Month: February 2009

Blogging The Origin: First Performance

by tristero

I’m a little under the weather so I’ll let this one be short. It’s just a nasty head cold, nothing serious, but I have nearly zero strength to do much more than listen to Parthenia on my computer and zone out in my hotel room.

The first performance of The Origin went extremely well. Eric Johnson’s performance of his solo “Difficulties On Theory” hit the perfect blend of humor and passion and mezzo Jacqueline Horner’s performance of one of the central movements, A Great Tree, was absolutely spectacular. I had rewritten her part for that piece that morning and she performed it as if she had been practicing it for months! KITKA, the female Balkan vocal group which represents the character of Charles Darwin were simply unbelievable. It will be a long time before I can get the incredible animal sounds they came up with for “The Voyage of the Beagle.” Bill Morrison’s films looked great and were loved by all (especially me), Julie Pretzat conducted brilliantly and the orchestra and chorus shone. We got a packed house and a standing ovation. Thanks to all for all the hard work.

There’s another performance tonight so it’s back to the sickbed for me until then. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

The Lowdown

by dday

(I am well aware that this post assumes a functioning Congress. Indulge me. Throwing up your hands and saying Ben Nelson is President is fun, and I like doing it too, but if we can improve this thing, here’s what can be done.)

OK, with a day to sit back and figure things out, here’s what’s going on.

The Senate is going to pass their version of the bill by noon on Tuesday at the latest, depending on how much Republicans want to obstruct. There will be a cloture vote on Monday at 5:30ET. Here’s a list of what the Axis of Nelson-Collins cut out of the bill to make room for more tax cuts.

$40 billion State Fiscal Stabilization
$16 billion School Construction
$1.25 billion project based rental
$2.25 Neighborhood Stabilization (Eliminate)
$1.2 billion in Retrofiting Project 8 Housing
$7.5 billion of State Incentive Grants
$3.5 billion Higher Ed Construction (Eliminated)
$ 100 million FSA modernization
$50 million CSERES Research
$65 million Watershed Rehab
$30 million SD Salaries
$100 million Distance Learning
$98 million School Nutrition
$50 million aquaculture
$2 billion broadband
$1 billion Head Start/Early Start
$5.8 billion Health Prevention Activity.
$2 billion HIT Grants
$1 billion Energy Loan Guarantees
$4.5 billion GSA
$3.5 billion Federal Bldgs Greening

The $40 billion for state aid is astounding. You’re not going to see an economic recovery if the states are having to cut budgets at the same time the feds expand them. They’ll cancel each other out.

What you don’t see in there are the three big tax cuts that the Senate put in this bill that has crowded out this spending, not for reasons of effectiveness, but purely because squishy moderates couldn’t live with a $900 billion dollar bill. They are:

1) $70 billion dollars for a patch so that the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) doesn’t affect high-middle-income earners making under $1 million dollars a year. This is passed annually because Congress is too cowardly to rewrite the tax code. But it doesn’t belong in a stimulus bill, as no less than House Minority Whip JON KYL just said in a floor speech. People making $400,000 a year aren’t likely to spend money they get to keep as a result of fixing the AMT.

2) At least $35 billion dollars for a $15,000 home buyer’s tax credit, which will only go to people who have enough money to buy a house. This is a craven attempt to reinflate the housing bubble before prices have settled, and because there’s so much inventory on the market it will not spur hardly any new home construction.

3) Around $11 billion for a tax credit for car buyers, which will only go to people who have enough money to buy a new car. This is not tied to greening the US fleet and will be implemented before fuel economy standards have changed over, so it doesn’t even reward fuel efficiency or reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

These are tax breaks for suburbanites, which in all likelihood won’t get spent at anywhere near the rates that they would in the hands of the poor or middle class. And they won’t create jobs, either.

Arlen Specter, one of the moderate squishes, said this is the best they can do. The above tax cuts are most certainly not. In particular, the House is piqued about the AMT patch in the bill.

House moderates oppose including the AMT provision in the stimulus package, arguing that the issue should be addressed in the regular budget process so that its cost can be offset by spending cuts or tax increases. But until yesterday, House leaders appeared willing to accept the provision, which was added at the urging of Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), the senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee.

With AMT in and some of House Democrats’ top spending priorities out, the package could become much more difficult for many House members to swallow, Democratic aides said. House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) said House Democrats will push hard to restore the Senate’s deletions. That means, lawmakers said, that the overall cost would grow to around $900 billion to accommodate the AMT fix.

This is the next step. The bill will go to a House-Senate conference. According to Kagro X in a must-read post, the Senate wants the House to swallow this bill whole, claiming that they cannot pass the bill if anything is deleted.

Assuming passage on Tuesday, the House will then have the option to accept the Senate package as is, to make still more amendments and send it back to the Senate, or to agree to the Senate’s request for a formal conference to resolve their differences. It is the Senate’s announced intention (also included in the unanimous consent agreements from last night) to insist on its version of the bill in conference. If the House acts immediately either to pass the bill or to go to conference, they would have an opportunity to do so Tuesday afternoon. The self-imposed deadline for clearing the bill for the White House falls prior to the scheduled adjournment for the President’s Day recess at the end of next week. That doesn’t leave a lot of time, and increases the pressure on the House and the likelihood that they’ll be forced either to accept the Senate bill, or make only minor changes.

You’re going to see a lot of House-Senate wrangling. The Senate could adjourn prematurely and stick the House with the bill. They’ll create a sense of urgency through an artificial deadline. And they’ll try to ram this flawed bill down the House’s throat.

The question is whether or not the Senate moderates would be willing to sink the economy if the House makes changes to the bill in conference that are more than cosmetic. Obviously the rump faction of the Senate isn’t going to alter their stance, you can’t compromise with crazy. But the Snowe-Collins-Specter-Nelson faction kind of knows that something has to be done. The President is talking up job creation and will be hitting the road this week to increase the pressure. If you want more jobs, you have to eliminate the AMT patch, which can be reconciled through a regular process with offsets, and add back the spending to the states, school construction, and more, which will probably add a million more jobs. Otherwise, you’re going to see cops, firefighters, nurses and teachers out on the street (John Kerry is explaining this very well on the Senate floor).

Will the House force the moderates in the Senate to eat a shit sandwich? Will the moderates do it, or will they vote against the bill and sink the economy? There can be no amendments to a conference report, but the bill will need a 3/5 vote. Again, Kagro X:

Just as the bill was subject to a budget point of order in the Senate, so will the conference report be. So the Senate will need 60 votes, filibuster or no, to pass any conference report. That, too, will increase pressure on the House to defer to the Senate position. Senate conferees will no doubt insist that nothing but their Perfect and All-Wise version of the bill could ever muster the necessary 60 votes, and House conferees will have to measure any changes they propose against the likelihood that the Senate’s claims are true.

This is a big game of chicken, but if the President and House Democrats can generate enough grassroots support, they may have the cover to swap state spending in and the AMT patch or some of these other suburbanite amendments out.

The other thing, as I’ve said before, is that the Senate can help themselves by immediately confirming Judd Gregg for Commerce Secretary. Gregg is now recusing himself from all recovery package votes, which is the same as a no vote under the circumstances. Confirming him would reduce the number of Senators to 98, which would mean only 59 votes would be needed for passage. It reduces the moderates needed to eat the shit sandwich by one. If Bonnie Newman then came to the Senate to be seated, she could be blocked unless Al Franken is seated in a compromise action, which would get us 59 Democratic Senators and again keep the number of moderate squishes needed to one. I have no idea why Harry Reid isn’t doing this. If he’s afraid of Republican bleating he could schedule the Gregg vote immediately before the final vote on recovery and shock doctrine them.

That’s basically what’s going on. I think the pressure points are Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. Tell Reid to allow a real conference instead of forcing the House to make changes, and tell Pelosi that we’ll have her back if she strips the AMT patch and adds back aid to the states.

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Presidents Nelson, Collins Upbeat After Saving Bipartisanship

by dday

Washington (BP) – Presidents Susan Collins, the historic first female President, and Ben Nelson, the historic first Nebraskan President (OK, Ford, but he was only born there), were reported in good spirits after working long into the night to save bipartisanship on the $780 billion dollar stimulus package. Just three weeks after their inauguration, they were able to avert the bipartisanship crisis and come together to restore the faith of everyone working as on-air or print talent in the media industry in the vicinity of Georgetown, Bethesda, MD and Arlongton, VA.

Sen. Ben Nelson, a Democrat from Nebraska and one of the chief negotiators of the plan, said senators had trimmed the plan to $827 billion in tax cuts and spending on infrastructure, housing and other programs that would create or save jobs.

“We trimmed the fat, fried the bacon and milked the sacred cows,” Nelson said as debate began.

According to several senators, the revised version of the plan axed money for school construction and nearly $90 million for fighting pandemic flu, among other things.

Remaining in the plan are tax incentives for small businesses, a one-year fix of the unpopular alternative-minimum tax and tax-relief for low- and middle-income families, said Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who was the most prominent Republican negotiator in the bipartisan talks.

“Our country faces a grave economic crisis and the American people want us to work together,” she said. “They don’t want to see us dividing along partisan lines on the most serious crisis facing our country.”

Making the recovery bill safe for tax cuts and free of wasteful spending like $40 billion in aid to states which will now have to lay off hundreds of thousands of workers was “a very liberating process,” Presidents Nelson and Collins said before repairing to separate corners of the White House with their families. “It feels good to have that sense of accomplishment that comes with kicking firefighters and teachers out onto the street and seeing others slip into poverty,” Nelson and Collins said in unison. “They said it couldn’t be done!” The Presidents offered a list of wasteful nonsense that was excised:

In addition to the large cut in state aid, the Senate agreement would cut nearly $20 billion proposed for school construction; $8 billion to refurbish federal buildings and make them more energy efficient; $1 billion for the early childhood program Head Start; and $2 billion from a plan to expand broadband data networks in rural and underserved areas.

Collins and Nelson’s chief of staff, former Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel, was singled out for praise:

Obama endorsed the moderates’ effort and brought its leaders — Sens. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) — to the White House to discuss their proposed cuts. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel attended the final meetings in Reid’s office last night to work out lingering differences. Before Emanuel arrived, Collins said, Democrats were advocating $63 billion in cuts. “Then Rahm got involved, and a much better proposal came forward,” she said.

Once the expected Senate passage is completed, the bill will move to a conference committee with the House of Representatives, whose leader, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, called the new package “very damaging” and said she was very much opposed to the cuts. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn was quoted as saying, “I don’t think much of what the Senate is doing.” In response, Presidents Collins and Nelson retorted, “Who died and elected them President?”

In other news, state Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) and his team won the Illinois Legislature pick-up basketball game last night by the score of 65-53.

Schmart As A Whip

by digby

Here’s Andrew Leonard at Salon on one of the shining intellectual lights of the modern conservative movement:

On Friday afternoon, Grover Norquist posted the following explanation of why the U.S. economy is sliding into the deepest recession since World War II at the National Review Online’s group blog, The Corner.

The economy as measured by the market and businesses’ willingness to hire does not sound very excited by the Reid/Pelosi/Obama spending spree.

The economy began to collapse when the Democrats captured the House and Senate and we then knew that the lower tax rates on individuals, capital gains, and dividends would end after 2010.

It’s not the first time that Norquist, president of the anti-tax lobbying group Americans for Tax Reform, has unburdened himself of such breath-taking imbecility. But to do so in response to the news that the economy lost 600,000 jobs in January is bold, even for him — (and of course, stunningly wrong, even in the narrowest sense — at the very moment Norquist wrote those words the stock market was rebounding, on hopes, theorized by none other than that shining beacon of leftwing propaganda, the Wall Street Journal, that the stimulus bill would pass. If Norquist wants to see a real market panic, wait and see what happens if the Senate fails to pass a stimulus bill.)

Leonard points out that even one of the Zombie Cornerites, Ramesh Punnuru, wasn’t buying Norquist’s economic insights, and that’s saying something.

I think the best thing I’ve seen lately to put Republican concerns about excessive spending in perspective is this chart, courtesy of FDL:

For some reason we still aren’t allowed to mention that. Even though everyone in the country agrees that Iraq was a complete and total cock-up.

Last night The Daily Show featured John Boehner saying this in June 2008, about one of the monstrous Iraq appropriations bills:

The cost of this bill, frankly, is high but it’s a price for freedom. And I don’t think you can put a price on freedom and security in our country.

I guess it all depends on how you define freedom and security. That is if anyone can possibly believe that fulfilling some crazed, neocon fantasy by starting an unnecessary money pit of a war that enrages the entire Muslim world is enhancing our freedom and security — while helping Americans deal with the worst economic downturn since the 1930s is nothing but wasteful spending.

Then, again, these are the people who fiddled while Katrina drowned New Orleans, so we know what their priorities are.

“We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.” –Rep. Richard Baker (R-LA) to lobbyists, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal (Source)

Not that we want to look in the rear view mirror and play the blame game or anything, but why should anyone listen to them now?

Update: credit where credit is due to Wolf Blitzer for this interview:

BLITZER: Just a little fact check right now.

Joining us is Mark Zandi.

He’s the chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com.

Mark, thanks very much for coming in.

What’s a better way to deal with this economic crisis — cut people’s taxes or spend government money given to the states to build infrastructure — roads, bridges?

MARK ZANDI, MOODY’S ECONOMY.COM: Well, I think you need both. The infrastructure spending has a bigger economic bang for the buck. It creates more jobs. But the problem is it can’t get into the economy quickly. So I think you do need tax cuts. That doesn’t have the same bang for the buck. It’s not as efficacious. But you can get that into the economy quickly.

So a plan, like the current plan, that has both tax cuts and spending increases, I think, is the best plan.

WOMAN: The Republicans say they want more tax cuts for the middle class, but only tax cuts for those individuals and families who actually pay federal income tax, not for those who don’t pay any federal income tax.

Are the Republicans right?

ZANDI: Well, I think that would reduce the effectiveness of tax cuts because people who are in lower income groups that, in fact, probably don’t pay income tax — look, if they got a tax break, would spend it and would spend it very quickly and that would raise the stimulus.

So, to make it more effective, I think it should go to lower income households, who, in fact, don’t pay income tax.

BLITZER: And they would, presumably, spend it very quickly. And that would help to stimulate the economy.

That’s the theory right?

ZANDI: That’s the idea. And I think it works. I mean people who are in lower income groups, they’re under more financial stress. If they get a dollar, they’re going to spend that dollar and they’re going to spend it very quickly. And that’s exactly what we want to see right now.

BLITZER: It passed the House at about — a little bit more than $800 billion. Now it’s ballooned to more than $900 billion in the Senate. And the Republican leader, the minority leader, Mitch McConnell, says, you know what, it’s going to cost a whole lot more than that.

Listen to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL (R-KY), MINORITY LEADER: And when you include interest, the bill before us will cost nearly $1.3 trillion. At some point, the taxpayers will have to pay all of this back. And they’re worried.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: Is he right? Is his math correct?

ZANDI: Yes, he’s right. If you throw in the interest costs from borrowing all the money necessary to finance the stimulus, it will ultimately cost about $1.3 trillion. That’s correct.

But another point to consider — if we don’t do stimulus, in my view, I think the economy will weaken very substantively. And that means we’re going to lose a lot of tax revenues. If people aren’t working, they’re not paying taxes. If businesses aren’t energy money, they’re not going to pay corporate income tax. And we’re going to see more spending to help all those people who lose their jobs.

So the deficit is going to rise anyway if we do nothing. So I think it’s better to take a shot at it — and a big shot at it — and see if we can’t make this work and get the economy going again.

BLITZER: What’s wrong with just pumping money in that’s going to create jobs right away?

Why do you need to put into this legislation money that’s going to create jobs two, three, four years down the road?

ZANDI: Well, a fair amount of the money is for jobs now — helping people who lose their jobs…

BLITZER: But a big chunk is only for two or three years down the road.

ZANDI: Yes, that’s right. But I think everyone does realize that in this economy — it’s not coming back quickly. So if it gets help in ’09, that would be wonderful and great. But if it gets help in 2010 and 2011, it’s going to need it then, as well.

BLITZER: When President Obama says you’ve got to pass it right now because every day is critical — we heard David Axelrod say that, his top adviser, in the last hour.

Are they right or is there time to make sure they do it better?

ZANDI: Well, we have to do it right. But time is of essence here. We just got a sense of that today with the jobs numbers. We lost almost 600,000 jobs in one month. We’ve lost 3.6 million jobs in a little over a year. The unemployment rate is rising very quickly.

We are getting trapped in a very negative cycle and so we need to break it. So we need this stimulus plan and we need it very quickly.

BLITZER: How quickly?

ZANDI: Now, that doesn’t mean we should do…

BLITZER: How quickly?

ZANDI: I think we should pass it in the next couple, three weeks. I think it’s very therapeutic what we’re going through — the debate. I think the Senate is going to make this a better bill. We’re going to get rid of the spending that makes very little sense as stimulus.

But I think, ultimately, we need to get this passed in the next couple, three weeks.

BLITZER: Some economists say this is a waste of money, a waste of time and it could be a disaster. And they point to the Japan model in the ’90s, when the Japanese government did a stimulus plan and they pumped tons of money into their economy and they say it was a lost decade for Japan, because it really didn’t turn their economy around.

Is there a parallel between what Japan went through in the ’90s and what the U.S. is going through now?

ZANDI: Well, there’s good lessons from the Japanese experience. What the Japanese did is they did their stimulus over a period of a decade. They took their time about doing it. They didn’t try to stem the downturn right up front with a lot of spending.

Moreover, they spent only on bridges and roads. And, ultimately, they built so many roads and bridges that they literally were building bridges to nowhere. And they — that wasn’t very effective.

So I think the lesson is we need to have a plan that includes spending, tax cuts, help for people who are losing their jobs, aid to state and local governments, a diversified set of stimulus and also do it up front and in a big way.

BLITZER: Bottom line, even though you were an adviser to John McCain during the campaign, you say support what Barack Obama is doing right now. You say that to members of the House and Senate.

ZANDI: I absolutely do. I — you know, I fear that the economy is slipping away. We need to act aggressively and quickly.

This isn’t a perfect plan, by any stretch, but it is a good plan — a good enough plan. It will create jobs and it will make a difference and we need to pass it quickly.

BLITZER: Mark Zandi, thanks very much for coming in.

ZANDI: Thank you.

.

Win, Win

by digby

Hardball is reporting that the new bill is 42% tax cuts now and 58% spending, which is considered a big win for Republicans.

And they are still fighting it.

And when it finally comes to the floor, they won’t vote for it anyway.

That’s how a truly ruthless opposition party works. They ruin the legislation, are lauded as winners for ruining the legislation and then vote against the legislation that they ruined. Awesome.

But, the plan will pass and that means the American people will at least win something, if not enough.

I don’t think the Democrats won much politically, and lost quite a bit by allowing the Republicans to seize the debate. But at least they didn’t have a bunch of Dem defectors, which can happen “like that” with the Timorous Ones when the GOP gets its hissy on.

I thought perhaps that the myth of bipartisanship had been blown up,which would have been a big win for everyone, but I’m not so sure, what with the elevation of Ben Nelson and Susan Collins to leadership positions today.

Ambinder indicates, by the way, that in spite all the political back and forth these past two weeks, the administration’s long term strategy is still in place:

After Daschle (AD?), I predict that the White House will adapt very quickly to the communication of their new environment, and they’ll be quicker to react during the next short term crisis. This week, they were reminded that the message is still limited by the medium.

Long-term, the strategy is the same. The quiet encouragement of moderate Democrats – which totally happened, by the way – is about entitlement reform and standing up to Speaker Pelosi.

The tacit empowerment of Sen. Ben Nelson is also about laying a paradigm for the long-term. Nelson was not trying to prevent a bill from being passed; indeed, he was the broker between moderate Republicans and the administration, consciously styling himself as a Senator John Breaux-esque compromiser.

Looks like Jane had it nailed. I’m guessing they think “entitlement reform” is going to be the new NAFTA.

It also occurs to me that it’s just accepted as fact that the Republicans will filibuster this bill if they can. In the middle of a national emergency. Why is that ok but filibustering a supreme court justice nomination was a crime against the constitution?

For some reason I keep thinking about the Senate voting 98-1 for the Patriot Act and all going to the steps of the capital to sing “God Bless America” together. Try to picture that happening under a Democratic president under any circumstances.

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Centrist Poseur Brain Trust

by digby

Following up on dday’s post below, meet the man who runs your country. You may have thought his name was Barack Obama, but it’s not. In tandem with the first female co-president Susan Collins, our country is now in the hands of the David Boren of the aught-years — Ben Nelson (via BTD at Talk Left):

The final package, said Nelson, is likely to be significantly lower. “I think it will be below 800 [billion]. For me it’s not symbolism, it’s an economic matter. At some point it’s just too big,” he said. Asked by the Huffington Post if that meant he thought 800 billion was the specific point at which it was too big, he said, “It’s whatever gets 60 votes, 61 votes.”

The gasbags are starting to get very excited again at the prospect that this new “Gang of 18” (or whatever the number), led by Nelson, are going to take charge of the government and ensure that the vaunted bipartisanship prevails no matter what. And thank goodness for that.

Update: Ronald Brownstein tells us (on Hardball)that he always felt that Obama’s weakness was that he didn’t have a fiscal responsibility element of his platform. Because, you know, you have to be willing to cut taxes for millionaires or else you aren’t fiscally responsible.

He also pointed out that in April 2001, the senate pared back Bush’s tax cuts but he got some of them all back in conference so Obama could get some of the money put back into the bill before the end.

Does anyone believe that this congress will be able to do that — even though the Dems have 18 more senators and dozens more congressmen than the Republicans had in 2001? I don’t.

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A Celebration Of Shrill

by digby

Since it’s Krugman day here at Hullabaloo, I thought I’d share this little graph which he calls “a tale of two presidencies.” It illustrates perfectly for every average Joe (except Sam the plumber) why they should put their hands over their ears and start chanting “shut up, shut up, shut up” whenever they see Republicans with the chutzpah to even raise a peep about what to do about the economy:

They have no credibility on anything and they should not be driving this debate, most of all. In fact, they should not even have the nerve to say a word, but rather slink back into their corners and contemplate why every single thing they touch turns to garbage.

They have the right to make their case, of course, but there is absolutely no necessity that the press gives them not just equal, but more air time, to further brainwash the public and there’s certainly no reason why the “centrist” Goldilocks faction should have the final word by pretending that the other side isn’t behaving as if it’s completely insane.

And watching John McCain, the man who said “the fundamentals of the economy are strong” just a few months ago, being equally ignorant today in sanctimoniously proclaiming today that the bill is a “spending bill, not a stimulus bill,” makes me want to go all Elvis and shoot out the TV screen. That was the man they chose to lead the country during this crisis. Imagine what would have happened if they had succeeded. It’s enough to keep you up at night.

Update: After listening to Alex Castellanos speak some gibberish about how George Bush’s tax cuts were a huge success, Paul Begala just said that the Republicans couldn’t lead, they refuse to follow, so they should get out of the way. At this point, I agree. They aren’t debating in good faith, they are following their leader in trying to make the president (and by extension the country) fail.

Update II: Just in case Krugman’s chart didn’t indicate just how bad this is, get a load of this one, (via Swampland)

This chart compares the job loss so far in this recession to job losses in the 1990-1991 recession and the 2001 recession — showing how dramatic and unprecedented the job loss over the last 13 months has been. Over the last 13 months, our economy has lost a total of 3.6 million jobs – and continuing job losses in the next few months are predicted.

By comparison, we lost a total of 1.6 million jobs in the 1990-1991 recession, before the economy began turning around and jobs began increasing; and we lost a total of 2.7 million jobs in the 2001 recession, before the economy began turning around and jobs began increasing.

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Blogging The Origin: Awaiting The Premiere

It’s only a few hours away from the premiere of my evening-long celebration of Charles Darwin’s work and life; The Origin, for chorus, orchestra, vocal soloists, and Balkan music ensemble. We’ve had more rehearsals than I can remember. There were several with the entire ensemble (I think there’s at least 150, if not 200 performers, but I’m not counting!) and numerous scheduled rehearsals with smaller groups. Also, since we’re all staying at the same hotel in town, I’ve had dozens of impromptu rehearsals with our terrific mezzo, Jacqui Horner and the eight amazing singers who make up KITKA, the Balkan music ensemble I’m using to represent Charles Darwin the man. The dedication of all the players, as well as conductor Julie Pretzat and filmmaker Bill Morrison has been nothing short of phenomenal. I’m both deeply touched and honored. I can’t count the number of times we’ve met for lunch or just a coffee and they – not me – have brought up some detail they wanted to perfect, or simply shoot the breeze about Darwin. I’ve also spent what must amount to eight or more hours being interviewed by the local television and radio stations, the AP, the Syracuse press, and at least 4 student journalists from the college. I’m not going to mention all the seminars, classes, and lectures I’ve given!

Fortunately, my health is holding up. This kind of schedule is typical for any large event, especially a major premiere. It’s both grueling and exhilarating. I can’t say you fall into a rhythm after a while, it’s too hectic for that, but you do learn to marshal your energy, falling asleep at the drop of a hat between events and politely, but firmly, turning aside invites to hang out with those other than other people directly involved in staging the event. I feel I’m living in Spinal Tap, only with a lot less hair…

Tonight, the audience will get to hear the incredible artistry of these performers and maybe get a view of Darwin they didn’t expect. I certain didn’t. I started this project thinking I’d write a serious piece about science. But a lot of it ended up being simply joyous, if not downright comical. I realized a lot about Darwin’s personality and his science, a side which is given short shrift in the oh-so-serious biographies of him, as good as many of them are. Darwin was simply a man who was not so much endowed with genius as he was filled with an enormous sense of wonder and curiousity, and enough wit to find the whole thing, ie, Nature, utterly delightful. That’s why the death of his 11-year old daughter came as a particularly cruel loss. He not only lost a treasured child, but also his last illusions of a beneficent, if impersonal universe. After Annie’s death, Darwin understood the universe is just impersonal, but even with her death, he managed, somehow, to regain his sense of awe and humor at it all.

If you read this blog and come to the performances, do say hello and introduce yourselves.

Big Bipartisan On Campus

by dday

A couple years ago at what was then Yearly Kos, I was quoted in the Washington Post saying that Joe Lieberman was more harmful to progressive policies than, say, Ben Nelson, because Nelson didn’t undermine Democrats in the media or borrow Republican talking points.

Let me say that I was wrong, and that Nelson is trying his best to become the new Village darling with a package of cuts to the recovery bill that would negate all of the positive benefits it could possibly offer.

Total Reductions: $80 billion

Eliminations:

Head Start, Education for the Disadvantaged, School improvement, Child Nutrition, Firefighters, Transportation Security Administration, Coast Guard, Prisons, COPS Hiring, Violence Against Women, NASA, NSF, Western Area Power Administration, CDC, Food Stamps

*****************************

Reductions:

Public Transit $3.4 billion, School Construction $60 billion

*****************************

Increases:

Defense operations and procurement, STAG Grants, Brownfields, Additional transportation funding

The Axis of Centrism, in addition to all that, wants to cut aid to the states.

By Thursday evening, aides said the group had drafted a list of nearly $90 billion in cuts, including $40 billion in aid for states, more than $14 billion for various education programs, $4.1 billion to make federal buildings energy efficient and $1.5 billion for broadband Internet service in rural areas. But they remained short of a deal.

I’m sorry, but anyone who proposes cutting funding to state and local governments at this point is a complete moron. The fastest stimulus is government purchasing. The jobs most in need of saving are at the state level. With slashed aid to states, millions of teachers, firefighters, and cops will be out of work. And cutting food stamps is just as dumb, considering that poor people are most likely to spend just on their own basic necessities, increasing demand. The money they don’t have to spend on food will go elsewhere in the economy.

Good to see as well that funding for the military, which we spend more on that every other country on Earth combined, is getting increases in the plan. That seems fair and balanced.

Harry Reid is trying to hold the line on this nonsense, but I’m sure Nelson and his axis will go lovingly into the arms of their media cohorts and decry all the “wasteful spending” on poor people that just has to go. Sen. Jeff Merkley, who can’t get on the teevee because of all that patchouli oil and tie-dye, makes the obvious point: there’s nothing wasteful about creating a job. That would be a unique perspective!

One project they’re attacking hit close to home. They’re calling funding to restore forest health and prevent wildfires in National Forests wasteful. Coming from Southern Oregon, I can tell you firsthand they are dead wrong.

I grew up in Southern Oregon. My father was a sawmill worker and a logger and his job put food on the table. Right now Douglas County, where I was born, has an unemployment rate of 12.8 percent. That’s the highest it’s been in decades and well above the current national average. Douglas County is home to many of Oregon’s timber workers and they need the stability of a good paying job. The money that would be allocated to counties like Douglas to restore forest health and prevent forest fires would put these folks back to work.

Let me explain. Due to federal mismanagement, there are millions of acres of choked and overgrown second-growth forests. These forests are a complete menace. They are diseased and are very little use for strong ecosystems. Moreover, they are a huge fire hazard. Thinning these neglected forests is essential for restoring forest health and generating thousands of rural jobs.

Let me emphasize this: this provision will create thousands of rural jobs. This is a win-win for our rural economies and our ecosystems.

Preventing wildfires is something that desperately needs to be done in any economic condition and now has the added benefit of providing jobs in areas that need them most. How Republicans can call job creation for hardworking millworkers like my dad “wasteful spending” is a mystery to me.

If Nelson and his centrists are choking on the price tag of the bill, they can get rid of the tax cuts they all inserted that will do nothing for anyone.

Sen. Olympia Snowe (ME), one of the four Republicans considered genuinely open to cooperation with Democrats on a workable economic recovery bill, just released a statement saying she was approached by Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to come up with a list of trims from the $275 billion-plus tax section of the stimulus.

Pruning the tax section of the stimulus is an idea that could hold promise for liberals, many of whom are concerned about the hits that education and transit would take in the centrist senators’ package of cuts. The portion Snowe is looking at contains plenty of cuts, for both businesses and individuals — some of them added in the hopes of winning GOP support — but also a number of tax credits that could take money out of government coffers in the short term while increasing economic growth in the long term.

If it suits you to make a bunch of phone calls, if there’s anything to go to the mats over, it’s this: defeating the Nelson-Collins amendment and preserving at least the good parts of the bill. Not to mention making David Broder cry. At least the bulk of the Republicans are honest neo-Hooverists; I respect them more. Ben Nelson and his “very serious” friends deserve to go down.

…by the way, Krugman is absolutely right about this:

Which raises the obvious question: shouldn’t Obama have made a much bigger plan, say $1.3 trillion, his opening gambit? If he had, he could have conceded to the centrists by cutting it to $1.2 trillion, and still have had a plan with a good chance of really controlling this slump. Instead he made preemptive concessions, only to find the centrists demanding another pound of flesh as proof of their centrist power.

Obama negotiated with himself, and this is the result. We can only speculate on what might have been if he didn’t pre-compromise the bill.

…Ben Nelson, by the way: for state aid before he was against it.

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An Army Of Krugmans

by dday

Paul Krugman delivered some upside the head slaps on Morning Joe today. Pat Buchanan actually tried to argue in favor of the WARREN HARDING TAX CUTS that led to expansion – never mind the Republican Great Depression afterwards. Joe Scarborough tried the fool’s game of disowning Bush, saying he was a big spender and not a classic conservative – never mind the fact that Reagan and both Bushes increased the deficit more than every other President combined. Krugman was having none of it. It’s worth watching from about the 4:30 mark on. Here’s one sample bite.

KRUGMAN: Look at what just happened, we had a proposal I think it was McCain’s proposal for an economic recover package, his version of it which was all tax cuts, a complete, let’s do exactly what Bush did, have another round of Bush-style policies. After eight years which that didn’t work and we got 36 out of 41 Republican senators voting for that which is completely crazy. So how much bipartisan outreach can you have when 36 out of 41 republican senators take their marching orders from Rush Limbaugh?

Unfortunately, there aren’t 150 Paul Krugmans to deploy to every news outlet in America. There are, however, 150 liberal Democrats in Congress, maybe even more! I know there’s a substantial faction of Democrats who are moles, essentially, and committed more to having Beltway chatterers smile at them in the hallways than anything else. But there really are enough actual Democrats to defend the concept of a stimulus. Here is someone who is decidedly NOT a Democrat, Steven Pearlstein, saying what shouldn’t need to be said, but definitely is, because Democrats have been cowtowed by Republican B.S. for so many years.

Let’s review some of the more silly arguments about the stimulus bill, starting with the notion that “only” 75 percent of the money can be spent in the next two years, and the rest is therefore “wasted.”

As any economist will tell you, the economy tends to be forward-looking and emotional. So if businesses and households can see immediate benefits from a program while knowing that a bit more stimulus is on the way, they are likely to feel more confident that the recovery will be sustained. That confidence, in turn, will make them more likely to take the risk of buying big-ticket items now and investing in stocks or future ventures.

Moreover, much of the money that can’t be spent right away is for capital improvements such as building and maintaining schools, roads, bridges and sewer systems, or replacing equipment — stuff we’d have to do eventually. So another way to think of this kind of spending is that we’ve simply moved it up to a time, to a point when doing it has important economic benefits and when the price will be less.

Equally specious is the oft-heard complaint that even some of the immediate spending is not stimulative.

“This is not a stimulus plan, it’s a spending plan,” Nebraska’s freshman senator, Mike Johanns (R), said Wednesday in a maiden floor speech full of budget-balancing orthodoxy that would have made Herbert Hoover proud. The stimulus bill, he declared, “won’t create the promised jobs. It won’t activate our economy.”

Johanns was too busy yesterday to explain this radical departure from standard theory and practice. Where does the senator think the $800 billion will go? Down a rabbit hole? Even if the entire sum were to be stolen by federal employees and spent entirely on fast cars, fancy homes, gambling junkets and fancy clothes, it would still be an $800 billion increase in the demand for goods and services — a pretty good working definition for economic stimulus. The only question is whether spending it on other things would create more long-term value, which it almost certainly would.

All spending is stimulus. It’s four words that have been absent from the debate. Democratic lawmakers have been banned from the teevee, I know, but when they do manage to get on, they could do worse than uttering those four words. All spending is stimulus. And if you want to talk about speed, the fastest stimulus is government purchases, either local, state or federal. This is exactly what the axis of centrism and the far right are trying to remove from the bill.

I think Obama’s speech to House Democrats last night was intended for a very particular audience. They are being outworked and they need to pull their weight.

(Just to be clear, the bill has too many tax cuts, and if the Axis of Centrism can’t swallow the price tag, they can get rid of the $70 billion AMT patch and the $35 billion home-buying credit and the auto-buying credit, cuts which won’t help anyone who can’t afford a home or a car and will just give away free money to people who would have bought those items anyway. There’s your $100 billion in cuts.)

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