Month: December 2012

The public negotiations grind on

by digby

I would take the time to parse all the “fiscal cliff” blather on the Sunday shows but it’s a big waste of time. They are publicly posturing for the negotiations and none of it really means much. All we know is that the Democrats are standing fast in their demands for tax hikes on the rich and the Republicans are trying to find their footing.

This morning Greg Sargent reports:

I have just confirmed that … Obama is willing, albeit very reluctant, to go over the cliff.

He would be extremely stupid to say otherwise at this point in the negotiations, but I am happy they are, at least, saying it. There is no good reason for them to be politically worried at this point and the market high priests have been naysaying so long that they sound like the boy who cried wolf, so perhaps the administration isn’t listening to them anymore. And the truth is that it’s the best way to get those tax rates back up without throwing the sick and the old over the cliff in the process, so I’ve always been in favor. Just let it happen.

Also, keep in mind that Grover “Nobody” Norquist already gave his dispensation to allowing the tax cuts to expire:

“Not continuing a tax cut is not technically a tax increase,” Norquist said.

Asked if it would violate his Americans for Tax Reform’s anti-tax pledge, Norquist said: “We wouldn’t hold it that way.”

Norquist explained that he doesn’t want them to expire, but he clearly gave his signers wiggle room on this one.

So, this is the way to go. But it isn’t a simple as we might want with the silly sequester nonsense still out there and the debt ceiling hanging over everyone’s heads, which the Republicans will use to extract their pound of flesh and we still don’t know what that will be. (Geithner took SS off the table on the Sunday Shows but was very careful to explain that they were more than willing to deal with it down the road.)

In fact, it would appear that the Grand Bargain is being broken up into a series of negotiations (also called “kicking the can down the road”) so vigilance is necessary. I’m fairly sure that the White House being in constant talks with the Republicans about cutting spending isn’t good. (But then neither is this high stakes cliff diving, so pick your poison.) But I have long taken the position that any programs that aren’t cut today is a good thing, so that’s probably the best we can hope for.

I have no way of knowing what’s ally going on in these negotiations and neither does anyone else. The administration is taking a public hard line on taxes and the Republicans are fumbling around on cuts, which is as Greg points out a turn around from the last negotations. If they can hold the line, we might get out of this first round of negotiations without too much sick and elderly skin in the game.

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Lindsay Graham’s nesting dolls of lies

by David Atkins

Senator Lindsay Graham, the same one being stupidly celebrated by some liberals for sticking it to Grover Norquist, makes a statement of breathtaking dishonesty:

“I think we’re going over the cliff. It’s pretty clear to me they made a political calculation. This offer doesn’t remotely deal with entitlement reform in a way to save Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security from imminent bankruptcy. It raises $1.6 trillion on job creators that will destroy the economy and there are no spending controls,” Graham said on CBS’s “Face The Nation.”

Let’s see how many lies are nested in this neat little statement.

1) The White House has bent over backward to compromise with Republicans at every opportunity. The fact that we’re even talking about deficits at all, to say nothing of cuts to basic social services at a time of multi-year recession and high unemployment is itself an extraordinary compromise. The fact that the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy haven’t already been rescinded after two presidential elections in which the winning side made its position clear on them is itself a huge compromise already. If there’s any political calculation at all, it’s the Obama Administration’s foolish calculation that voters will celebrate deficit reduction and the “adult in the room”, rather than punish whatever political party is perceived to have cut Medicare in 2014 and 2016.

2) Social Security isn’t broke. It’s funded for 40 years even without raising the caps, which is the easy “fix.” Bankruptcy for Social Security certainly isn’t “imminent.” To lump it in with Medicare is either madness or gross deceit.

3) Medicaid isn’t broke. There is no such thing as Medicaid going broke. Rising Medicaid costs may, like any other budgetary item, put a crimp in state and federal budgets. But since it’s not a program funded by beneficiaries on a dollar-to-dollar level like Medicare and Social Security, Medicaid can’t “go broke” unless the federal government itself goes broke. Which is impossible since we have a sovereign currency. The very worst that can happen is an inflationary spiral. But Medicaid can’t go broke.

4) Medicare isn’t broke, either. It’s funded for eight years, which is quite a long time as projections go given rising healthcare costs. The best way to extend the life of Medicare in the short term is to create cost savings from providers in the program. The best way to do it long-term is to extend the Medicare pool to younger and healthier patients. Another good fix would be allowing the federal government to negotiate drug prices. And even if Medicare did “go broke” at the end of eight years, all it would mean is a shortfall requiring some cuts to benefits. So in order to prevent the supposed disaster of benefit cuts eight years from now, we’re proposing to cut them in advance?

To say nothing of the fact that it’s insane to demand that Medicare “pay for itself,” anyway, particularly as the population ages. We don’t demand that our wars pay for themselves, or that oil subsidies do, or that farm subsidies do, or that tax cuts for the wealthy do. And those are the bad things. On the good side, we don’t demand that NASA pay for itself or that AIDS prevention in Africa pay for itself. Some things are worth doing for their own sake, and funding from the federal treasury. Why in the world such health insurance for the elderly be any different?

5) Going back to the Clinton tax rates certainly wouldn’t “destroy the economy.” Forget the fact that rich people aren’t actually job creators (consumers are, of course.) Most independent analysts believe it would have a minimal impact–especially the taxes on the wealthy. Recall that when we talk about going back to Clinton rates on the wealthy, we’re talking about people who make $21,000 every month whining about paying a 4% higher rate on their last couple of thousand dollars. We’re talking about people who rake in $50,000 every month paying a 4% higher rate on only the second half of that money. It’s preposterous to believe that that would have much economic impact at all.

6) Spending controls? Is this a citizen initiative process? Senator Graham may not realize that he’s a legislator in the U.S. Congress. Congress controls how the money is spent, with some minor input from the Executive Branch. That Senator Graham doesn’t seem to understand that he and his fellow 534 fellow legislators on Capitol Hill are the spending controls, we’re in bigger trouble he realizes.

The only part of Senator Graham’s statement that isn’t an obvious, easily refuted lie is the notion that we’re actually going over the fiscal cliff. Good.

I hope he’s right about that one. Glory hallelujah.

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Ah, Socialism!

by tristero

If corporations are people, then people can be corporations. How about throwing a few bucks my way, Texas?

The guest of honor was Gov. Rick Perry, but the man behind the event was not one of the enclave’s boldface names. He was a tax consultant named G. Brint Ryan.
Mr. Ryan’s specialty is helping clients like ExxonMobil and Neiman Marcus secure state and local tax breaks and other business incentives. It is a good line of work in Texas.
Mr. Perry, Texas gives out more of the incentives than any other state, around $19 billion a year, an examination by The New York Times has found.
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“While economic development is the mantra of most officials, there’s a question of when does economic development end and corporate welfare begin,” said Dale Craymer, the president of the Texas Taxpayers and Research Association, a group supported by business that favors incentives programs.

Lying for Life

by digby

You know what the most consistent characteristic of self-professed Christian anti-abortion zealots is? They are blatant liars:

Michigan lawmakers are considering legislation that would let parents claim a tax deduction for fetuses, extending them the same benefits as children.

House bills 5684 and 5685 would amend the state’s tax code to include fetuses that have completed at least 12 weeks gestation as of the last day of the tax year as “dependents.” Doing so would allow the fetus’ tax-paying parents-to-be to save an estimated $160 on their taxes. Critics of the bill, which had its first hearing in the House Tax Policy Committee on November 20, say that such a law is just another way to make it harder for women in Michigan to get abortions.

“It is a backdoor attempt to get personhood for a fetus,” said Shelli Weisberg, legislative director for the ACLU of Michigan. “These are just ways to begin to build the record, so one day they can say there’s enough in our legislative history to say that the intent is to say that a fetus is a person.”

Dan Jarvis, research and policy director for Michigan Family Forum, a conservative, Christian public policy organization, said the bill was an idea that his group had discussed with “a number of lawmakers” since 2008. “It does cost money when you’re pregnant,” said Jarvis. “We thought it was a good thing for young families in particular to get that added tax credit a few months earlier.”

Jarvis says that endowing “personhood” to the unborn was not the intent of the measure—the goal was to encourage women to seek prenatal care, and to decrease the tax burden on young families. “To be perfectly honest we were totally caught off guard by that,” said Jarvis. “We had never talked about that with the sponsors. When it came up in committee we were all floored.”

I’m sorry, that’s 100% unadulterated bullshit. This has been the strategy for many years and everyone knows it. I’m pretty sure that one of the Ten Commandments says “thou shalt not bear false witness” but I guess that’s flexible when it comes to lying for “life.”

Here’s a little video from the Michigan Family Forum just so you know what they’re really all about. Let’s just say it isn’t tax policy.

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Self-awareness watch

by digby

Fox News had this headline today:

Par For The Course: Obama Plays Another Round Of Golf

A twitterer reminds me of this:

I still don’t miss him.

h/t to @dragoncalf

One journalist has a Howard Beale moment

by David Atkins

There’s a reason that Howard Beale is on the Hullabaloo mast. He represents the willingness of someone in a time of small minds and universal deceit to betray the conventions of their profession and loudly proclaim they’re “not going to take it anymore.” The fiction in the film Network (and Bulworth and many others) is that the simple act of doing so by a highly placed individual will lead millions of others to protest as well. Perhaps, perhaps not. But one can hope.

Given the rotten state of journalism in this country, it’s nice to see not only cheetos-eating bloggers like me and Digby, but someone on the inside of the Village stand up and tell the emperor they have no clothes as well. Case in point: Michael Grunwald, senior editor of Time Magazine, calling out the not only the fiscal cliff fiction, but also journalists’ role in perpetuating it:

Fiscal Cliff Fictions: Let’s All Agree to Pretend the GOP Isn’t Full of It

It’s really amazing to see political reporters dutifully passing along Republican complaints that President Obama’s opening offer in the fiscal cliff talks is just a recycled version of his old plan, when those same reporters spent the last year dutifully passing along Republican complaints that Obama had no plan. It’s even more amazing to see them pass along Republican outrage that Obama isn’t cutting Medicare enough, in the same matter-of-fact tone they used during the campaign to pass along Republican outrage that Obama was cutting Medicare.

This isn’t just cognitive dissonance. It’s irresponsible reporting. Mainstream media outlets don’t want to look partisan, so they ignore the BS hidden in plain sight, the hypocrisy and dishonesty that defines the modern Republican Party. I’m old enough to remember when Republicans insisted that anyone who said they wanted to cut Medicare was a demagogue, because I’m more than three weeks old.

I’ve written a lot about the GOP’s defiance of reality–its denial of climate science, its simultaneous denunciations of Medicare cuts and government health care, its insistence that debt-exploding tax cuts will somehow reduce the debt—so I often get accused of partisanship. But it’s simply a fact that Republicans controlled Washington during the fiscally irresponsible era when President Clinton’s budget surpluses were transformed into the trillion-dollar deficit that President Bush bequeathed to President Obama. (The deficit is now shrinking.) It’s simply a fact that the fiscal cliff was created in response to GOP threats to force the U.S. government to default on its obligations. The press can’t figure out how to weave those facts into the current narrative without sounding like it’s taking sides, so it simply pretends that yesterday never happened…

Whatever. I realize that the GOP’s up-is-downism puts news reporters in an awkward position. It would seem tendentious to point out Republican hypocrisy on deficits and Medicare and stimulus every time it comes up, because these days it comes up almost every time a Republican leader opens his mouth. But we’re not supposed to be stenographers. As long as the media let an entire political party invent a new reality every day, it will keep on doing it. Every day.

I’ve left out quite a bit. Be sure to read the whole thing. It’s great.

When the facts are so clearly on one side, it’s not biased or irresponsible journalism to point that out. It’s just good journalism.

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Human decency

by digby

The image above was taken recently on a cold evening in Times Square, right in the middle of New York City. According to a New York Times article, a New York Police Department officer named Lawrence DePrimo was working a counterterrorism post when he spotted a homeless, shoeless man. He brought the man a new pair of boots, and a tourist snapped this image of DePrimo helping the man put on the shoes.

It was rapidly shared around the Internet on social media sites — a little reminder to all of the importance of the holiday season. DePrimo mentioned in an interview that it was a very cold night, and he dipped into a nearby shoe store to purchase the boots with his own money.

I don’t know if that’s some kind of a set-up (I’m waaay too cynical these days) but I really hope it’s for real. In fact, I choose to believe it is real. For all the criticism I give police who overstep their bounds I’m sure there are a million acts of kindness that we never see.

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A simple tale of elite privilege

by digby

… with a surprise ending:

Six days after a trooper ticketed him for speeding in February and refused to cut him a break, Assemblyman Nelson Albano wrote a scathing letter to the head of the State Police.

The lawmaker claimed the trooper, Randy Pangborn, targeted him on his way to the Statehouse, refused to accept his temporary vehicle registration, requested backup, and had other troopers box in his car. He said he was “humiliated, embarrassed and disrespected as a legislator.”

“There was absolutely no reason to treat me like a criminal and detain two other troopers from public safety while trooper Pangborn conducted his charade,” Albano wrote from his Assembly office to State Police Superintendent Col. Rick Fuentes, requesting an internal investigation.

Normally, I would be sympathetic to any citizen being treated disrespectfully by the police. But this is a little bit different, isn’t it? He was disrespected as a legislator. (“Don’t you know who I am?”) So the lesson here isn’t that citizens deserve respectful treatment, but that one should never treat a powerful person like a criminal.

In fact, average citizens are routinely treated much worse than that, even to the point of being shot full of electricity for failing to immediately and unquestioningly comply with a police officer’s orders. But then, they aren’t as important as this fine fellow, are they?

Here’s the kicker:

But a video of the traffic stop, captured by a camera inside the trooper’s patrol car and recently obtained by The Star-Ledger, tells a different story from the one Albano described.

The trooper was respectful, calm, never raised his voice and had the lawmaker on his way in just eight minutes. Pangborn never rejected the temporary registration, and even apologized for writing the ticket. When Albano asked for a break, he politely told him to call the court.

A spokesman for the State Police, Lt. Stephen Jones, said dispatch records indicated Pangborn did not request backup. Two other patrol cars were at the scene, the video shows, but they stayed only briefly.

So it wasn’t even the mild rousting originally described but rather the simple failure to be corrupt in the face of power. The trooper should be given medal.

You might also be interested to know that the police resisted releasing the tape which would have exonerated their own officer, however, and only did so in response to a FOIA request from the newspaper. Apparently, power has some privileges after all.

*In case you were wondering, the assemblyman is a Democrat. But that’s no surprise. This phenomenon isn’t partisan, by any means.

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Oh my, Village leaders are up in arms about that nobody Grover Norquist


by digby

I think everyone knows that I’m not Grover Norquist’s biggest fan. But this comment from Claire McCaskill is repulsive:

“Everybody’s elevated Grover. I met him for the first time this AM. Nice to meet him. But, you know, who is he?”

Cokie Roberts just said a similar thing on This Week:  “Who is he?”

Everyone at that round table knows very well that Grover Norquist has run the most important conservative meeting in DC for two decades.  He’s also an American citizen and a very successful activist who managed to get a bunch of DC elites to adhere to a principle that their voters strongly believe in, which seems to be the real problem.  I happen to think it’s an absurd principle that has resulted in America coming ever closer to a banana republic (and I’m not personally unhappy to see him on the hot seat) but he has every right to do it. Watching these people deride him as some “nobody” is sickening.

Who the hell is Cokie Roberts and why is she on my TV every Sunday dispensing stale conventional wisdom and pretending that she’s just an average common sense American who believes “we” should all be willing to “sacrifice” our medicare and Social Security? She is the privileged daughter of a famous political star and a Villager by birth. Why is she more legitimate than Grover Norquist? Or any other American?

This is Village behavior at its worst.  Grover is getting in the way of their hysterical deficit fetish and its demands for human sacrifice so he is being exiled as a non-person. I don’t think he’s right about taxes, obviously, but I certainly think he has a right to agitate against them. I only wish we had some ideological activists on the left who were as good at it.

Update:  I should have reiterated my (and Ezra Klein’s) earlier point that Grover has already won. And the Villagers all profit from it.

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Saturday Night at the Movies


Bingo and porn

 By Dennis Hartley

La vallee: Hemingway and Johnson in Starlet

As the Hollywood hype machine prepares to carpet bomb the multiplexes with hobbits and SEALs, it’s somehow reassuring to know that even in the midst of the Oscar-bait season, it is still possible to unearth a small, no-budget gem like Starlet. An insightful, 1970s-style character study in the tradition of Harry and Tonto and Harold and Maude, it’s an episodic slice-of-life tale about an unlikely friendship between a 21 year-old porno actress and her misanthropic 85 year-old neighbor. Now…I know what you’re thinking; while this film is “unrated” (more on that shortly), it is not as salacious as it might sound.

For example, it may surprise you to learn that the eponymous character is actually a Chihuahua (and again, get your mind out of the gutter). The adorable little scene-stealer is in the care of a sweet-natured young woman named Jane (Dree Hemingway), who shares a house in the San Fernando Valley with her high-strung co-worker Melissa (Stella Maeve) and Melissa’s skuzzy drug-dealing boyfriend Mikey (James Ransone). It goes without saying that the roommates have, shall we say, non-traditional jobs. Consequently they enjoy quite a leisurely schedule (you know…get up at the crack of noon, fire up a couple bong hits for breakfast, and then while away the days zoning out on video games).

While she obviously shares some of the lifestyle trappings, there’s something that sets Jane apart from her comparatively dysfunctional roomies (Melissa is a classic drama queen, and Mikey is the type of guy whose idea of a home improvement project is to install a stripper pole in the living room). Jane, on the other hand, possesses a kind of down-to-earth, girl-next-door quality that makes you wonder how “a nice girl like that” wound up in the porn biz. However, she isn’t necessarily incorruptible, as is evidenced when she buys a thermos from a cranky widow named Sadie (Besedka Johnson) who is having a yard sale next door. Jane discovers $10,000 in rolled-up bills stashed inside. While her first instinct is to literally return the money, she does decide to “give it back”, but in her own unique way. Initially, she wants to sate her curiosity. But as we know-you can’t always go digging into other people’s secrets without getting your own hands dirty.

This is an impressive starring debut for the 25 year-old Hemingway (daughter of Mariel). At times (perhaps not surprisingly), her brave performance strongly evokes her mother’s role as Playboy model Dorothy Stratten in Bob Fosse’s 1983 film, Star 80(being a 2012 indie, Starlet is more sexually explicit, but it’s rendered in a relatively tasteful manner, and while it’s still enough to earn the film an “NR” rating, the brief scenes merely serve to establish what Jane does for a living). Johnson is equally impressive, perhaps even more so considering that she apparently has never acted before (at 87, she is likely the most mature “hot new talent” to keep an eye on). She and Hemingway have a lovely chemistry together; both give warm, naturalistic performances.

I was surprised to discover that director Sean Baker and his writing partner Chris Bergoch were the same creative tag team behind the cult TV series Greg the Bunny (I never would have made a connection between a wacked-out, puppetry-based satire like that and a thoughtful, beautifully acted art house drama like Starlet…but then again, Peter Jackson made Meet the Feebles and Heavenly Creatures …so anything’s possible). Thematically, Baker’s film reminded me of two other L.A. based character studies-Adrian Lyne’s highly underrated Foxes, and Robert Altman’s 3 Women , in the way that it delicately sifts through the complexities of female friendships (intergenerational and otherwise). Also akin to Altman’s film, the cinematography (by Radium Cheung) utilizes the hazy, diffuse light of the sun-bleached L.A. environs to help create a languid, dreamy mood; providing the perfect canvas for a story that moves right about at the speed of life.

Saturday Night at the Movies review archives

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