Elizabeth Edwards smacks down Annthrax Coulter in 2007:

I don't think anyone took Coulter seriously after that.

Labels: Ann Coulter, Elizabeth Edwards

I'm on short sleep rations these days because of a timetable that must be met, and I can't afford to expend any energy talking about fecklessness, dicklessness, betrayal, the growing plutocracy, and the handing of America over to the corporatists today. So I'll let others do it.

Draftglass: "America is currently too fucking stupid, spoiled and hateful to make good, long-term decisions." (You MUST read this one.)


Ezra Klein, who used to be a cute progressive kid blogging at Pandagon, has joined the Borg.

Digby, as usual, says what I lack the time or discipline to say.

Skippy notes that for people like our own jurassicpork, the 13 month extension doesn't include any benefits for those who have already exhausted all tiers of unemployment. If you are about to become a casualty of the Stuff the Rich Nation, you will have a year and a half to find another job for when these rich people who have had eight years of these tax cuts and have not created jobs, decide to create some (despite the fact that no one can afford anything they make). If you are already one, not one person in our government other than the outgoing Congressman from Florida's eighth district and Sen. Bernie Sanders gives a shit about you.

Michael Stickings wonders whether "something is better than nothing" is our new standard of achievement.

Greg Sargent explains why we're angry.

E.D. Kain, the resident conservative over at Balloon Juice, thinks it was a pretty good deal on a page which features an ad by the Progressive Change Committee, about which Angry Black Lady has some interesting and cogent observations.

And finally:

Yesterday the sad news came across that it seems Elizabeth Edwards is reaching the end of her cancer journey.

Every day, for 8, 10, 12, and sometimes more hours, I'm steeped in the conduct of cancer trials. For me it's about how to collect data, and once the data collection mechanism is done, I'm pretty much done until they either need a system change or there's a problem. In the latter case, I may have to take a cursory look at actual data. When I see what we call "The death form" completed, it means that an actual person that someone cared about has succumbed. When I see someone with liver cancer who's still alive after six, eight, twelve cycles of treatment, it's a sign of hope. That's what drives home for me that what I do, as removed from actual patients as it is, is about hope -- not the hope that's based on blind faith, but hope for small victories like time measured in days and months, if not years.

Yes, it's appalling that a half-century into serious cancer research we are still all about cut, irradiate, and poison. But for now that's what we've got. And if it gets someone through to his daughter's wedding, his son's graduation, just one more summer of watching the sun set over a Caribbean beach, it's a victory, however small. And for those who get that time, it FEELS like a victory, in the way getting relief for the hundreds of thousands of new unemployed in return for stuffing the pockets of the wealthy doesn't.

In 2007 and 2008, John and Elizabeth Edwards were the only ones on the campaign trail talking about the America in which people now find themselves -- people who thought it would never happen to them. Back then the rumblings of economic collapse were only starting. And those who had succumbed to trickle-down economics over the last thirty years were still forgotten.

In 2008 August 2007 I offered to hold a fundraiser for the campaign at my house. You have to realize that my house is a money pit -- a 1950's POS cape in which nothing had been updated since 1975. We've been updating very slowly, mostly on the outside where it shows. My living room has the same ugly red carpet it did when we moved in. My kitchen is still a work in progress three years after I started refacing the cabinets. Our basement family room still had ugly dark paneling and ugly rust-colored carpet.

Over fifty people showed up to schmooze with Elizabeth Edwards for a couple of hours. She was as kind and gracious in person as she seemed on television and that my house was not ready for prime time didn't seem to matter. When she left to go to a book signing, I said "This is the coolest thing I have ever done."

Of course we all know what happened next, and as more came out about exactly what Elizabeth knew even as she was taking donations for a campaign that we knew even then would go nowhere, and that would have been an utter disaster had it succeeded in making it through the primaries, I found myself utterly disgusted with her. She KNEW, and yet she carried on as if she and John were the couple we all thought they were. She continued to take the donations even as she must have known in her heart it was for naught. She took advantage of me, my friends, my neighbors, and the others who came and paid over a hundred dollars to schmooze with Elizabeth Edwards.

Later on, we read in the book written by those loathsome hacks John Heilemann and Mark Halperin that she was a harridan to John Edwards' staff, that she would get hysterical, that she was impossible.

Wouldn't you be? And if you were faced with a recurrence of breast cancer in the middle of a presidential campaign and found out that your husband had thrown away not just your marriage, but a cause you both had supposedly believed in -- for a fling with an aging New York party girl who was the inspiration for a character in a 1980's Jay McInerney novel? Wouldn't you try to Act As If everything was normal?

In the Showtime series The Big C, the protagonist played by Laura Linney explains her unwillingness to tell her family about her Stage IV cancer diagnosis, "I just wanted a little more time where it's not about me being sick." I think that's what motivated Elizabeth Edwards too -- that and kicking the can of deciding what to do down the road -- putting it off because it's just too painful to deal with now.

I still feel angry at how we were sold a bill of goods about John Edwards, but I do understand why she did it. I understand why she thought that the bigass North Carolina house that he built her would somehow compensate for SOMETHING. I understand why she felt the need, after probably hundreds of house fundraisers like mine, to get out into the media and punishing her no-good dog of a husband for what he squandered.

But at this point, all that is behind us. What we need to keep in mind about Elizabeth Edwards is how she stayed out there, looking marvelous for a long time, trying mightily to sound the alarm about health care in this country. While she was out in public, she was a living rebuke to the "I Got Mine and Fuck You" doctrine -- someone with pots of money who still remembered that there are people out there dying because their insurance will not cover the cancer treatments that allowed her to stay out there fighting long after others with recurrent breast cancer have succumbed.

I wish Elizabeth Edwards a peaceful passing with no pain. I wish her children well. I thank her for what she tried to do to call attention to the inequities in our health care system.

And I hope that the image of this brave woman's last battle tortures John Edwards every single fucking day of the rest of his life.

UPDATE: Elizabeth Edwards died this morning at the age of 61.

Labels: capitulation, Elizabeth Edwards, taxes, unemployment, wussy-ass Democrats

Christian conservatives will always tell you that they LOVE the Jews. Why, look at how we support Israel, they'll say. What they don't tell you is that they support Israel because they need Israel for their insane Apocalyptic delusions, and that they look forward with eager anticipation to sitting on the Big Sofa in Heaven, right next to Jesus, sharing nachos and beer and watching unconverted Jews burn.

Finally there's a Christian conservative with the courage to bust through this nonsense and let us know where he REALLY stands on the Jews:

Ordinarily, who gets elected Speaker of the Texas state House would only be of interest to those in Texas. But the current dispute in Austin has a larger significance.

The current state House Speaker is Joe Straus, a conservative Republican leading a conservative Republican majority. He's currently facing a challenge from state Rep. Ken Paxton, who appears to agree with Straus on nearly everything.

So what makes this noteworthy? Straus is Jewish, and some far-right activists in Texas have a problem with that.

A few weeks ago, a coalition of Tea Party and right-wing Republican groups began lobbying for Paxton to replace Straus, with coalition activists circulating anti-Semitic emails. The message from conservatives was that the GOP state House needed a "Christian conservative" leader.

This week, the Texas Observer reported on an email exchange between two members of the State Republican Executive Committee, which governs state GOP affairs. One of the two party leaders, John Cook, insisted in a message, "We elected a house with Christian, conservative values. We now want a true Christian, conservative running it."

The Observer's Abby Rapoport connected with Cook to ask about his efforts to replace the current state House Speaker.

"When I got involved in politics, I told people I wanted to put Christian conservatives in leadership positions," he told me, explaining that he only supports Christian conservative candidates in Republican primary races.

"I want to make sure that a person I'm supporting is going to have my values. It's not anything about Jews and whether I think their religion is right or Muslims and whether I think their religion is right. ... I got into politics to put Christian conservatives into office. They're the people that do the best jobs over all.

Oh yes, he loves the Jews.

Labels: Anti-Semitism, bigotry, Christofascist Zombie Brigade

Come on, admit it. The fact that Senate Democrats are caving to Republican demands that the top 1% keep their tax cuts doesn't even make you shriek with frustration anymore. I don't know about you, but I shrugged my shoulders when I read this:

White House officials and Congressional Republicans said Sunday they were closing in on a deal to temporarily continue the Bush-era tax cuts at all income levels, while bitterly frustrated Democratic Congressional leaders began exploring whether they would have the votes for such a package.

[snip]

Senior Democrats on Sunday said that they were resigned to defeat in the highly charged tax debate, and they voiced dismay.

“We’re moving in that direction,” Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat said dejectedly when Bob Schieffer, host of “Face the Nation” on CBS, asked him if the 2001 and 2003 tax rates would be extended even for the wealthy. “And we’re only moving there against my judgment,” Mr. Durbin added.

In meetings with administration officials after the Senate votes, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and many other House and Senate Democrats voiced deep unhappiness at the prospect of extending all the tax cuts and also expressed their belief that the White House did not appear to be getting enough for such a big concession, officials said.

What makes Nancy Pelosi think that this president even WANTS anything else? At this point, it's pretty clear that lip service to working Americans is all this guy does, while he amasses chits with Wall Street to be cashed in for a fat Wall Street paycheck when he leaves office. What's hilarious is that in return for a seven-figure windfall for Rush Limbaugh, Republicans "probably" would vote to extend unemployment benefits.

No guarantees.

Does anyone actually believe that an extension of unemployment benefits will be part of the final package?

Meanwhile, Wall Street multimillionaires are so concerned that they might have to buy one less Maserati that they're planning to move bonuses into 2010:

Worried that lawmakers will allow taxes to rise for the wealthiest Americans beginning next year, financial firms are discussing whether to move up their bonus payouts from next year to this month.

At stake is a portion of the hefty annual payouts that are a familiar part of the compensation culture on Wall Street, as well as a juicy target of popular anger. If Congress does not extend the Bush-era tax cuts for the highest income levels, a typical worker who earns a $1 million bonus would pay $40,000 to $50,000 more in taxes next year than this year, depending on base salary.

Goldman Sachs is one of the companies discussing how to time bonus season, according to three people who have been briefed on the discussions. Pay consultants who work with major Wall Street companies say that just about every other large bank has also considered such a move in recent weeks.

With tax politics in Washington unpredictable, bank executives have spent months sketching out several options for their bonus plans, including the possibility of an earlier payout. Lawmakers have been trading accusations across a partisan divide, but after this weekend, it appears likely that a compromise will extend the tax cuts for all income levels.

Even so, the banks’ discussions about bonus timing underscore how focused the industry is on protecting every dollar of pay.

Isn't is nice that Goldman Sachs and other banks are so concerned with protecting every single little dollar of their employees' pay, while other industries are still hemorrhaging jobs? Doesn't it make you feel all warm and fuzzy that the people who got us into this economic mess, the people WE THE TAXPAYER bailed out are going to have their bonuses protected come hell or high water while the rest of us are going to work every day wondering if today is the day we're going to get called in to find out we don't have a job anymore?

The fix was in from the beginning under the previous president, as Krugman notes today. Bush was an instant-gratification kind of guy who has always been able to evade any kind of responsibility:

Back in 2001, former President George W. Bush pulled a fast one. He wanted to enact an irresponsible tax cut, largely for the benefit of the wealthiest Americans. But there were Senate rules in place designed to prevent that kind of irresponsibility. So Mr. Bush evaded the rules by making the tax cut temporary, with the whole thing scheduled to expire on the last day of 2010.

The plan, of course, was to come back later and make the thing permanent, never mind the impact on the deficit. But that never happened. And so here we are, with 2010 almost over and nothing resolved.

[snip]

Bear in mind that Republicans want to make those tax cuts permanent. They might agree to a two- or three-year extension — but only because they believe that this would set up the conditions for a permanent extension later. And they may well be right: if tax-cut blackmail works now, why shouldn’t it work again later?

America, however, cannot afford to make those cuts permanent. We’re talking about almost $4 trillion in lost revenue just over the next decade; over the next 75 years, the revenue loss would be more than three times the entire projected Social Security shortfall. So giving in to Republican demands would mean risking a major fiscal crisis — a crisis that could be resolved only by making savage cuts in federal spending.

And we’re not talking about government programs nobody cares about: the only way to cut spending enough to pay for the Bush tax cuts in the long run would be to dismantle large parts of Social Security and Medicare.

Yes, but this is what Americans WANT, isn't it? They really truly care about deficits to the exclusion of all else, right? They WANT the wealthiest one percent to have big tax cuts continued because Rich People Create Jobs™, right?

Wrong:

According to a new CBS News poll, however, Boehner is off-base in his claim that Americans "want us to stop all the looming tax hikes."

The poll finds that 53 percent of Americans want the Bush-era tax cuts extended only for households earning less than $250,000 per year. That roughly matches the proposal put forth by the White House, which wants to extend the cuts only for incomes less than $250,000 for families and $200,000 for individuals.

Just 26 percent of Americans say they support extending the cuts for all Americans, even those earning above the $250,000 level, which is the GOP proposal.

Doesn't that make you feel great about America? And doesn't that just INSPIRE you to continue to elect the kind of people who allow this to happen?

Labels: despair, Greedy Republican Bastards, wussy-ass Democrats

Tbogg's most recent Thursday Night Basset Blogging.

(This is not to say that cats are incapable of getting into some pretty serious mischief. I remember Oliver once walking around with 14 inches of yarn hanging out his ass and I had to keep cutting it till it had all been expunged. But I have never had to have the vet retrieve my underwear out of a cat's stomach.)

And don't forget to read the comments while you're there. Just be sure to swallow that mouthful of coffee before you do.

Labels: bloggers, dogs

"The Torture Never Stops" -- Barcelona, 1988:

It seemed appropriate.

(Oh, yeah. Happy this holiday too.)

Labels: Frank Zappa, music

These are the people whom you are sacrificing on the altar of "bipartisanship":

Is your need to prove that you're the NICE black man so deep-seated that you will allow Republicans throw these people out on the street? If the answer to that is yes, than pack up and go home. Just go home. Led Biden run things for a while and let the chips fall where they may in 2012.

Go back to Chicago, or move to New York and call in all your markers to Wall Street for that eight-figure job you know you can ask for in exchange for continuing to hand the store over to the bankers. Orszag might even be in a position to hire you. Yes, you'll be known forever as a quitter -- right up there with Sarah Palin -- except YOUR job may in fact BE unmanageable. But at least what's left of the middle class in this country after thirty years of Reaganomics might have a fighting chance, at least for the next two years, until people's angry is so red-hot that they put someone in charge who will accelerate the path of middle class destruction. And I'm sorry, Mr. President, but the people in this video, and the hundreds of thousands more who don't appear in it, and the many, many others, some in my own industry, for whom the axe will fall in the next year, are more important than you are.

You know the saying, "Lead, follow, or get out of the way"? Following is what you've been doing. Following is doing nothing to prevent the pulling the rug out from under tens of thousands of people EVERY SINGLE DAY. Either lead or get the fuck out of the way and make room for someone who does.

(via)

Labels: Barack Obama, heartlessness, unemployment, wussy-ass Democrats

No, it's not racist at all to hold a "Secession Ball", celebrating South Carolina's Ordinance of Secession:

The Sons of Confederate Veterans plan to hold a $100-per-person Secession Ball on Dec. 20 in Gaillard Municipal Auditorium. It will feature a play highlighting key moments from the signing of South Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession 150 years ago, an act that severed the state’s ties to the Union and put the nation on the path to the Civil War.

Jeff Antley, who is organizing the event, said the Secession Ball honors the men who stood up for their rights.

“To say that we are commemorating and celebrating the signers of the ordinance and the act of South Carolina going that route is an accurate statement,” Antley said. “The secession movement in South Carolina was a demonstration of freedom.”

They deny that slavery has anything to do with it, but when you're celebrating the secession, you're celebrating a stand which meant perpetuation of a system in which white people OWNED black people outright, and were legally able to buy, sell, abuse, rape, and work them to death at will.

That's the good old days for "states rights" Republicans. And THAT'S what they mean when they talk about it.

Nope. Got nothing to do with racism. Believing that an entire race should be subordinate to another and that human beings can be owned isn't racist at all. Not in these people's minds.

Labels: just another outrage, racism, Republican Confederate Party

I know. But the denizens of Florida's 8th district, when their theocratic new Congressman votes to screw them over ten ways to Sunday, are going to miss this guy:

Labels: Alan Grayson, Democrats with balls

I'd pretty much thrown in the towel after health care "reform". I've realized for a long time that what we have in the White House is yet another guy replaying his childhood tape loops on a national stage. George W. Bush spent eight years and the nation's economy and reputation trying to simultaneously prove that his dick was bigger than his father's, and simultaneously gain that father's approval. Barack Obama seems bound and determined to spend four years (because it's impossible to believe that having completely alienated his base AND independence, he'll get eight) trying to prove to an intransigent Republican Party that would hang him by a rope from a tree if it thought it could get away with it that he's not one of those THREATENING, MEAN black men. No, indeedy, he's a NICE black man, one who won't knife them in a dark alley. And he seems bound and determined to spend four years and what's left of the nation's economy and reputation trying to prove that.

And that's the CHARITABLE interpretation.

One of the less charitable ones is that 56% of American voters were hoodwinked by a guy who's more like the Republicans than anyone even now wants to believe; a guy who BELIEVES in torture and assassination; a guy who BELIEVES in tax cuts for the wealthy and screw everyone else; a guy who WANTS endless war; a guy who is all about doing the bidding of corporations BECAUSE HE WANTS TO; a guy who feels every bit as "icky" about Teh Gays as John Edwards did, only who lacks even the courage that a weasel like John Edwards had to admit it; a guy who WANTS to gut Social Security and Medicare; a guy who decided to become president as a kind of ruling class internship; in which he spends four years doing Wall Street's bidding in exchange for a nice eight-figure gig upon leaving office.

The even less charitable, tinfoiley-scarey one is that American Presidents have absolutely zero power; that there are shadowy figures who really run things who sit every new president down and lay down the law. And that if he (or she) wants his/her children to survive to adulthood and not be gunned down on live television to be replayed over and over again on 24-hour cable news, the line is to be toed and their bidding is to be done without question. And that bidding is to wreck the middle class, push everyone who doesn't sit at their table into grinding poverty, and expand military adventures without end to feed the defense contracting beast. On the right they would call these shadowy figures "George Soros". There's FAR more evidence of this from right-wing corporate circles, what with the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch. But if such a shadow government exists, it's not run by anyone that we have ever heard of. It wouldn't be shadowy in that case.

But whatever the deal is with Barack Obama, there's no denying now that there is no game of 11-dimensional chess going on, -- that he really does know what he's doing and we should just trust him. No, it's clear that what we have to look forward to is two more years of utter sellouts to a lunatic right-wing House of Representatives and corporate interests, followed by an election in which a despairing public forgets what a grifter the Wackjob from Wasilla is and puts her in the White House.

If Obama has lost Krugman, he's lost America:

After the Democratic “shellacking” in the midterm elections, everyone wondered how President Obama would respond. Would he show what he was made of? Would he stand firm for the values he believes in, even in the face of political adversity?

On Monday, we got the answer: he announced a pay freeze for federal workers. This was an announcement that had it all. It was transparently cynical; it was trivial in scale, but misguided in direction; and by making the announcement, Mr. Obama effectively conceded the policy argument to the very people who are seeking — successfully, it seems — to destroy him.

So I guess we are, in fact, seeing what Mr. Obama is made of.

About that pay freeze: the president likes to talk about “teachable moments.” Well, in this case he seems eager to teach Americans something false.

The truth is that America’s long-run deficit problem has nothing at all to do with overpaid federal workers. For one thing, those workers aren’t overpaid. Federal salaries are, on average, somewhat less than those of private-sector workers with equivalent qualifications. And, anyway, employee pay is only a small fraction of federal expenses; even cutting the payroll in half would reduce total spending less than 3 percent.

So freezing federal pay is cynical deficit-reduction theater. It’s a (literally) cheap trick that only sounds impressive to people who don’t know anything about budget realities. The actual savings, about $5 billion over two years, are chump change given the scale of the deficit.

[snip]

Mr. Obama’s pay ploy might, just might, have been justified if he had used the announcement of a freeze as an occasion to take a strong stand against Republican demands — to declare that at a time when deficits are an important issue, tax breaks for the wealthiest aren’t acceptable.

But he didn’t. Instead, he apparently intended the pay freeze announcement as a peace gesture to Republicans the day before a bipartisan summit. At that meeting, Mr. Obama, who has faced two years of complete scorched-earth opposition, declared that he had failed to reach out sufficiently to his implacable enemies. He did not, as far as anyone knows, wear a sign on his back saying “Kick me,” although he might as well have.

[snip]

The real question is what Mr. Obama and his inner circle are thinking. Do they really believe, after all this time, that gestures of appeasement to the G.O.P. will elicit a good-faith response?

What’s even more puzzling is the apparent indifference of the Obama team to the effect of such gestures on their supporters. One would have expected a candidate who rode the enthusiasm of activists to an upset victory in the Democratic primary to realize that this enthusiasm was an important asset. Instead, however, Mr. Obama almost seems as if he’s trying, systematically, to disappoint his once-fervent supporters, to convince the people who put him where he is that they made an embarrassing mistake.

Whatever is going on inside the White House, from the outside it looks like moral collapse — a complete failure of purpose and loss of direction.

Krugman is more charitable than I am. He implies that there ever was a purpose other than what we're seeing.

(Obama has lost the Kossacks, too. And yeah, what Yellow Dog said.)

Labels: Barack Obama, despair, We Are So Screwed

HuffPo lists the 10 states that will be hammered the hardest by a lapse in unemployment benefits. With the exception of New York and California, the other states all elected teabaggers in last month's election. I'm only covering governorships and Senate seats, there are too many Congresscritters to cover individually:

10 - Indiana: The "throw out the insiders" bunch just elected Dan Coats, "the consummate insider, a six-figure-income lobbyist with "only second homes" in Maryland and North Carolina." to the Senate. He's on record from BEFORE the election as opposiing an extension to unemployment benefits. Coats replaces Evan Bayh, a loathsome corporate Blue Dog who would no doubt have voted with the Republicans anyway. It's a wash, but Coats' opponent, Brad Ellsworth, just voted FOR H R 6419 - the Emergency Unemployment Compensation Continuation Act.

9 - Ohio just elected John Kasich (killer of a job-creating rail project) to be their governor over incumbent Ted Strickland, and kept incumbent Republican Rob Portman in the Senate. Portman buys into the Republican "Give Rich People Enough Tax Cuts and Let Them Do Whatever They Want And They'll Create Jobs Even If No One Has Money To Buy What They Make doctrine, but at least he favors allowing states with high unemployment rates to access additional funding without Congressional action -- an odd stance for the Teabaggers' choice.

8 - Georgia just elected as Governor Nathan Deal, a guy who had to resign his Congressional seat back in March 2010 after:

...the Office of Congressional Ethics released its report anyway, concluding that Mr. Deal appeared to have improperly used his office to pressure Georgia officials to continue a vehicle inspection program that generated hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for his family’s auto salvage business.

He got 53% of the vote. Perhaps Georgians without jobs believe that if they Just Work Hard Enough, they too can go to Congress and strongarm state officials into enacting programs that will allow them to stuff their pockets. The throw-the-bums-out sentiment didn't apply in the state's Senate Race either, where incumbent Republican Johnny Isakson won 53.8% of the vote. In June 2010, Senator Isakson had to apologize for referring to the unemployed as "unwashed." In July he voted again against an extension of unemployment benefits. He is, however, going full-bore now on an extension of tax cuts for the top 1%.

7) Michigan's new governor is Rick Snyder, who is going to Washington this week but refuses to say if he will ask for an extension of unemployment benefits for his long-beleaguered state. Over 180,000 Michigan residents will run out of benefits in the next five months. Neither of the state's Senators was up for election.

6) Florida took a turn to the Very Hard right, electing health care fraudster Rick Scott as governor and teabagger favorite Marco Rubio to the Senate. Without a previous record of votes, we can't tell for sure what Rubio will do, but in July he said he would stand with Republicans in opposing any extension to unemployment benefits -- but of course he favors tax cuts for the wealthy:

"At some point someone has to draw a line in the sand and say we are serious about not growing debt," Rubio said.

However, when it comes to offsetting the costs of an extension of the Bush Tax Cuts that Rubio wants made permanent, his campaign couldn't give an answer to CBS4.com's Tim Kephart.

Meanwhile, governor-elect Rick Scott is planning a lavish inaugural celebration for which he's seeking donations of up to $25,000. The more you pay, the more access to him you get. If you like trickle-down economics, you'll LOVE Florida under Rick Scott.

5) Illinois' new senator is Mark Kirk, who only seems moderate when compared to the extremists who now dominate the Republican Party. But on extending tax cuts for the top 1%, these don't have to be offset by spending cuts...whereas unemployment benefits extensions require offsets:


4) We usually think of Texas as having weathered the economic crisis relatively unscathed. with a comparatively "low" unemployment rate of 8.2%. But with 127,900 losing benefits before December 31, it remains to be seen whether relatively robust job creation will offset this. Texas didn't have a Senate election this year, but Texas is represented in the Senate by John Cornyn and Ron Paul. In July, Cornyn blamed Democrats for a failure to extend unemployment benefits. Like other Republicans who believe that the revenue reductions from tax cuts for the wealthy don't need to be offset with spending cuts but that unemployment benefits do, Cornyn wanted drastic spending cuts and tax cuts in return. We already know about Ron Paul's views on anything government does.

3) Pennsylvania: This is a state that could have elected Joe Sestak to the Senate, but instead chose to send über-wingnut Pat Toomey. In July, Toomey said that any unemployment benefits extension must be offset with spending cuts. Toomey favors ending ALL capital gains and corporate taxes. This means that even if "rich people" "created jobs", the wages of said jobs would pay the entire national tax burden, while those whose income comes from investments while they sip margaritas in the Caymans would pay none.

The top two spots are occupied by New York and California, which at least had the good sense to eschew the insane Carl Paladino and the greedy, too-cheap-to-hire-a-housekeeper-she-couldn't exploit Meg Whitman.

So there you have it. The states with the most people at risk of being cast out without a penny are states that voted in these lunatics. I'd be tempted to shrug my shoulders and say "You get what you pay for", except that 30-49% of the people in these states DIDN'T vote against their own interests. And they will be swept in the street right along with the idiots.

Labels: American Idiots, Greedy Republican Bastards, unemployment

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari Goldstein.)

If you were to ask Rush Limbaugh in between trips to the hubs of the child sex slave trade, he'd stubbornly insist it was Daniel Ellsberg. Then again, Limbaugh is a latter day Republican who still probably harbors a grudge about the Teapot Dome Scandal and, if Eisenhower was still President, he'd be calling for his impeachment for being a radical, anarchic Socialist for taxing the richest 1% up to 90% of their income.

But, as usual, el Rushbo fails to see the bigger picture and insists that Wikileaks founder and head Julian Assange, this decade's answer to Dr. Richard Kimble, is a traitor on a par with Ellberg.

Let's get a few things straight, starting with waving away the superficial similarities:

As with Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers in the latter half of June 1971, Julian Assange made Wikileak's most massive disclosures a year and a half into the Obama administration. The first of these Four Horsemen were the videos of gunship troops killing over a dozen Iraqi civilians, two of them Reuters photojournalists, in 2007. The second was the hardly stunning revelation through 75,000 documents pertaining to Afghanistan that not all is going well there. Hot on its heels was Wikileaks' biggest disclosure yet: The release of nearly 500,000 documents pertaining mostly to Iraq that read like a massive police blotter going back to the invasion in 2003.

Then just after Thanksgiving, the State Dept's internal memos and cables, some of them going back to the Johnson administration, were released, making Secretary of State Hillary Clinton grab her phone to apologize to foreign governments for all the nasty things she and her underlings had said amongst themselves about them. In other words, it revealed that the State Dept. was filled with little Richard Armitages, petty gossips who apparently forgot their cables and internal memos are now part of the digital age.

It's almost like the Dreyfus Affair all over again, only real and multiplied by 251,000.

The Obama administration, because it's still a new one, can hardly be held as accountable as the eight year-long Bush administration for the embarrassing and outrageous disclosures that, just as embarrassingly, were brought to us courtesy of a fresh-faced Pfc. barely out of high school and who used little more than a memory stick and a Lady Gaga CD.

As with the Pentagon Papers and the two year-old Nixon administration, the latest Wikileaks furor and the two year-old Obama administration is outraged not because it's being blamed for originating the abuses and lies spoon-fed to the media, the US public and even foreign governments but for perpetuating those self-destructive policies.

But let's be clear about the even bigger differences: The mainstream media have not divulged the secrets of the government and one nowadays can hardly imagine it showing the same intestinal fortitude of its ancestors that had holed up for weeks in hotel rooms while dedicated reporters hammered out millions of words and braved the DOJ's barking.

Wikileaks, an online entity answerable to no one, did it from the safety of their anonymity and seemingly impenetrable firewall. This time, the press is spreading the news not as actual, crusading journalists but passive spectators. In fact, it could be said the passivity of the US press, especially during wars, since Watergate is the very reason for Wikileaks' existence.

Daniel Ellsberg was a hero, an insider who was a policy analyst for the Pentagon and the Rand Corporation in California who was genuinely tortured by his conscience and felt, rightly, responsible for helping to create the bloody juggernaut that was the Vietnam War. Julian Assange is an egomaniacal little martinet living safely beyond the grasp of a vengeful government that isn't even his by birth who doesn't possess one shred or molecule of the moral currency still wielded by Ellsberg, a man who never fled the country and was quite willing to go to prison.

Ellsberg was motivated by a conscience as tortured as an Iraqi detainee. Assange's motives for embarrassing the US government? No one really knows aside from perhaps an abstract sense of outrage. Or maybe Assange and Wikileaks are merely the Nexus phase of gossip, an indelible reminder that we live in the most Gotcha Age of all time, the Alan Funt of Uncle Sam.

It's still unclear whether or not Assange authorized the leak of any classified material. In Ellsberg's case, it was undeniable (Ellsberg even had his children helping him Xerox classified documents at Rand, even cutting off the "Top Secret" from the tops.). But one thing is clear:

It will set our diplomatic credibility back to the Stone Age, which is to say back to the Bush years, a time in which the Bush Doctrine boiled down to, Agree With Us or We'll Either Blow You to Smithereens or Ignore You Until You Agree With Us. It'll make it that much harder for foreign governments to trust us and work with us and will all but wash away whatever few inroads President Obama had made to repair our international standing.

But to accuse Assange of being a traitor is ridiculous since, unlike Ellsberg, he's not a US citizen.




Assange seems to have a problem with the United States in particular and, to a lesser degree, governments that keep secrets, which is to say all of them. It would be easy to look at these four highly publicized disclosures as the World against Julian Assange but the fact is the latest batch of disclosures shows it's Uncle Sam against the World, with a greasy thumb perpetually at the tip of his nose.

In John Shadegg's (R-Looneytunes) world, corporations hire people because they have more money than they know what to do with, not because people want what they have to sell:

According to calculations by the Congressional Budget Office, Moody’s Economy, and myriad other economists, unemployment benefits are the single best way to pump money into the economy and generate economic activity, as the unemployed are very likely to spend all of the benefits they receive (thus moving money into local businesses). But during an interview with MSNBC’s Mike Barnicle today, Rep. John Shadegg (R-AZ) scoffed at the notion that unemployment benefits help the economy. “Unemployed people hire people? Really? I didn’t know that,” Shadegg jeered:

BARNICLE: What about the fact that unemployment benefits pumped into the economy are an immediate benefit to the economy? Immediate…

SHADEGG: No, they’re not! Unemployed people hire people? Really? I didn’t know that.

BARNICLE: Unemployed people spend money Congressman, ’cause they have no money.

SHADEGG: Aha! So your answer is it’s the spending of money that drives the economy and I don’t think that’s right. It’s the creation of jobs that drives the economy…Actually, the truth is the unemployed will spend as little of that money as they possibly can. Job creators create jobs.

BARNICLE: Have you ever been unemployed? Have you ever been unemployed?

SHADEGG: Yes, I have.

BARNICLE: What did you do with the money? Save it?

[snip]

Shadegg never managed to explain why all of the job creators he cites would create any jobs if households aren’t spending money. In that vein, MarketPlace noted today that “when unemployment checks stop, it’s felt right away by businesses like gas stations, apartment operators, and grocery stores.”

Barnicle is an ass, but in this case he was spot-on in challenging Shadegg on this. We keep hearing about theory of markets from the right, and then a blithering moron like Shadegg gets up there and completely ignores the very basic concept of supply and demand. And in one fell swoop, Barnicle completely debunked the entire supply-side Reaganite economics.

Labels: American Idiots, Greedy Republican Bastards

We've already seen (contrary to Ross Douthat's opinion) common ground between the teabag right and the progressive left in outrage against TSA's nude-or-grope airport security methodology. Here's another area of common ground: that it's time to stop the no-questions-asked gravy train for the Defense Department:

The conservatives write that ignoring “the burden military spending places on the taxpayers” promotes an “ethos” of “reckless spending.” They conclude that “any such Department of Defense favoritism would signal that the new Congress is not serious about fiscal responsibility and not ready to lead.” They end their letter by writing, “We call on you to lead the crusade for a new era of responsibility – one that knows no sacred cows“:

We write to urge you to institute principled spending reform that rejects the notion that spending cuts can be avoided in certain parts of the federal budget. Department of Defense spending, in particular, has been provided protected status that has isolated it from serious scrutiny and allowed the Pentagon to waste billions in taxpayer money. A new Congress, with a clear mandate to cut spending and the size of government, should signal its fiscal resolve by proposing cuts for all federal spending.

Ignoring the burden military spending places on the taxpayers promotes the same reckless spending ethos that led to failed “stimulus” policies, government bailouts and a prolonged economic recession. Leadership on spending requires commitment that aims to permanently change the bias toward profligacy, not simply stem the tide in the short-term. True fiscal stewards cannot eschew real spending reform by protecting pet projects in the federal budget.

Any such Department of Defense favoritism would signal that the new Congress is not serious about fiscal responsibility and not ready to lead. As we enter a new Congress and search for ways to significantly decrease the size of government, we call on you to lead the crusade for a new era of responsibility – one that knows no sacred cows.

Conservative leaders are right to call for reining in defense spending to battle the deficit. The defense budget for FY2010 is a whopping $533.8 billion, larger than the 2008 GDP of 116 countries. And the Department of Defense has been a major factor in the growth of the budget deficit, accounting for 65 percent of the discretionary spending increase since 2001.

While numerous Republican legislators have endorsed cutting defense spending as one way to reduce the budget deficit, it is unclear if the GOP leadership will endorse such a plan. Unfortunately, in the GOP’s much-touted “Pledge For America,” Republican leaders explicitly exempted defense-related spending from waste-trimming. Yet many analysts do believe that the tea party-progressive coalition will successfully start to rein in defense spending.

We've now been Afghanistan longer than the Soviet Union was, and we all know what happened to the Soviet Union in the aftermath of its misadventure in Afghanistan. We're still spending billions in Iraq (and what ABOUT that $9 billion that just "disappeared"? Where was the outrage about that on the Republican right?). We're still fighting wars without end, to the tune of over $1 trillion a year. For the most part, even with all the talk about Americans tightening their belts, only two industries have been exempt from such talk: banking and defense contractors. It remains to be seen if the Tea Partier in the street shares the willingness of some of the people he elected to take on the sacred cows of Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin; if he's willing to let go of the rah-rah flag waving that has given the Department of Defense a blank check since the 1960's and even more so since the 9/11 attacks.

But this is now two areas, both related to national security, in which the Tea Party right and the progressive left have common ground? Can we find more? And if so, can we also put an end to the stranglehold of corporate cash over our government so that it works for the people again?

Labels: defense spending