Month: May 2011

Going all in with Ryan

by digby

I knew they were crazy but not this crazy:

From:Reince Priebus, RNC Chairman
Subject:Support the Ryan Budget

Dear —,

Our Republican Members of Congress need to know conservative grassroots leaders like you have their backs in the ongoing 2012 budget battle. I’m asking our Party’s strongest supporters to sign the Republican National Committee’s “Support The Ryan Budget“online petition today to let our GOP leaders know you back their efforts to cut government spending and reduce our massive national debt.

And after you sign the petition, I hope you will take a moment to make a secure online contribution of $25, $50, $100 or more to help elect principled, conservative Republican candidates from the county courthouse to the White House in the 2011-2012 election cycle.

It’s critical you make your voice heard today. Representative Paul Ryan and House Republicans have courageously and boldly done what President Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats refused to do: Present and pass a serious 2012 budget that slashes spending and puts our nation on the path to prosperity.

Of course, the Democrats reacted with outrage. For the past two weeks they have sent their leftist allies and Astroturf protesters to town halls to try to batter and smear Republicans for actually putting forward a credible plan that cuts spending by $6.2 trillion, reins in our spiraling debt, reforms our tax code and protects retirement security plans for both current beneficiaries and future generations.

Americans are tired of the Democrats playing games with our nation’s future. A recent USA Today/Gallup Poll shows Americans believe Republicans in Congress would do a better job than Democrats in dealing with the budget.

Republicans know we have a moral duty to pass a responsible budget that addresses our nation’s fiscal woes. While Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats have made the calculation that whistling past the graveyard is a good political strategy, Republicans have offered real leadership that stops Washington from spending money our country doesn’t have and lays the foundation for long-term prosperity and job growth.

So please take this opportunity to let Representative Ryan and all our Republican Members of Congress know you are behind their efforts to save our country from debt collapse and economic ruin by signing the RNC’s “Support The Ryan Budget” Petition today.

Sincerely,
Reince Priebus
Chairman, Republican National Committee

I signed it. You should too. I think these Republicans should definitely stick to their guns. No deals. Ryan or nothing at all!

But people should really think twice about the fund raising. They’re going to need every last penny if Ryan and the GOP have their way::

A 54-year-old today will have to save an additional $182,000 in their IRA or 401(k) before he or she retires just to pay for the House Republican plan to eliminate Medicare, an analysis released today by U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-CA) found.

The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) estimated that individuals born in 1957 would need $182,000 by the time they retire at 65 to pay the additional costs imposed by the Republican plan if they live to 84. The analysis was included in a letter to Rep. Miller.

“Under the Republican plan, seniors will go into debt. They will be forced to sell their homes that they spent a lifetime paying off. And they will have to rely on their children just to pay for basic medical care,” said Miller. “This is not what anyone would envision as a dignified retirement.”

Now that I think about it I think I can still spare a couple of bucks. After you sign their petition, maybe you’ll want to contribute a dollar or two as well: StopPaulRyan

h/t to ms

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Reigniting the GWOT

by digby

Here’s an interesting perspective that should give the media some pause as they start to sound like Chevy Chase announcing “Francisco Franco is still dead” with this relentless coverage of the bin Laden operation:

As Americans celebrate the death of Osama bin Laden, there is a risk we will exaggerate his importance in death as we did in life.

While bin Laden presided over al-Qaeda’s rise in the 1990s and early 2000s, just as important, he presided over its growing irrelevance. In recent years, al-Qaeda, while retaining its ability to wreak havoc, has become an increasingly marginal actor on the Arab stage.

The Arab Spring, particularly the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, discredited the notion that real change could come only through violence. In 18 days of demonstrations, Egypt’s protesters were able to do something few had thought possible — peacefully overthrow a repressive, hated regime.

In the early weeks of the uprisings, al-Qaeda remained quiet, seemingly unsure how, or even if, it could spin events to its advantage. The protesters, after all, were not calling for the establishment of an Islamic state, attacks on the United States, or ending the peace treaty with Israel. They were calling for freedom and democracy.

It wasn’t always this way. The attacks of 9/11 seemed, at least for a time, an unlikely victory for a group that few Americans had ever heard of before. Al-Qaeda had launched a decisive blow against the world’s superpower. In so doing, it established itself as a leader of resistance and rode the wave of Arab anti-Americanism.

In elevating al-Qaeda to a threat to a Western civilization — something it never was — the Bush administration fell into a trap, allowing Middle East extremists to define its policy agenda. The Iraq war, Guantanamo Bay and the U.S. use of torture were all, to varying degrees, justified as necessary to win the war on terror. These distortions in American policy led to distortions in the Arab response. In a time when many Arabs sympathized with bin Laden’s aims if not his methods, al-Qaeda managed to gain mainstream credibility and popularity.

According to the Pew Global Attitudes Project, in 2003, confidence in Osama bin Laden reached a high of 61% in Jordan, 59% in Indonesia and 72% in the Palestinian territories.

Though al-Qaeda could destroy, however, it could not build. In its unwillingness and inability to offer anything resembling a constructive vision for change, al-Qaeda gradually descended back into irrelevance. Its gruesome attacks in places such as Jordan and Iraq alienated supporters. Meanwhile, the group’s operational capabilities suffered under unrelenting U.S. pressure, with many of its leaders captured or killed.

Today, ordinary Arabs are fighting and dying for something — freedom — bin Laden and his followers would take away if they had the chance. For the first time in decades, the future of the Arab world seems to offer genuine promise. By 2011, support for bin Laden plummeted to all-time lows. In Jordan and Palestine, the drop was a striking 43 and 38 percentage points, respectively.

There’s more, not all of which I agree with. But it does point up the fact that bin Laden was already a fading figure in the middle east and it probably doesn’t do anyone any good to elevate him once again. Certainly, phony demagoguery of Pakistan doesn’t seem like a good idea. And this afternoon’s drone attack allegedly targeting the American Al-Awlaki for assassination in Yemen and this “hot on the heels of Al-Alawi”looks like a ratcheting up of the GWOT at the time the other revolutionary model is gaining steam. Maybe it doesn’t matter, but getting more and more bellicose in the wake of assassinating bin Laden could easily change the dynamic in the wrong direction.

I’m sure we’re going to be seeing more of Chris Matthews oogling the SEALs and everyone going on endlessly about America’s big comeback as a badass superpower. That’s just how Americans roll. But contrary to Palin’s view that we need to put the bad guys’ head on pikes to prove that we won’t be trifled with, this extended, self-congratulatory victory lap and bloviating saber-rattling is “sending a message” that the US is reigniting a war that was already winding down. And it’s at a time when the people of the middle east were in the process of dealing with the fundamental problems that spawned it themselves.

They’re breathlessly going on about Al Qaeda in Yemen “targeting the homeland” right now on CNN. Looks like we’re back in business.

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Taser Friday — “he only did what everyone else does”

by digby

They’re harmless …. unless they use it on each other:

A Boynton Beach police officer who has a history of using a Taser improperly has been arrested for the same offense, this time near a fellow officer, according to a police report.

David L. Coffey, 30, was charged Thursday with improper exhibition of a dangerous weapon or firearm and culpable negligence. He has been placed on administrative leave with pay pending the outcome of an internal affairs investigation, police spokeswoman Stephanie Slater said.

According to the arrest report, Coffey, while on duty, sneaked up behind fellow officer Rachel Loy on April 2, placed his department-issued M-26 Taser behind her ear and activated it for a few seconds. Coffey told Loy that he had done so to get “back at her for an alleged incident that occurred over a month ago,” the report stated. Loy is now being treated for hearing loss.

During the investigation this week, Loy told a detective that she and Coffey share a “working relationship” and are not personal friends. She felt that what Coffey did was “harmful, but was very concerned for retaliation and problems with her professional reputation.”

Another officer, who witnessed the incident, told the detective that Coffey had placed the Taser 2 to 3 inches from Loy’s ear and activated it, according to the report. While being interrogated Thursday, Coffey said “he was only test-firing the Taser and that he only did what everyone else does,” the report stated.

This isn’t Coffey’s first Taser- related incident. In 2007, he was fired by the Boynton Beach Police Department after an investigation found he attacked a suspected intoxicated driver in a holding cell and later, after the man had been handcuffed, stunned him four times with a Taser.

An arbitrator later determined that Coffey could get his job back and he was rehired in December 2008.

That’s the type of officer who should always get a second chance. Obviously, he learned from his mistake.

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Silver Linings

by digby

C-Span’s web site reports:

The number of unemployed persons, at 13.7 million, changed little in April. The unemployment rate edged up from 8.8 to 9.0 percent over the month but was .8 percentage point lower than in November.

That’s good. It’s also lower than it was during the height of the Great Depression. So it’s actually good news.

Perhaps more pertinently, the main reason the unemployment rate went up is because of all the public employees being laid off because of budget cuts.

I’m beginning to think that people got the famous Keynes quote wrong. It should be “in the long run we’ll all be morons.”

Read Krugman’s column today for the full rundown of the non-crises our political elites seem intent upon “solving” in lieu of the real one. I’ve decided to write a Broadway musical based on the concept. I’m going to call it Fiddlin!

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If Putin rears his ugly head…

by digby

… the Republicans know who they want in charge.

I missed last night’s junior varsity GOP debate (which means that Newt and Bachman are on the A-team, btw) so I haven’t heard their foreign policy agenda for 2012. But this is downright scary:

The GOP respondents in the Gallup poll say that if their issue is business and the economy their man is Romney. Okay, understandable, given his background (though I guess that means they’re going with someone who fires people to make a buck for himslef.)

And if it’s moral values, their man is Huckabee. I get that. He’s a preacher, and sometimes there’s a connection there (alas, sometimes not.)

And if it’s foreign policy, their chosen expert candidate is…. Jon Huntsman, Ambassador to China and someone with actual foreign policy experience? Nah, he gets 1%. Newt Gingrich, experienced DC pol? He gets 10%.

The choice is Sarah Palin, because she can see Russia from her house.

I’m guessing this explains it:

Behold the cats of war

by digby

You dog lovers may have something to be proud of with your Navy SEAL dogs and all, but Slate reports on the highly secret military “CATS” program, which has, apparently been going on for quite some time.

The CATS program originated during World War II and was instrumental in the invasion of Normandy.

Who knew? Today the military can hardly function without them:

A still from an unseen episode of 24, never aired due to objections from top military officials that it jeopardized national security.

This explains a lot. My cat does the same thing, which confirms my suspicion that he knows a lot more than he’s letting on.

read on…
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Mandates and Medicaid

by digby

Paul Ryan on the individual mandate in his Medicare “reform” plan:

Q: If Medicare becomes a voucher program, would you require seniors to purchase private insurance and if so isn’t that an individual mandate? If you will not require them to purchase insurance how do you propose to prevent a situation where the costs of uninsured seniors is very expensive and gets passed on to me as a private policy holder? […] RYAN: Its mandate works no different than how the current Medicare law works today, which is you just select from a wide range of different plans. It literally would be like Medicare Advantage…

It’s also an albatross around the necks of every House Republican. The Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee pretty much declared Ryan’s plan dead in the water and clearly wants to move on. but they went so all-in that it’s hard to see how they can.

He also acknowledged that their plan to repeal health care reform wasn’t going anywhere (and that the sun will come up tomorrow.) But he isn’t giving up on it altogether, oh no:

Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, acknowledged Thursday that Republican plans to repeal President Barack Obama’s signature health care law were “dead.” Instead, Camp predicted, the GOP would turn its focus to overturning the most controversial portion of that legislation: the mandate requiring individuals to buy insurance.

Oopsie. Looks like Paul Ryan’s plan to turn Medicare into an individual mandate could cause a bit of a problem with this one too. The Ryan plan is the gift that keeps on giving for Democrats if they choose to run with it. Every last one of them voted for it and they can’t run from it.

On the other hand, as predicted, there is one program they are probably all going to be able to agree upon slashing to the bone: Medicaid. Ezra Klein writes today:

There are two reasons Medicaid is more vulnerable than Medicare. The first is who it serves. Medicaid goes to two groups of people: the poor and the disabled. Most of the program’s enrollees are kids from poor families, though most of the program’s money is spent on the small fraction of beneficiaries who are disabled and/or elderly. These groups have one thing in common, however: They’re politically powerless.

The second is who pays. Medicare is a federal program. Medicaid is a state-federal match, and it kills states during recessions, as unlike the federal government, states can’t run deficits, and so they find themselves with increased costs because they have more people in need but decreased revenues. So there are a lot of governors — particularly GOP governors — straining under overstretched state budgets who’d like a way out of their fiscal crisis that doesn’t include raising taxes, and there are a lot of federal legislators who’d like to save money without having seniors mounting protest marches outside their office, and Medicaid begins to look like an answer to everyone’s problem. “You can shift costs to states so they can be the bad guys while the federal policymakers pretend they didn’t hurt anybody,” says Bob Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

I don’t know how this affects the mechanism to expand Medicaid under Health Care Reform but even under the best case scenario (that the dollars are already mandated under the bill and the president refuses to sign anything that changes that), if these cuts go through, it’s robbing Peter to pay Paul. Certainly, any cuts that are happening in 2012 will create a worse starting point for the level of expansion envisioned for 2014 and beyond.

This was always my gut feeling about the health care reform bill and I wrote about it incessantly during the endless debate. I believed it could improve the private insurance market for some members of the middle class who are self-employed and that there was some potential for cost savings down the road. But the only truly liberal vision contained within it — bringing more poor people under Medicaid — would fall apart once the deficit hawks who were already circling swooped in. (Remember Ben Nelson’s Medicaid “opt-in” proposal?) This was the bait they used to trap progressives and I understood exactly why they couldn’t get out of it. It’s very hard to walk away from something that might benefit millions and millions of poor people. But it was always the weakest link and it’s just sad to see it all playing out so predictably.

I had hoped that the administration would not let anyone mess with his plan, but I’m beginning to think that this may be the one area they are willing to compromise. Ezra quotes former Clinton health care adviser Chris Jennings:

It’s relatively invisible. It’ll give states the flexibility they say they want. And it’ll hurt a population that doesn’t vote.”

Looks like we might just be finding some “common ground” on health care after all.

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Extreme Partisanship

by digby

It’s an exciting day — the first presidential debates of the 2012 campaigns! And if this is any example of what we’re going to see it should be a memorable one:

In Greenville, South Carolina tonight, five presidential contenders will meet for the first GOP presidential primary debate. According to the debate’s official program, it is sponsored by several extremist groups, including the Oath Keepers militia group and the radical anti-communist John Birch Society. You can see a picture of the program here.

Seriously? I guess there’s a certain nostalgia factor to the JBS, but Oathers?

The Oath Keepers’ website is riddled with paranoid rhetoric about government officials “disarm[ing] the American people,” “confiscat[ing] the property of the American people, including food and other essential supplies,” and “blockad[ing] American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps.” In early 2008, the Oath Keepers’ founder warned that a “dominatrix-in-chief” named “Hitlery Clinton” would impose a police state on America and shoot all resisters. After primary voters chose a different candidate, the Oath Keepers simply rewrote their paranoid fantasy to include a taller, African-American lead.

Here’s more:

Oath Keepers and the Age of Treason. Glenn Beck loves them. Tea Partiers court them. Congressmen listen to them. Meet the fast-growing “patriot” group that’s recruiting soldiers to resist the Obama administration.

In Pray’s estimate, it might not be long (months, perhaps a year) before President Obama finds some pretext—a pandemic, a natural disaster, a terror attack—to impose martial law, ban interstate travel, and begin detaining citizens en masse. One of his fellow Oath Keepers, a former infantryman, advised me to prepare a “bug out” bag with 39 items including gas masks, ammo, and water purification tablets, so that I’d be ready to go “when the shit hits the fan.”

When it does, Pray and his buddies plan to go AWOL and make their way to their “fortified bunker”—the home of one comrade’s parents in rural Idaho—where they’ve stocked survival gear, generators, food, and weapons. If it becomes necessary, they say, they will turn those guns against their fellow soldiers.

These nuts have a booth at this thing.

I suppose it’s hard these days to hold any kind of GOP event without crackpots. Crackpots are the GOP. But the John Birch Society and the Oathkeepers as sponsors? Good lord. Why don’t they just invite the Klan and get it over with?

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Waterboarding Funnies

by digby

I’m fairly sure this is what passes for humor among right wingers. I just don’t know what to say about these people anymore. Depravity apparently knows no bounds:

Monica Crowley has long been vying for the Ann Coulter humanitarian award and over the past few months I think she’s earned it.I

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David Barton’s Historical Hallucinations

by digby

In case the recent Trumpmania didn’t convince you, here’s the latest example of how the media helps to mainstream the craziest wingnuts in the land. Check out today’s front page NY Times article on Glen Beck’s personal historian, the leader of his Black Robed Regiment, pseudo-historian David Barton. You’ll find that he’s quite a nice fellow who is influential in the GOP. You’ll also find that some “liberal groups” like People for the American Way and Americans United for Separation of Church and State are alarmed because he’s one of those …zzzzzzzz. (Aren’t they always upset about something???)

What you won’t find is any serious discussion of his alleged scholarship, politics or theocratic vision for America. Instead you get this mealy mouthed nonsense:

[M]any professional historians dismiss Mr. Barton, whose academic degree is in Christian education from Oral Roberts University, as a biased amateur who cherry-picks quotes from history and the Bible.

“The problem with David Barton is that there’s a lot of truth in what he says,” said Derek H. Davis, director of church-state studies at Baylor University, a Baptist institution in Waco, Tex. “But the end product is a lot of distortions, half-truths and twisted history.”

Mr. Barton says it is his critics who cherry-pick history by underplaying the religious dimension. Over the years, he has only dug more deeply into his documents, filling out books like “Original Intent” (published by WallBuilders, his organization here).

No need to go into that any further, I guess. It’s just an academic disagreement. And there were only ten paragraphs left and it was important to talk about his sleeping habits and horse back riding hobby. Besides, I’m sure that that everyone who reads the NY Times can read between the lines and “get” that Barton is saying something silly. There’s no need to rile up the right wingers by coming right out and saying it. They’ll send a bunch of nasty emails and who needs that?

I’ve been writing about this guy for a long time so anyone who reads this blog or any of the writers who chronicle the religious right know about him. But I’ll just take a wild guess that that isn’t very many people, even among those who are proficient in reading the NY Times’ Kremlinogy. But he’s a very familiar figure on the the right and has been heavily indoctrinating the religious right, and more recently the Beck audience, for years. He’s a professional social conservative political operative, not a folksy autodidact who is serious about history and challenges the stale status quo.

Last night he appeared on Jon Stewart and lied repeatedly. And no, I’m not just talking about American history, I’m talking about his own history. Right Wing Watch has the video and fact checks his many lies and obfuscations. I urge you to look at it. This is just one of many examples:

…Barton told Stewart that he “never had to retract a single thing.”

Oh really? As noted in Barton’s Bunk, Barton “edited and renamed one book (The Myth of Separation became Original Intent) after critics pointed out false material.”

Here are just a few erroneous quotes of the Founding Fathers used by Barton in his books and documentaries that he later admitted were questionable:

We have staked the whole future of all our political constitutions upon the capacity of each of ourselves to govern ourselves according to the moral principles of the Ten Commandments. – Falsely attributed to James Madison

The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: It connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity. – Falsely attributed to John Quincy Adams

It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible’’- Falsely attributed to George Washington

I have always said and always will say that the studious perusal of the Sacred Volume will make us better citizens. – Falsely attributed to Thomas Jefferson

It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ. – Falsely attributed to Patrick Henry

He’s especially close to Mike Huckabee who had this to say about him just last month:

“I almost wish that there would be, like, a simultaneous telecast, and all Americans would be forced–forced at gunpoint no less–to listen to every David Barton message, and I think our country would be better for it. I wish it’d happen.”

Yeah. I’ll bet he does.

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