Salvaging Something

I know, your comments will range along the lines of "Yea, if he had testicles," but there are some things President Obama could throw into the tax compromise that both make sense and can make him buff his Democratic credentials a little now by forcing the Republicans to deal with some issues they'd prefer to take up next year:

What do I think Democrats should ask for?

First, I agree with Fernholz's last suggestion, the debt ceiling — although what I'd suggest is what Ezra Klein has argued for some time now, that they should just toss it into the agreement now, rather than just get some positive public statements. I wouldn't be surprised if that couldn't get done; from what John Boehner has said I don't think he's looking forward to a debt ceiling fight with a caucus he probably can't control on that issue, and I've argued that it's quite dangerous to his position as Speaker.

Second, I think the Democrats should bargain for whatever they can get on other, unrelated legislation — for example, allowing the food safety bill to get through whatever parliamentary fix is necessary for it to advance to the president. Ideally, that would include the three big remaining items on Barack Obama's lame duck agenda — DADT repeal, DREAM, and New START (and yes, that's a lot of all-caps items). I'm not sure whether there's any bargaining room in there at all, but remember that for the most part Democrats wouldn't be asking for Republicans to vote yes; they're just asking for less obstruction. If, as is likely, there's no give on those, at least perhaps Democrats could bargain for the Senate to clear some lower-level, less controversial measures, with food safety probably at the front of the line.

Third, there are still quite a few uncontroversial executive branch and judicial branch nominations pending. There's no way that conservatives are going to clear liberal Goodwin Liu for the 9th Circuit as part of this deal. But there are nominees for Under Secretary of Management at Homeland Security, Under Secretary of Export Administration at Commerce, Deputy US Trade Representative, General Counsel to the Army, and many others that as far as I know just didn't happen yet, and probably won't without Republican cooperation.

Let's analyze Bernstein's analysis a little more, since I have the column space.

 

First, the debt ceiling. We're going to bump up hard against the debt ceiling early next year. Congress needs to authorize an increase or the government will have no capacity to borrow more money. Since we'll run deficits for the foreseeable future, this is pretty important. Unlike the limit on your credit card, we don't just pay a fee and keep spending. The government shuts down.

 

There was some bluster on the campaign trail earlier this year that, indeed, the Teabaggers would do exactly that, especially if spending wasn't reined in, yaddayaddayadda. In truth, it was a scare tactic designed, I feel, to force the Bush tax cuts to be extended, at least temporarily.

 

The obstacle to what seems like a simple matter of tit for tat is Boehner. He's going to want to bring the ceiling up in his Congress so he can mock Democrats and liberals as tax and spend automatons. Given the distinct lack of message cohesion from the Democrats, he'll have an unobstructed field to work with, and can safely ignore all but the most strident Republicans the point that it has been REPUBLICANS over the past thirty years who have really run up the charge account.

 

Assuming Obama did not include this in his negotiations (which seems likely, but who knows what hasn't and won't be announced) the Democrats would be right to point out that the Bush tax cuts will hugely inflate the debt over the next two years and so we ought to tidy up this piece of business now.

 

Small potatoes, but it's a small victory, which is all Obama and the Dems seem capable of.

 

On unrelated legislation...well, careful readers of my column will know that I felt it was an huge mistake to allow the terrorist Republicans to hold the American people hostage to tax cuts for the poor, deprived wealthiest among us. Obama may have been ham-fisted in his use of that term, altho I'd argue it was more about timing than use, but it's an accurate assessment of what happened, and had to sting a little.

 

Me, I would have been all over the "hostage" trope from day one. It would take a lot of the teeth out of Republican scare-mongering.

 

So to throw a bunch of unrelated business into the bill sounds silly, on face, but given that this bill is far from comprehensive and will likely be laden down with earmarks rushed through by Republicans before they take over the House, why not?

 

This, I think, is the more serious gain that Obama and the Dems can win in passing this bill, not that extension of unemployment benefits, the holiday from a portion of our Social Security taxes and an extension of EITC is unserious. But it's in there already, and we're talking about improving a piss-poor bill.

 

It's like redesigning your kitchen: there's always a list of "you may as wells".

 

The pending appointments could be decoupled to be certain, by why not get this done and say it's done by the end of the year?

 

Look, this "compromise" or capitulation on the part of Obama highlighted and exposed some really horrible weaknesses in his administration. I'm infuriated by what has happened, and I consider myself enough of a realpolitiker to know that sometimes you have to give up a rook to take a queen.

 

He just gave up the queen in exchange for a pawn and a bishop to be named later. If at all.

 

This was a pile of shit. We might as well try to grow a couple of mushrooms from it.

If You Were Here Today...

And If I Say I Really Loved You
And Was Glad You Came Along.
If You Were Here Today.
Ooh- Ooh- Ooh- For You Were In My Song.
Ooh- Ooh- Ooh- Here To - Day.

- Paul McCartney "Here Today"

 

It was a snowy Saturday morning in January, late 70s. I can't remember the exact year, and I suppose I could bother to go and do the meterological research.

 

But I won't.

 

Sixteen of us gathered on the Sheep Meadow in Central Park for a game of tackle football. No equipment. There was snow on the ground, about half a foot, to cushion our falls, and besides, no one hit that hard anyway.

 

We were in our teens and early twenties, college and high school kids. We met every weekend to play, then shake hands and go home to breakfast.

 

I had just thrown a pass to my friend Brian and missed him. The ball bounced west on the lawn, towards the grand buildings on Central Park West. A couple was walking. He was skinny, in a great coat and kind of cab driver hat, a tam? She was also skinny, and wore a jacket. She had long black hair. They stopped on the path, worn down by footprints and some shoveling by park personnel. They were close together, as if there was one four footed humanoid walking. They were about fifty feet away.

 

I only noticed them because Brian was retrieving the ball from their general direction. It was a glimpse, and with the weather, I chose not to wear my glasses. I guess I needed to squint, but didn't.

 

We ran a few more plays, and they stood there for a few moments, then strolled on slowly. I don't recall how long, my attention was on the game, and I only saw them in the corner of my eye. It was rare for people to stop and watch us, the great anonymity of New York City working its magic.

 

Fourth down and we were to punt. I stood back and called signals as the cop tromped over the fresh powder, and kicked the ball. That's odd.

 

The snow settled, and we prepared defense. Now the cop came closer, and called to us. He was grinning. Probably reminded him of his youth, altho he couldn't have been that much older than we were.

 

"You guys know who you just missed? John Lennon!" He sang out like a canary that ate the cat. He was proud. I guess the precinct had an eye out on John even then, altho I think his naturalization problems had been resolved by that point.

 

I tell that story, because for all the New York celebrities and rich and famous people I encountered growing up, there is only one I would have given my left arm to meet, and it was John Lennon. And I was that close, all for the want of a pair of glasses.

 

It's hard to describe to someone younger what the Beatles meant to us, our generation. So many bands have been hyped as the next Beatles, pushed and polished and ultimately failing. The Beatles were transcendant, rising above the hype to perform their talents, and both proving the hype and raising the alert level.

 

Led by JohnandPaul, the Beatles did to music what, well...there really is no comparison. Perhaps Bill Gates and personal computing.

 

There's not a day that goes by that I don't think of John Lennon, if only for hearing a Beatles or Lennon tune on the radio. Or McCartney. Or Harrison. Or Starr. It's hard to think of one without the other three.

 

I've posted before that I wonder what Lennon would think of the world. If he could come back, and look around, what would he marvel at? And more, what would he spit out his disgust at? I suspect the answer to the latter is easier. He'd be pretty pissed that we didn't take the lessons of the Sixties and the Seventies, lessons he was not ashamed to put to music, and keep the flame alive.

 

A forceful advocate for so many things, especially world peace, Lennon was a complex figure. You knew his heart was good, but he had so many struggles to shed the chains of his learned behaviors, particularly when it came to his wives. He reminds us all that it is human to be flawed, no matter how towering the monument you've built to your name.

 

And in the end, the love you make really is equal to the love you take. If you were here today...but I am holding back the tears no more.

Barn Doors

There's a bit of "too little, too late" in this:

While David Certner, legislative policy director for AARP, says his members fully support efforts to rein in federal spending, he adds that upping the age for Social Security eligibility isn't the right way to go about it. Raising the wage cap, currently $106,800, would be better, he says.

In truth, a very different scenario is playing out, and I'm pretty surprised that Certner is missing it: de facto, people are raising their own retirement ages significantly.

 

See, most Boomers and people like me immediately following them believed in the lie of a "job for life and a gold watch at 65". You know, pension, retirement, benefits. We planned our early work careers along those lines, and when the deep recessions of the 80s and 90s (and 00s) hit, we made some small adjustments. Sure, we lost our pensions along the way and were asked to contribute to 401(k)s, but only the really careful among us, like me, did so.

 

After all, we needed to buy cars, and pay for education and houses. And vacations from the jobs that were becoming harder and harder to do on our owns as we saw our co-workers laid off. And we swapped jobs because the new firm offered better salary and benefits, but then got laid off when the economy tanked a little.

 

But we managed to latch onto a new job in relatively short order and could put our houses in some form of financial order again.

 

In other words, that image we had of Dad going off to work until he retired with IBM or whomever had completely changed and we never noticed it. And we also never noticed that Social Security had gone, at the insistence of businesses and with the complicity of government, from a supplement to our retirement income designed to keep poor elderly folks from starving to death to many people's main source of retirement income.

 

Of course, there will be an element in this country that says "It's your own fault," blitheringly ignorant of the fact that they're in the same boat as well, but expecting a bailout. Too, you may recall the other myth that our homes would fund our retirement: the best investment, housing prices always go up, and so on. Those same scolders probably think this is still true, as well.

 

In reality, what's going to start happening now, particularly as more and more Boomers reach 65, is they'll simply ignore the calendar and keep working. They'll file for Social Security, make no mistake about it, but those benefits are tied to one's salary, reducing at a sliding scale as one grows older. For many, there would be no benefit to filing for Social Security.

 

In effect, then, they won't actually retire until closer to 70 or 75. Or...raising the actual retirement age significantly from 65 (62, for many).

 

The deficit reduction commission that President Obama has suggested that long term rises in the retirement age will save significant amounts of money, and it would. The GAO claims that these would be offset completely by hikes in disability claims, and there's some possibility ot that happening as well, altho I'd need to see their data, especially in light of the current meme of healthier living as opposed to what our parents and grandparents did (smoke, drink to excess, chemical additives, pollution, and so on).

 

The one thing no one can deny is, to talk about raising the retirement age right now is ludicrous, because it's happening already.

 

Bailing Why-er

Along the lines of my simple questions theme today comes this column from Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the first and likely last Socialist to sit in Congress:

What have we learned so far from the disclosure of more than 21,000 transactions? We have learned that <b>the $700 billion Wall Street bailout signed into law by President George W. Bush</b> turned out to be pocket change compared to the trillions and trillions of dollars in near-zero interest loans and other financial arrangements the Federal Reserve doled out to every major financial institution in this country. Among those are Goldman Sachs, which received nearly $600 billion; Morgan Stanley, which received nearly $2 trillion; Citigroup, which received $1.8 trillion; Bear Stearns, which received nearly $1 trillion, and Merrill Lynch, which received some $1.5 trillion in short term loans from the Fed.

We also learned that the Fed's multi-trillion bailout was not limited to Wall Street and big banks, but that some of the largest corporations in this country also received a very substantial bailout. Among those are General Electric, McDonald's, Caterpillar, Harley Davidson, Toyota and Verizon.

Perhaps most surprising is the huge sum that went to bail out foreign private banks and corporations including two European megabanks -- Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse -- which were the largest beneficiaries of the Fed's purchase of mortgage-backed securities.

Deutsche Bank, a German lender, sold the Fed more than $290 billion worth of mortgage securities. Credit Suisse, a Swiss bank, sold the Fed more than $287 billion in mortgage bonds.

Has the Federal Reserve of the United States become the central bank of the world?

(ed. note: emphasis added for the yahoos who read this blog and blame Obama for the bailout)

OK, so not only banks got bailouts, but solid American companies like Harley-Davidson, McDonald's, Caterpillar, Verizon and General Electric did.

Aside from Harley (full disclosure: I own an insignificant number of shares of HOG) which is perennially on the ropes, do any of these companies sound like they're in any financial difficulty?

And Toyota? Deutsche Bank? Credit Suisse? Why aren't Japan, Germany and Switzerland taking care of their own? Did Germany help us bailout GM?

Here's the kicker: as Sanders points out, that bailout money went to businesses that, for the most part, are doing rather nicely now, thank you. Meanwhile, we quibble over extending unemployment benefits of less than $33 billion becomes "class warfare".

Companies no longer rely on nations for their financial health so why should we be bailing them out at all?

 

 

I Have A Simple Question

Why?

 

I mean, I get that unemployment benefits could stand an extension, to be certain. Why not put that to an up or down vote on its own merits and let the Teabaggers and their relatives see what they have wrought?

 

Why not, for deficit reduction sake, let the goddamn moronic Bush tax cuts just die, and pass a new set of targeted tax cuts?

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Jon Kyl (Ariz.), the Republican whip, told different interviewers that they expect Congress to vote for the tax cuts, which have been in effect for almost a decade, to continue unaltered for at least several years in exchange for an agreement to extend an emergency unemployment program that expired last week for millions of people.

"Obviously, the president won't sign a permanent extension of the current tax rates. So we're going to have some kind of extension. I'd like one as long as possible," McConnell told host David Gregory on NBC's "Meet the Press." Moments later, he added: "I think we will extend unemployment compensation. . . . We're working on that package. . . . I think we're going to get there."

We are trading the long-term benefits of a tax increase on those who are doing quite nicely in the current economy, thank you, for a few weeks' extension of benefits.

We can do better. I think if we tied the unemployment benefits to a jobs creation bill (and there has to be at least one in the hopper now), it sends a far better message that Congress, this Democratic Congress, has the interests of the working and middle classes at heart, and then let the tax cuts die just to prove it.

We're going to have to restructure taxes next session anyway, and the Democrats, curiously, will have a bigger say in that, since they don't have to wrangle 60 votes in the Senate.

Weird to say, huh? They had a 60 vote minority, and the influence of asshats from sparsely populated states like Nebraska and Arkansas was grossly overstated because of it. Now, we can basically tell the Nelsons and Lincolns of the Congress to fuck off (I know, Lincoln lost. Good riddance). Your "services" are no longer required.

We'll fight this fight on ideology now.

 

Happy Birthday, Carl!

A day late, but I'm sure I speak for all your peeps when I say Thanks! for all your writing and efforts here online. Stay healthy!
=^..^=

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) So...Buffalo was supposed to be able to handle this kind of snowfall. I've heard tales of five and six feet in a day. What happened?

 

2) You could, I suppose, make 'em an offer they can't refuse...

 

3) You know, quietly, the Republican party is falling apart at the seams. For all the boisterous rowdifying of the Teabaggers, an awful lot of respected Republicans are taking stances anathema to the radical fringe.

 

4) Sadly, Ron Santo, an icon of 60s baseball, has died. RIP and godspeed, Ron. I liked him, only because my Mets shut him up in 1969. Wait 'til Bill Buckner bites the big one, and see how magnanimous I'll be.

 

5) The difference, and difficulty, of this recent economic collapse is it tended to affect older white male workers disproportionately to past collapses. While there's an element of schadenfreude in that (and as a former chronically unemployed white collar worker, a lot of empathy), it still does not bode well for the next decade's economy.

 

6) WikiLeaks: The Sequel continues in theatres near you. I anticipate a deal worked out by Monday for Assange to submit to questioning. I still think it's a terrible misuse of the international justice system.

 

7) By the way, Meat Loaf? Shut up. When you put out a good album, then maybe you can talk. Maybe. Three out of three IS bad.

 

8) A day late, but....HAPPY BIRTHDAY, EPA!

 

9) Ooooooooooooooooooooookay! Only in Idahooooooooooooooooooo!

 

10) Finally, the kind of art exhibit only a Teabagger could love...

Fuckin' A!

Way to go, Nancy Pelosi!

And Old Lace

Well, NASA sure does have the capacity to surprise us all....

 

I'll just note that one of the people in charge of keeping the secret, Ginger Pinholster of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, has observed that some of the reports out there are "comically erroneous." It's a safe bet that the research being published in the journal Science is not about the discovery of extraterrestrial life itself. Not even Pinholster could keep that secret under wraps.

It's also a safe bet that the research has to do with biochemistry that involves arsenic, which is toxic to life as we know it. That's because one of the featured speakers at the NASA news conference is Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a research at the U.S. Geological Survey who has spent years studying organisms in California's arsenic-rich Mono Lake. Numerous reports have said her research relates to "life as we don't know it."  The big question is just how far down that road Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues have gone.

Sarah, Palin & Fall

Like her or not, it's hard to ignore the monstrosity that has become "Sarahpalin". She's transcended being a politician to becoming a symbol open to interpretation.

 

For my part, I don't hate her. I hate Dick Cheney, because I think he knows he's evil and yet does nothing to better himself. Sarah is just a fucking loon. It's hard to hate an idiot.

 

Now, I hate her politics and the smarmy condescending way she talks down at her "constituents" as well as her opponents, as if she is some paragon of virtue and justice when in point of fact she is and has always been a loser who skated by on looks and luck. Unintelligible to the Nth degree, what people hear is what they want to hear, and since she doesn't form complete thoughts or even factual thoughts, people have to read an awful lot into them.

 

Normally, this would immediately disqualify her from any office higher than dogcatcher, but apparently Alaskans and rightwingers like teh stoopid.

 

There's a double-barrel backlash rising up against her, however. She might want to take a breath, because we have all seen how thin her skin is, and I suspect it's only going to get worse for her.

 

First, Ed Rollins, rightwinger and former Reagan administration capo di capi:

You're a media star and a great curiosity. You were plucked out of political obscurity because of the whim of presidential contender John McCain, who didn't know you and made you into an overnight sensation. You performed well for three weeks in the campaign, did better than expected against Joe Biden in the debate and then you self-destructed.

You clearly weren't ready for prime time, but neither was your running mate. After the election, you quit your day job as governor of Alaska with 18 months left in the term and went out and made a fortune making speeches and selling a book.

[...] Right now, polls indicate you wouldn't carry your home state of Alaska.

The last Presidential candidate to not even carry his home state was Al Gore.

He goes on to bash her comparisons to Reagan and Rollins is right: she certainly is no Reagan, who at least had accomplishments before her was forty. Even Obama, whom many saw as a cypher, had all those law school honors and community organizer functions on his CV.

Her closest analog would probably be Dan Quayle: a mindless bumbling buffoon who couldn't rub two words together to create a dialectical fire, yet somehow managed on the strength of his charm and his daddy's name (something Palin distinctly does NOT have) to parlay a minor political career.

Next up, Sarah Palin herself:

People probably think that my greatest frustration is the lies that are told in the tabloids and on hateful blogs full of anonymous sources about my family … and there are constant everyday lies that we have to read that are out there in the public. But my family and I…thick skin…we can take it, you know…we can take what the haters say despite the fact that there’s injustice in the situation.

I mean, look at the other day. Willow, finally, my 16 year old, she had had it up to here with somebody saying very, very hateful things about the family and saying mean things about her little brother Trig, and Willow finally responded and she used a bad word when she responded in defense of her family. And her response became national news, even hard news copy it turned into, so that’s ridiculous and I had to explain to her, “Willow, there is no justice here but you have to just zip your lip and let’s move forward.”

The "bad word" in question is "faggot". Not "shit", or "fuck", or "douche", but an ad hominem of the very worst kind, striking at a group that is already on America's shitlist.

One wonders what it would take for Sarah Palin to take umbrage at a word? *koffkoff*retard*koffkoff*

Oh. Right. It would take ANY word directed at her or her family, despite the fact that her "family" is about as dysfunctional as the Gosselins. Odd thing about her comment on Hannity, not once was Trig mentioned!

Her life is a train wreck, to be certain, and her public image is only held together by the spit and duct tape that her moronic mesmerized supporters patch together, forming a wagontrain-like circle around her. Except the wagons lack fabric. Or wood. Or wheels. It really is just the human shields she's cajooled into protecting her, including her children.

Todd seems to be the only sane one, and that's more because he's basically said "Good luck with that!" and gone off snowmobiling until the cameras are turned on.

Of course, the kids might be sane. It's hard to tell since she treats them like props.

And yet, for all that, Palin could be a minor danger on the political scene, and a major threat to the United States if her luck holds out. To-wit:

In her brilliant new book Reality Bites Back, Jennifer Pozner argues that Americans prefer the scripted "reality" of reality TV to the messy complexity of our lives because these shows "both play to and reinforce deeply ingrained societal biases about women and men, love and beauty, race and class, consumption and happiness in America." And Palin is the perfect reality-show star: more ruthless, more eloquent, more audaciously dishonest, more single-mindedly ambitious, more likable and eminently more electable than Hillary Clinton in 2008. She is a pencil skirt–wearing marathoner who operates without a shred of shame or self-doubt. There is something remarkable and frightening about the depth of her belief in her narrative. Every criticism, every defeat, every attack is just evidence of the virtue of her chosen path. Her show replaces the tough tradeoffs of a politically complicated and economically insecure world with a fiery self-assurance born of the hard, bright blindness of righteousness. In uncertain times, this unassailable certainty, set in the compelling aesthetic of the American frontier and packaged with pitch-perfect editing, proves magnetic even for those who disagree with her.

Pozner reminds us that media are "as much a dissemination mechanism for ideological persuasion as...a means of entertainment;" they are "our most common agent of socialization, shaping and informing our collective ideas about people, politics and public policy." Media, especially reality TV, encourage us to think less and buy more. They capture our emotions and silence our inner critic. They send us in search of products to fulfill our deepest desires. Palin may just be the political embodiment of our contemporary cultural moment; a presidential candidate born from TV's easy emotional draw and limited analytic capacity, a candidate who needs only 140 characters to explain policy, a candidate who attracts us even when she repulses us. As with reality TV, to underestimate Palin is to invite her to reach ever deeper into the American consciousness.

Indeed, Sarah Palin may be the embodiment of the American Idiot: someone whose attention span lasts up to the next Tweet.

 

 

Taking A Leak

Al Capone committed all sorts of nefarious and dastardly crimes during his reign in Chicago. He was nailed on tax evasion.

 

Any number of criminals have been arrested and jailed on minor charges from littering to jaywalking, nuisance infractions that are enforced only in the most extreme circumstances, or when they really need to hold someone, but have no real charges to post.

 

This, however, smacks of illegality:

PARIS — Interpol has placed Julian Assange, the founder of the WikiLeaks whistle-blowing organization, on a so-called red notice wanted list following allegations of sexual misbehavior by a Swedish prosecutor, according to the police organization’s Web site on Wednesday.

The notice said Mr. Assange, 39, was wanted for “sex crimes” on an arrest warrant brought by the international public prosecution office in Gothenburg, Sweden. Interpol is based in Lyon, France. Mr. Assange’s whereabouts were not immediately known.

Now, I don't really want to get into the merits of the charge--and if you feel strongly about them, comments are open-- although that does play a part in my analysis.

You may recall that over the summer (on August 20) an investigation was opened in Sweden, accusing him with one rape and another case of sexual harassment. The rape charge was dropped almost immediately, then re-instated a week later. Assange admits to having sex twice during the period in question, alluding to the possibility that it was with both women. He also says it was consensual, if unprotected (which might under Swedish law be an issue).

In other words, this really becomes a "he said, she said" matter (although I'm sure there must be some physical evidence tying him to the events), and consequently the purview of local authorities. A criminal investigation was handed up in November, and an arrest warrant handed down. This has ballooned into the current Interpol order.

There seems, however, to be some conflicting details about Assange's cooperation. His lawyer claims he's offered to meet on neutral territory (including a Swedish embassy), but the Swedish prosecutor has insisted he return to Sweden to face the charges. Of course, the prosecutor denies this.

Now, a Red Notice is Napoleonic in nature. The fugitive has to prove his innocence before it's lifted, and he is presumed guilty of the charges until he's tried and exonerated. There are actually two Red Notices: one is an arrest warrant, the other is for a fugitive who has been tried, convicted, and sentenced. Interpol claims that there is no arrest warrant on Assange, meaning he's wanted for fleeing a sentence.

Um, excuse me? He hasn't even been tried yet. Effectively, he's being chased down across the globe to be arrested, but yet, there's no international arrest warrant other than the Swedes own BOLO.

This disturbs me. Here we have two events that involve no physical evidence of a crime being committed, only evidence that the events happened. Yet, Assange is being equated to Osama bin Laden in criminality.

That's simply not right. Whatever you think of the leaks (the Libertarian in me thinks he did signal service, but the American in me wishes he had been a little more cautious in what he leaked), for a state, or group of states, to hunt down a person internationally on the word of two women, neither of whom has to come forward to reveal their identities is a New World Order writ small.

The timing of all this is a little suspect, as well. Who has ever heard of an international probe launched for sexual misbehavior within months of the event? It's not like Assange killed women he slept with and would be an imminent danger to be around. In July of this year, Assange released the Afghan war documents, internal Pentagon documents that detail secret conversations and discussions of the war in Afghanistan. In August, he's accused of rape. By December, he's on what amounts to an international terror watch and presumably could be assassinated by a trigger-happy cop in whatever country he lands in.

All because he spoke the truth.

Like it or not, support him or not, this has to send a chill down your spine.

 

Suck It In, Folks

There are times I part company with both my leftist friends and my union buddies. This is one of them:

 

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Monday announced a two-year pay freeze for civilian federal workers as he sought to address concerns over high annual deficits and appealed to Republicans to find a common approach to restoring the nation’s economic and fiscal health.

...The move would save $2 billion in the 2011 fiscal year that ends Sept. 30 and $5 billion by the end of two fiscal years. Over 10 years, it would save $60 billion, according to Jeffrey Zients, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget and the government’s chief performance officer.

 

Now, I get the objections. Federal workers are, compared to the private sector, substantially underpaid already and they have not been exempt from some of the economic crisis.

 

There is one thing they ARE exempt from, and that has to be acknowledged by our side: federal employees are much much harder to fire or layoff.

 

And it doesn't save much, and so why are federal workers, mostly working and middle class family people, being forced to shoulder the burden of a wage freeze?

 

Again, in the private sector, jobs are being cut, so are wages and benefits, and hiring is seeing very slow progress. We have chronically unemployed people whose benefits run out in a few days. None of this is really affecting the federal bureaucracy.

 

Obama makes a symbolic gesture to Republicans. Since the lame-duck Congress has kicked deficit reduction forward, Obama took a step that was calculated to deflate a Republican negotiating chip, one that is very popular with the base.

 

Remember, these are innumerian idiots who think that 19% of them are in the top 1% of wage earners, among other really insane and wacky mathematics. Somehow, they think that $60 billion will balance the budget painlessly.

 

Fareed Zakaria points out the underlying problem, the one that Republicans will have to settle with their base:

Americans have an appetite for government benefits that greatly exceeds their appetite for taxes. For more than a generation, we have squared this dishonest circle by borrowing vast amounts of money. As more people age, this gap between what we want the government to provide and what we are willing to pay for is going to widen to an unsustainable level. Over the next 75 years, benefits under entitlement programs will exceed government revenue by $40 trillion. The federal budget deficit, if unattended, will reach 24% of GDP in 2040 —well beyond Greek and Irish territory. At that point, the measures it would take to close the gap are so punitive — we're talking tax hikes of 70% or spending cuts of 50% — that it is inconceivable that we will make them. If by some chance we were to make them, they would put the economy in a death spiral.

In many ways, the GOP winning the House is a great thing for the nation as a whole. Now, they have no choice but to roll up their sleeves and get involved, as opposed to sitting back and criticising everything Pelosi and Reid did, and by retaining the Senate, Obama has political cover to avoid vetoes (altho you have to know he's itching to stamp a bill or two hard for all the shit he's been taking).

 

If the Republicans take this seriously, and that's a big-- no, huge grey area, then this next Congress could conceivably get much of the necessary heavy lifting done. If the Republicans decide to risk the House by trying to capture the Senate thru obstructionism and deferral of these issues, the Democrats will rightly point out that they had skin in the game, and did nothing, whereas the past Congress got more done for Americans than any Congress since LBJ.

 

And we'll be back to one-party rule for the forseeable future. The Republicans are on the clock too, now. Their base has become more rabid, and won't put up with much compromise, and yet, it will have to be compromise to get anything done. By taking a chip off the table, Obama has given them one less accomplishment to tout to these whining mewling babies.

 

This is why the Party of Children is such a fascinating topic to watch.

Budget Holes And A Shovel

I spent a bit of time thinking this weekend about ways to fill the deficit, and I wanted to float a trial balloon.

 

As tax reform seems to be on the table and as the vast majority of our resources are now being spent to prop up business in this country, I thought it might be fun to drop a tax increase into the mix: five percent, off the top, on all revenues. Call it an emergency surcharge to protect American jobs.

 

Oh, right. I guess I should preface this tax increase. The President will announce a policy that any company that off-shores jobs or moves to a post office box or a physical building in another country will no longer enjoy American protection, including defense forces and/or copyright and patent protection, and that any country-- from Bermuda to Abu Dhabi to China-- will suffer a concomittant reduction in foreign aid to the tune of the lost tax revenue from the companies that move there.

 

What say you?

Woolgathering

Every so often, I start down this odd path of thinking about stuff that's piled up in my mind. Today is one of those.

 

First, to the people who have made this blog as moderately successful as it is, thank you. It's been over six years since I first put fingers to keyboard in anger. I have Katrina to blame.

 

Not the hurricane, the writer.

 

Thanks, Kat. A bigger drain of energy I've never experienced.

 

To my friends at The Reaction and Agonist, thank you for welcoming my words on an almost daily basis. Whether I agree with my co-bloggers and readers or not, I've enjoyed the chance to develop my thinking and to be challenged on my positions. I may not always come away with a changed mind...OK, I'm almost always right, so hardly ever...it is in these discussions that I learn the flaws in my arguments.

 

It's Thanksgiving in America, so it feels right to acknowledge how important this part of my life has become. I vowed in January of this year to work harder at being right on a story and to work less hard on being someone who grabs eyeballs. I felt like I was selling out in 2008 and 2009. This year, not so much.

 

To you all, I wish a happy and healthy and safe Thanksgiving, and to my international readers, well, have a good Thursday tomorrow.

 

The beauty of the Internet is that I can speak with people from Colorado to Colombia to Canton. The fact that always amazes me is how much people outside the US know and even understand about America, and how little we know of them. OK, there's a law of large numbers involved: if you live in Spain and focus on America, that's different than living in Spain and trying to understand America AND Sweden AND Dubai AND Malaysia, all at the same time.

 

Still, I'm really impressed by people who post things like "Well, I live in Clapham, and..."

 

Doubly so as a New Yorker. I've lived here all my life, and am a child of the streets (as anyone who's followed my Flickr account can tell you), and just when I think I know it all, I'm surprised by what I find. I envy tourists one thing: the first impression. I walk the streets near my office and am jealous of the folks who pull out a camera and snap a photo of Grand Central Terminal or the Chrysler Building. For them, that's a lifetime story to tell people.

 

For me, it's another building that I have to walk around to get from A to B.

 

Every so often, I get that same thrill, though. I rode my bike in Red Hook this summer and found these little vest pocket parks with these adorable little names, and marveled. And then I started to notice that parks all over the city started these cutesy names.

 

It got a little annoying, in fact. Maybe it's because I've become so feminized.

 

I realized that this morning when I was catching up on Time Magazine, and found this article on the "Sheconomy". Women, you see, make or are involved in 85% of the purchases around the house, including some surprising things, like home theatre systems. Companies are only starting to notice this in a way that is meaningful. Marketing designed for women has finally gotten past "paint it pink and slap a flower on it," to understanding better how women buy something.

 

In the course of the article, the Midas corporation example was brought up. It turns out, Midas markets to women not by selling them a service, but by making them a customer, getting them to buy into a process by explaining things to them.

 

You know, you need a new alternator. Rather than gruffily say that, the technician will sit down with the customer, pull out a diagram and explain what the alternator does, how it charges the battery as the car moves, and explain precisely what broke down.

 

As they tell their technicians, "Explain it to your customers like you have to explain it to your mother."

 

And so here I am, thinking, "Wow, that's how I would have done it!"

 

And that's when I realized just how feminized I had become. See, men-- or rather as I term them in my next book, "guys"-- walk into a repair shop and presume that they have to have the appearance of knowing everything there is to know about cars. so the mechanic sizes them up, looks at the car, and pronounces his judgement that the car needs an new alternator.

 

The guy nods in agreement, grunts, and pulls out his wallet.

 

There was a time when this might have been the case, back before fuel injection and computers. Hell, I used to do all sorts of repairs to my engine as a kid. Now, I open the hood and go all Tim Allen, grunting and bug-eyed like one of the monkeys in front of the monolith in 2001.

 

And I've done that, to be sure. For whatever male vanity reason, letting a mechanic know I have no clue what he's talking about seems comforting.

 

Maybe to him, but why is it comforting me?

We're Number One! We're Number One! We're Number One!

Anyone who's driven in NYC at any time, day or night, weekend or weekday, could tell you this:

 

NAVTEQ— the digital map, traffic and location data company— released a study today via its Traffic.com site and service naming New York City and its freeways as the most congested and traffic-delayed in North America.

 

It's ironic in a city where the mass transit system is unparalleled in terms of its ability to carry passengers, the fact that it runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and its access to parts of the city woefully underserved by major roads, and a city that is one of the up-and-coming bicycle cities in the world, that traffic would be so bad.

 

And yet, it is. To the point where I, who have driven these streets since Jimmy Carter was President, avoid getting in a car at all costs. And I know the back routes and secret expressways to get around!

 

It can't be that subway and bus service is so bad. Most trains are clean and maintained, and most buses, while they can run slowly because of traffic, are pretty regular and certainly well-kept and run smoothly.

 

And it can't be that it's cheaper to drive. Tolls at our major bridges range from $5.50 (soon to rocket upward) to over $10 (with a free return trip).

 

New York City is a friendly city for walkers. Blocks are short and great attention is paid to where stop lights need to replace stop signs.

 

Most of the time. Indeed, the city Department of Transportation is continually assessing pedestrian policies and advances to try to make walking in NYC even better, even faster.

 

Personally, I really think two things need to be done. First, a parking permit needs to be issued to city residents that gives them priority rights to park on select streets. Too many neighborhoods suffer from a commuter outside the city who drives as close as he or she can to Manhattan, park the car and then hop on a subway.

 

Yes, this is an improvement over driving up to their offices, but it still creates an enormous burden on our roads and on our local streets.

 

Second, I'd like to see Michael Bloomberg's idea of congestion pricing invoked, but taken one step further to encompass the entire five boroughs of New York City. Downtown and midtown Manhattan are a nightmare, but so are parts of Queens and Brooklyn and forget Staten Island during rush hour. We could cut an exemption for residents of any borough to remain within that borough without incurring a fee, of course, or perhaps make it so that crossing a river triggers the fee, but I digress.

 

It's insane the traffic we get around here, and it's becoming a crisis.

Clean Your Own Muddy House First, Ms. Palin

Item: Palin says she will 'clean up' journalism

 

Pardon me for a second, k?

 

*smirk* *grin* *hand to mouth* *giggle* BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA!!!!!

 

Ok, now that I got that out of my system...

 

Here's the funiest bit:

"I want to help clean up the state that is so sorry today of journalism. And I have a communications degree. I studied journalism, who, what, where, when, and why of reporting. I will speak to reporters who still understand that cornerstone of our democracy, that expectation that the public has for truth to be reported. And then we get to decide our own opinion based on the facts reported to us."

"And I can see Russia from my front porch!"

Now, here we have Sarah Palin. She attended five colleges to get that "degree" in communications, something they ought to revoke retroactively given her complete inability to construct a sentence that doesn't contain either a syntatical error or a neologism that, well, reeks of plagiarism.

 

We have Sarah "Half Term" Palin. We have a mother who isn't, a governor who isn't, and a college graduate who barely is. And if rumour is accurate, we have a wife who isn't. 

I don't expect scintillating conversation from a political figure, but it would be nice if I could read a speech without Google Translate, or the same feeling I get trying to understand a credit card agreement.

 

If she truly understood reporting, the way she claims to, then Katie Couric would have been praised by Palin, instead of basically called a heartless bitch, saying she will not speak to Couric again, calling her "biased" and won't "waste my time."

 

Because, you know, Couric dared be a journalist! OMG! Imagine!

 

Her reasons?

She added: "So a journalist, a reporter who is so biased and will, no doubt, spin and gin up whatever it is that I have to say to create controversy, I swear to you, I will not my waste my time with her.  Or him."

Irony:

In an interview later tonight on Fox News...

Where, of course, she's an analyst.

"We, The People..."

...ain't half as dumb as we look.

 

A few Sundays ago, the NY Times published an interactive US budgeting webpage. There, you could personalize your own 2011 Federal budget and try to reduce the deficit.

 

(For the record, I scored an $800 billion surplus by the year 2015, and a $2.6 trillion dollar surplus by 2030, all without major cuts to social programs or tax hikes on the middle class and working poor. But I digress...)

 

Well, over the weekend, the Times followed up with some startling, eye-opening statistics:

Reduce the size of the military rather than reduce pay for noncombat members of the military. Impose a millionaire’s tax rather than cut deductions for high-income households. Cap the growth of Medicare spending rather than raise the eligibility age...

The single least popular choice was allowing the expiration of the Bush tax cuts on income below $250,000 a year. Fewer than 10 percent of the solutions included that option. But when it came to tax cuts for incomes above $250,000, people’s opinions appeared to diverge according to their political views. Those who preferred spending cuts — a conservative group, in all likelihood — generally wanted this tax cut to remain in place. Among those who closed the deficit mostly with tax increases — probably a liberal group — the expiration was the single most selected policy.

The most popular option among all respondents? Reducing the military to less than its size before the Iraq war — included in about 80 percent of the solutions posted to Twitter. But cutting pay and benefits for the military was a choice of only 40 percent.

It seems I was not alone.

Admittedly, this is not a scientific sample. Altho there were over one million page views, the Times was only able to analyze those people who either tweeted (ugh!) or posted links to their solutions. Furthermore, they culled only those solutions that saved at least $1.345 trillion from the 2030 projected deficit, thus creating a balanced budget. This cut the total size of the analysis to a population of about 7,000 people, from which only a thousand or so were able to successfully balance the budget by 2030. (Results here)

Twitter and, say, Facebook postings tend to skew younger, and younger usually means more liberal.

But check out the agreement with regards to taxes: a full 73% of respondents believed that the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy ought to expire, and nearly the same percentage believed a new "millionaire's tax" should be imposed (by the way, great little piece of neurolingsuitic programming, that. A "millionaire's tax"...who could possibly object?)

Even the carbon tax saw a 6 out of ten choice. This means that not only did liberals choose these taxes, but that many conservatives did as well!

There's hope yet for this nation.

 

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) Best line I heard about the Bristol/Willow Palin antics this week: "They make the Bush twins look like Chelsea Clinton."

 

2) Y'know, Google puts this stuff in a cache that last FORevah....

 

3) An article that points out what we're up against. What say you? Herd the twenty percent or so together, and build a big-ass fence around them?

 

4) Information = energy. Conceivably, this could alter physics as we know it, but it seems an obvious equation. After all, energy has to be conserved, and information has to be conserved. The only question is, in what form? It turns out that matter may hold the key to both.

 

5) Facebook: Instrument of the Devil.

 

6) Only Republicans could turn a twenty years to life sentence into an imminent warning about terrorism. Seriously, how paranoid is this country?

 

7) I assume this was a trial balloon. May this one float.

 

8) First, CERN produced what for our purposes was a mini Big Bang. Next up, a stream of antimatter. If we can just get world peace and a one world government, and we can have Star Trek!

 

9) It turns out, all children got left behind...

 

10) So how did that Arizona anti-Hispanic law work out for them? Well, there were 800,000 fewer undocumented workers in America than in 2008, but that number seems to have levelled off and since the drop happened before the law took effect, it was a combination of the bad American economy and tougher enforcement...by the Federales! So the law wasn't such a big help. Oh, wait, it did drive $140 million in convention business away from the state. Way to go, you dumb fucks!

Matt Miller, Mensch

Matt Miller triggered a thought in my head about a column I've been meaning to write for a few weeks now, but life has intervened.

 

America is a deeply paranoid nation. On the one hand, we have this deep feeling of exceptionalism. This grandeur manifests itself in wars of aggression, arrogant foregin policies, treating our allies like assistants and our enemies as nuisances, instead of people to be engaged and either defeated or deflected.

 

On the other hand, as I alluded to earlier today, we have an equally deep feeling of persecution. So much so that to ask us to sacrifice for the greater good of the nation would be like eliminating Social Security: a political third rail that no one would dare touch unless they were in a tank full of piranha. And even then, I think most politicos would try to reason with the fish first.

 

It's the fact that we swing back and forth between these two extremes that troubles me. It's one thing to be jingoistic, to really believe you're exceptional and to behave as if its true.

 

We did that after World War II. Having defeated the Axis alongside our allies, we set about rebuilding both sides. We could be magnanimous, despite being just a few years removed from an economic crisis that saw a huge number of our own citizens suffer famine, dislocation, and deaths both at home and in a war spanning the globe, despite only barely having come of age.

 

Today, we argue over whether people about to lose their homes should be given a few bucks to see if maybe they can make it beyond the next month. And forget foreign aid. if it ain't got oil, we ain't interested. We've become that old man with the shotgun and the inviting lawn.

 

Miller says, "Does anyone else think there's something a little insecure about a country that requires its politicians to constantly declare how exceptional it is? A populace in need of this much reassurance may be the surest sign of looming national decline." I'd argue that the decline began long ago, that America for some silly reason got it in its collective head that there was this big-ass target on its back and started looking over its shoulder instead of ahead.

Groping For Consensus

There's a real irony in the outcry over the new TSA body-scanning, junk-touching protocols.

 

It's united the right and the left.

 

Let's sum up the conservative (and by extension, the purported American) mindset here:

 

Invading a sovereign people innocent of any wrongdoing against us? Well, that's OK, I suppose.

 

Bombing the ever-living fuck out of civilians in the name of "fighting terorrism"? Cool. No problem.

 

Waterboarding and torturing enemy combatants? Bring it on!

 

Raise taxes a fraction just to pay for all this? NO!

 

The left opposed all those, of course, and I'm proud to have been among that number.

 

I part company on this one, however. Perhaps it's the libertarian streak in me.

 

Flying an airline is a voluntary activity, driven by private enterprise. You pays your money, you takes your chances. The alternative is to let the airlines decide what security protocols to insitute, which means things will range from "Why, yes, Mr. bin Laden, we do in fact have a seat for you!" to "I don't care if you're the President and you're on Air Force One! It's in our terminal, so you'll be cavity searched!"

 

No one's made the case for any alternatives, although personally I'd prefer the Israeli system, and frankly, I can't see why it hasn't been adopted here. It's efficient and much less intrusive than the American system.

 

Of course, it would cost real money and involve trained personnel who would require higher pay and benefits and all that goes with that. We could hire Blackwater (or Xie or whatever nym it goes by this week).

 

But I digress...

 

Maybe I'm just more comfortable about my naked body. Maybe it's that I ride the NYC subway on a daily basis, so I'm used to having my junk groped, or at least rubbed.

 

Maybe I'm just an adult. I don't know.

 

All I do know is, apart from the radiation risk (in my case, a real one, as I've had more X-rays than you've had hot meals, and have already developed at least one cancer), I have no problem with this.

 

I purchase my ticket to fly to my destination with the understanding that, indeed, I will get there. At 35,000 feet, I do not want any preventable risk. I see enough human error on a daily basis to know my chances are already less than 100% but they'd be lower if I was to drive to where I needed to be.

 

Especially if I had to cross an ocean!

 

We just went through eight years of the most egoistically driven administration since, well, Reagan/Bush. In that time, we drove up our national debt six trillion dollars, almost doubling it. We weren't asked to make sacrifices, like the US did in World War II. Instead, we were warned to go shopping, or the terrorists win. We were coaxed into borrowing more money than we could possibly pay back in two lifetimes to buy houses that were way too big for our families. All this time, it was Christmas every day, as companies came out with new toys and gizmos that barely improved our lives.

 

And we spent. And spent. And spent. And the bill is coming due, right at the time that we can least afford to take our eye off the ball. The national government is in a real struggle between the haves and have-mores, while we the people dread going to the mailbox, not because of anthrax but because of Amex.

 

And we all get angry at a government that can do this to us, and in the next breath mock a government that can't get its act together over something as simple as the Zadroga bill. You can't have it both ways. Either the government is this well-oiled conspiratorial dictatorship (which I believe is an aspiration, but not a reality) or an incompetent boobish puddle of contradictions (more likely).

 

As to the National Opt-Out Day, I will be watching the news to see how it breaks. My guess is that there will be a few handfuls of people who will resist, but eventually, the added delay and the realization that it's the single biggest traffic day of the year will either cause fistfights among the would-be passengers, or force most people to chicken out of opting out.

 

For me, well, I won't be flying next week, but I will be and soon, and I want that TSA agent touching my junk, because for the first time since 9/11, that man will be as uncomfortable screening me as I am being screened.

 

As Lewis Black put it so succinctly this week on The Daily Show: "I get to fly five hours AND someone's touching my balls?"

 

Where do I sign up?

UPDATE: Megan McArdle gives libertarianism a bad name by being an asshole.