I am a big movie fan. As part of the deal that brought cable to the town I grew up in (Ypsilanti represent!) and one of the very few perks of Dad’s time as City Attorney, we were one of the first homes in town to get cable. So I was exposed to a huge range of films as a early teen and later.

One of the ones that always got to me was a Mel Gibson flick called Gallipoli. It is the story of two Australian runners who enlist in WWI and are sent to that disastrous campaign. At the end of the movie the troops are in their trenches, and they are about to be ordered to charge a hill controlled by Ottoman machine guns.

Mel Gibson’s character is a orders runner. He has been given the order that will stop the attack that will certainly lead to the slaughter of the troops, which the other runner is part of. He fails to get there in time and the men go over the top, into the teeth of the machine gun fire.

The other runner has been saying the mantra that he recited before a race and when the whistles blow he goes over the top, and starts to run to the enemy lines, eventually dropping his gun and being shot down. It is a horrible and wonderful statement about war and futility and courage.

What the hell does all of this have to do with politics? I am so glad you asked, gentle reader! I have been feeling more and more like that runner in Gallipoli lately. Specifically in regards to the completely manufactured debt ceiling crisis and the “solutions” that are coming out of it.

There are a lot of folks to slather blame on. One of them who is not getting a lot of play is Chicago Mayor Rham Emanuel. He is the guy who made “a crisis is an opportunity that should not be wasted” a White House article of faith.

Of course that would not be too bad if it were not for the President’s willingness to use a dangerous game by the Republicans to try to achieve a so-called ‘grand bargain” on a wide range of contentious issues. The major failure on the President’s part in this was assuming, against evidence and the fact that there are 85 hard right Republican House Freshmen, that he would have rational actors to negotiate with.
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Has the Republican Party been infected with Charlie Sheen-ism? Stick with me a little on this.

Obviously the Republican’s aren’t doing bricks of cocaine over the weekend (at least we don’t think they are) and folks like Sen. David Vitter aside they are not engaging in wild sex parties (though, come to think of it, things might be better if they were. At a minimum they’d be more relaxed) but they are engaging in the hyperactive belief that they are “winning”.

There seems to be zero awareness of reality amongst the House Republican caucus of what is really going on here. There are 6 days, a mere 144 or so hours before we run our happy asses off the economic cliff.

Yet these gals and guys seem to think they have all the time in the world for crap that will never fly. Take “Cut, Cap and Balance” for instance. All of last week was taken up in the House by this plan that not only was never going to have a chance of passing, but would be so horrible that even the old gold standard for draconian cuts, the Ryan budget, would not fit under its rubric.

The centerpiece of this craptastic piece of legislation is the Balanced Budget Amendment. Even though it requires 2/3 of both Houses of Congress to pass, there are Republicans out there saying they 100% sure that it would get the votes needed in both Houses. This, of course, ignores the fact that this Republican plan could not even command 2/3 of the House where it passed.

They ran around toting the “bi-partisan” passing of this bit of legislative malpractice because they managed to peel of exactly five Blue Dog (morons) Democrats to vote for it. A little under 2.5% of the Democratic caucus supported this thing. It is not what I would call bipartisan, since the Blue Dogs can be counted on to vote for dumb laws if it cuts taxes or spending.

It seems that the Republicans need a lot of votes to make themselves feel good about things. After all CCB was the second vote they took on a plan that would not pass the Senate and would not be signed by the President. We were told both times that once they got it out of their systems they would be able to be more reasonable, since they were on record for the maximalist position but would hold their noses for something less. Read the rest of this entry →

Steve Benen at Political Animal managed to reach back a couple of years to find just the right quote form John Cole about dealing with the Republicans in Congress:

I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years.

I know that I have a spent a lot of time hammering Republicans for being dumbasses and nitwits over the last couple of years, but this whole fight with the debt ceiling really is showing what happens when conspicuously uncurious people who only listen to their own ideological outlets get into power.

The Conventional Wisdom (including mine) keeps saying that we will get some kind of deal to avoid a real potential disaster. And things certainly look that way. After all the rumors are that Majority Leader Reid is going to unveil a plan that cuts 2.5 trillion (2,500 billion) from the budget over 10 years in ways that Democrats can get behind. A major feature of this plan is that we’d say 1.5 trillion by ending our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It would have no increased revenue and it would have no cuts to entitlements.

All of this is to the good (if you can call anything about Republican made mess good) in that the Democrats have offered the Republicans everything they insisted on, cuts that equal the increase the debt ceiling and no new revenue. In any sane world that would be that, a total acquiescence’s to the hostage conditions and an end the crisis.

The problem is that it is unclear that Republicans can take a solution that does not only meet their stated goals but lets them stick it to the people they have decided that they don’t like. It is no mystery that the GOP really does not like the “average” people of the nation. They have been showing their disdain for the millions of unemployed people for a very long time, call them lazy and wanting to subject them to random drug screenings merely for being victims of the economy they helped to engineer.
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I’ve written a lot about the fact that Democrats have a hard row to hoe in the debt ceiling negotiation in that they don’t have rational actors to negotiation with. To be fair to the Republicans (and the gods know I hate to be fair to Republicans) it is not just the yahoos inside their caucus that are nuts, there are the outside groups as well.

 

It seems that the (Hair) Club for Growth is actually pushing Republicans to vote against the only plan that seems to have any chance a this point, the “Hybrid McConnell”. Now you all being rational and informed folks understand what that means, that’s right the Club for Growth is actually telling Republicans to hold out for a default.

Now, it seems to me that they have just abandoned their name, after all there will not be growth if we default on our debt, in fact there will be the opposite of it.

What they want instead is the crazed “Cut, Cap and Balance” plan, listen to what (H)CfG president Chris Chocola had to say today, from the article at TMP:

“Cut, Cap, and Balance will fix our fiscal mess. The McConnell-Reid plan does not,” said Club for Growth President Chris Chocola in a statement accompanying an alert that these votes will be counted on the group’s scorecard. “McConnell-Reid simply punts our budget problem further down the road and is everything that’s wrong with Washington. Congress has proven that they are unable to balance the budget without reform. Cut, Cap and Balance is the only plan that permanently handcuffs politicians from spending more money than they take in.”

Now Count Chocola is not just some random nut. He is the president of a group that has exactly no qualms about supporting far right candidates against sitting Republicans. It was their own Pat Toomey that ran Arlen Specter out of the Republican Party by being so far to his right as to make the so-called moderate Republican look like Noam Chomsky (sorry Noam).

When the Count speaks, Republicans tend to listen. After all it one thing for a bunch of dirty hippies to tell you what you should be doing, but when the guy who runs the group which has been instrumental in purging your party of any moderate voice tells you that if you vote rationally on an issue it will count against you on their score card, well you have to think twice if this is the issue you want to end your political career over.

Personally, this seems like the one. We have seen a slow break with Grover Norquist on raising revenues by some Republican Senators. Given that if we don’t raise the debt ceiling the consquences are going to be dire for everyone, this is probably the time to get a back bone.

But beyond that there is this meme that you are going to hear a lot of over the next week, namely that politicians have proved they can’t be trusted to curb spending so we need to in the words of Count Chocola “handcuff them permanently”. I don’t know about you but this would make me pretty mad if I were serving in the Congress.
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It is no secret that I am in favor of more handgun regulation. It is not that I hate guns, it is that I see the caviler attitude to this dangerous tool and that is unacceptable when we are going to allow almost any citizen to purchase them. Hand guns have a single purpose, to harm other humans. For all that staunch gun advocates will tell you that one could hunt with them; we all know that is just BS.

Still if people feel the need to carry such a tool, well, that is their choice. Personally I couldn’t deal with living in that kind of fear, but each to his own. The issue is always going to be over what is the appropriate level of regulation.

For me regulation is all about safety. The Supreme Court has found that gun ownership, especially handgun ownership is an individual right and we are going to have to live with that for quite a while. Given that it is incumbent on all of us to develop sensible regulation based on safety.

The problem is that many, not all by any means, gun-rights advocates are not willing to bend on the issue at all. They want a totally unfettered ability to carry any gun they want anywhere they want. Which leads us to situations like the one that is unfolding in Arizona.

A staunch gun-rights advocate in the State Senate, Republican Senator Lori Klein recently whipped out her raspberry red .380 hand gun, with a laser sight and no safety and pointed it straight at the chest of a reporter from the Arizona Republic she was talking to about gun rights. It seems that her intent was not to menace the reporter but to just show off the weapon.

Reportedly Sen. Klein said that this was okay as “She did not have her fingers on the trigger”. As anyone who has ever been to any kind of gun safety class knows this breaks several rules. You never assume that a gun won’t fire; you never, ever, point a weapon at something you don’t intended to shoot.

The issue here is not one moronic State Senator, but rather what the cult of gun ownership and non-regulation leads to. Arizona is one of only two states to have a State Gun, and it is one of many states that has removed mandatory safety training for handgun owners. Sen. Klein has said that she has had ‘informal gun safety training” mainly from her father. This is where the real problem comes. Read the rest of this entry →

Since it was a holiday weekend, you might have missed the Senior (so very, very senior) Senator from Arizona on CNN. Leaving aside the reason that this failed presidential candidate gets a billion appearances on Sunday news shows, he said some things that deserve a little attention.

On the debt ceiling negotiations he said that Americans don’t want compromise. I get this feeling that John McCain does not really know a lot of Americans, because poll after poll shows that more than half of us want a balance approach combining cuts and tax increases for the solution to this BS crisis that the Republicans have manufactured and the Democrats have bought into. If we must have a solution to the non-short term problem of the deficit and debt, then this is the one they want, by overwhelming numbers.

That is bad enough, but he also said something worse:

To McCain, the danger from continuing to let the federal deficit expand without taking substantive cost-cutting steps is much greater than the threat from failing to increase the federal debt ceiling by August 2.

“I think that this catastrophe or short-term meltdown that we’re facing isn’t nearly as bad as the meltdown that we’re facing unless we get our deficit under control,” McCain said.

This is insane. I mean really bat-shit, howl at the moon, rub your own crap in your hair nuts. Sen. McCain is suggesting that if we default, for the first time in the history of our nation, and against the 14th Amendments requirement that the debt of the United States not be questioned, it won’t be that bad.

I don’t expect every Senator to know about every set of policies, it is really too much for any individual to be an expert in everything it takes to run the nation, but if you are a dumbass about economics you should, shut your gob.

As if that is not bad enough, he is actually saying that it would be worse for the nation if we continue to spend as we have than a world wide economic meltdown and increased borrowing costs for the US for decades to come. Like his assertion that Americans don’t want compromise this just shows how completely out of touch Sen. McCain is (maybe the clouds are provoking him…).
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Okay, I’ve been hard on Rand Paul. I’ll own it. I’ve called him a Bodineism suffer and been called out folks saying he must be smart if he is a doctor. Well, there is the issue that he is self certified, he did set up a certification board so he could be board certified. Then there is the issue of how good was the medical school? Where did he graduate in his class?

But all of that is aside. Maybe he was smarter before he came into the public eye. Still seeing is believing. Take a look at this video

In it Senators Sanders and Franken try, really, really try to explain the concept of spending money in the front end to avoid the back end costs which are much higher. The issue is hunger for seniors. There is a program that costs $2 billion that gets food to the elderly who can’t drive or are just old and confused.

The way this program saves money is that being malnourished is one of the major ways that older Americans wind up in the hospital. Not being able, for whatever reason, to get good food is one of the major reasons that people wind up in nursing homes. By providing this modest service we save a ton of money on nursing homes by letting people stay in their homes and another ton of money by not having emergency room visits and hospital stays.

The very epitome of the phrase “Penny wise, Pound foolish”.

Senator Paul, does not seem to grasp this very clear idea. Sadly he is not alone in the Republican ranks of Bodineism suffers. Cutting Medicare to save it, cut regulatory agencies to make our food and work places safer, let the “markets” decide what health care should cost.
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Informal immigration is a problem. At its base is leads to a culture of crime acceptance. I am not talking about the misdemeanor level crime of coming to this country without the proper paper work, but the whole criminal universe that grows up around people who are nervous about interaction with the law. They can be cheated of wages, they can be housed unfairly and, of course, there is the issue of human trafficking that grows from smuggling people across the boarder.

Now GOP Massachusetts State Rep. Ryan Fattman is saying this is a feature not a bug. He said, and you will really not believe this, from the Worcester Telegram and Gazette :

Asked if he would be concerned that a woman without legal immigration status was raped and beaten as she walked down the street might be afraid to report the crime to police, Mr. Fattman said he was not worried about those implications.

“My thought is that if someone is here illegally, they should be afraid to come forward,” Mr. Fattman said. “If you do it the right way, you don’t have to be concerned about these things,” he said referring to obtaining legal immigration status.

That’s right, if you are an informal immigrant to this country, folks like Rep. Fattman (no there will be none of the 2 million name jokes that can be made here, they are just too easy) believe that you should live in fear and be helpless if you are victimized by anyone else, even in the case of serious crimes like rape and assault.
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It is Monday so what do I find in my in-box but another tightly coiled steaming pile of conservative idiocy by Robert Samuelson. It is a real drag to write about him because there really are no snappy pejoratives to describe him that don’t insult the people or item one compares him to. So I am not going to try that today, I am just going to call it straight, Robert Samuelson is a partisan liar.

His entire column is filled with half-truths, false comparisons and blatant lies. Let’s break it down. He starts out by trying to co-opt the “Ending Medicare as we know it” meme that not only Democrats but just about any person that can read and reason understands is the outcome of the Ryan budget. But then Robby ups the ante he says:

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that unless we end Medicare “as we know it,” America “as we know it” will end.

This is, not to put too fine a point on it, a lie. There is no chance that our taking care of the elderly has to end America as we know it. Well, unless you have been so brainwashed by the conservative movement that you are still living in the 1880’s idea of what America is. You know, white, rich and a bunch of basically peasants that are just there to turn the wheels of industry and take the crumbs the Robber Barons deign to leave behind. Then it might be end to that America, which the rest of us left behind long ago.

He then conflates health care spending for government programs (which do include the VA, but he doesn’t mention it since he wants to kill Medicare and Medicaid) and private health care spending. He says:

Uncontrolled health spending isn’t simply crowding out other government programs; it’s also dampening overall living standards. Health economists Michael Chernew, Richard Hirth and David Cutler recently reported that higher health costs consumed 35.7 percent of the increase in per capita income from 1999 to 2007. They also project, that under reasonable assumptions, it could absorb half or more of the gain between now and 2083.

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Well there is as bad as we generally perceive traditional media, there is a little bit of bright news in this area this week. The National Republican Congressional Committee, the group that works on getting Republican Representatives elected and re-elected, sent a letter to the local Comcast provider in Boston, insisting that they remove the Progressive Change Campaign Committees commercial, which hammered Rep. Charlie Bass (R-NH) for his vote in favor of the Ryan Budget and its ending of Medicare as we know it.

Here is the commercial in question.

For those who don’t get video very well here is what the woman says

As a social worker here in the north country, I’ve spent my life helping people with disabilities. Now, I have a disability,” the woman in the ad says. “If I didn’t have Medicare, doctors’ bills could wipe me out — and put a burden on my five kids. When Congressman Charlie Bass voted to end Medicare, that was an attack on New Hampshire families just like mine.”

The NRCC claimed that it was a false ad, in that it the Ryan budget does not end Medicare. This is spurious on its face. If I take away your car and give you a two wheeled rider propelled vehicle (a bicycle) and call it a car, you still don’t have anything close to what you had. This is what the Republicans have been trying to do for weeks. Make it seem like they are not going to be ending one of the most popular programs in the history of the nation and replace it with something only vaguely the same.

Greg Sargent broke this on Friday. He had a copy of the entire letter, which you can find at this link, but here is the money paragraph:

The Budget Resolution as approved by the U.S. House of Representatives does NOT end Medicare. In fact, the Budget Resolution makes no changes at all to Medicare for current or near retirees, as none of the Medicare-related provisions in the Budget Resolution would even take effect until 2022.2 This fact makes the Advertisement especially misleading, as the woman featured in the Advertisement is a current Medicare beneficiary, and would not have her Medicare benefits ended, or even changed in any way, under the Budget Resolution.

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