Month: January 2013

Passing the baton to George P

by digby

They just keep coming…

George P. Bush has raised a whopping $1.3 million in less than two months – with a financial boost from the family and the Bush political network – to launch his first race for statewide office in Texas. Top contributors included father Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, and uncle George W. Bush, the former president. Each gave $50,000 to the younger Bush’s fledgling political campaign. Uncles, cousins and long-time family financial also sent checks. Bush has indicated he’s looking at a race for Texas land commissioner in 2014, but has not ruled out the possibility of running for attorney general or even governor depending on the circumstances. The robust financial showing in his first weeks of fundraising indicates that the Bush network is very much alive and ready to help bankroll the next generation of the nation’s best-known Republican political family.

Governor? Well, he’s 36 so he’s getting ready to make his move. And despite his famous name I’m going to guess they want to sell him as the first Hispanic governor/president.
Which would be the perfect sequel to Bush Junior the Wasp Cowboy.

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Investing in renewables creates more jobs than exporting coal

by David Atkins

Another piece of evidence that we don’t have to choose between economic growth and responsible action on climate change:

Per dollar invested, efficiency and renewables generate many more jobs than fossil fuels.

Modern coal terminals are highly mechanized facilities, with towering, ten-story cranes pivoting massive arms above coal storage piles 60 feet high. At the ends of these arms, huge rotary shovels bigger than a house dig up the dusty coal and deposit it onto conveyor belts that snake away to bulk carriers three to four football fields long. Few workers are needed to operate these gargantuan “stacker/reclaimers.”

A currently proposed installation near Seattle provides a good example of the phenomenon:

As estimated in official project documents, the Gateway Pacific Terminal would support only 257 steady jobs, including office workers, at full build-out. That’s just one new job for every $2.6 million invested, assuming the terminal can indeed be built for its advertised price. If you include “induced jobs” that may be added in maritime and railroad industries, the total increases to 430. But extra expenditures would occur in these areas, say for necessary railroad upgrades, so figure about one new job created per $2 million spent…[I]nvesting the same $665 million in energy efficiency or renewables would create twice as many jobs at minimum. In solar manufacturing, for example, figure several hundred more jobs than at the coal terminal. For solar-installation and energy-efficiency companies, add at least another thousand…

The savings in energy costs that steadily accrue after these clean-energy projects are completed can be recycled through organizations to create even more jobs, setting up a multiplier effect that stimulates greater prosperity. Such investments also lessen dependence on fickle foreign sources of fossil fuels, whose costs can skyrocket if supply lines are threatened.

Then, too, these are jobs in construction, maintenance, building supplies and finance that will be difficult, if not impossible, to ship overseas. The wages and salaries earned will largely be spent in local communities, enhancing local economies.

The only reasons not to engage in an Apollo Program for clean energy is the corrupting influence of Big Fossil Fuel lobbying, and an ideological group of anti-spending advocates paralyzing the entire political process. Given that we are a nation desperately in need of both good jobs and immediate action on climate, the failure to take these steps is political and moral malfeasance of the highest order.

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The R’s need a nap

by digby

So I hear Republicans are threatening to impeach President Obama if he tries to enact any kind of gun control via executive order:

Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas) is threatening to file articles of impeachment against President Barack Obama if he moves to change gun regulations through executive order.

“I will seek to thwart this action by any means necessary, including but not limited to eliminating funding for implementation, defunding the White House, and even filing articles of impeachment,” Stockman said.

In a statement, Stockman didn’t hold back, saying Obama is launching an “attack on the very founding principles of this republic.”

“The President’s actions are an existential threat to this nation,” Stockman said in a statement. “The right of the people to keep and bear arms is what has kept this nation free and secure for over 200 years. The very purpose of the Second Amendment is to stop the government from disallowing people the means to defend themselves against tyranny. Any proposal to abuse executive power and infringe upon gun rights must be repelled with the stiffest legislative force possible.”

I think someone should get Congressman Stockman a bottle and send him to bed. The chances of the President enacting gun policy via executive order is nil. I’m not sure what Biden was talking about but I’m fairly sure it will never happen.

But if it did, and the congress decided to impeach the president over it, I’m going to guess that the country would find such action just a little bit over the top. Here are the new Pew Poll findings on guns:

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We just disagree

by digby

This kind of analysis is why I love Ed Kilgore. He discusses the latest GangofNoLabels bipartisan conceits, this one led by Joe Manchin and Jon Huntsman, in which they predictably conclude that the only challenge is for Washington Pols to come together and get along so they can get under the hood and “solve our problems.”

[I]t would be nice if partisans did not treat their differences as equivalent to the divisions that produced the Thirty Years War. But there are a few, well, problems with this abstract ideology of problem-solving.

One of the most obvious is the false-equivalency meme, the idea that all partisans are equally culpable for gridlock in Washington and thus must in equal measures abandon party discipline to “solve problems.” It’s understandable that any bipartisan group would accept as a point of departure this fiction, but it’s still fiction. One party is dominated by people who believe in a fixed, eternal set of principles and policies that are required of anyone expressing fidelity to the Constitution, to American traditions, and (for many) God Almighty. And the other is an unwieldy coalition of people who believe in all sorts of things, but is generally innocent of the conviction that its party platform came down from Mount Sinai or Mount Vernon on stone tablets.

But put that aside for a moment, if you can. The other problem is the conviction that reconciliation of the two parties’ points of view is simple if politicians agree to compromise.

At the moment, the impasse that is creating crisis after crisis in the fiscal management of the country is that Republicans contend the only real problem we have is the proliferation of domestic spending, mainly in “entitlements.” Congressional Republicans are largely unwilling to identify specific “reforms” that must be initiated to “solve” this problem—in part because they have selectively championed unrestrained entitlement spending (i.e., for Medicare) when it was to their electoral advantage. To the extent a Democratic position can be identified, it is that we have a short-term economic problem that militates against deep short-term spending reductions, and a long-term fiscal problem that must be addressed with a combination of economic growth, restraints in both domestic and defense spending, a reform of a tax system that is insufficient to pay for the government Americans consistently profess to want. Democrats, moreover, typically believe the key to domestic spending restraint involves reductions in heath care cost inflation that require more, not less, government intervention of a type that Republicans have denounced in terms usually reserved for the great totalitarian movements of the twentieth century.

A fiscal compromise between these two points of view that just “splits the differences”—i.e., the type that can be produced by Washington pols cutting deals across party lines—will not only be messy and offensive to ideologues and the two parties’ “bases” and interest groups, but will also be incoherent and internally self-cancelling to a degree that it may not solve any problem other than the most recent impasse in Congress.

Thank you. Unfortunately this seems to be the only approved alternative to the equally fatuous John McCain method:

“One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, ‘Stop the bullshit,’”

Solving these impasses really isn’t a matter of just “knocking some heads together” or coming up with a compromise that will “please no one but which everyone can live with.” And that’s assuming they have even identified the right problem in the first place (which I would argue they have not.) But as Kilgore rightly points out, even then the majority of the two parties disagree on how to fix it.

And this is a real disagreement, not just some tantrum by a bunch of spoiled citizens who can’t be trusted to understand what’s good for them. Many of the politicians these Very Serious People find so reprehensible are just responding to their constituents’ legitimate wishes. I know that’s inconvenient, but it happens to be the democratic process. Sorry.

But I think what Kilgore identifies here as the real problem is important: that this alleged “split-the-difference” form of centrist compromise doesn’t split the difference at all. It’s a forthright position of its own. He quotes Manchin and Huntsman to make the point:

“We need to attempt those things and to seek solutions now from the system and the leaders we already have. Businesses are not hiring, and investors are not investing as a direct result of the uncertainty created by Washington. Too many would-be workers are not working. The coming generations are being doomed to a worse standard of living than previous generations.”

Kilgore writes:

This, folks, is an ideological statement, not a statement of pragmatic abandonment of ideology. Our principal economic problem, it is asserted, is “uncertainty.” If that is true, then any long-term set of fiscal and economic policies is desirable.

But what if liberals are right and the real problem with the economy is a dearth of aggregate demand? What if conservatives are right and the real problem is the perpetuation of the twentieth-century welfare state and regulation of “job-creators?” Compromises that pull in opposite directions on the basic diagnosis of what is wrong with the economy—particularly the preferred Beltway Fiscal Hawk “consensus” of adopting both sharp spending reductions and tax increases—are very likely to damage and reverse our fragile economic recovery more than all the “uncertainty” in the world.

And yet, isn’t that what we are in the process of doing? I’ll just put this chart up again:

And we have every reason to fear they are going to slash spending even more in the next round. (Even the Democrats’ best case has more tax hikes and spending cuts.) In other words, Manchin and Huntsman may not be able to bring together a new GangofNoLabels — but they don’t really need to. So far, they are getting exactly what they want.  And when this plan fails to revive the economy, the Republicans will rush to blame the tax increases and the Democrats will rush to blame the spending cuts and the Village pundits will insist that these same Centrist Goldilocks “grown-ups”  offer up more of the same. And the wealthy will do fine, as they always do, while the middle class and the poor will be squeezed even more than they already are.

I believe the Republicans are dead wrong on almost everything.  I loathe the idea of allowing their agenda to pass.  If they had won the election I would hope (futilely, I’m sure) that the Democrats would fight them with everything they had, within the boundaries of responsible governance (i.e raising the debt ceiling.) And I am not surprised that the Republicans are fighting dirty.  It’s in their nature.  But it’s important to understand that this centrist mush is just making things worse. 

If we have to have this fight, let’s have it.  And let the people hold those who do it accountable for what happens. This insistence on a consensus or grand bargain is hurting the country not helping it.

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Headline ‘O the Day (so far)

by digby

You have to love it:

GOP looks for ways to stop the rape comments

Note they aren’t trying to persuade their members that rape is not a victimless crime or that some women do not “rape easy.” They just want these candidates to be more sensitive.

And who are they turning to for advice about rhetoric? Why, the very sensitive “pro-life” movement:

[A] training program [has] already being launched by an anti-abortion group — the Susan B. Anthony list — to keep candidates and lawmakers from continually making the same kind of comments that may have helped ruin Republicans’ chances of winning the Senate.

Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser said the lawmakers are falling for a trap set by proponents of abortion rights who want to focus the debate on extremes such as rape instead of other abortions.

“It’s a tactic to [force pro-life lawmakers to] talk about this rather than the 98 percent of abortions because they know that they lose it,” Dannenfelser said.

That’s right. They need to get back to being decent and sensitive toward women — by calling them baby killers or morons.

See? That’s how you talk about the issue with sensitivity.

The truth is that the rape and birth control comments revealed a little bit too much about the conservative position on abortion. It’s not about the fetus, no matter how much they want it to be. It’s about women and sex and their desire to control it. They consider an unwanted pregnancy a punishment that must be borne by women who refuse to “take responsibility” for being … sexual.

They don’t want their politicians talking about this because it’s deeply offensive to almost everyone and resulted in their losing some important elections. We’ve always known they were out of the mainstream but they’d been very clever about keeping the focus on the fetus and not the woman. Now the cat’s out of the bag and they are desperate to put it back in. The problem is that their base is clueless and has been told that everyone agrees with their medieval belief system. It’s not going to be that easy.

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Cyber cop warriors and paranoia

by digby

I was on Virtually Speaking last night with my friend Marcy Wheeler. I was down with a cold and less informed of the details than she (as one would expect) so spent as much of the hour as I could get away with   letting her educate me and the audience about the Aaron Swartz case and other assorted DOJ misdeeds. It was a very interesting hour to say the least.

This morning she has a post up with one of the aspects of the case I did not know:

The public story of Aaron Swartz’ now-tragic two year fight with the Federal government usually starts with his July 19, 2011 arrest.

But that’s not when he was first arrested for accessing a closet at MIT in which he had a netbook downloading huge quantities of scholarly journals. He was first arrested on January 6, 2011 by MIT and Cambridge, MA cops.

According to a suppression motion in his case, however two days before Aaron was arrested, the Secret Service took over the investigation.

On the morning of January 4, 2011, at approximately 8:00 am, MIT personnel located the netbook being used for the downloads and decided to leave it in place and institute a packet capture of the network traffic to and from the netbook.4 Timeline at 6. This was accomplished using the laptop of Dave Newman, MIT Senior Network Engineer, which was connected to the netbook and intercepted the communications coming to and from it. Id. Later that day, beginning at 11:00 am, the Secret Service assumed control of the investigation. [my emphasis]

In fact, in one of the most recent developments in discovery in Aaron’s case, the government belatedly turned over an email showing Secret Service agent Michael Pickett offering to take possession of the hardware seized from Aaron “anytime after it has been processed for prints or whenever you [Assistant US Attorney Stephen Heymann] feel it is appropriate.” Another newly disclosed document shows the Pickett accompanied the local cops as they moved the hardware they had seized from Aaron around.

Odd, don’t you think? Read the whole thing for Marcy’s informed speculation.

My general view of this is that the government is paranoid about cyber-crime and sees it as having an almost mystical power to threaten … everything. The way the cyber-cops talk about it sounds as close to Alex Jones conspiracy mongering as you get from government officials (aside from the neocon terror types.)  I don’t know if the Swartz indictment had anything to do with Wikileaks, but because of this paranoia I have to assume it fell into the same threat matrix because Swartz was political and he was a hacker and he hung out at MIT, all of which have been factors in that investigation.

This case was handled by one of the DOJs cyber crime gurus, which means he is a guy who “knows things nobody else knows” and is probably allowed a great deal of latitude about deciding what constitutes a cyber threat (whether to big business or national security.)  I expect that there are few real geeks in the bureaucracy and that the brass gives these specialists more rope than they should. And when people with a particular ax to grind have a lot of rope it’s not uncommon for them to become just a teeny bit obsessive. (See: all of Western literature)

Anyway, Marcy has some theories about all that that are quite interesting. I can’t help but believe there’s more to this as well.  At the very least, it’s fairly clear that he wasn’t just being dogged for his alleged JSTOR crime. Whether it was a case of corporate America generally demanding that their “property” be protected (even as they rampantly steal  from others with impunity) or it’s a more nefarious abuse of the national security powers, this case was  an over-the-top prosecution that shouldn’t have happened. And I think we all know that it isn’t the only one.

They wanted him in jail:

Mr. Swartz’s lawyer, Elliot Peters, first discussed a possible plea bargain with Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann last fall. In an interview Sunday, he said he was told at the time that Mr. Swartz would need to plead guilty to every count, and the government would insist on prison time.

Mr. Peters said he spoke to Mr. Heymann again last Wednesday in another attempt to find a compromise. The prosecutor, he said, didn’t budge.

Mr. Heymann didn’t reply to requests for comment Sunday.

With the government’s position hardening, Mr. Swartz realized that he would have to face a costly, painful and public trial, his girlfriend, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, said in an interview Sunday. The case was draining his money, and he would need to ask for help financing his defense; two of his friends had recently been subpoenaed in the case. Both situations distressed him, she said.

“It was too hard for him to ask for the help and make that part of his life go public,” she said. “One of the things he felt most difficult to fathom was asking people for money.”

On Friday, Mr. Swartz was dead.

Note that he was facing up to 50 years in prison for this non-crime. To put that in perspective, Think Progress put together a handy list of crimes for which a person would be charged substantially less:

Manslaughter: Federal law provides that someone who kills another human being “[u]pon a sudden quarrel or heat of passion” faces a maximum of 10 years in prison if subject to federal jurisdiction. The lesser crime of involuntary manslaughter carries a maximum sentence of only six years.

Bank Robbery: A person who “by force and violence, or by intimidation” robs a bank faces a maximum prison sentence of 20 years. If the criminal “assaults any person, or puts in jeopardy the life of any person by the use of a dangerous weapon or device,” this sentence is upped to a maximum of 25 years.

Selling Child Pornography: The maximum prison sentence for a first-time offender who “knowingly sells or possesses with intent to sell” child pornography in interstate commerce is 20 years. Significantly, the only way to produce child porn is to sexually molest a child, which means that such a criminal is literally profiting off of child rape or sexual abuse.

Knowingly Spreading AIDS: A person who “after testing positive for the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and receiving actual notice of that fact, knowingly donates or sells, or knowingly attempts to donate or sell, blood, semen, tissues, organs, or other bodily fluids for use by another, except as determined necessary for medical research or testing” faces a maximum of 10 years in prison.

Selling Slaves: Under federal law, a person who willfully sells another person “into any condition of involuntary servitude” faces a maximum prison sentence of 20 years, although the penalty can be much higher if the slaver’s actions involve kidnapping, sexual abuse or an attempt to kill.

Genocidal Eugenics: A person who “imposes measures intended to prevent births” within a particular racial, ethnic or religious group or who “subjects the group to conditions of life that are intended to cause the physical destruction of the group in whole or in part” faces a maximum prison term of 20 years, provided their actions did not result in a death.

Helping al-Qaeda Develop A Nuclear Weapon: A person who “willfully participates in or knowingly provides material support or resources . . . to a nuclear weapons program or other weapons of mass destruction program of a foreign terrorist power, or attempts or conspires to do so, shall be imprisoned for not more than 20 years.”

Violence At International Airports: Someone who uses a weapon to “perform[] an act of violence against a person at an airport serving international civil aviation that causes or is likely to cause serious bodily injury” faces a maximum prison sentence of 20 years if their actions do not result in a death.

Threatening The President: A person who threatens to kill the President, the President-elect, the Vice President or the Vice President-elect faces a maximum prison term of 5 years.

Assaulting A Supreme Court Justice: Assaults against very senior government officials, including Members of Congress, cabinet secretaries or Supreme Court justices are punished by a maximum prison sentence of just one year. If the assault “involved the use of a dangerous weapon, or personal injury results,” the maximum prison term is 10 years.

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Held hostage by Hastert: a minority of one chamber threatens the whole country

by David Atkins

In a move that will surprise absolutely no one, Republicans are making serious threats to default on spending they already racked up in order to force devastating cuts onto a nation that resoundingly rejected their message of austerity for the middle class.

With the Obama Administration openly refusing the 14th Amendment and platinum coin choices, it becomes a game of chicken. It’s a game the Obama Administration has shown itself unwilling to play. Given the Administration’s history, it’s probable that it will seek a Grand Bargain on spending cuts despite its protestations to the contrary.

But more interesting that second-guessing that Administration’s true intentions is taking stock of the perversity of the situation. It’s not just that Republicans are threatening to take the entire nation off an economic cliff if they don’t get their way. It’s not just that the gerrymandered House is refusing to play ball with the White House and the Senate. Nor is it just that a party that dramatically lost a big election is refusing to abide by the results of that election.

It’s that a minority of a single chamber of the government is holding the country hostage. If John Boehner brings to the floor raising the debt ceiling while simply funding most of the programs cut by the sequester, a majority of House would vote for it: nearly all the Democrats, and enough Republicans either sane or more threatened from the left than from the right. But having violated the Hastert rule over the fiscal cliff, it would be nearly political suicide to do it again on the sequester where the rabid right wing feels it holds all the cards.

So what is threatening to send the country toppling into default is purely John Boehner’s ambitions to remain the Speaker, and an arcane “rule” that makes an already sclerotic government completely inoperable. A slim majority just of the House Republican caucus–a minority in the House overall–is holding the entire country hostage not through the regular Constitutional checks and balances, but through yet another abuse of yet another arcane voluntary rule that almost no one who isn’t a political obsessive knows about.

The need to enact major reforms to the American legislative system has never been more clear.

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Treading water for decades

by digby

Not that anyone should worry, mind you:

Wages have fallen to a record low as a share of America’s gross domestic product. Until 1975, wages nearly always accounted for more than 50 percent of the nation’s G.D.P., but last year wages fell to a record low of 43.5 percent. Since 2001, when the wage share was 49 percent, there has been a steep slide.

“We went almost a century where the labor share was pretty stable and we shared prosperity,” says Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard. “What we’re seeing now is very disquieting.” For the great bulk of workers, labor’s shrinking share is even worse than the statistics show, when one considers that a sizable — and growing — chunk of overall wages goes to the top 1 percent: senior corporate executives, Wall Street professionals, Hollywood stars, pop singers and professional athletes. The share of wages going to the top 1 percent climbed to 12.9 percent in 2010, from 7.3 percent in 1979.

Some economists say it is wrong to look at just wages because other aspects of employee compensation, notably health costs, have risen. But overall employee compensation — including health and retirement benefits — has also slipped badly, falling to its lowest share of national income in more than 50 years while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share over that time.
[…]
From 1973 to 2011, worker productivity grew 80 percent, while median hourly compensation, after inflation, grew by just one-eighth that amount, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group. And since 2000, productivity has risen 23 percent while real hourly pay has essentially stagnated.

Meanwhile, it’s been a lost economic decade for many households. According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, median income for working-age households (headed by someone under age 65) slid 12.4 percent from 2000 to 2011, to $55,640. During that time the American economy grew more than 18 percent.

But surely, this must mean we simply have to cut “entitlements” right? Because people are living so much longer and all? Sure, they’ve just been financially treading water for decades and lost much of whatever measly amount of wealth they’d managed to set aside in the epic housing and stock market crashes of 2008 — but that doesn’t mean they don’t need to put even more skin in the game, right?

I think there might be a patch left on the back of their feet.

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“It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.”


by digby

Chris Hayes featured a very nice tribute to his friend Aaron Swartz this morning in his “you should know” segment:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I think this is particularly important for major TV analysts to remark upon:

You should also know that at the time of his death Aaron was being prosecuted by the federal government and threatened with up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines for the crime of — and I’m not exaggerating here — downloading too many free articles from the online database of scholarly work JSTOR. Aaron had allegedly used a simple computer script to use MIT’s network to massively download academic articles from the database that he himself had legitimate access to, almost 5 million in all, with the intent, prosecutors alleged, of making them freely available. You should know that despite JSTOR declining to press charges or pursue prosecution, federal prosecutors dropped a staggering 13 count felony indictment on Aaron for his alleged actions. In a statement about his death Aaron’s family and partner wrote:

“Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death.”

You should know his death is a good reason to revisit the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the law under which he was prosecuted, since it is far too broad, and to take a hard look at Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, whose office prosecuted Aaron with such recklessly disproportionate vigor, and who is reportedly considering a run for governor.

That’s just for starters. There is a huge discussion to be had about the government’s almost mystical paranoia about its secrets being exposed in this brave new world of the internet and its willingness to use the full force of its power to prosecute citizens on trumped up charges to serve as “examples” for others. This is supposed to be a democratic, free society.  The behavior exhibited toward Swartz is more akin to something we might have seen in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War.  There’s is also a badly needed discussion about the government’s willingness to intercede heavily on behalf of business interests while simultaneously allowing business to go unpunished for their crimes. That’s always been true to some extent but we’ve reached a point at which they aren’t even hiding it.

It doesn’t make this loss any easier to take, but it does focus the mind once again on just how vulnerable we all are to these powerful forces — and it makes me appreciate the courage of people like Aaron Swartz who are willing to take them on. His death doesn’t make that any less awe inspiring.

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The debt sequester mash up

by digby

Krugman says that he gets phone calls:

The White House insists that it is absolutely, positively not going to cave or indeed even negotiate over the debt ceiling — that it rejected the coin option as a gesture of strength, as a way to put the onus for avoiding default entirely on the GOP.

Truth or famous last words? I guess we’ll find out.

I’m sure the White House believes this and it’s possible they will stare down the GOP this time on the debt ceiling and the GOP will back down. But after all that’s come before the GOP has every reason to believe it will be the White House that blinks. We all do. It’s almost impossible for me to believe that they will allow Armageddon (for real, this time, honest) to happen on their watch.

But as I wrote earlier, the truth is they’re being very cute about all this and I don’t think this is the play at all. It’s not a coincidence that the sequester can was kicked down the road to ripen right after the debt ceiling. It means that while we are all watching the debt-ceiling showdown at the OK Corral, it’s entirely possible the real negotiation will be happening on the separate sequester track. And that’s unlikely to end well for the people. These wingnuts are hungry — they feel they got robbed in the last go-round and they believe they were promised some major spending cuts in the next one.

It’s a good thing for the country if the White House is able to stop this ongoing debt ceiling hostage situation. And maybe the Republicans want to stop it too, who knows? For all we know, Biden and McConnell prayed at the portraits of Tip ‘n Ronnie and worked it all out in advance. Certainly it can’t have entirely escaped the GOP leadership that they are playing with fire. But my read on the House crackpots is that they really want to make the President cry Uncle after that last one. Whether they have the nerve to cause an economic earthquake in order to do that is another question but I honestly don’t know that they care whether anyone “blames” them. Their voters will support their actions.

So, if I had to guess, they’ll be given some major inducements in the sequester to try to make sure that doesn’t happen. I also suspect they would have to be things that will make the left side of aisle scream with pain.  But would that even be enough?

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