very popular petition to normalize marijuana use? All kinds of pseudo-scientific crap that it might be a gateway drug, or its effects still were in dispute, and that any change to the law would be imprudent.

“…none of these other weapons are illegal to possess.” Are you sure? The Second Amendment doesn’t protect hunting bows. Since 9/11 the state legislatures have been passing all kinds of laws to make nearly anything illegal. It’s the same thing the Gestapo did — if everyone is guilty of something then you can always threaten them to make them obey. I forget who it was who said everybody now is guilty of a dozen felonies every day. They were laughed at, but there is an amount of truth in it. Maybe not a dozen, and maybe not every day, but they’ve made so many things illegal without publicizing it that I’ll bet everyone commits at least one misdemeanor a week.