Month: May 2011

Brinksmanship For Dummies

by digby

It’s one thing for the Republicans and centrist Democrats to defy their voters. But is there anyone on the planet who believes hey are really going to defy these guys?

Sixty-two business groups, including the American Gas Association, the Telecommunications Industry Association, and the National Association of Manufacturers, urged congressional leaders on Wednesday to raise the federal debt ceiling amid fears that political brinkmanship could lead to another financial crisis.

“Raising the statutory debt limit is critical to ensuring global investors’ confidence in the creditworthiness of the United States,” the groups wrote to Speaker of the House John Boehner (R., Ohio), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.). “With economic growth slowly picking up we cannot afford to jeopardize that growth with the massive spike in borrowing costs that would result if we defaulted on our obligations. It is critically important that the United States stands fully behind its legal obligations.”

Treasury has already taken steps to avoid defaulting on its obligations, but officials believe it will run out of maneuvers on Aug. 2. They have asked Congress to raise the ceiling as soon as possible, but many Republicans and some Democrats want spending cuts to be part of any deal to raise the limit.

According to Village rules it’s ok for the markets if these ideologues run out the string on the debt limit to the very last minute so they can use it to check off items on their screw-the-people wish list, but if the Democrats just say no and refuse to negotiate for something they know the other side has already agreed to do, it’s irresponsible and dangerous. But the least the Democrats could do is get something in return. Are they asking for anything aside from what both sides already intend to do in return for slashing spending on their own constituents? I haven’t heard of anything.

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Watching the details

by digby

Here’s a tax expert criticizing Jon Stewart for being obtuse about the president’s vow to cut “tax expenditures” as a way of raising taxes. Stewart wondered what side of the ledger this really falls on:

You had a lot of fun with President Obama’s pledge to make “spending reductions in the tax code”:

What??? The tax code isn’t where we spend. It’s where we collect. … You managed to talk about a tax hike as a spending reduction. Can we afford that and the royalty checks you’ll have to send to George Orwell?

Jon, meet me at camera 3.

I know you say it’s fake news, but when you riff on policy, people take you seriously. And, with respect, in this case, you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.

For 40 years, tax geeks like me have been trying to explain that there’s a boatload of spending programs masquerading as tax cuts, and they’re multiplying. Their number increased by almost 60 percent between 1987 and 2007.

The fact that pols can claim credit for “tax cuts” (good) rather than “spending” (bad) has made them irresistible to legislators of both parties.

This is correct. But Stewart is right about the Orwellian language and there’s reason for it — they’ve been hiding government spending in the tax code for several decades. But that’s because the Republicans made government spending a dirty word.

This also shows how phony the “fight” between Grover Norquist and Tom Coburn over Coburn’s willingness to entertain “raising taxes” through cutting the “tax expenditures” really is. What Coburn is calling a brave sacrifice and Norquist is calling a betrayal of conservative principles is actually just another spending cut. Since when are they against that?

Here’s how the Center for American Progress describes tax expenditures:

Tax expenditures are, quite simply, spending programs implemented through the tax code. These programs give people and businesses special tax credits, deductions, exclusions, exemptions, deferrals, and preferential rates in support of various government policies. Some of these programs help people save for retirement, buy a home, or pay for college; others encourage companies to invest in green energy technologies or build nuclear power plants; they even subsidize corporations that drill for oil or purchase real estate; and much more.

The government uses both tax expenditures and direct spending to support its policies. Direct spending is when the government takes taxpayer dollars and gives them to others to spend for a specific purpose. The government uses tax expenditures to accomplish the same goals as direct spending, but it transfers money by lowering taxes for an individual or company instead of giving them the money.

Consider this example to see the similarities between direct spending and tax expenditures: The government wants to create a program that provides $10,000 to every individual who weatherizes his or her home. The government can deliver the subsidy in one of three ways: (1) cut a check for $10,000, (2) create a tax expenditure like a refundable credit worth $10,000, or (3) use a combination of direct spending and tax expenditures. In all three cases the individual who weatherizes his or her home receives $10,000 from the government.

What makes tax expenditures different from other forms of government spending?

The government uses tax expenditures and direct spending for the same purposes, but tax expenditures receive different treatment in two key ways. Most tax expenditures are not subject to the same annual appropriations process as other forms of spending. This means they are less likely to be scrutinized.

Second, tax expenditures appear to be tax cuts instead of spending because they transfer funds to businesses and individuals through tax subsidies. It is therefore generally easier to win votes for tax expenditures than direct spending. And members of Congress often pursue their priorities through tax expenditures as a result, even if direct spending would be more effective and cost less.

And there’s real money there, a trillion a year or so. And I think everyone knows that a whole lot of it is in the form of corporate loopholes that are the result of money changing hands on Capitol Hill. Liberals would be happy to see these go and some of them might. Unfortunately, the pending “deal” is that corporations will get their rates slashed in return. The idea seems to be that there will be more revenue when all is said and done. Do you believe that?

I just don’t see any politicians signing on to higher taxes for corporations in an election year in which one side is braying like donkeys about how American corporations pay the highest taxes in the world. Moreover corporate accountants are capable of adding up the numbers and figuring out if they are paying more kin taxes — and I haven’t seen the kind of civic mindedness coming from that sector lately that would lead me to believe they will stand for it. No, their taxes will not go up.

The tax expert says that there are other sorts of tax subsidies that are rip-offs as well:

There are lots of chicken s**t tax subsidies. The mortgage interest deduction is basically a housing voucher for rich people. Those who really need help get bupkes. The tax-free health insurance you get at work is heavily subsidized by the tax code, but those with low incomes rarely get health coverage and, if they do, the subsidy is worth little or nothing.

Theoretically, I could agree with that. There are good reasons take a hard look at both of those subsidies. But the idea that they will touch the housing subsidy in the middle of this ongoing housing slump isn’t likely. And the health care subsidy is one of the cornerstones of President Obama’s health care reforms.

There are quite a few tax expenditures which were enacted to give businesses incentives to do things they wouldn’t normally spend the money to do. Energy is one of those areas:

The exponential growth of these programs is particularly evident in the energy sector where more than half of all energy programs are now funded through tax expenditures. The number of energy tax expenditure line items grew from 12 to 37 between 2000 and 2007, and spending in these areas increased from $3 billion to more than $10 billion.

Obviously, getting rid of the sickeningly profitable oil companies is a good place to start. They are more than capable of funding anything directly and the government should force them to do it through regulation. But that’s not the only kind of “energy subsidies” that are out there. There are a whole bunch of infrastructure upgrades that are funded through this mechanism. So if they get rid of those subsidies the likely result is that many of the companies just won’t bother doing the upgrades. I suspect that many of the “incentive” programs that have been put on the books in lieu of regulations over the past few decades will end up on the scrap heap.

There are many tax expenditures that are giveaways to business. There are also many tax expenditures that are the only way liberals could get any kind of government support for average Americans and necessary public programs over the past 25 years of the GOP tax and spending jihad. It’s really important to differentiate between them. I have no doubt that Tom Coburn is perfectly willing to eliminate the Earned Income Tax Credit or Making Work Pay and call it a tax hike. You could probably twist Grover Norquist’s arm on that one too. But when it comes to eliminating a valuable corporate subsidy, I’d guess he won’t be as likely to sign on.

It’s obvious that this has become an excellent way to give lucrative goodies to wealthy contributors and lobbyists. But it’s important to remember that most of this came about because the Republicans demagogued government programs to the point that it became almost impossible to enact one straight out. Combined with the Democrats DLC experiment to unleash “market forces” for liberal goals and you have a quarter century’s worth of liberal initiatives caught up in this idiotic funding method. There is great danger in throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I think it would be just terrific if they took the good programs out of the “tax expenditure” category and made them directly evaluated and appropriated. That’s how government is supposed to work. However, call me cynical if you will, I just don’t see that happening in the near term. The most likely scenario is that the corporations will unleash their lobbyists to ensure that they don’t pay a penny more in taxes at the very least. (I’m betting they end up paying less) and that nobody has the nerve to touch the big money subsidies like the home mortgage deduction in an election year. So that leaves a few minor industry subsidies that have outlived their usefulness and maybe one or two big ticket items for show in exchange for getting rid of programs like the EITC or important subsidies for alternative energy.

In a perfect world they could work this out so that we preserve what’s important and get rid of what isn’t. But our political system is so dysfunctional and corrupt at the moment that it’s hard to see how that happens. I would keep a very sharp eye on the details. And certainly, the Democrats should fight like hell not to lower those corporate rates until it’s demonstrated that closing those “loopholes” will raise the revenues they promise. Verify, then trust.

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Keeping Them Hungry

by digby

This story about the Koch brothers buying teaching slots at public universities for conservative ideologues is shocking, but only in its crudeness. The wealthy have endowed Universities for years for their own purposes, although I doubt many of them had the nerve to totally flout the normal academic conventions by insisting that they get to appoint their own people. And Universities normally would not have allowed such strings to be attached because they cared about their academic integrity.

But a subtler approach has been used for quite sometime. I wrote about this one three years ago at Our Future:

Paul Krugman points to an article that should send chills down the backs of good progressives everywhere:

Ayn Rand’s novels of headstrong entrepreneurs’ battles against convention enjoy a devoted following in business circles. While academia has failed to embrace Rand, calling her philosophy simplistic, schools have agreed to teach her works in exchange for a donation. The charitable arm of BB&T Corp., a banking company, pledged $1 million to the University of North Carolina Charlotte in 2005 and obtained an agreement that Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged” would become required reading for students. Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, and Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina, say they also took grants and agreed to teach Rand.

I have written about the pernicious effect of Rand before, and noted that the Ayn Rand Institute provides nearly half a million free copies to American high schools to indoctrinate teen-agers into romantic selfishness (thus validating their natural adolescent tendencies as being acceptable adult behavior.) But this is truly beyond the pale. Corporations, which have very good reasons to train young people into an ethos that extols the alleged virtues of heroic captains of industry and their lonely fight to retain freedom in the face of left wing collectivism, should not be buying academic curriculum of any kind. The very idea of academic freedom is that the academics decide what to teach, not the government or the community or especially some company who wants to promulgate a puerile political philosophy designed to make people believe that selfishness is a virtue. That it’s in the form of a very bad romance novel makes it even worse. (To those romance novel aficionados out there, please note that I said “bad” romance novel. It’s not a slam at the whole genre.) The Ayn Rand Institute, ever creative, has come up with a new marketing scheme to promote the book. Sensing a change in the zeitgeist, and seeking to take advantage of what they perceive as this opening in academe, they are pushing the anti-religious side of objectivism.

Yaron Brook, the executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, a nonprofit organization in Irvine, California, that promotes objectivism, said some professors are re-evaluating Rand. “We’re definitely seeing more of an interest in the academic world,” Brook said. He said he senses a softening of opposition from academics and sees more conferences and articles about Rand. “Ayn Rand has a kind of absolutist ethics,” Brook said. “She believes in right or wrong, good and evil, but based on secular principles, not religious principles, and I think there’s an appeal for that now.”

Very, very clever. As for its moral dimension, objectivism simply holds that it’s moral to be completely selfish and rapacious. Indeed, it is immoral not to be. That would seem to be something of a difficult sell in an age of greedy sub-prime mortgage brokers and billionaire hedge fund operators, but you have to give them credit for perseverance in the face of abject philosophical failure. It’s hard to believe that any academic worth his or her salt would take this line of argument seriously, but apparently the lure of big money is enough to make them consider it:

Allison’s BB&T, based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in March pledged $2 million to establish the first U.S. chair in the study of objectivism, at the University of Texas at Austin. That school and 27 others have accepted an aggregate $30 million from the bank’s foundation in the last decade. “These gifts are really about the study of capitalism from a moral perspective and all we want is to make Rand part of the dialogue,” said Bob Denham, a spokesman for BB&T, the parent of Branch Banking & Trust Co. The BB&T Charitable Foundation made a five-year, $1 million commitment to the University of North Carolina Charlotte in January 2005 after a dinner meeting between Allison and Claude Lilly, then dean of UNC Charlotte’s business school. The grant agreement described “Atlas Shrugged” as “required reading” in a course about the fundamentals of capitalism.

This is the real agenda. It’s not about literature or about philosophy. The point of this is to indoctrinate young business majors into the Rand philosophy, which is a perverted and radical form of capitalism that bears no relationship to the way the world really works. (In fact, it’s real agenda may be to indoctrinate young people into believing that overpaid executives actually deserve to make hundreds of times the average worker’s pay while driving the company into the ground.

So now that the plutocrats managed to make taxes the equivalent of the black plague and then produced an economy that only benefits themselves, the starving public beast has no choice but to do whatever they want if it wants to stay alive.

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Cruel and Unusual Budget

by digby

Oh my goodness. It looks like the Republicans may have awakened certain members of the Catholic Church to who they really are:

Dear Mr. Speaker, We congratulate you on the occasion of your commencement address to The Catholic University of America. It is good for Catholic universities to host and engage the thoughts of powerful public figures, even Catholics such as yourself who fail to recognize (whether out of a lack of awareness or dissent) important aspects of Catholic teaching. We write in the hope that this visit will reawaken your familiarity with the teachings of your Church on matters of faith and morals as they relate to governance.

Mr. Speaker, your voting record is at variance from one of the Church’s most ancient moral teachings. From the apostles to the present, the Magisterium of the Church has insisted that those in power are morally obliged to preference the needs of the poor. Your record in support of legislation to address the desperate needs of the poor is among the worst in Congress. This fundamental concern should have great urgency for Catholic policy makers. Yet, even now, you work in opposition to it. The 2012 budget you shepherded to passage in the House of Representatives guts long-established protections for the most vulnerable members of society. It is particularly cruel to pregnant women and children, gutting Maternal and Child Health grants and slashing $500 million from the highly successful Women Infants and Children nutrition program. When they graduate from WIC at age 5, these children will face a 20% cut in food stamps. The House budget radically cuts Medicaid and effectively ends Medicare. It invokes the deficit to justify visiting such hardship upon the vulnerable, while it carves out $3 trillion in new tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy.
read on…

It calls GOP policies anti-life.

You know who else calls himself a Catholic? Paul Ryan. (Don’t tell him about what his idol Ayn rand would have to say about that.) And some Catholics seem to be under the misapprehension that he shares their religious values.

This should be interesting. The American Catholic bishops long ago decided to make abortion and contraception their only focus. And it resulted in an unholy alliance with a Political Party that would have called Jesus a communist. But Ryan’s plan is so cruel and heartless that it seems they couldn’t ignore it any longer. I have little hope that any of these so-called Christian politicians will change their minds. (Ryan’s real religion is Randism, Boehner’s is golf.) But it could present a bit of a quandry for some Catholics of conscience.

h/t to Think Progress

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Simply The Best

by digby

A while back I wrote about the recent media tour of James B Stewart, the author a recent book called Tangled Web: How American Society is Drowning in Lies about the culture of lying in America. I commented because this is a person who knows a lot about lies since his book Blood Sport was filled with them. I quoted this passage from Conason and Lyons’ The Hunting of the President:

[Anthony] Lewis compared D’Amato’s performance to that of Senator Joseph R McCarthy during the anti-communist witch hunts of fifties. But Lewis noted one major difference. “On Whitewater the press seemed all too eager an accomplice of the accusers…

Still other celebrated journalists continued to predict the first lady’s probable indictment as the election year began, most notably Pulitzer Prize winning author James B Stewart. Published by Simon and Shuster in 1996 to the accompaniment of a multimedia publicity campaign, Stewart’s book Blood Sport claims to be the inside story of “the president and first lady as they really are.” Set forth as a sweeping narrative, it includes dramatized scenes and imaginary dialog purporting to represent the innermost thoughts of individuals whom the author had in some cases never met, much less interviewed.

“Scenes that Mr Stewart could never have observed first hand,” complained New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani, “are recounted from an omniscient viewpoint. Mr. Stewart rarely identifies the sources for such scenes not does he take into account the subjectivity and oftens self-serving nature of memory. The reader never knows whether the quotes Mr Stewart puts into the mouth of an individual… are from a first or second hand source.”

It would appear The Times is quite forgiving of such journalistic malpractice. Perhaps the “lying epidemic” has becomes so pervasive they don’t even care anymore:

Mr. Stewart will take the slot vacated by Joe Nocera, who joined the Times Op-Ed page last month. In a memo to the staff, Larry Ingrassia, business editor of The Times, summed up Mr. Stewart’s credentials, writing, “Jim is one of the best in the business.” Mr. Stewart shared a Pulitzer for explanatory reporting in 1988 when he was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal for his coverage with Daniel Hertzberg of Martin Siegel, an investment banker charged with insider trading, and the immediate aftermath of the stock market crash of Oct. 19, 1987. He was named page one editor of The Journal in 1988 and stayed with the paper until 1992 when he left to help found SmartMoney…James B. Stewart, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter and author of several best-sellers on the business world, will become a columnist for the Business Day section of The New York Times, the paper announced on Tuesday.

They mention his books about Milkin and Disney back in the 80s. Oddly no mention of Blood Sport.

He should have a lot to add to the coverage. You won’t know if it’s made up or not, but it’s sure to be entertaining.

h/t to attaturk

Welching

by digby

Last December there were a whole bunch of liberals who were caught between a rock and a hard place as the president and the Republicans made a deal to extend the Bush tax cuts in exchange for extending Unemployment Insurance until 2012, thus taking it off the table as a bargaining chip every few months.

Guess what?

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp and Senate Finance Committee Ranking Republican Orrin Hatch have introduced a bill that, they say, would improve the unemployment insurance (UI) system by “forward funding” federal UI payments to states. That sounds good and, in fact, “forward funding” is a worthy goal, as explained below. But, their bill actually would let states take federal funds that are supposed to help the long-term unemployed and use them for other purposes. That not only would hurt some of the most vulnerable Americans but also would slow the economic recovery.

“Forward funding” refers to the practice of putting aside enough money in state UI trust funds in good times to pay for the benefits needed in hard times. The families that receive UI benefits then boost the economy by spending the money when consumer demand is weak. As we explained in a recent report, Congress needs to enact legislation to give states a framework to restore forward-funding before the next recession. Without such legislation, most states likely will enter the next recession without the money needed to pay benefits. Senate Bill 386, introduced earlier this year, provides the sort of framework that states need.

The Camp-Hatch proposal would do something very different, and damaging. It would break a deal the President and Congressional leaders negotiated late last year in which lawmakers extended jobless benefits for one year for the long-term unemployed—those out of work for more than 26 weeks. That assistance is especially important for the long-term unemployed because states’ unemployment benefits typically end after 26 weeks, but — with the job market still very weak — more than 4 in 10 unemployed workers are not able to find jobs within that time.

Surely the Republicans wouldn’t just blatantly break this deal would they? And there’s no way that the Democrats would let them, right? Yeah …

I honestly don’t know. But with the unemployment numbers stuck at around 9%, the housing market shakier than ever and growth looking anemic at best, it’s a very bad idea, not to mention cruel and dishonest. But get ready, they are going to argue that the private sector is going gangbusters now and there’s nothing stopping these lazy sods from getting a job. It’s just how they roll.

They will, by the way, do the same thing with any other “concessions” in the next Grand Bargain the first chance they get. Their post-modern politics doesn’t acknowledge the concepts of hypocrisy or intellectual consistency. Keeping their end of a bargain would hardly break any of their rules.

Now the Democrats could certainly cry foul and I would guess there will be some mewling from the usual suspects. But if it’s expedient to ditch this old hostage to “save” a new one, I could see them letting it go. I’m guessing they’ll trot out Planned Parenthood again. It’s become the perpetual damsel tied to the railroad tracks in these negotiations.

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Freeloading

by digby

John Stossell:

Dear Mr. Stossel,

I am a veteran who is rated and compensated as 100% disabled.

Do you, and Libertarians in general view me as a “freeloader;” and should I not be compensated according to your views of this situation?

Like your show, and I am truly curious. While I register as a Democrat, I’m probably a Libertarian at heart.

Regards,

Stephen Chase

I responded:

No, Stephen, if you are 100% disabled, I do not consider you a freeloader, I consider you: compensated.

Of course, the VA is another clumsy government bureaucracy, and I have little faith they make good judgments when deciding who needs help, and who freeloads. Today’s Washington Post calls the agency “obstructionist, antiquated and overwhelmed.”

Right. It’s fine to “compensate” only the people who deserve it. And the best way to determine that would be to privatize and introduce the profit motive which magically cleanses the system of corruption and creates a foolproof method of determining social value. You know, like the way the insurance industry works today:

An investigation by the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations showed that health insurers WellPoint Inc., UnitedHealth Group and Assurant Inc. canceled the coverage of more than 20,000 people, allowing the companies to avoid paying more than $300 million in medical claims over a five-year period.

It also found that policyholders with breast cancer, lymphoma and more than 1,000 other conditions were targeted for rescission and that employees were praised in performance reviews for terminating the policies of customers with expensive illnesses.

“No one can defend, and I certainly cannot defend, the practice of canceling coverage after the fact,” said Rep. Michael C. Burgess (R-Tex.), a member of the committee. “There is no acceptable minimum to denying coverage after the fact.”

The executives — Richard A. Collins, chief executive of UnitedHealth’s Golden Rule Insurance Co.; Don Hamm, chief executive of Assurant Health and Brian Sassi, president of consumer business for WellPoint Inc., parent of Blue Cross of California — were courteous and matter-of-fact in their testimony.

But they would not commit to limiting rescissions to only policyholders who intentionally lie or commit fraud to obtain coverage, a refusal that met with dismay from legislators on both sides of the political aisle.

Of course, the expensive veterans who the companies find ways of not compensating would have recourse. They could always go to a competing company and ask them to review their claim and “compensate” them instead. See, no need for regulations or bureaucrats. Just good old fashioned capitalists working hard to provide a necessary service at a fair price.

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44 Million Uninsured

by digby

The Kaiser Foundation has analyzed the new proposals to cut Medicaid and it’s pretty grim:

Projected federal spending on Medicaid for the 10-year period 2012 to 2021 would fall by $1.4 trillion, a 34 percent decline. By 2021, states would receive $243 billion less annually in federal Medicaid money than they would under current law, a 44 percent reduction.

The effect on enrollment in state Medicaid programs could vary widely. By 2021, between 31 million and 44 million fewer people nationally would have Medicaid coverage under the House Budget Plan relative to expected enrollment under current law, the analysis finds, examining three possible scenarios using different assumptions about how states might respond to lower federal funding. Most of those people, given their low incomes and few options for other coverage, would end up uninsured.

The House Budget Plan also would affect health centers, hospitals and safety‐net facilities that serve low-income and uninsured people and rely heavily on Medicaid revenues. By 2021, hospitals could see reductions in Medicaid funding of between 31 percent and 38 percent annually, or as much as $84.3 billion, under the plan compared with projected funding under current law. The reductions would come at a time when millions more people would lack coverage, increasing the potential demand for uncompensated hospital care.

As I have written before, I have always assumed that the ACA is the one inviolate priority for President Obama. But Medicaid seems to be one area where there might be some play, whether the changes happen under the Act or prior to the Act taking effect (which amounts to the same thing.)I figured they’d start whittling away at that once he was out of office but it appears to be much too tempting a target for the government slashers in both parties and the White house hasn’t taken it off the table so I’m not sure what’s going to happen.

This is a horrifying development for anyone who cares about the poor (and I guess that’s now just a few old hippies and a UCC pastor or two.) And in case anyone has failed to notice, there are a lot more of them being created every day by this moribund economy.

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“He’s said two very different things”

by digby

Andrea Mitchell and Stu Rothenberg were handwringing about the debt ceiling this morning. But Rothenberg, at least, did note something that nobody else ever seems to recognize:

Speaker Boehner has said two very different things. He has said that they won’t raise the debt limit unless there is corresponding debt reduction. And he’s also said that absolutely we’re going to raise the debt limit, we’re going to abide by our obligations.

No analysis of what that really means, however. (That his threats are meaningless.)

Mitchell also missed the point and went on with the GOP set-up on “conceding” Medicare cuts as part of the debt ceiling negotiations.

Mitchell: You’ve had mixed signals from Eric Cantor, and from head of Ways and Means, Dave Camp, and importantly, from Paul Ryan, about whether Medicare and the big deal is or is not part of these negotiations.

Rothenberg: I was talking to a Republican earlier this morning. He said to me that his members, that is Republican candidates who have been elected to congress, have been getting hammered for weeks and weeks and months on debt and this is what Republican voters really care about, it is debt and spending and deficits. The party has to maintain a very hard line position on this.

That’s a talking point. And it’s being carried by all the Republicans who want the country to believe that John Boehner simply has no choice but to blow up the country unless he gets some serious concessions from the Democrats on raising the debt limit. Evidently we are all supposed to accept that the hard core GOP base is running the country despite the fact that they account for only about 25% of all voters.

If the Republicans really are so nuts that they are willing to destroy this already fragile economy, even against the wishes of their Wall Street overlords, to appease a bunch of Fox-addled fools, then they should be called on it and held responsible for what happens. This is rule by a terrorist minority and if they are given this kind of power there will be no end to it. If, on the other hand, the entire political class of both parties sees this as another opportunity to deliver for Wall Street and corporate America in both the short term and the long term with these draconian budgets then we have a different problem.

It’s very hard to believe that the Democrats are such handicapped negotiators. Even a child would recognize that the Republicans are the ones with the political challenge on their hands and all the Democrats have to do is sit back and let the GOP answer to Wall Street’s short term angst. I don’t believe they are so stupid they don’t see this. There’s a reason that the Democrats are allowing this to play out the way it is. They want cuts too — it’s just a matter of which ones.

Why they feel the need to allow the Republicans to pretend to be driving that bus is anybody’s guess. It won’t buy them a single vote and it will make their own base feel either sour or defensive. And they look like losers to the people who don’t pay attention to the details.

This is the worst kabuki I’ve ever seen. To be honest, I didn’t think any of them would have the nerve to go through with it. It’s so crude and obvious that it’s excruciating to watch. And think about this: it isn’t even the big kahuna. It’s very likely they are going to save the real “entitlement” and “deficit reduction” fight for 2012 budget battle.

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Bloggeury

by digby

This is nice. Thanks!

They are announcing the winners tomorrow at a ceremony in DC. Since I’ll be in Santa Monica, I’m guessing that I didn’t win so congratulations to the blogger who did. It’s a good thing for blogging to be categorized as a specific form of opinion writing. It’s its own thing: interactive, stream of consciousness, conversational, intensely immediate. It’s nice to see it recognized for the distinct type of writing that it is.

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