John Boehner's spokesman is a guy named Michael Steel?

TenuredVulture wrote:Everybody, quick--go read Michael Kammen's People of Paradox. Available at your local university library, probably. Or somewhere on my shelf.

couldn't you just hold the book up to your webcam & flip the pages once every couple minutes?

Werthless wrote:John Boehner's spokesman is a guy named Michael Steel?

Bronze would seem more like Boehner's metal.... and that name confusion would probably be more of an issue if Boehner actually strategized regularly with the party leader guy.

I like that Harold Ford's been running for a week or whatever, and he's been talking about it for longer than that, and I just remembered he was black.

Edit: W/r/t his Dem primary electoral math, which with this realization shifted from impossible to very improbable. Although the fact that Burris will be departing the Senate, and we'll likely be back to 0 black senators unless Meek wins in FL is also worth noting.

jerseyhoya wrote:I like that Harold Ford's been running for a week or whatever, and he's been talking about it for longer than that, and I just remembered he was black.

Edit: W/r/t his Dem primary electoral math, which with this realization shifted from impossible to very improbable. Although the fact that Burris will be departing the Senate, and we'll likely be back to 0 black senators unless Meek wins in FL is also worth noting.

I had a moment like that last night while watching the first couple minutes of "Inside City Hall," our local nightly politics show on NY1. (Btw, the fact that this show even exists is almost enough reason for you to contemplate a one-day move to NYC.) They showed Paterson and I yelled "fuck you!" at the screen; they showed Ford and I did so again; then I realized they were both black, and that even so I felt no compunction whatsoever at hoping they fail. Yet another upside to Obama's presidency!

If Ford somehow beats Gillibrand and the Republicans nominate someone sane, I'll very happily give him/her a hearing. And if s/he sucks, I'll probably go Marijuana Liberation Party, as I did whenever Hillary was last up.

jerseyhoya wrote:Obama to propose three year freeze in discretionary spending. It will be interesting to see if he can make something like this hold up. Seems like they're in panic mode at the White House. They'd do well to take a deep breath and realize that the President is still relatively popular, and not give up your whole agenda over one special election, but whatever, they didn't ask me.

Discretionary spending is nothing though. It is purely a symbolic gesture to appease those who either don't know or don't want to admit that discretionary spending is not the problem. The Economist has an honest and sobering write-up on what our budget problems really are on this on its Democracy in America blog:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica

In short, 1. the Bush tax cuts meant we lost out on running what would have been surpluses in the mid-2000s. 2. the recession is killing revenues even further 3. the cost of the stimulus and the bailouts, which we can't do anything about now 4. we spend too much on defense and foreign wars 5. if nothing is done about the cost of health care, the government's tab for Medicare and Medicaid will bankrupt us all.

So the freeze on discretionary spending is just pissing in the wind and telling people its raining (so to speak...)

If they save $250 billion, it might not fix all of America's fiscal problems, but it's $250 billion less added onto the debt. Just because the move doesn't fix everything, or take on the biggest problem, doesn't mean it isn't worth doing.

The freeze (which is already impacting policy thinking at the local level--it came up in both meetings I was in this morning as a reason to be more modest and thrifty in thinking about programs) is obviously a symbolic gesture; everybody knows that it will take entitlements and defense spending reform to get us back toward balance. If it helps create political space to take on those tougher fights, I'm reluctantly okay with it.

Most liberals won't be, though, and given long-term spending trends in "discretionary" programs, it's hard to blame them. In workforce development, the area I know best, today we spend something like 11 percent in real dollars of what we spent in the mid-'70s, and at their best those programs have fantastic ROI. So it's frustrating.

The bigger problem is that both parties are so irresponsible around the notion of reductions to entitlements and defense that, short of something like a bipartisan commission that makes a body of recommendations subject to an up or down vote, I can't imagine how it gets done. That the Republicans have demagogued proposed Medicare "cuts" in the current health care debate was the last straw; it showed a willingness, really an eagerness, to toss away a desired policy outcome in hopes of gaining political advantage. (Admittedly, this was partial payback for the Dems doing the same during the Gingrich speakership--but the Democrats are "supposed to" oppose Medicare cuts.)

Congress can't restrain itself no matter which party controls it. Which is both why the proposed freeze probably will fail anyway, and why the much bigger problems The Brig notes are pretty much intractable.

jerseyhoya wrote:If they save $250 billion, it might not fix all of America's fiscal problems, but it's $250 billion less added onto the debt. Just because the move doesn't fix everything, or take on the biggest problem, doesn't mean it isn't worth doing.

I'd say any small step it makes towards addressing the problem is undermined by how it distracts the debate from where the problem really is. And at the same time, any attempt to resolve our longterm health care costs crisis is going to require investment and setup costs.

I know it doesn't need to be said, but the longer our politicians wait to be honest with us about what the situation really is, the more difficult and painful the solution will be to bring about.

I can't recall a roll call vote with a more random assortment of Yeas and Nays than the one on the deficit commission today.

dajafi wrote:And if s/he sucks, I'll probably go Marijuana Liberation Party.

whether good pot or bad politicians - reject quantity limits!!

jerseyhoya wrote:I can't recall a roll call vote with a more random assortment of Yeas and Nays than the one on the deficit commission today.

I'll have to check this out. Weirder than the pro/con on Bernanke?

The Senate on Tuesday, as expected, rejected legislation to create a bipartisan commission to devise a debt-reduction plan that Congress would have to vote on. While the vote was 53 to 46, 60 votes were required. Supporters argued that Congress has proved it will not take the politically painful action necessary. Many Republicans objected that a commission would lead to tax increases and some Democrats opposed the prospect of cuts in costly Medicare and Medicaid programs.

link

Guess what, assholes: you're going to need both tax increases and entitlement cuts.

These people are disgusting.

Barry Ritholtz is thinking Geithner might be the sacrificial lamb they offer up in place of Bernanke now that the AIG details are starting to break... seems like just a hunch, but there could be something to it:

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/01/ge ... n-walking/

I am nervous about losing Bernanke. I think Geithner's exit would be a well-earned one however.

TheBrig wrote:I am nervous about losing Bernanke. I think Geithner's exit would be a well-earned one however.

I agree on both counts. I know one concern about Bernanke is that the markets will pitch a fit if he goes; not sure if that's also true of Tiny Tim, however.

dajafi wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:I can't recall a roll call vote with a more random assortment of Yeas and Nays than the one on the deficit commission today.

I'll have to check this out. Weirder than the pro/con on Bernanke?

Dems voted for it 37-23; GOP voted against it 16-23, so I guess there's a sizable difference there, but within the parties I have no idea how anyone made up their minds.

Some of the old guard was for it (Leahy, Kerry, Levin; Lugar, Bond), some was against it (Byrd, Specter, Inoyue; Hatch, Roberts). Some fiscal conservatives were for it (Gregg, Graham); some were against it (McCain, Coburn, Demint). Some good government Dems were for it (Feingold, Wyden); some were against it (Harkin, Whitehouse). Some tools were for it (Bayh, Ben Nelson, Lincoln; Voinovich); some were against it (Baucus; Cochran, Shelby)

Any time you can split up Graham and McCain, Collins and Snowe, the Udall cousins and my two senators from New Jersey, you've got yourself a weird roll call vote.

Good take. (I love the "tool caucus" split.)

My guess is that the Republican Nos are more concerned with No Tax Hike Ever than long-term budget stability, as are the Dems with No Entitlement Cuts Ever. Again, pretty shameful shit, and disappointing from the likes of Coburn (whom I always took to be sincere in his professions of fiscal rectitude) and Whitehouse (my favorite Dem Senator of recent vintage and, as you say, a good-gov guy).

I would guess the nos of whatever ideological predilection are afraid of admitting that actually trying to reduce the deficit will be painful. A couple of Rs may be embarrassed when they were defending Bush's deficit increases.

jerseyhoya wrote:

dajafi wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:I can't recall a roll call vote with a more random assortment of Yeas and Nays than the one on the deficit commission today.

I'll have to check this out. Weirder than the pro/con on Bernanke?

Dems voted for it 37-23; GOP voted against it 16-23, so I guess there's a sizable difference there, but within the parties I have no idea how anyone made up their minds.

Some of the old guard was for it (Leahy, Kerry, Levin; Lugar, Bond), some was against it (Byrd, Specter, Inoyue; Hatch, Roberts). Some fiscal conservatives were for it (Gregg, Graham); some were against it (McCain, Coburn, Demint). Some good government Dems were for it (Feingold, Wyden); some were against it (Harkin, Whitehouse). Some tools were for it (Bayh, Ben Nelson, Lincoln; Voinovich); some were against it (Baucus; Cochran, Shelby)

Any time you can split up Graham and McCain, Collins and Snowe, the Udall cousins and my two senators from New Jersey, you've got yourself a weird roll call vote.

I did find that particularly interesting.

If given a vote I probably would have voted "No", not because I don't like the idea but because all the political wrangling would have only lead to nothing actually being accomplished. Reminds me of that idea at the top of Obama's agenda; what was that.....?

Klein draws a political conclusionfrom the freeze debate:

The White House can fairly say that they're trying to use a scalpel rather than a hatchet. Their budget doesn't freeze all programs (hatchet!), it freezes the overall numbers, and within that context, cuts some programs and increases others (scalpel!). The Obama administration can also say the budget deficit was larger than expected, and when the facts change, so too do their policies.

But you can't look at this as anything less than a tremendous defeat for the Obama administration. It's not the policy itself. The freeze locks in a post-stimulus, and potentially post-jobs-bill, level of spending. It's not terribly onerous. But it's also the administration's white flag on the argument that the deficit must be understood as a health-care reform problem rather than a taxes and spending problem. This was their most audacious effort to change the way Americans think, and it didn't work. For all the effort Democrats put into building a health-care bill that cuts the deficit, a full 60 percent of Americans think (pdf) the legislation increases the deficit. Only 15 percent think it's a deficit reducer.

It's also evidence of the White House's failure to win the argument over the stimulus. The administration is smart enough to refuse specifically tying the freeze to the recession. But the freeze is entirely a function of voter concerns over the recession. And the fact that those voters think the right response is to cut government spending is evidence that the administration has not convinced them of the basic case for the stimulus, or persuasively explained the basic nature of the recession.

What we have here is a failure to communicate.

In other words, good policies (or at least policies they believed to be good) give way to bad politics.

As if that isn't depressing enough, here's Greenwald, echoing my first thought upon hearing the freeze announcement:

[A]ll "security-related programs" are also exempted from the freeze, which means it does not apply to military spending, the intelligence budget, the Surveillance State, or foreign military aid. As always, the notion of decreasing the deficit and national debt through reductions in military spending is one of the most absolute Washington taboos.
...
Even as the U.S. sunk under increasingly crippling levels of debt over the last decade, defense spending rose steadily, sometimes precipitously. That explosion occurred even as overall military spending in the rest of the world decreased, thus expanding the already-vast gap between our expenditures and the world's. As one "defense" spending watchdog group put it: "The US military budget was almost 29 times as large as the combined spending of the six 'rogue' states (Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria) who spent $14.65 billion."

He concludes with a clip about a recent meeting SecDef Gates had with several of the biggest defense contractors, pledging to work with them to ensure steady annual Pentagon budget increases in the years to come. Maybe there's some alien invasion they know about that we don't, or the whole "Warsaw Pact dissolves" thing was actually a fiendishly clever trick. There isn't much other possible justification to maintain our ginormous military.