Category: Issues of the Day

But Black People Govern Like This … – Ta-Nehisi Coates

“[Tuesday’s] Census report shows that in 2010, the share of all Americans and the share of children living in poverty, the number and share of people living in ‘deep poverty,’ and the number without health insurance all reached their highest level in many years — in some cases, in several decades — while median household income fell significantly after adjusting for inflation. The data also show that many of these grim figures and the level of hardship would have been much worse if not for key federal programs such as unemployment insurance, the Earned Income Tax Credit, food stamps, and Medicaid.”

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

The Tea Party solution to these problems, of course, is to abolish the Census Bureau.

The HPV vaccine issue is ideal for Bachmann, who is the most intellectually irresponsible candidate in the Republican field. In the nineteen-nineties, when she was travelling around the state of Minnesota warning that new federal and state education standards would lead to totalitarianism, she often mentioned the tale of a little girl who was forced to clean toilets at a motel under the new laws—a story that produced audible gasps from her audiences. When Bachmann crusaded against same-sex marriage, she warned that children were the “prize” for the gay community. She is just getting started on HPV, and in front of much larger audiences than she ever had access to in her home state, she is already falsely linking the vaccine to mental disabilities.

News Desk: Ryan Lizza: The New Yorker

““If the medical community developed a vaccine for lung cancer, would the same critics oppose it, claiming it would encourage smoking?”

— Governor Rick Perry

“Did you know that a vote to fund FEMA failed in the Senate yesterday?”

War Room – Salon.com

Yes, it only received 53 votes to 33 against but, as you know, you need 60 votes to pass anything in the United States Senate.

I received mail on just three days this week, and that just six ads, nothing I wanted.

If the volume of mail has dwindled, and it has, and if the Postal Service is in financial trouble, and it is, why not cut back delivery to four or three or even two days a week?

Would anyone be upset if the mail only came every other day?

Late in the morning of the Tuesday that changed everything, Lt. Heather “Lucky” Penney was on a runway at Andrews Air Force Base and ready to fly. She had her hand on the throttle of an F-16 and she had her orders: Bring down United Airlines Flight 93. The day’s fourth hijacked airliner seemed to be hurtling toward Washington. Penney, one of the first two combat pilots in the air that morning, was told to stop it.

The one thing she didn’t have as she roared into the crystalline sky was live ammunition. Or missiles. Or anything at all to throw at a hostile aircraft.

Except her own plane. So that was the plan

Click to read F-16 pilot was ready to give her life on Sept. 11 from The Washington Post.

Governor Brown’s vetoes.

“Basically if the richest most awesomest country in the world can’t provide, for most people who try reasonably hard (and a safety net for those it doesn’t provide for), enough money to have a place to live, transportation, ability to raise a couple of kids and send them to college, have some nice things and the occasional vacation or night out, then we’re doing something wrong.”

Atrios

He doesn’t mean charity or handouts. He means a living wage.

Elsewhere, Kevin Drum has a insightful piece on Raising the Retirement Age.

Gov. Perry is running on his record of saving Texas from the recession, which is ironic when you think about it because he is also running against government.

But, in any case, here’s the real story.

From 2007-2010 Texas had a net loss of just 53,000 jobs. In a nation that lost 8 million jobs, Texas looks good.

Look a little closer and you will see however, that Texas lost 178,000 private jobs but gained 125,000 public jobs.

Of all the public jobs NATIONWIDE added during the four years, Texas added 47% of them.

And how did they add all those public funded jobs? They used federal Recovery Act (the stimulus money) to hire people.

Sounds like Keynes to me.

… are totally repudiating the debt ceiling deal. Stocks are dramatically down; government securities are dramatically up.

Do they not have televisions, radios, newspapers or the internet in Washington? Are they too busy talking to each other to see and hear what is happening in the country and around the world? Is their assigned agenda unmovable at any cost? Scaring the people so that Medicare and Social Security can be undermined seems to be all that matters.

It is as if they wanted another Great Depression. Investors are scared.

First posted two years ago today.

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this morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US department of energy. I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the municipal water utility. After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC regulated channels to see what the national weather service of the national oceanographic and atmospheric administration determined the weather was going to be like using satellites designed, built, and launched by the national aeronautics and space administration. I watched this while eating my breakfast of US department of agriculture inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the food and drug administration.

At the appropriate time as regulated by the US congress and kept accurate by the national institute of standards and technology and the US naval observatory, I get into my national highway traffic safety administration approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal departments of transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the environmental protection agency, using legal tender issed by the federal reserve bank. On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the US postal service and drop the kids off at the public school.

After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the department of labor and the occupational safety and health administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to ny house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and fire marshal’s inspection, and which has not been plundered of all it’s valuables thanks to the local police department.

I then log on to the internet which was developed by the defense advanced research projects administration and post on freerepublic.com and fox news forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can’t do anything right

My source, Discourse.net. He doesn’t know its origins.

As Fallows says, these cases of two 75-year-old pilots will prove interesting.

“No, S&P was flat-out wrong — no caveats. They are, to put it very bluntly, idiots, and they deserve every bit of opprobrium coming their way. They were embarrassingly wrong on the basic budget numbers, as everyone knows now, so they were forced to remove that section from their report, and change their rationale for the downgrade. (Always a sign that you’re dealing with hacks.)”

Economics of Contempt

He goes on, including this: “Naturally, before meeting with a rating agency, we would plan out our arguments — you want to make sure you’re making your strongest arguments, that everyone is on the same page about the deal’s positive attributes, etc. With S&P, it got to the point where we were constantly saying, ‘that’s a good point, but is S&P smart enough to understand that argument?'”

What Happened to Obama’s Passion?

This came to my attention this morning from several sources. Highly recommended.

America does have a long-run fiscal problem, driven by the combination of rising health costs, an aging population, and the unwillingness to raise taxes to pay for the programs we already have. If we don’t come to grips with that problem, bad things will happen. But what happens to the deficit in the medium term is almost irrelevant to the question of whether our long-run finances will get under control.

Yet S&P (and others) obsess about those medium-term numbers, without ever explaining why. Maybe they think there’s some critical level of debt — but they don’t know that. Maybe they think that fiscal austerity over the next decade will somehow guarantee good behavior further out — but that didn’t work in the 1990s. Or maybe they’re just pulling stuff out of regions I can’t mention in the Times.

Paul Krugman, who has been remarkably prescient for several years now, from a blog item, The Arithmetic of Near-term Deficits and Debt.

“Reminder: the main budgetary disagreement is over what the GOP considers ‘wasteful’ spending of about $16 million per year. The ongoing shutdown, which prevents the FAA from collecting airline taxes, is costing the Treasury more than $20 million per day.”

James Fallows – The Atlantic

An estimated 70,000 people are out of work (FAA, construction at airports, related services). Airport inspectors (you know, government workers) are working without pay or reimbursement for their travel expenses. Meanwhile Congress has gone on vacation for the month.

Chris Weigant suggests the President make a speech. An excerpt:

This is unacceptable. This is beyond dysfunctional. This is, in fact, an outrage. So I’m giving Congress a grace period of precisely two days, to get their butts back to Washington to fix this problem immediately. If I don’t have a bill on my desk by the end of this Friday, I will instruct my Attorney General to immediately put every member of Congress on the “no-fly” list. To be blunt, if they can’t find the time to fund the F.A.A. and prefer to take weeks off on vacation instead, then they will not be allowed to use the F.A.A.’s services in the meantime. Period.

Fallows adds:

This episode is such a flagrant illustration of “let them eat cake”-ism on the part of legislators — tens of thousands of families suddenly with no paychecks because of our pouting! hundreds of millions lost to the Treasury! but we don’t care! — and of deep dysfunction in our system, that perhaps it will have some turning-point effect. On the other hand, probably not.

Michael Lind has an interesting article on The Tea Party, the debt ceiling, and white Southern extremism.

Lind points out that 39 of the 62 members of the Congressional Tea Party Caucus are from southern states: Texas (12), Florida (7), Louisiana and Georgia (5 each) and South Carolina, Tennessee and Missouri (3 each). And Maryland, southern certainly outside Baltimore and the Washington suburbs has the only northeastern member. (Lind does not reveal the 39th southern member.)

In other words, Lind maintains, the Confederate States of America are well represented. The Tea Party, he claims, is a much more Southern-based entity than generally recognized, in part because of the prominence of midwesterner Michele Bachmann. Lind suggests it be called the Fort Sumter movement rather than the Tea Party.

The goal, the methods and the passion of the Tea Party in the House are all characteristic of the radical Southern right.

From the earliest years of the American republic, white Southern conservatives when they have lost elections and found themselves in the political minority have sought to extort concession from national majorities by paralyzing or threatening to destroy the United States.

This is from three years ago today when I sold the revolver from my dad’s estate. I repost it for the punchline, timely in light of my recent commentary.

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I sold the revolver without incident — for a good price too, I think.

The shop was interesting — and very busy before 11 in the morning. I am not anti-gun by the way. I’d kind of like to own some authentic 19th century firearms if I knew what I was doing — as an investment. When I was curator of Richard Nixon’s musuem items (after he left office), I was impressed by the nice collection of firearms the firearm manufacturers had given him. I suspect most politicians — and at least five supreme court justices — have similar collections.

Two guys working in the gun shop wanted to talk about the election; how it worried them. I assured them not to worry, that the black liberal guy was sure to win.

The federal government is projected to spend $46 trillion during the next 10 years; the proposed cuts of $2.4 trillion are just are a bit more than 5 percent.

5%. Why the fuss?

Because most of the 5% is going to come from that 15% of the budget that goes for non-defense “discretionary” spending. Do the math. That means that one-third of non-defense discretionary spending is on the block.

One third.

Of national parks, environmental regulation, medical research, space exploration (oh, wait we’ve already stopped doing that), bridges, highways, dams, agricultural research, labor mediation, pharmaceuticals review and approval, education, Indian affairs, forest firefighting, disaster relief, weather forecasting and warning, diplomacy. You know, the quality of life stuff.

Sovereign governments such as the United States can print new money. However, there’s a statutory limit to the amount of paper currency that can be in circulation at any one time.

Ironically, there’s no similar limit on the amount of coinage. A little-known statute gives the secretary of the Treasury the authority to issue platinum coins in any denomination. So some commentators have suggested that the Treasury create two $1 trillion coins, deposit them in its account in the Federal Reserve and write checks on the proceeds.

An excerpt from “3 ways Obama could bypass Congress” by Jack M. Balkin, Knight Professor of Constitutional Law at Yale Law School