“All successful social movements are built – and all social progress is built out out of multitudes of tiny miracles just like the one we saw today in New York City. A single person, an accretion of people, a union of thousands or millions who decide against the odds, with no protection, to do something courageous. To speak up for their dignity. To proclaim themselves fully human. That is what the striking fast-food workers did today.”
This is the way liberals used to talk, unembarrassed by emotion and passionate in their advocacy for the little guy. It’s good to see it again.
Mark this day. For the first time in history, a Democratic president has officially proposed to cut the Democratic Party’s signature New Deal program, Social Security:
President Obama next week will take the political risk of formally proposing cuts to Social Security and Medicare in his annual budget in an effort to demonstrate his willingness to compromise with Republicans and revive prospects for a long-term deficit-reduction deal, administration officials say.
In a significant shift in fiscal strategy, Mr. Obama on Wednesday will send a budget plan to Capitol Hill that departs from the usual presidential wish list that Republicans typically declare dead on arrival. Instead it will embody the final compromise offer that he made to Speaker John A. Boehner late last year, before Mr. Boehner abandoned negotiations in opposition to the president’s demand for higher taxes from wealthy individuals and some corporations.
The way this was explained to me is that the liberal Democrats in the House put out a leftward proposal and the Democrats in the Senate put out a moderate proposal, which the president tacitly endorsed. The Crazy Republicans then came back with a rightward proposal so now the president has simply set forth a compromise between the Senate Dems and the Crazy Republicans. And it’s his final, final offer this time.
God help us if the Republicans wise up and take this deal. After all, it’s a more conservative budget than even their hero Ronald Reagan ever submitted.
If Obama includes it in his budget, he is claiming this as a policy idea he supports before he even starts negotiations with the Republicans. This is terrible policy and terrible politics at the same time. In a budget document that has no actual policy impact but that symbolically represents what he stands for and who he wants to fight for, he will alienate senior citizens and the families who worried about taking care of them, he will split his political party down the middle, and– by being the first one to formally propose cuts to Social Security– he will hand Republicans a big political weapon to hurt Democrats in 2014.
I understand the president has political reasons he wants to do this. He wants to look like the most reasonable guy in the room, and he wants the Republicans to look like they are the extremists who won’t compromise. He doesn’t want the attacks that will come from the deficit hawk crowd if offers nothing on “entitlement reform,” and he feels like this is a modest cut compared with the budget ax the Republicans are threatening. He feels like he can lessen the impact of the Social Security cuts by adjusting the formula to protect the oldest and poorest recipients.
But, folks, this is rotten public policy, and all those political reasons pale in comparison to the damage he is doing here. With the demise or curtailment of most pensions, the drop in family wealth due to the collapse of the housing sector in 2008, the big unemployment numbers cutting into many families’ life savings, the flattening or decrease of wages for most workers, and the inflation in many essentials among those who are working driving down the ability to save for retirement, this is the absolute last time we should be looking at cutting incomes for retirees.
As to the idea that Obama will keep the most vulnerable low-income seniors from harm, I am very appreciative of that fact that he cares about them and is trying to preserve them from cuts. Obama’s compassion for the poorest of the poor is something to be lauded, one of his best values. But I used to do a lot of organizing with moderate income senior citizens, and I know a lot of middle-income seniors. I can tell you that even for those a little above the cut-off line but still living mostly on Social Security, they are not living in luxury, they are in fact just making it. When groceries or utilities or out-of-pocket health care expenses spike, it hurts and hurts bad. I have been in the apartments of seniors when utility prices were going on one of their periodic jumps, have seen what they can afford to eat, have felt the cold in their apartments in the winter because they can’t heat their place. I know in my heart, because I have seen the evidence up close and personal, that for a lot of seniors the $500 a year they will have lost from chained CPI a few years from now if this cut goes into effect will result in more seniors dying of hypothermia or malnutrition.
Most Americans, over 80 percent in polls I have seen, understand that cutting Social Security benefits is a terrible idea, and I believe that if that is what happens people will be angry. But even if the politics were not on our side, this is a moral issue pure and simple. The president should not propose cutting Social Security, and Democrats in Congress should raise hell and oppose him if he does. As Democrats, according to all that rhetoric I kept hearing during the campaign last year, we believe in fighting for the middle class, and this proposal punches the middle class– both older Americans and the families who care for them– in the gut.
Ok, so what do we do now?
First, we cannot simply sit back and expect the GOP to do our dirty work for us. After all, the way things are going, the Prsident or could start offering up new tax cuts for all we know. He’s either a terrible negotiator or he really, really wants these cuts. Either way, counting on him holding the line is probably not a good idea.
So, we have to buck up the Democrats. I know, I know. But they still have to face voters while the president has run his last election. They should be made very, very aware of what they are contemplating: attacks from both the left and the right in the next election. Any incumbent Democrat who could face a primary challenge will be facing withering criticism for voting to cut SS, veterans benefits and medicare. And if they are lucky to fight them off and win they will be attacked by the Republicans challenger on exactly the same issues. These are very, very popular programs which, by the way, don’t actually need to be cut. Anyone who votes for this will hear about it. If you have a Democratic congressional rep, give them a call and let them know that you will hold it against them. (Also too, if you have a Republican representative. They have to face voters too and it can’t hurt to remind them of that. And after all, they are just looking for reasons to oppose this …)
And call your Senators starting today. The pattern so far has been that Speaker Boehner will only suspend the Hastert Rule (allowing legislation to the floor without a Republican majority) if it is already passed with a bipartisan Senate vote. Best to try to stop it here first.
Meanwhile prepare for a barrage of savvy, world weary commentary from your fellow liberals telling you that this is no big thing and that Democrats will not suffer even a tiny bit if they vote for a common sense proposal like this one. You will be shushed and told to calm down and take a chill pill. In other words, you will be gaslighted by fellow liberals who are embarrassed that you aren’t being coolly accepting of something that is completely unacceptable. This is how this works. Tell them to STFU and move out of the way.
Responding to a flood of angry phone calls and letters from their elderly constituents, a growing number of Congressmen and Senators are seeking to repeal or revise the “Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act of 1988” enacted in June of that year. The amount and the tenacity of elderly opposition to the law, particularly to the new taxes that will fund it, took many Congressmen by surprise. It also has provoked an open and widespread grass-roots rebellion within the nation’s largest senior citizen lobby, the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), whose national office pushed hard for the original legislation. Already, some 30 bills have been introduced to repeal the catastrophic act in whole or in part or to change the way it is financed. More bills are expected.
The cool kids should think twice before predicting a complacent acceptance of this proposal because sometimes the people do stand up and object. Especially when it comes to these programs. They don’t call it the third rail for nothing.
As if on cue, from the Speaker: “If the president believes these modest entitlement savings are needed to help shore up these programs, there’s no reason they should be held hostage for more tax hikes.”
Hey, there are plenty of things the president propose to meet them in the “new middle.” He could agree to raise the medicare and SS age, for instance, in exchange for tax cuts. No worries. There’s lot’s of room for further negotiation.
How to convince your fence-sitting friend or relative on climate change
by David Atkins
James West at The Nation has a great flow chart for convincing your fence-sitting or skeptical friend or relative of the reality of climate change, copied below:
Dismantling the federal regulatory apparatus is an unusual liberal project
by digby
Read this piece if you feel like getting your blood boiling at the end of a long day. It’s about President Obama’s “regulatory czar” Cass Sunstein’s new book called “Simpler: The Future of Government.” It tells the story of his four years as the head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (“OIRA”) which oversees the executive branch’s regulatory apparatus. It’s Cheney-esque in its power — obscurity.
Rules on worker health, environmental protection, food safety, health care, consumer protection, and more all passed through Sunstein’s inbox.
Some never left.A group of Department of Energy efficiency standards, for example, have languished at OIRA since 2011, as has an Occupational Safety and Health Administration rule to finally reduce exposure to the silica dust that sickens workers every year.
In his revealing book, Sunstein tells us why: It is because he, Sunstein, had the authority to “say no to members of the president’s Cabinet”; to deposit “highly touted rules, beloved by regulators, onto the shit list“; to ensure that some rules “never saw the light of day”; to impose cost-benefit analysis “wherever the law allowed”; and to “transform cost-benefit analysis from an analytical tool into a “rule of decision,” meaning that “[a]gencies could not go forward” if their rules flunked OIRA’s cost-benefit test.
Assertive intrusions into agencies’ prerogatives — prerogatives given by law to the agencies, not to OIRA — were necessary, Sunstein insists, because otherwise agency decisions might be based not on “facts and evidence,” but on “intuitions, anecdotes, dogmas, or the views of powerful interest groups.” In Sunstein’s account, OIRA’s interventions also ensured “a well-functioning system of public comment” and “compliance with procedural ideals that might not always be strictly compulsory but that might be loosely organized under the rubric of ‘good government’.” No theme more pervades Sunstein’s book than the idea that government transparency is essential to good regulatory outcomes and to good government itself.
The deep and sad irony is that few government processes are as opaque as the process of OIRA review, superintended for almost four years by Sunstein himself. Few people even know OIRA exists; in fact, the adjective that most often appears in descriptions of this small office is “obscure.” Even fewer people know that OIRA has effective veto power over major rules issued by executive-branch agencies and that the decision as to whether a rule is “major” — and thus must run OIRA’s gauntlet before being issued — rests solely in OIRA’s hands. Most people, I would venture to guess, think that the person who runs, say, the Environmental Protection Agency is actually the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. But given OIRA’s power to veto rules, the reality is otherwise: In the rulemaking domain, the head of OIRA is effectively the head of the EPA.
Read the whole thing. If you know anything about the origins of the “cost benefit analysis” idea, you know that liberal isn’t a word that is commonly associated with it.
And keep in mind as well, that this is not something that Republicans had anything to say about. It’s purely an executive branch function and one that president’s of both parties have always used to advance their own ideology, not the ideology of the opposing party, particularly in secret and without public accountability. You can’t pin the blame for this one on the horrible Republicans in congress — it’s a direct reflection of the administration’s priorities. And it’s extremely revealing.
CNBC Contributor: “You have more people that vote for a living than work for a living….I think you’re lucky if you don’t lose your life.”
by David Atkins
Marc Faber, permabear and commentator on economic royalist channel CNBC, made waves yesterday with a hysterical yet fascinating bit of “analysis”:
Growing wealth inequality means that the wealthy have nowhere to hide and that events like those in Cyprus will happen in more countries around the world, including developed nations, said Marc Faber, the contrarian investor and publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report.
“It will happen everywhere in the world, in Western democracies,” Faber said “Squawk on the Street” on Tuesday. “You have more people that vote for a living than work for a living. I think you have to be prepared to lose 20 to 30 percent. I think you’re lucky if you don’t lose your life.”
“If you look at what happened in Cyprus, basically people with money will lose part of their wealth, either through expropriation or higher taxation,” he added.
“The problem is that 92 percent of financial wealth is owned by 5 percent of the population. The majority of people don’t own meaningful stock positions and they don’t benefit from a rise in the stock market. They are being hurt by a rising cost of living and we all know that the real incomes of median households has been going down for the last few years,” he said.
It takes some real gall to acknowledge that 92% of all financial wealth is controlled by 5% of the population, that median household incomes have been shrinking, and to even still say the problem is that the moochers and looters are voting themselves benefits instead of working for them. It’s bizarre to the point that I can’t even get inside this person’s head.
Combined with the newly discovered fact that the plutocratic class has at least $32 trillion–that’s trillion, with a “t”–stashed away in offshore accounts, it takes some very strange belief systems to assume that the market distributes rewards exactly in proportion to just deserts, that only a very few people therefore are productive at all, while the rest of humanity is a lounging mass of excrement voting themselves into a life just evading the squalor their laziness merits. It’s inconceivable and childlike narcissism.
I think on some level most of these people know they don’t deserve the ungodly wealth they’ve been lucky to accumulate at everyone else’s expense. At some level they have to know that the difference between their success and others’ failures had as much to do with luck, connections and often family ties as any particular effort or brilliance on their part. I think they must also know deep down that concentrating their lives on accumulation of wealth while most of the rest of the world devotes itself to survival, family, following divine dictates and bettering the lives of others, makes them worse human beings in spite of their extravagant riches.
They must know deep down that all of this is terribly wrong. They know the hand of karma either waits round the corner, or ought to. That insecurity and fear leads to a lot of self-justification, immoral universe construction and paranoia. It’s no way to live. It also helps explain why so many of our elites make such bad decisions.
Roger Ebert passed away today. I will hoist a glass tonight in his honor.
I was a struggling film student when Siskel and Ebert’s “Sneak Previews” debuted on PBS and it immediately became must-see TV for me and all of my grubby little friends. In those days before DVRs we would actually gather together for drinks and dinners to watch the shows together. As budding filmmakers and writers, we were all entranced at the idea that anyone would want to put film reviews on TV. It seems so odd to think of now, with all the “inside Hollywood” stuff and endless feedback loop of infotainment, but at the time it was revolutionary. Film clips! Every week! It was nirvana for movie mad freaks like us.
In recent years, Roger Ebert did something else that was revolutionary: He showed us how to live with a terrible illness and, despite a disability that would have destroyed most celebrities, stayed as relevant as ever by engaging the public through social media. His writing became even more feisty and aggressive than it had been when he was younger, particularly when it came to politics. He was an inspiration.
Anyway, I will miss him. He was important to me as a young film student and old political writer. I can’t say that about too many people.
Here’s Dennis’ tribute to Siskel and Ebert on the occasion of the At the Movies finale a few years back:
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Nice sweaters: Adieu to TV’s At the Movies
By Dennis Hartley
Being a renowned film critic in the blogosphere, I am often stopped by strangers on the street; and if there is one question that I am inevitably going to be asked, it is this one: “Sir? Would you know if the Route 27 bus comes by here more than once an hour?” OK. Maybe after that question, the, erm, one I am most frequently asked is this: “So, what ever made you think other people might care about your opinions on cinema?” Well, if you must pry (“I must! I must!”), there are a couple pop cultural touchstones that nudged me toward upgrading from Annoying Movie Geek Who Never Shuts Up at Parties to Aspiring Film Critic. First, there was this classic 1985 panel by Matt Groening:
Depending on your screen size, the graphics may not be 100% legible, but here’s the gist: Are you qualified to be a clever film critic? · Did you have no friends as a child? · Do you salivate at the smell of stale popcorn? · Do you thrill at the prospect of spending a career writing in-depth analyses of movies aimed at subliterate 15-year-olds? · Do you mind being loathed for your opinions? The four types of clever film critics: Which do you aspire to be? · Academic type: boring, unreadable · Serious type: reveals endings · Daily type: nice plot summaries · TV clown: nice sweaters For advanced clever film critics only: Can you use “mise-en-scène” in a review that anyone will finish reading?
“Hey,” I thought to myself, after passing a substantial amount of milk and Cocoa Puffs through my nose, “I could do that!” Unfortunately, however, the internet hadn’t quite taken off yet, and if you wanted to be a clever film critic you still had to try to get a job at like, an actual newspaper or something. Besides, I was too busy at the time chasing a broadcasting career (funnily enough, after 35 years in the business, I’m still “chasing” it).
All kidding aside, there was a more significant touchstone for me, which preceded Groening’s satirical yet weirdly empowering observations. Back in the late 70s, I was living in Fairbanks, Alaska. This was not the ideal environment for an obsessive movie buff. At the time, there were only two single-screen movie theaters in town. To add insult to injury, we were usually several months behind the Lower 48 on “first-run” features (it took us nearly a year to get Star Wars, if I recall). And keep in mind, there was no cable service in the market, and the video stores were a still a few years down the road as well. There were occasional screenings of midnight movies at the University of Alaska, and the odd B-movie gem might pop up on late night TV, but that was about it. Sometimes, I’d gather up a coterie of my fellow culture vulture pals for the 260 mile drive to Anchorage, where they had more theatres (and were slightly ahead of us in line to get first run prints). Consequently, due to the lack of venues, I was reading more about movies, than actually watching them. I remember poring over back issues of The New Yorker at the public library, soaking up Penelope Gilliat and Pauline Kael, and thinking they had a pretty cool gig; but it seemed like it was requisite to actually live in NYC (or L.A.) to be taken seriously as a film critic (most of the films they reviewed didn’t make it out to the sticks).
Then, in 1978, our local PBS television affiliate began carrying a bi-weekly 30-minute program called Sneak Previews. Now here was something kind of interesting; a couple of guys (kind of scruffy lookin’) casually bantering about current films-who actually seemed to know their shit. You might even think they were professional movie critics…which it turned out they were. In fact, they were professional rivals; Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel wrote for competing Chicago dailies, the Chicago Sun Times and the Chicago Tribune(respectively). This underlying tension between the pair was always bubbling just under the surface, but imbued the show with an interesting dynamic (especially when they disagreed on a film). Still, I always got a vibe that they treated each other with respect (if begrudging at times) and most importantly, treated the viewers with respect as well. You never felt like they were talking above your head, like some of the traditional film essayists who were “boring, unreadable” (as Matt Groening describes the “academic types” in his panel above). Nor did they condescend, either. This is where I part ways with Groening; his “TV clowns” reference above is clearly directed at Siskel & Ebert, but I would reserve that description for someone more along the lines of the perennially ridiculous Gene Shalit. One thing these two did share was an obvious and genuine love and respect for the art of cinema; and long before the advent of the internet, I think they were instrumental in razing the ivory towers and demystifying the art of film criticism (especially for culturally starved yahoos like me, living on the frozen tundra).
Last weekend, with minimal fanfare, A.O. Scott and Michael Phillips, the most recent hosts of At the Movies (the long-running weekly syndicated review show that Siskel & Ebert created after they parted ways with the producers of Sneak Previews back in 1982) each gave their farewell soliloquy and quietly closed up the balcony for good. That’s too bad, because during their relatively brief tenure, Scott and Phillips brought an erudite and thoughtful discourse to the show that had been sorely lacking for some time. To be sure, the program went through a lot of personnel changes over the years, and not always for the best (would it be tacky to mention Ben Lyons by name?). Although Ebert remained a stalwart fixture until health issues precipitated his 2006 departure, I thought that the show never quite recovered from the absence of Siskel (who died in 1999). As Scott and Phillips rolled a collage of vintage Siskel & Ebert clips, I found myself unexpectedly choking up a little. Granted, the model pioneered by Siskel and Ebert may now seem staid and hoary in the era of Rotten Tomatoes, but its historical importance and effect on some of us “of a certain age” cannot be overlooked.
So Roger, should you happen to be reading this (not likely, but I can dream, can’t I?) and to Gene, wherever you may be, somewhere out there in the ether: FWIW, I humbly offer my two enthusiastic thumbs up. .
I’m beginning to develop a real respect for Republican Party chairman Reince Priebus. Every day he says something aggressively absurd but which always features very strong emotional logic with his rank and file. Yesterday there was this bizarroworld discussion. Today, you have this:
A legion of limousine liberals will descend tonight on San Francisco’s famed Billionaire’s Row. Leading the pack, the most famous limo of them all — and inside it, the chief liberal, President Barack Obama.
Though now free of the demands of campaign fund-raising, the president has discovered he really, really misses it. So he’s back on the big-money circuit, this time for his friends at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
And where better for the self-ordained defender of the middle class to champion his cause than the home of oil heir Gordon Getty, in the heart of Billionaire’s Row, the bay-view boulevard where those with ten-figure net-worths snatch up homes with eight-figure price tags.
But what else does the president have to do?
Well, his budget is two months late to Congress. No matter, the national debt is only $16.7 trillion. Then there’s the floundering economy. But surely the middle class can put the bills on hold while the president sips a top-shelf cocktail.
In his February State of the Union Address, the president delivered a robust defense of the middle class. “It is our generation’s task, then, to re-ignite the true engine of America’s economic growth: a rising, thriving middle class.” Great! The middle class needs help after the first four years of his presidency. Yet watching the president’s actions, his words ring hollow.
For good measure, the president used the speech to fire a rhetorical shot at billionaires — as he often does. Few Americans haven’t heard him malign “millionaires and billionaires” for any number of reasons. But nothing says “I really mean it” like rubbing elbows with them in the Bay Area.
This is Obama’s method of operation: publicly brow-beating then privately back-slapping. And while he collects checks from those he pretends to disdain, taxpayers get to foot the bill. A jaunt to California may cost a couple hundred dollars on JetBlue. But on Air Force One, it costs $180,000. An hour.
Last month, the Obama administration announced it was axing White House tours. Why? They blamed the sequester budget cuts that went into effect March 1. So there’s no money for third-graders to visit the people’s house, but there’s plenty of money for the president to schmooze at a billionaire’s house?
As Vice President Biden likes to say, “Don’t tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.”
To be fair, the president doesn’t yet have an official budget to show. But, by now, we’ve seen enough to know what — or whom — he really values.
What an amazing collection of contradictory and hypocritical assertions. I’m frankly impressed. Here we have the Chairman of the Party which ran the scion of one of America’s most well known and wealthy political families in the last presidential race — a man who was at least partially undone by a video which showed him lugubriously explaining to bunch of millionaires that half the country is a bunch of moochers. A statement, by the way, which the entire GOP elite loudly applauded. Today, Preibus is claiming that his party is the protector of the middle class and the enemy of the wealthy (well the “bad” wealthy, the limousine liberals, not the “good” ones like the Koch Brothers. They’re Real Makers, dontcha know.)
Then he condemns the president for spending money to fly around the country while the White House tours have been closed, even though the reason for the closing, the sequester, is largely the result of the GOP’s decades-long spending jihad. Indeed, the Paul Ryan budget would slash spending even more. (And yes, the president is also guilty of deficit hawkery, but it’s really rich for the party of small government to now decry spending cuts. It must be nice not having to worry about cognitive dissonance.) Oh, and by the way, political travel costs are reimbursed to the taxpayers which Preibus as a top level political hack surely knows.
Finally, “sipping cocktails” harkens back to some of their earliest broadsides against him back in 2008. You remember, the image of the “presumptuous” Obama. He’s basically a lazy goodfernothing avoiding his responsibilities in Washington so he can rub elbows with the wealthy (and laugh, I tell you, laughat all you losers!)
Anyway, this whole thing makes little intellectual sense, but it does have an emotional resonance for the GOP base. It’s simple. In these populist times, the GOP leadership is projecting its own image as the party of the rich onto the Democrats and then taking the role of protector of the middle class. You can understand why they would feel the need to do this after Romney made total asses of them in the last election and they subsequently spent months ostentatiously fighting to protect the wealthy from even paying a cent more in taxes. But it takes real talent to be so boldly hypocritical a without betraying even a modicum of sheepishness.
But then that’s always been one of the right’s very special talents. And they have found a very talented leader in Preibus (or whomever is writing his blog everyday.) He’s got his work cut out for him.
NRA instructor Eugene Kenny would have joined his fellow gun-rights supporters at the state Capitol Wednesday—if he hadn’t accidentally shot himself in the foot.
He was there in spirit. And on the internet.
“I’ve been watching this like a hawk,” Kenny said about the debate in Hartford over what may be the toughest proposed state gun-control laws in the country, including expanded background checks on buyers as well as a ban on the sale of most assault weapons and all high-capacity magazines. (The legislation passed Wednesday evening; the governor was expected to sign it mid-day Thursday.) Kenny was rooting for the package of laws to fail; he said they would cut into gun-owners’ rights without protecting the public any more than current laws already do. “You can count on one hand the number of assaults with an automatic weapon” that take place in New Haven, he said. “When you have sick minds out there—it’ll be a bullet, a gun, a bomb—they’re going to do evil” no matter what laws are on the books.
Kenny, a 49-year-old licensed National Rifle Association instructor who leads training classes in pistol and rifle use, delivered his arguments in the front foyer of the two-family Edgewood Avenue house where he rents an upstairs apartment in the Edgewood neighborhood.
Wearing an NRA hooded sweatshirt, he had his left foot in a cast because he accidentally shot a bullet last week while cleaning his Glock handgun.
This is why I’m in favor of gun regulation: way too many of the people who own them are meatheads. It’s just not safe for anyone when yahoos like this are waving around deadly weapons, especially in public. He’s lucky he didn’t kill someone — or himself.
Keep in mind: this guy’s an NRA instructor.
I usually always cock it back and it usually ejects a shell that’s in the chamber,” he recalled. “You pull the trigger to release the slide … This time there was a cartridge in there. And BANG! Hit my ankle.”
A self-described “stickler about safety,” Kenny said he has never had a student injured over 10 years of leading firearms classes. He said he’ll draw two lessons for his students about this recent accident: How he did the wrong thing by not checking the chamber. And how he did the right thing—saving his life—by pointing the gun toward the ground, not at his head or chest, as he cleaned it.
Kenny went to the hospital for treatment. The police interviewed him there about the incident.
They’re still investigating the incident, according to Sgt. Al Vazquez, head of the major crimes unit. They have the Glock in custody as part of the investigation. The gun was legally registered.
Vazquez said his detectives are also still investigating the theft of a safe last November from Kenny’s apartment. It contained around 10 guns—mostly handguns, plus a Saiga 12 rifle. “I took a hit, $8,000 worth of firearms” in that theft, Kenny said.
Jonathan Chait flagged this quote from Eric Cantor today and came up with an interesting theory as to why he said it:
Mr. Cantor complained that the president, while insisting on additional tax increases, still has not embraced the structural changes to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security that he says are needed to strike a deficit reduction deal.
Even on the divisive tax issue, however, Mr. Cantor can sometimes sound as if he is leaving a door open. If Mr. Obama shows he is “serious about fixing the problem,” he said, “then we’ll see” about additional taxes.
(When pressed on the point, Mr. Cantor returned to his familiar position that the House would not back higher taxes.)
Chait thinks this might explain why the Republicans have been bizarrely insisting that the President has refused to cut the “entitlements” despite his repeated offers to do so — it’s a sort of self-serving delusion that they are “making him do it it” so they can justify making a deal. Otherwise, if they did come to agreement, they’d have entirely capitulated and they just can’t do that. Not after their bruising loss in the election and their agreement to allow some of the Bush tax cuts to expire when they swore they never would.
This makes sense to me. By calling for the “balanced approach” up front, the administration gave the Republicans no way to save face. The administration probably thought they were just creating a campaign slogan at the time (and that, if it came to it, the sequester and fiscal cliff threats would bring them to heel.) Now, the sequester is upon us and in order to agree to a Grand Bargain, the GOP is stuck trying to pretend they’ve “forced” the president to agree to entitlement cuts — and it just isn’t very convincing.
Now, I suppose it’s possible that the White House did all this to ensure that the Republicans wouldn’t come to the table, but that means they really wanted these sequester cuts, which I kind of doubt. The Grand Bargain has always been their stated goal. So this whole thing is the result of a series of negotiating blunders that has us inflicting austerity on the economy at a very bad time — with the prospect of austerity for the most vulnerable populations far into the future being the only alternative on offer.
The question is if the Republicans can figure out a way to pretend to their people that they got something out of this deal. The President hasn’t left them much room, so it’s going to take some creativity. Unfortunately, I’m going to guess that the only way they’ll be able to get there is for the president to first negotiate with himself to cut “entitlements” even more and raise revenue even less so they can tell themselves they got something out of the deal.
Everyone says he won’t do that no matter what, so that’s good.
