Tag: politics

The white flag waves

I’m sure you’re nearly as surprised as I am to learn that the House Republicans not only caved on the debt ceiling, but caved in a preemptive manner:

A conservative proposal to raise the debt ceiling — known as “Cut, Cap and Balance” — passed the House with bipartisan support late Tuesday, by a vote of 234 to 190. Five Democrats (Boren, Cooper, Matheson, McIntyre and Schuler) voted with the majority, while nine Republicans (Bachmann, Broun, Canseco, DesJarlais, Griffith, Walter Jones, Mack, Paul and Rohrabacher) voted ‘no.’

What is this cunning plan, precisely?

“Under the “Cut, Cap, and Balance” legislation, Congress would raise the debt ceiling by $2.5 trillion (the amount requested by President Obama to get him through the 2012 election). However, that increase would go into effect only if both houses of Congress pass — with two-thirds majorities — a balanced-budget amendment (BBA) to the Constitution and send it to the states for ratification. In addition, the plan calls for significant spending cuts to next year’s budget — about $111 billion — and firm caps on federal spending at 18.5 percent of GDP by the end of the decade. According to White House data, given current trends, spending will exceed 25 percent of GDP this year and will hover around 22.5 percent for the next five years. (The legislation will make no immediate changes to Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security.)”

Significant spending cuts? $111 billion is about 7 percent of the 2011 deficit. Spending needs to be reduced to 18.5 percent of GDP or less now, not ten years from now. This is a craven and abject collapse on the part of the House Republicans and Bachmann’s vote against it shows that they know this to be the case.

The sinking of the Hermanator

I did warn you that he was intellectually over-matched:

This guy is not longer a joke, he’s simply despicable. Chris Wallace asked Herman Cain about a mosque being built in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. After arguing that Islam doesn’t qualify as a religion or something under the 1st Amendment, they got to the heart of the matter.

“So Wallace asked the inevitable question: does any community have the right to ban mosques? “Yes, they have a right to do that,” Cain replied, without skipping a beat. He later added that, while he is not willing to discriminate based on religion, “I’d rather err on the side of caution.””

Cain has a rather convoluted understanding of the US Constitution, at least when it comes to it’s applicability to Muslims in this country. I didn’t like John McCain’s attempts to rewrite the 1st Amendment through campaign finance reform laws and I don’t like candidates for President like Cain who think some people may only build houses of worship at the sufferance of their fellow citizens.

I’m not saying that Cain’s instincts about the inevitable curtailment of religious freedoms aren’t on target, as there are real doubts about whether the concept of religious freedom can survive a large Islamic population any better than the right to bear arms survived the introduction of nuclear weapons. And there are certainly major problems with the way secular officials around the nation are violating the First Amendment in favor of Islam. Even so, to argue that Islam isn’t a religion is simply absurd, on par with the assertion that the Federal Reserve doesn’t need an external audit because it performs so many internal ones.

As a general rule, Americans look disfavorably upon any politician who attempts to narrow the scope of the Bill of Rights, particularly with regards to the First and Second Amendments. If you don’t want mosques built in your community, the correct time to deal with the issue is not permitting immigration from countries filled with people who are inclined to want to build mosques.

Captain Underoos makes two bad hires

Dean Baker, who is among those who foresaw the 2008 meltdown, notes that Romney’s economic advisers didn’t:

That’s right, the Washington Post told readers that the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination is relying on two economists, Greg Mankiw and Glenn Hubbard, who completely missed the $8 trillion housing bubble whose collapse wrecked the economy. Unfortunately the Post neglected to mention this fact to readers.

Since Romney is making his ability to manage the economy the centerpiece of his campaign it would have been worth noting that his two top economic advisers were unable to see the largest asset bubble in the history of the world. This might raise some questions about Mr. Romney’s competence.

It probably won’t, since there is practically no one in the media, still less the opinion pages, who knows the first thing about economics. But it certainly should.

Cackling while Rome drowns

Miss Coulter appears to be under the extraordinary impression that preemptive surrender is a brilliant political tactic:

Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has checkmated the Democrats. He has proposed a bill that will allow Obama to raise the debt ceiling three times, up to $2.4 trillion, over the next 18 months, but only provided Obama proposes equivalent cuts in spending each time. Finally, the Democrats will be forced to pony up spending cuts – or default on the debt and crash the economy.

Contrary to some hysterical Republicans, McConnell’s bill does not forfeit any of Congress’ authority: The House and Senate will still have to decide whether to accept Obama’s proposed cuts when they write their appropriations bills.

But we will finally get some proposed cuts to federal programs from Obama, and not more nonsense about theoretical savings from “investing” in our children’s future with additional spending on Pell grants and prenatal counseling.

McConnell’s deal cleanly takes the debt-ceiling issue off the Republicans’ back and puts it on the president’s back. Either the Democrats tell us what they’ll cut or they’ll have to admit: “We will never cut anything. Everything Ann Coulter says about us is true!”

McConnell’s “schooling” of Obama on the debt ceiling is an epic one and ranks with Chamberlain’s schooling of Hitler at Munich and King Guy’s schooling of Saladin at the Horns of Hattin. Ann has clearly been spending far too much time orbiting around the New York-Washington axis as she has clearly failed to recognize how Americans who are paying attention to the issue, particularly Tea Party Republicans, are going to view the raising of the debt ceiling, not once, not twice, but three times in advance, with about the same degree of favor as neocons would view the US Air Force giving three SLBM-equipped nuclear submarines to Iran.

The idea that anything negative is going to be blamed on the president by his de facto press agency is completely absurd. If recent articles are any indication, they’ll probably just keep blaming Bush and the people who get their news from the news will believe it. It is astonishing that a media star such as Coulter still doesn’t understand that it doesn’t matter what actually happens, because the narrative remains.

Coulter also demonstrates that she knows literally nothing about economics. A failure to raise the debt ceiling will not cause default but it will crash the economy. Spending cuts will also crash the economy. This is because the private economy has already crashed and all that is preventing this from being completely apparent to everyone is all the government spending, 43% of which is presently borrowed.

As I pointed out two years ago in RGD, this crash isn’t something that can be avoided. It was inevitable. It was eminently predictable and it was, in fact, predicted by numerous economic observers. Raising the debt ceiling will only make things worse by digging the hole yet deeper and allowing the extension of the extend-and-pretend strategy. But the strategy is not only logically absurd, we have 21 years of empirical evidence demonstrating that it hasn’t worked in Japan and are now approaching three years of showing that it hasn’t worked in Europe or the USA.

This is why the political considerations to which Coulter is appealing are not only incorrect – and they are incorrect as the public rejects a debt-ceiling increase by 58 to 36 percent, including 38 percent of Democrats – more importantly, they are irrelevant. The only responsible thing, the only relevant thing, that the House Republicans can do is to refuse to accept any deal that raises the debt ceiling for any reason. The economy will crash, this is certain, but the vital point is that until it does, absolutely none of the necessary restructuring can begin to take place.

The “read my lips” moment

It’s rather a neat trick. A Republican candidate caves on the debt limit while simultaneously telling Republicans they can’t cave:

We just can’t cave.

After months of posturing and failed leadership from President Obama and politicians of both parties, the debate on the debt limit is finally coming to a head.

I honestly believe we have reached a moment in history when the fate of our country is at a crossroads.

Down one road is an uncertain future marked by reckless spending that deepens the debt and deficits that are killing jobs and holding American prosperity hostage. The elites and experts tell us we have no choice but to accept the path of higher taxes and new borrowing. And naturally, they prophesize disaster if we don’t continue down the only path the rest of us know America can’t afford.

But this is the same argument we’ve heard before. Trillions of dollars in spending later and trillions more in the hole, it is time to change course and chart a new direction….

Raising the debt limit without fundamental reforms will tell the world our government has become so corrupted by spending that we are beyond redemption. Our allies will grow more anxious about what a diminished America means for their future. And our enemies will grow more emboldened.

The issue isn’t raising the debt limit “without fundamental reforms”. It is raising the debt limit, period. It doesn’t matter what excuses Republicans offer for it, if they vote to raise it, (as I expect they will), they will eminently merit the political crucifixion that awaits them. This is their “read my lips” moment and I fully expect them to follow the example of George Herbert Walker Bush.

But imagine the costs of drug legalization!

Somehow, I tend to doubt 40 people will be killed every day by hash brownie overdoses:

Battles between the vicious Zetas gang and other drug cartels killed more than 40 people in a 24-hour span, a government official said Saturday. At least 20 people were killed when gunmen opened fire in a bar late Friday in the northern city of Monterrey, where the gang is fighting its former ally, the Gulf Cartel, said federal security spokesman Alejandro Poire.

Eleven bodies shot with high-powered rifles were found earlier Friday, piled near a water well on the outskirts of Mexico City, where the gang is fighting the Knights Templar, Poire said. That is an offshoot of the La Familia gang that has terrorized its home state of Michoacan. He said another 10 people were found dead early Saturday in various parts of the northern city of Torreon, where the gang is fighting the Sinaloa cartel headed by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

“The violence is a product of this criminal rivalry … surrounding the intent to control illegal activities in a community, and not the only the earnings that come with it, but also with transporting drugs to the United States,” Poire said in a news conference.

It will be interesting to see if all the anti-drug conservatives will start to change their thinking once the Zetas and other drug cartels are shooting it out in Hispanic communities across America, or if they’ll stick with the “no matter how bad it gets, it would be even worse if drugs were legal” approach.

The inevitable drift left

On a scale of one to ten, how surprised are you that David Frum has had a sudden change of heart with regards to homogamy now that New York has legalized it? I’d say minus four. About the only thing less surprising will be Obama’s new position on the topic once he doesn’t have to run for office anymore.

I was a strong opponent of same-sex marriage. Fourteen years ago, Andrew Sullivan and I forcefully debated the issue at length online (at a time when online debate was a brand new thing). Yet I find myself strangely untroubled by New York state’s vote to authorize same-sex marriage — a vote that probably signals that most of “blue” states will follow within the next 10 years.

I don’t think I’m alone in my reaction either. Most conservatives have reacted with calm — if not outright approval — to New York’s dramatic decision.

Frum illustrates what today’s “conservative” opinion “leaders” do. They do their best to march in front of the mainstream media parade in an attempt to appear they’re leading it. What will be amusing is Frum’s desperate attempt to have another change of heart once he realizes that the buying off of a few Republican senators is not the political sea change that he is reading.

Since all politics ebb and flow over time, it can be amusing to watch how the pragmatists’ positions float along with them.

Preemptive surrender

The Senate Republicans wave the white flag:

There has to be another way, and there is. Republicans in the Senate are united in our concern about our nation’s fiscal future. Before we consider saddling our children with even more debt, we must enact significant spending cuts and enforceable caps on future spending. For the long term, to prevent both this Congress and its successors from hijacking the promise of American prosperity, we also need a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, like the one we and all 47 Senate Republicans have introduced.

Translation: we must surrender before we are defeated. The morbidly amusing thing is that Senator DeMint is outright telling Americans that Republicans fully intend to “saddle our children with even more debt”, but the good news is that first they are going to promise to spend less money 10 years from now. Again. And as a bonus, they will pass an amendment that will no doubt be as respected by future Congresses as the 2nd Amendment presently is.

No Republican who votes to raise the debt ceiling, for any reason, merits a vote in November.

The rats abandon ship

Turbo Timmy is looking to leave:

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner has signaled to White House officials that he’s considering leaving the administration after President Barack Obama reaches an agreement with Congress to raise the national debt limit, according to three people familiar with the matter.

It’s telling that he thinks it is safe to assume that the Republicans, for all their brave talk about not raising the debt limit, are going to cave, wouldn’t you say?