Month: April 2011

Good lord

by digby

Via Atrios, in other news …

Japan may raise the severity of its nuclear accident to seven – the top level on an international scale – from five, the Kyodo news agency reported on Tuesday, as workers battled to contain the crisis.

Kyodo said preliminary figures from the country’s Nuclear Safety Commission revealed the battered Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant had released up to 10,000 terabecquerels of radioactive materials per hour for several hours.

The calculation prompted Japan to consider upgrading the accident to the highest level – something that has only be given to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster – Kyodo said, citing unnamed government sources.

According to the INES, level 7 accidents release radioactive material of more than tens of thousands terabecquerels of radioactive iodine 131.

Haruki Madarame, chairman of the government-run commission, said it has estimated that the release of 10,000 terabecquerels of radioactive materials per hour continued for several hours, the report said.

It’s hard for me to believe that the whole world isn’t riveted on this story — and maybe everyone but Americans are. This ongoing epic disaster is unfolding right before our eyes and yet we look away. Is it too much for us? Or are we just so self-absorbed that unless it affects us personally we lose interest?

I’m not blaming anyone. I have been just as obsessed with arcane beltway tomfoolery. It’s odd though. We’re talking about a major nuclear disaster happening in Japan, a first world nation (not that it makes it any worse but you would think it would make it something we could relate to.)

In any case, it’s awful. And it’s getting worse.

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Grand Bargain Gang

by digby

Two members of the Gang of Six emerge from their spider hole to squawk about deficits and bipartisanship on CNN:

Jessica Yellin: Here are two members of the so-called Gang of Six a bipartisan group of Senators who are trying to negotiate deficit reduction. Saxby Chambliss is a Georgia Republican and Senator Mark Warner is a Virginia Democrat. Gentlemen thanks for being here.

First to you Senator Chambliss. You have been working together on this proposal for months. When will you reveal it and do you really think you can get 4 trillion dollars in savings?

Chambliss: Well there’s not question but that we’re working on a plan will achieve 4 trillion dollars in savings over the next ten years.As to when we’re going to complete the details, that’s still up in the air, but out group of six has been working very diligently over the last several months and we’re going to continue to work until we can get this done and get it done the right way.That’s a lot more important than the time frame in which to get it done.

Yellin: Well let me press you on that Senator Warner. House Republican budget Chairman Paul Ryan has revealed the initial Republican deficit reduction proposal, president Obama will reveal one on Wednesday, don’t you both need to unveil it now, within days to be relevant in this debate.

Warner: I think one of the things we saw in last week’s debate, if we start in our partisan corner you wind up with an 11th hour brinksmanship. We’ve been working for months on a serious plan and we’re very close. We want to make sure it’s right. And I do think in the coming short period of time that we need to get this into the debate and I think there are members in both parties who are willing to step up and say we are starting from a bipartisan basis and there’s a much better chance of getting something done.

Yellin: let’s start with bipartisanship because we saw an awful lot of acrimony over the last month over just a tiny sliver of the budget, the continuing resolution. How in the world Senator Chambliss, are you going to get Democrats and Republicans to agree for a long term spending plan in this partisan environment?

Chambliss: Well, that’s why it’s important that we work together as a bipartisan group to develop a bipartisan product. If we do start from one side or the other side and hope that we can meet in the middle, my guess is that never gets done. But the fact that we have three Republicans and three Democrats in a room discussing in a very serious way the most significant national security interest that the United States is facing today I think says an awful lot number one about the fact that we think we can get it done. And secondly that this group is committed to make sure that in a bipartisan was we address the issue will in itself give us a better opportunity than if we started at opposite ends and hope that we could meet in the middle.

Yellin: Senator Chamblis do you believe that Senate Republicans will agree to a package that includes any sort of tax changes?

Chambliss: Well, the fact of the matter is that you can’t solve this debt problem just with reductions in discretionary spending. You can’t solve it just by attacking and reforming entitlements. You’ve got to look at the revenue side also.

What we are looking at proposing is actually a reduction in corporate rates and personal individual income tax rates, which will put more money in people’s pockets and we’re going to do that with the reduction in tax expenditures. Every time we’ve done that in years past whether it was under President Reagan or president Bush we have seen revenues increase. And we’ve got to have an increase in revenues if we are going to retire this debt… revenues have to be on the table if we’re serious about attacking that debt.

Yellin:Senator Warner, that’s a big concession by Republicans. For Democrats, you’ve acknowledged that they have to come along and tweak entitlements. Over the week-end one of the president’s advisers said this should potentially include social security. So what changes to social security would be part of your budget proposal?

Warner replied that they don’t plan to take money from social security to pay down the debt but just feel they should make SS “secure” for the next 75 years anyway. (Apparently this epic deficit battle is such a breeze that they can squeeze in this unnecessary issue right along with it.) He finished up with this:

Warner: I think we’ve got the makings of a Grand Bargain if we start with a bipartisan basis, I think we can get it done and surprise a lot of the pundits.

Ok, so they are afraid of getting upstaged by Obama and Ryan and they’ve decided to sell their snake oil with this bipartisan Grand Bargain drivel.(And Warner is clearly anxious to get it out than Chambliss who is willing to let the Republicans in the House carry the water for the moment.) Whatever.

But Chambliss did say something very interesting. Did you catch it?

You’ve got to look at the revenue side also.

What we are looking at proposing is actually a reduction in corporate rates and personal individual income tax rates, which will put more money in people’s pockets and we’re going to do that with the reduction in tax expenditures. Every time we’ve done that in years past whether it was under President Reagan or President Bush we have seen revenues increase.

Uhm, no, Saxby. Cutting taxes for your rich friends (again) doesn’t count as raising revenue. Seriously. Supply siders tried that rationale years ago and it’s not going to be any more successful when you say you are going to cut up the future safety net than it was when you pretended that you didn’t need to cut at all. It was a very slick presentation though. He’s an excellent bullshit artist.

Warner stood there vacantly babbling about bipartisanship and Grand Bargains and didn’t even attempt to set the record straight so I’m guessing he’s on board with this Orwellian claptrap. But that’s nothing compared to Jessica Yellin responding that Republicans had made a big concession and demanding to know if Democrats had agreed to cut “entitlements” in turn. I think that frames it about as perfectly as the deficit phonies could ever hope for.

It’s getting really claustrophobic down in this rabbit hole, guys.

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Catfood: It’s what’s for dinner

by digby

In case you had any doubts:

Another impetus to Wednesday’s move is the White House’s belief that a bipartisan “Gang of Six” senators will announce this week that they have reached agreement on a debt-reduction package similar to that of the president’s fiscal commission.

After months of private discussions, the tentative agreement among the three Republican and three Democratic senators would cut military and domestic programs and overhaul the tax code, eliminating popular tax breaks but using the new revenues to lower income-tax rates and reduce annual deficits. It would be the model, if not in all details, for Mr. Obama’s own goals, Democratic officials say.

Now that’s a shocker. Well, not really.

But this is just adorable:

Several presidential advisers interviewed in recent weeks said Mr. Obama has been torn between wanting to propose major budget changes to entice Republicans to the bargaining table, including on Social Security, and believing they would never agree to raise revenues on upper-income Americans as part of a deal.

Three House Republican leaders, including Mr. Ryan, were on the fiscal commission; unlike the three Senate Republicans, they opposed the recommendations because they raised revenues and did not cut enough from health care.

The risk to Mr. Obama includes further alienating liberals in his own party. Progressive groups have formed coalitions to oppose any changes to Social Security, for instance.

Oh who cares about them? Seriously:

A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Monday indicates that the budget agreement that prevented a government shutdown is popular, with Americans supporting it by a 58 to 38 percent margin. But there’s a partisan divide, with two-thirds of Democrats and a majority of independent voters backing the deal, and Republicans divided.

By a 48 to 35 percent margin, the public thinks Democrats are more responsible than the GOP for the late Friday night agreement, which prevented a shutdown of some government services and offices. And according to the survey, which was conducted Saturday and Sunday, 54 percent say they approve of how the president handled the budget negotiations, compared to only 44 percent who approve of how the Republican leaders in Congress handled themselves last week.

Mainstream Democrats trust Obama and Independents don’t care about any specific policy or party. That means none of this adversely affects his re-election unless unemployment goes back up and growth stalls out. I guess they’re rolling the dice that it won’t.

Certainly future cuts in “entitlements” won’t have any immediate effect on the economy so if this dynamic remains, they’re perfectly safe for him to cut — indeed, they’re perfect.

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Demented

by digby

You’d think the silly Manchiurian Candidate nonsense would be enough. But no:

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Leading The Army

by digby

You know, when Democrats complained that Obama parachutes into negotiations at the last moment after a tone of blood and sweat has already been spilled, I’m not sure this was the remedy they had in mind:

Many Congressional Democrats found out about Obama’s surprise speech by watching the Sunday shows, as top Obama aide David Plouffe made the rounds to note that the president would lay out a plan for long-term deficit reduction this week. “Plouffe’s announcement yesterday morning did leave us scrambling, that’s something we’re working on right now,” the House aide said on Monday.

House Democrats had already been preparing to release their own 2012 budget, under the leadership of Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), the ranking Democrat on the budget committee. The House Dems’ budget plan had been in the works for weeks, as Van Hollen had been meeting with every major caucus in his party to craft an alternative to the Republicans’ plan. Last week, the GOP’s decision to push out Ryan’s plan to radically alter Medicare and Medicaid in the middle of the 2011 budget fight threw Democrats for a loop. Now the news of Obama’s speech has left Dems on Capitol Hill grappling with another unexpected turn of events that could force them to change their plans, as they won’t want to be too out of sync with whatever Obama proposes.

I know that everyone has been clamoring for the president to “lead” but I’m fairly sure they expected a heads up at the very least. In fact, one might even expect some behind the scenes coordination, just to maximize the impact of his “leadership.” But apparently, this is leadership-by-surprise, which a little bit unusual. Having your troops on the same page can be useful, but apparently this White House believes it’s so good that it doesn’t need that. Interesting approach.

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Where Hippie Punching Gets You

by digby

Jonathan Cohn makes the good point that Obama’s speech on Wednesday is unfortunately going to be seen as the left most position in the debate which makes a compromise between his plan and Ryan’s the “juuust right” sweet spot. Cohn rightly suggests that tit would be helpful to have a leftward plan that incorporates left wing values the same way Ryan’s plan incorporates Ayn Rand’s wet dreams.

An equally extreme proposal on the left would balance the budget, first, by raising new taxes–on everybody and, most likely, with particular levies on carbon. I doubt Obama will endorse either idea in his speech. A seriously left-wing proposal would also seek to reduce overall health care costs (as well as those incurred by the government and individuals) more aggressively than the Affordable Care Act does, by using the kind of blunt, global price controls you get in single-payer systems. In other words, a truly left-wing alternative on health care reform might actually justify the label “government-run health care.”

A compromise that represented a middle ground between that kind of plan and Ryan’s might be worth contemplating. But you’ll find nothing along those lines in the debate right now. Yes, a number of liberal plans are circulating, the most detailed of which is probably the “Our Fiscal Future” proposal from Demos*, the Century Fund, and the Economic Policy Institute. And it would be helpful indeed if plans like this got more attention, as Representative Jan Schakowsky and the Congressional Progressive Caucus have been urging. But “Our Fiscal Future” doesn’t call for system-wide health care price controls; it merely calls for creating a public option, as the architects of the Affordable Care Act originally envisioned. In that respect, and others, the current liberal alternatives are closer to what I’d consider the political mainstream than either my imaginary left-wing plan or Ryan’s not-so-imaginary right-wing alternative.

He’s right, of course. The leftward position is tepid market-oriented compromises coming out of the gate. Better than Ryan, of course. But hardly a position that could balance the rightward yank that Ryan and the Simpson Bowles atrocity have given us or serve as an opening ante. The problem, unfortunately, is that when anyone sets forth a truly liberal plan like Cohn proposes, they are not only met with shrieks of horror from conservatives, establishment liberals and Democratic third-way centrists stalk them like a pack of hyenas and marginalize them as outside the “mainstream” and assure everyone who will listen that they are not “serious.” You may have noticed that Paul Ryan’s lunacy is not similarly treated by his own. Indeed, it’s not even similarly treated that way by liberals. Just try to imagine a plan like the one Cohn describes being hailed as “courageous” (even though it surely would be.) Yeah, I know. Shrill.

The fact is that there is no liberal establishment willing to validate liberalism. Indeed, for reasons only they can tell us, they almost always go out of their way to exclude anyone who can readily be identified as a person of the left and rush before the cameras and into print to reassure America that they have no support. I have my theories about why that might be, but suffice to say it’s a fairly easily documented phenomenon. There is simply no space in the establishment political dialog for explicitly left policy or rhetoric.

I’m thinking that TNR is one place where the liberal wonks (Cohn excluded) might take a minute and ask themselves if their reflexive derision of the hippies for being unrealistic and lacking in pragmatism has served their own goals. When you wake up one morning and see a Democratic president praising the biggest spending cuts in history at a time of 8.8% unemployment, it might be time to take a look in the mirror.

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They shot a few hostages

by digby

Ok, I didn’t see this one coming. In fact, I thought it was the one area of the budget President Obama would never allow them to touch. But it looks as though they’ll be allowed to whittle away at elements of his health care plan too:

The budget agreement also takes aim at two provisions of the new health care law. It would cut more than $2 billion set aside for the creation of private nonprofit health insurance cooperatives.

It also eliminates a program that would have allowed hundreds of thousands of lower-income workers to opt out of employer-sponsored health plans and use the employer’s contribution to buy coverage on their own, through new insurance exchanges.

Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, the architect of this provision, lamented its demise.

“Publicly,” Mr. Wyden said, “both parties say they are champions of choice and competition and making health insurance more affordable for everyone. But then behind closed doors they kill a program that does exactly that. This seems like a victory for special interests.”

I know that everybody must have seen this coming — special interests systematically removing pieces of the health care bill that create competition or offer services beyond their commercial reach. But I did think that they wouldn’t succeed in doing it as long as Obama was president. Seems it’s fair game.

It should be interesting now to see what he decides is essential. Watch out Medicaid.

*One piece of excellent news, though. Taxpayers will no longer be burdened with the budget strain of keeping the gray wolf on the endangered species list. The two Democratic Senators from Montana fought hard and they won the right to shoot them. So that’s good.

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Leverage

by digby

Speaking of Cantor, here’s what he said about the debt ceiling this week-end:

CANTOR: We’re talking about putting in maximum caps as far as expenditures are concerned. We’re talking about changing the way that the entitlements work in this country for the future, while protecting today’s seniors. These are the kind of things that we’re talking about.

WALLACE: Let me make sure I understand. Obviously, that would be part of the 2012 budget. Are you saying you will impose them as part of the deal to raise the debt limit?

CANTOR: Just as we saw happened this week in Washington, there comes a time leverage moment here, a time in which the White House and the president will actually capitulate to what the American people want right now. They don’t want to raise taxes. They don’t want spending to continue to spiral out of control. Those are the kind of things and mechanisms — whether it’s spending caps, entitlement reforms, budget process reforms — these are the kinds of things that we’re going to have to have to go along with the debt limit increase.

Friendly reminder:

At the House GOP retreat in Baltimore, “Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) delivered a stern message that the debt ceiling will eventually have to be raised to keep the government from defaulting. But he also promised that Republicans will ‘use the leverage’ they have to enact at least some of their spending-reduction goals. ‘It’s a leverage moment for Republicans,’ Cantor said in an interview Friday. ‘The president needs us. There are things we were elected to do. Let’s accomplish those if the president needs us to clean up the old mess.'”

One can see where Cantor would get the idea that you have “leverage” even as you are announcing that your threats are completely empty. After all, it’s worked really well for them so far. But I don’t think we need to sign on to this delusion, do you? As I wrote at the time he first announced his clever plan to the Republican retreat:

Cantor just said that they will have to raise the debt ceiling. He said it out loud and on the record. Therefore, we now know that any capitulation made by the President and the Democrats in the negotiations will be made because they wanted to make them. There can be no doubt about that.

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Do More With Less

by digby

Here’s Eric Cantor talking about the necessity of kicking your grandmother out of her nursing home to move in with you. (You’d better get that nursing degree — you’re going to need it.)

CANTOR: We are in a situation where we have a safety net in place in this country for people who frankly don’t need one. We have to focus on making sure we have a safety net for those who need it.

WALLACE: The Medicaid people — you’re going to cut that by $750 billion.

CANTOR: The medicaid reductions are off the baseline. so what we’re saying is allow states to have the flexibility to deal with their populations, their indigent populations and the healthcare needs the way they know how to deal with them. Not to impose some mandate from a bureaucrat in Washington.

WALLACE: But you are giving them less money to do it.

CANTOR: In terms of the baseline, that is correct…What we’re saying is there is so much imposition of a mandate that doesn’t relate to the actual quality of care. We believe if you put in place the mechanism that allow for personal choice as far as Medicare is concerned, as well as the programs in Medicaid, that we can actually get to a better resolve and and do what most Americans are learning how to do, which is to do more with less.

You see, it’s the spending mandate that’s causing the low quality of care. If states have less money to work with the poor will be much better off. Isn’t that how it works in your family? Isn’t your life always improved when you lose income? In fact, I think the Republicans have come upon an excellent new theme: The new American Dream —doing more with less!

*In case you were wondering, millions of elderly who are in nursing homes are on both programs. With nursing homes costing around 150 bucks a day, it’s a rare middle class senior who needs to be in one who doesn’t end up a pauper on Medicaid. It’s how many of us check out in this country. And needless to say, the pernicious political and policy effects of turning it into block grants so that Governors Walker and Kasich can do all the dirty work of punishing the poor while touting their fiscal rectitude is obvious.

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Rosen and Zechman on the media’s ideologyby digby
Tonight’s Virtually Speaking should be interesting.

A discussion beginning from Prof. Jay Rosen’s PressThink post “Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right: On the Actual Ideology of the American Press” and Stuart Zechman’s response in commentary.

Rosen, of course, is one of the premiere press critics in the nation and Zechman has developed a an intriguing thesis about ideological centrism. This could be enlightening.

You can tune in here, 9PM edt, 6PM pdt.

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