Monthly Archives: June 2011

Clock Ticking on Economy

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It appears the debt ceiling fight is going to get nastier. And crazier. Senate Republicans actually are making noises about a balanced budget amendment. Funny they never talked about that when George W. Bush was president.

Paul Krugman says using the debt ceiling for political extortion is new in American politics, but Ezra Klein says it isn’t. Republicans tried it before, during the Clinton Administration. Their demands at the time included elimination of the Commerce Department.

Back to Krugman, who writes,

So failure to reach a debt deal would have very bad consequences. But here’s the thing: Mr. Obama must be prepared to face those consequences if he wants his presidency to survive.

Bear in mind that G.O.P. leaders don’t actually care about the level of debt. Instead, they’re using the threat of a debt crisis to impose an ideological agenda. If you had any doubt about that, last week’s tantrum should have convinced you. Democrats engaged in debt negotiations argued that since we’re supposedly in dire fiscal straits, we should talk about limiting tax breaks for corporate jets and hedge-fund managers as well as slashing aid to the poor and unlucky. And Republicans, in response, walked out of the talks.

So what’s really going on is extortion pure and simple. As Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute puts it, the G.O.P. has, in effect, come around with baseball bats and declared, “Nice economy you have here. A real shame if something happened to it.”

Sheila Bair, who is coming to the end of her five-year term as chair of the FDIC, testified to Congress this week that even coming close to default on the debt could be catastrophic. And yes, she’s a Bush appointee, but apparently not crazy.

Specifically, Ms. Bair, herself a Republican, said that if the markets get spooked – even if the debt ceiling is ultimately raised – the consequences could have long-lasting impact on interest rates, which would hurt consumers, businesses and even the national debt itself. If the government gets close enough to default, even if it doesn’t happen, “you’ve increased interest costs, you’ve increased Treasury’s borrowing costs and you’ve created a bigger deficit problem. So why even go there? Why even flirt with it? I just don’t understand it – it’s very harmful and will make the budget deficit worse.”

Ms. Bair said that there’s obviously no “immediate fix” to the deficit issue, but lawmakers don’t seem to get that.

This is going to be a lot of hard work, a lot of hard decisions,” and involve some combination of entitlement reform and revenue increases, she said. “It just seems like all those things are so obvious [but] the political process doesn’t seem able to produce the tough decisions that really need to be made and execute on them.”

No More Mr. Nice President?

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Looks like somebody’s getting fed up, finally:

White House Spokesman Jay Carney said Thursday afternoon that President Barack Obama rejected an invitation from Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell to meet about cutting the deficit.

“What the senator invited the president to do was to hear Senate Republicans restate their maximalist position. We know what that position is,” Carney said.

Update: Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell is inviting President Barack Obama to the Capitol to hear first-hand why his proposed tax increases will not pass, The Associated Press is reporting.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-rejects-invitation-to-meet-with-senate-republicans-on-debt-ceiling-2011-6#ixzz1Qn22Fe00

That’s the thing with righties. They’ve been reciting the same dogma for decade after decade, yet they always assume no one else has heard it before.

Elsewhere: SEC rules in favor of Colbert. Seriously.

The mindless hysteria of right-wing sheep.

From the other blog — something inspirational — a hate crime victim is trying to save his assailant from execution.

6th Circuit Court Upholds Affordable Care Act

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It is so Constitutional. From the decision:

By regulating the practice of self-insuring for the cost of health care delivery, the minimum coverage provision is facially constitutional under the Commerce Clause for two independent reasons. First, the provision regulates economic activity that Congress had a rational basis to believe has substantial effects on interstate commerce. In addition, Congress had a rational basis to believe that the provision was essential to its larger economic scheme reforming the interstate markets in health care and health insurance.

See also Steve Benen and Adam Serwer.

New Jersey Turning Against Christie

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Hey hey hey hey tell me what’d I say …

More than half of New Jersey residents say they wouldn’t back Governor Chris Christie for a second term, disapproving of his choices on a range of policy and personal issues, from killing a commuter tunnel to using a state-police helicopter to attend his son’s baseball game

On the night Chris Christie was elected, I wrote,

I think the people of New Jersey possibly don’t understand how far right Christie is. New Jersey has had Republican governors in recent memory, but not crazy hard-right ideological Republican governors. New Jersey likes governors who cut taxes, but if Christie pushes a hard-right social agenda, he will be a one-term governor.

Christie’s mostly been pushing a hard-right economic agenda. It’s one thing to cut taxes (which I believe he has done only for the wealthy, anyway), but something else to cancel building projects that would have employed a lot of people and cut funding for schools.

To hear Republicans nationwide tell it, Christie is achieving great results in New Jersey (although they tend to be vague about what those “results” are). But it’s plain to me the only thing he’s good at is going viral on You Tube.

Update: See also Atrios.

Stuff Everyone Should Know

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Maddow at her most brilliant —

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

It’s about the lengths to which Republicans will go — including trashing the economy and opposing their own policies — to hurt the Obama Administration.

Elsewhere — Eric Cantor would reap a windfall from one of his investments if the U.S. goes into default.

I don’t believe I have purchased or consumed any product made by the Hormel Corporation in many years, but after I read this I checked the brand names listed at the corporate website to be sure. The company may be more humane to the animals it slaughters than to its workers.

Unions Made Him Do It!

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Unions made Justice Prosser put his hands around Justice Bradley’s neck! John Hayward writes for Human Events —

It seems the Wisconsin Supreme Court provides a tense working environment, with no love lost between the liberal bloc headed by Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson and the more conservative justices. Prosser has accused Abrahamson and Bradley of being “masters at deliberately goading people into perhaps incautious statements,” and claims she successfully goaded him into calling her a “total bitch” on at least one occasion.

It’s disheartening to learn that a state Supreme Court is full of goading and bitching, instead of wisdom and scholarship, but as we have seen over the past year, Big Labor politics does not create a solemn environment for statecraft, especially when Big Labor is losing.

I’ve been withholding judgment on exactly what happened between the justices, but whenever any man says a woman made him assault her, verbally or physically, I am inclined to think he’s an abusive SOB who thinks he is entitled to shove women around.

Elsewhere — Michele Bachmann confuses John Wayne with John Wayne Gacy, but refuses to forgive Chris Wallace for asking her if she is a flake.

Sarah Palin is sniffing around in Iowa, pretending to be low key. I’m wondering if she’s trying to arrange to be declared a candidate by popular acclamation.

The Fetus Gestapo Tightening Its Grip

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New laws in several states prohibit nearly all abortions after 20 weeks’ gestation. This flies in the face of Roe v. Wade, which permits states to prohibit elective abortion only after viability is possible, at roughly 24 weeks’ gestation.

The laws are being justified on the theory that a fetus at 20 weeks can perceive pain, in spite of the fact that its cerebral cortex has not yet developed. Most scientists insist that a functioning cerebral cortex is necessary to perceive pain, or anything else.

On a Web site summarizing their case, abortion opponents counter with recent studies by a handful of scientists claiming that a functioning cortex is not necessary for the experience of pain. They charge that the American and British obstetrical colleges are biased, dominated by abortion supporters.

Projection, much?

These laws allow for an exception only in the case of possible death or permanent bodily injury of the mother. The law focuses on a couple who were not allowed to terminate a 22 week pregnancy, even though the fetus had stopped developing and the pregnancy had caused a serious infection.

Even worse, states are beginning to prosecute women for stillbirths. Kansas is attempting to shut down its three remaining abortion clinics through onerous and arbitrary building regulations.

Several states have passed new laws that force women to overcome arbitrary and unnecessary hurdles to terminate pregnancies. These include coercive “counseling” and ultrasounds. And, of course, several states are moving toward defunding Planned Parenthood, or have already defunded it. Across the country there has been a huge spike in state anti-abortion legislation.

I am glad to hear that everything is so hunky-dory in so many states that legislators have nothing else to do but think up ways to ban abortions. I’d hate to think this obsession with womb regulation might be taking precedence over more pressing matters. (/snark)

But I say again, polls going back many years show that American public opinion on abortion is not nearly as extreme as what one sees in a lot of state legislatures. A Time poll conducted last week showed that 64 percent of adults nationwide think that women have a right to terminate a pregnancy in the first few weeks, as opposed to 35 percent who think they don’t. So, while many Americans lean more conservatively on such issues as parental notification and limits on later-term abortions, there has long been a broad consensus that abortions in the first trimester or so (which are 88 percent of abortions performed in the U.S.) are a woman’s business, not the government’s.

This leads to two question. One, it seems to me there long has been a pattern for state legislatures to be more right wing than the the people of a state on many issues. Over the years I’ve noticed this in regard to several issues, from flying Confederate flags over statehouses to allowing bar patrons to carry guns. This speaks to the power of right-wing organizations to elect candidates, but I really wish someone would do a comprehensive study of this someday.

Second, I do wonder what the people in many of these states think. I suspect many of them voted for the guys who promised to cut taxes and grow jobs. Once elected, however, they appear to spend the bulk of their time trying to shut down abortion clinics. Which doesn’t grow jobs. When are they going to realize that if they want sane, responsible government, they have to weed out politicians who are obsessed with abortion.