Mirror Image by cosygreeneyes

I watched both speeches last night on the debt ceiling. I have to say that this whole thing makes me crazed. It is a dumb time to talk about pulling trillions out of the economy, especially when we are talking about a policy that is supposed to be a decade long. All I see from the debt reduction right now is a slow growth of jobs because we never addressed the underlying problem of demand.

Be that as it may, there was plenty to be unhappy about from both the President and Speaker Boehner. President Obama is pitching us on the idea that cutting spending, and cutting it on social safety net programs is somehow going to bring the confidence and jobs fairies out of their coma and everything will be Moring in America again (I am not keen in any fashion on how much this President, this Democratic President grooves on Ronald Regan).

I understand that he is standing on the bridge of the Titanic and watching the Republicans push and iceberg into the path of the national and planetary economy. At this point I am not at all sure that there is much different he could have done, but that does not let him off the hook for granting the legitimacy of the deficit reduction by hostage taking (call it Disaster Legislating) in the first place.

He had the bully pulpit and could have been hammering it for months if he chose to do so. It is entirely possible that things would have been different, but it is water under the bridge now.

Last nights speech was kind of a primer for those (unlike you and me) who have not been paying attention and don’t have a the history of debt ceiling fights on the tip of our tongues. Still he was far too easy on the Republicans in terms of who is at fault for our massive debt. Five trillion (that is 5 million, million for those how don’t do big numbers well) was added to our debt in the 8 years of the Bush administration. That is more than 1/3 of the total.
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Paul Ryan - Caricature by DonkeyHotey, on Flickr

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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Bank Of Montreal by Galt Museum & Archives on The Commons, on Flickr

We’re flat broke. What do you think of when you read that? Having been busted more than a few times in my life it means no money and no prospect of getting any. Pretty simple and straight forward, unless, of course, you are the Speaker of the House; then “broke” can be parsed and spun and twisted.

We have all seen the great orange Speaker saying “We’re broke” over and over again as he tries to sell a justification for what his masters (the Freshmen Republican “Tea Partiers”) insist on him doing with the budget. It is really an effective statement, powerful, short and direct. It would be perfect if it were not for the fact that it is flatly a lie.

The United States has a deficit. That is true. The United States also has a lot of debt, but to say that we are “broke” is ridiculous. It is just another half truth scare tactic from the party that has made a performance art-form of the practice.

Even Speaker Boehner’s office has had to admit that he is parsing the word. When they were challenged on the claim the U.S. is broke they came out with a statement that said when the Speaker says “broke” he means spending more than you have for an extended period of time. Sheesh! It is hard enough to communicate in this life without making twisted and tortured parses of common words.

What gets up right up my nose about this meme is that is completely ignores the fact there are two things to do when one does not have enough money. Spend less or get more money. As State Rep. Joe Gibbons (D-FL) put it so succinctly on NPR this morning:

If my family checkbook at home is short, you know what I do? I get a second job. I don’t just eat three days instead of seven. … What they’re telling us we got to do is, you got to eat three days.”

There is a lot of opportunity and in fact lot of desire on the part of the citizenry in the nation to raise taxes on the wealthy both at the state level and the national level. Nationally 88% of folks surveyed said they would rather raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires than cut programs in an effort to balance the budget. In Wisconsin where this fight is playing out on the smaller scale 67% percent said they would like to see higher taxes on people making $150,000 a year.

Of course this shows the basic Republican ideological bankruptcy. They have been trumpeting (that’s what Elephants do, trumpet, right?) about the freaking deficit for two entire years. Yet in that time they have not been willing to raises taxes on the ultra-wealthy. Just so it does not go down the memory whole, they were the ones that held the extension of unemployment benefits for millions of out of work Americans hostage to get an extension of the Bush Tax Cuts for the Paris Hilton’s and Koch Brothers of the nation.

They are also the ones that are now trying to claim that the modest job growth that we are seeing as the final bits of the stimulus money from the American Reinvestment Act are spent is due to keeping taxes at the same rate as when their deregulatory policy crashed the national and planetary economy.

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BMW apline wrecked car by Kingfisherblue2009 Liz Callan, on Flickr

Mississippi Governor and probably presidential hopeful Haley Barbour is a real piece of work. With his Boss Hogg good looks and his penchant for idolizing Jim Crow groups like the Citizens Council (who enforced an economic apartheid on Southern Black citizens)  but thus far that has not stopped him from looking like he might be a viable candidate.

Still the level of mendacity and crypto-racism from the Deep South Governor is not something I think will play in the larger election. Sure whoever the Republican candidate is will be going up against an African American in the general election and the racist minority in this nation is going to be wanting to line up behind anyone (who is white) who will run against him, but the vast majority of the nation is not going stand for that kind of thing.

Still Gov. Barbour can’t seem to help himself when it comes to making statements that are not only false but also laced with more than a hint of racism. At the recent governors conference Barbour was front and center in trying to get the Federal Government to relax the requirements for coverage in Medicaid that went with the stimulus money which boosted the state coffers.

He went so far as to say:

“We have people pull up at the pharmacy window in a BMW and say they can’t afford their co-payment.”

When arguing that States should be allowed to make Medicaid recipients pay for some of their medication. If that statement sounds familiar to you, it did to me too. It is right along the lines of the infamous story of the “Welfare Queen”.

For those who have heard the term but forgotten the story, let me refresh your memory. It was President Reagan who told the anecdote about one woman who defrauded the welfare program for $150,000 dollars, and driving a Cadillac. The only problem with this story is that it was $8,000 not 150K, and the woman went to jail on fraud charges.
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We have all been watching the drama of the Wisconsin collective bargaining fight. It has seen the some really revealing attitude from Gov. Scott Walker when he was pranked this morning by a blogger pretending to be Doug Koch. All that is very good, but there is always the issue of how these conservative Republicans get elected.

Gov. Walker has been claiming that if people did not know he was going to do exactly this plan to break the unions, then they had not been paying attention for the last two years. That is flatly a lie, but it is not just the new Governor of Wisconsin that promotes a lot of lies and misinformation for the Right. The biggest culprit by far is the massive News Corp and its Republican propaganda arm, Fox News.

By giving a friendly place on where only softball questions will be asked and where an alternate reality is shaped the Fox “News” organization allows Republicans to seem not only well informed but as the ones who are popular with “Real Americans”. The problem is that the reality keeps trying to intrude.

Today there was a Gallop poll that showed 61% of the nation is in favor of unions and public employee unions in particular having the right to bargain collectively. So what did Fox “News” show? Exactly the opposite! Take a look at this video courtesy of Media Matters.

It is not surprising that when a network like Fox “News” acts this way survey after survey shows that people who get their news from this so-called News channel are the least likely to know the real facts on any issue you care to name.

There are a lot of problems in our political system, but one of the biggest is that large minority of the nation is being systematically misinformed about not only the facts of an issue but the opinion of the rest of the nation.

If this were the only time that Fox had done something like this it might, might be excusable. But the pattern that is emerging is that they will change any inconvenient fact if they think they can get away with it.

Back before he died Dad was pursuing a complaint with the FCC over Fox’s claim of “Fair and Balanced”. He never intended to win, he just wanted to make a stink about their need to propagandize about the quality of their reporting. Maybe it is time to file a similar compliant about their use of the word News in their name, given that they really have no interest in what we would normally call news.

What’s on your minds tonight Firedogs? The floor is yours.

They say all politics is local (well Tip O’Neil said that) so I thought I would take this post to talk about the governors race here is the great state of Colorado. For those of you who don’t live in the Centennial State we have a mildly interesting state of affairs. Our Democratic Governor decided this winter that he would not run for a second term. Colorado has term limits so this would have been his final term in any case but the polling did not look good for Gov. Ritter so he decided that he would not contest the election.

In one way this is good thing. He had made several decisions that had alienated him from his base; failing to side with unionized grocery workers; the nearly inexplicable appointment of political novice Michael Bennet to the United States Senate; these kinds of things were going to make for tough sledding in a state where you must carry your base if you have a prayer of living in the Governors Mansion.

"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"

This has led to the nomination of Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper to fill Bill Ritter’s shoes. The Mayor is a local businessman and brewpub owner. He is what you would expect from a Mountain State Democrat, not as liberal as we would like but not the bat-crap insane tax cutter, immigrant basher, social conservative that is usually the alternate choice.

The thing that caught my eyes and ears recently is the amount of effort an out of state group is putting into try to define Mayor Hickenlooper. The Republican Governors Association has been running ads on local radio and all over the internet (you can see the website here) trying to tie Mayor Hickenlooper to Governor Ritter and painting both as fiends out to wreck the economy by raising taxes.

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People will tell themselves lies. Everyone does it, it is part of making life more comfortable. They will say that what they do matters more than it does, that their activism has a bigger impact than it in fact does, that they are better looking or more popular than they really are. Most of the time there is not a lot of harm in these little lies. However when you are a United States Senator, these lies have the potential to do a great deal of harm.

The Senate has a lie that is causing a great deal of trouble, and the real problem is that only the Democrats in the Senate believe it. It is the lie of the “Greatest Deliberative Body In The World”. This is the idea that these 100 men and women who were elected by the people of their various states are somehow better able to dispassionately judge the needs of the nation and then act on their sage wisdom.

It comes with the corollary that since they are all women and men of exceptional judgments, they should be exceptionally respectful to each other, even when they vehemently disagree. This is a nice idea, and it would be a great thing, if it had any intersection with reality. Unfortunately, it does not, and continuing to believe this is the way the Senate actually operates is damaging the nation as a whole.

It is not very hard to find glaring examples that the members of the Senate are no more stable or high minded than any cross section of the population as a whole. We have been treated to the sight of Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY) holding up the unemployment checks of hundreds of thousands of Americans because he does not like what the majority of both parties have decided. Are we to really believe that a man who allowed “Tough Shit” to be entered into the record of the Senate is of more sound judgments than some of the Dirty Freaking Hippies that blog and drop the f-bomb on a regular basis?

How about Sen. Larry Craig, who showed the sage judgment of a Senator when he was arrested and convicted for soliciting sex in a airport men’s room? Or Sen. Jim Webb who did not remember that while you can go armed with a concealed weapon in Virginia (and he routinely does) you can not carry it into an airport? The point here is not to lay our the foibles of every Senator, but to show these are just men and women who have lapses in judgment like the rest of us.

This idea of the majesty of the Senate is not a bad one per se, it is just that this majesty must come from the actions of the Senate and not the building itself. It is time for our Democratic Senators to recognize that this highly valued collegial working environment exists only on their side of the aisle. It is a myth that is being used against them to the determent of the nation.

How often does a good colleague say your actions will result in Socialism? Is someone that says you are destroying the nation you are elected to lead actually a good faith partner? Is a person that is thwarting the will of the people you were all elected to represent someone that deserves every deference?

It would be great if the Republicans in the Senate (and the House for that matter) were really willing to work on the issues. I am a believer in the idea of better governance through compromise, but when one side will not compromise at all, when it has to be all their way all the time, then that is not something that is available. When you are governing a nation of 300 million, you can only wait for reasonableness and patriotism ahead of political gain for so long before you have to act on the reality in front of you. That time has come.

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