Tag: ek Politics

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Obama to supporters: I understand your frustration

By JULIE PACE, Associated Press

Thu Apr 21, 6:27 am ET

SAN FRANCISCO – Easing into his 2012 campaign, President Barack Obama is telling his supporters he understands their frustration over the compromises he’s made with Republicans, while preparing them for more to come.

It’s a timely warning given the upcoming vote on raising the debt ceiling and the ongoing debate over long-term deficit reduction, both issues Obama says can only be solved if Republicans and Democrats work together. But further compromises could prove a tough pill to swallow for many of Obama’s liberal backers, who have grown tired of watching the president cede ground to the GOP on spending cuts and tax breaks for the wealthy.

…

Obama senior adviser David Plouffe offered a more sobering political forecast to the hundreds of young supporters gathered for the nighttime rally.

“This is going to be a close campaign,” Plouffe said. “The one thing we better assume is that it’s going to be closer than the last one.”

No shit Sherlock.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

So much goes over Beltway Access Bloggers heads that it’s genuinely hard to determine if they are morons or liars (with moron being the more charitable choice).

I find that a fitting introduction to Greg Sargent’s current piece.

New Washington Post/ABC News polling released this morning is unequivocal: There is strong across the board support for Obama’s policy preferences on the deficit.

And yet, in what appears to be an emerging pattern, that support is not matched by general approval of Obama’s handling of fiscal matters.

The poll finds that 72 percent overall, and 68 percent of independents, support hiking taxes on those over $250,000. Even 54 percent of Republicans support this.

Meanwhile, 65 percent say Medicare should remain as it is today and should not be transformed into a voucher program. Only 34 percent favor changing the program.

A solid majority, 59 percent, also supports a mix of tax hikes and spending cuts to reduce the deficit – the Dem approach – versus only 36 percent who support only cuts.

But only 39 percent approve of Obama’s handling of the deficit, versus 58 percent who disapprove. That’s better, but only marginally so, than the GOP’s 33-64 spread on the same question. And more say the GOP is taking a stronger leadership role than Obama, 45-40. This matches yesterday’s McClatchy poll, which found the same disconnect.

Either voters don’t know what Obama’s proposals are; or they do, but the GOP’s success in creating generalized anxiety about Dem overspending continues to dominate; or perhaps all views of Obama are colored by unease about the economy. Whatever the cause, closing this disconnect – translating support for Obama’s policies into confidence in his economic and fiscal leadership – is perhaps Obama’s central political challenge.

Zing!  Obama’s central political challenge is that people know he’s a liar.  He should stop lying.

Update: (h/t Think Progress)

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Full Lyrics

(h/t emptywheel)

(Massive h/t TheMomCat)

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

The DCCC’s Bad Ad Team

By: David Dayen

Tuesday April 19, 2011 12:59 pm

Why would you play this funny? Why give the message that old people are worthy of derision, essentially because they’re old? This looks like a really bad Super Bowl spot when the issue discussed is deadly serious. Republicans are claiming that the ad represents “scare tactics” but no, I could show you scare tactics. A closeup of a senior’s hand as she struggles in the last throes of life and then pulling out to reveal she’s laying on the middle of the sidewalk as white men in suits ignore her, that’s scare tactics. This looks like a GoDaddy ad.

Furthermore, it gets progressively worse. The lemonade stand shot is fine, but then you have the lawnmower riding played for laughs, with the jerk owner of the lawn telling the old man that he missed a spot. Still generally on point, but discordant; why is the focus on basically getting amusement out of the old man’s condition with the walker? And then there’s the strange third segment. When the bachelorettes come to the door, I have no idea what’s going on. The old guy is dressed like a firefighter, and given that the women are all screaming, it’s just as plausible at first glance that he’s moonlighting as a firefighter. Indeed that’s a concern in a world without Medicare; the elderly will extend their working days to keep a hold on their employer-provided health insurance. Only a few seconds later do you figure out that he’s a stripper, and are again told to laugh at the old man’s expense.

…

Even if this ad were funny, which it isn’t, the subject of the comedy is completely misplaced. Would an old person watching this and seeing people their age held up for ridicule have a better opinion of Democrats?

But, you might say, they got the facts out. It says right there that Republicans voted to end Medicare. Who cares? The narrative of the story is generally a light one, where old people have to work demeaning jobs and we derive pleasure from that spectacle.

Obviously, one ad isn’t going to change people’s views on the subject; it isn’t going to change much of anything. But it strikes me as a missed opportunity to clarify the record. An ad that said “Republicans voted to end Medicare” over and over for 30 seconds would do the job better and you wouldn’t have to hire a septuagenarian who’s comfortable in a feather boa. In fact, I know it does, because the DNC ran that ad back in 2009.

So in addition to having contributions go to save the most conservative Blue Dogs in the most conservative districts in their re-election efforts, DCCC donors just paid for this, where the party takes a winning issue and inexplicably lampoons it.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Duh.

Secret memos expose link between oil firms and invasion of Iraq

By Paul Bignell, The Independent

Tuesday, 19 April 2011

The minutes of a series of meetings between ministers and senior oil executives are at odds with the public denials of self-interest from oil companies and Western governments at the time.

The documents were not offered as evidence in the ongoing Chilcot Inquiry into the UK’s involvement in the Iraq war. In March 2003, just before Britain went to war, Shell denounced reports that it had held talks with Downing Street about Iraqi oil as “highly inaccurate”. BP denied that it had any “strategic interest” in Iraq, while Tony Blair described “the oil conspiracy theory” as “the most absurd”.

…

The papers show that Lady Symons agreed to lobby the Bush administration on BP’s behalf because the oil giant feared it was being “locked out” of deals that Washington was quietly striking with US, French and Russian governments and their energy firms.

Minutes of a meeting with BP, Shell and BG (formerly British Gas) on 31 October 2002 read: “Baroness Symons agreed that it would be difficult to justify British companies losing out in Iraq in that way if the UK had itself been a conspicuous supporter of the US government throughout the crisis.”

The minister then promised to “report back to the companies before Christmas” on her lobbying efforts.

The Foreign Office invited BP in on 6 November 2002 to talk about opportunities in Iraq “post regime change”. Its minutes state: “Iraq is the big oil prospect. BP is desperate to get in there and anxious that political deals should not deny them the opportunity.”

War Crimes–

To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

Accessory After The Fact–

An accessory after the fact is often not considered an accomplice but is treated as a separate offender. Such an offender is one who harbours, protects, or assists a person who has already committed an offense or is charged with committing an offense. – Encyclopedia Brittanica

(h/t emptywheel)

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

President Obama’s Real Proposal (And Why It’s Risky)

Robert Reich

Thursday, April 14, 2011

The betting in the White House is that by 2014 the recovery will be in full force, and the economy will have grown so much that the ratio of deficit to the GDP will be in the range of 3 to 5 percent anyway. That means any across-the-board cuts wouldn’t have to be very deep.

…

Yet what are the chances of a booming recovery? The economy is now growing at an annualized rate of only 1.5 percent. That’s pitiful. It’s not nearly enough to bring down the rate of unemployment, or remove the danger of a double dip. Real wages continue to drop. Housing prices continue to drop. Food and gas prices are rising. Consumer confidence is still in the basement.

…

The underlying problem isn’t the budget deficit. It’s that so much income and wealth are going to the top that most Americans don’t have the purchasing power to sustain a strong recovery.

Until steps are taken to alter this fundamental imbalance – for example, exempting the first $20K of income from payroll taxes while lifting the cap on income subject to payroll taxes, raising income and capital gains taxes on millionaires and using the revenues to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit up to incomes of $50,000, strengthening labor unions, and so on – a strong recovery may not be possible.

or

How’s that Austerity thing working out for you again?

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Pain of British Fiscal Cuts Could Inform U.S. Debate

By LANDON THOMAS Jr., The New York Times

Published: April 14, 2011

(I)n Britain, one year into its own controversial austerity program to plug a gaping fiscal hole, the future is now. And for the moment, the early returns are less than promising.

Retail sales plunged 3.5 percent in March, the sharpest monthly downturn in Britain in 15 years. And a new report by the Center for Economic and Business Research, an independent research group based here, forecasts that real household income will fall by 2 percent this year. That would make Britain’s income squeeze the worst for two consecutive years since the 1930s.

All of which has challenged the view of Britain’s top economic official, George Osborne, that during a time of high deficits and economic weakness, the best approach is to aggressively attack the deficit first, through rapid-fire cuts aimed at the heart of Britain’s welfare state.

…

(T)he big worry now is not tax rates. Instead, the fear is that Mr. Osborne’s emphasis on cuts in social spending – which aim to achieve an approximate budget surplus by 2015 and are likely to result in the loss of more than 300,000 government jobs – might tip the economy back into recession.

Already the government has had to slash its growth estimate to 1.7 percent, from 2.4 percent, for this year, as consumer incomes are under pressure from high inflation, weak wage growth and stagnant economic activity.

“My view is that we are in serious danger of a double-dip recession,” said Richard Portes, an economist at the London Business School. “This is going to be a cautionary tale.”

(note: dday mines some of the same territory.)

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Tepco Seeks to Start Reactor Idled in 2007 as Crews Battle Fukushima Leaks

By Tsuyoshi Inajima, Yuji Okada and Michio Nakayama, Bloomberg News

Apr 13, 2011 10:53 PM ET

Tokyo Electric Power Co. plans to seek government approval to start a nuclear reactor shut after a 2007 earthquake to help ease power shortages, while the utility battles radiation leaks from its Fukushima Dai-Ichi station.

…

“This ‘operations first, safety second’ approach and the failure to learn the lessons from the 2007 quake was the cause of the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear disaster,” said Philip White, international liaison officer at the Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center in Tokyo. “How many more disasters will it take?”

…

Three of seven reactors at the Kashiwazaki Kariwa station are closed while Tepco strengthens structures to improve their resistance to earthquakes. Work can continue at two units, while Unit 3 is restarted, Shimizu said yesterday.

Tepco Said to Plan for Three Months of Cooling at Fukushima

By Jason Clenfield, Bloomberg News

Apr 14, 2011 1:29 AM ET

Tokyo Electric Power Co. estimates the fight to stabilize its crippled Fukushima reactors will last through June, leaving the plant vulnerable to further earthquakes and radiation leaks, according to a person briefed by the utility on its recovery plan.

…

The primary danger at the plant is reactor No. 1, where temperatures and pressure are still high, the person said. Flooding the space between the pressure vessel and a surrounding containment with water would bring temperatures down in days rather than months, the person said.

…

While Tokyo Electric’s plan for ending the crisis says getting exposed fuel rods covered with water again is one measure of stabilization, according to the person briefed on the document, the utility’s data shows pumping efforts have failed to raise the water level more than 20 centimeters in the 35 days since the disaster started.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

The Truth About the Confederacy

Tony Wikrent, Corrente

Mon, 04/11/2011 – 10:03pm

The 150th anniversary of the Fort Sumter bombardment that formally began the Civil War is tomorrow, and wrong-wingers throughout the South and the rest of America are fixing a big celebration. There’s going to be a seemingly infinite issuance of blogs, articles, radio interviews, and television appearances that will proffer a prettified picture of a brave and stolid South, courageously defending the “true conservative Constitutional” principles of states rights, individual responsibility, and limited government. If you’re one of the many Americans who don’t really know that much about the Civil War, you have probably been perplexed by the number of wrong-wing Republican politicians who have made open statements of admiration the past year or two for the Confederate ideas of states rights and secession. This very lengthy diary is designed to fully inform you what the Confederacy was really like – a society suffering acutely from class differences; a society ruled by a slave holding oligarchy that was sickeningly arrogant and grasping, as well as racist. A number of myths about have been developed about the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy for over a century, and those myths and lies are probably going to be repeated so often the coming days and weeks that you’re going to want to puke. My intent for this diary is to help shatter those myths and lies.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Ludicrous and Cruel

By PAUL KRUGMAN, The New York Times

Published: April 7, 2011

(T)he Ryan proposal trumpets the results of an economic projection from the Heritage Foundation, which claims that the plan’s tax cuts would set off a gigantic boom. Indeed, the foundation initially predicted that the G.O.P. plan would bring the unemployment rate down to 2.8 percent – a number we haven’t achieved since the Korean War. After widespread jeering, the unemployment projection vanished from the Heritage Foundation’s Web site, but voodoo still permeates the rest of the analysis.

…

A more sober assessment from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office tells a different story. It finds that a large part of the supposed savings from spending cuts would go, not to reduce the deficit, but to pay for tax cuts. In fact, the budget office finds that over the next decade the plan would lead to bigger deficits and more debt than current law.

…

According to the budget office, which analyzed the plan using assumptions dictated by House Republicans, the proposal calls for spending on items other than Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid – but including defense – to fall from 12 percent of G.D.P. last year to 6 percent of G.D.P. in 2022, and just 3.5 percent of G.D.P. in the long run.

That last number is less than we currently spend on defense alone; it’s not much bigger than federal spending when Calvin Coolidge was president, and the United States, among other things, had only a tiny military establishment. How could such a drastic shrinking of government take place without crippling essential public functions? The plan doesn’t say.

…

(P)rivatizing Medicare does nothing, in itself, to limit health-care costs. In fact, it almost surely raises them by adding a layer of middlemen. Yet the House plan assumes that we can cut health-care spending as a percentage of G.D.P. despite an aging population and rising health care costs.

The only way that can happen is if those vouchers are worth much less than the cost of health insurance. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that by 2030 the value of a voucher would cover only a third of the cost of a private insurance policy equivalent to Medicare as we know it.

…

In the past, Mr. Ryan has talked a good game about taking care of those in need. But as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, of the $4 trillion in spending cuts he proposes over the next decade, two-thirds involve cutting programs that mainly serve low-income Americans.

…

The G.O.P. budget plan isn’t a good-faith effort to put America’s fiscal house in order; it’s voodoo economics, with an extra dose of fantasy, and a large helping of mean-spiritedness.

A little bit more-

Ryan and Taxes

By PAUL KRUGMAN, The New York Times

April 8, 2011, 9:48 am

The Ryan plan calls for cutting the top marginal rate to 25 percent – lower than it has been at any time in the past 80 years. That in itself should tell you that this is a deeply unserious proposal: anyone who tells you that we have to face hard truths, that everyone must sacrifice, and by the way, rich people will pay lower taxes than they have at any time since the 1930s, is just engaged in a power grab.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

It’s not like Paul Krugman has been silent about Paul Ryan’s glitter and unicorns magical thinking budget, but it’s been spread across several blog posts and kind of hard to integrate.

Fortunately Scarecrow over at Firedog Lake has done the heavy lifting for me-

Krugman Exposes GOP Ryan’s Unicorn Budget, Catches Heritage Burying Number

By: Scarecrow, Wednesday April 6, 2011 8:26 pm

Paul Krugman spent Wednesday combing through the details of Tea-GOP genius Paul Ryan’s budget and in a series of blog posts utterly destroyed the Ryan budget’s phony math, implausible assumptions and unicorn forecasts. Kudos to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow for picking this up.

Krugman once called Ryan a “flim flam” man, a virtual con artist, and yesterday, he proved it. Let us count the ways.

Here’s the Maddow clip-

Scarecrow summarizes 8 recent posts by Krugman who is back at it again today-

• Even More Ryan Ridiculousness
  
  Paul Krugman, The New York Times
  
  April 7, 2011, 11:13 am

Pointing out that this is a return to Coolidge era spending.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the racist secessionist traitors of the Republican Party are unhappy with the results of The War of Rebellion and wish to revisit it.