Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Backing Into Shock Therapy

by digby

After all the wrangling over the recovery package this week, what’s the upshot? Krugman says:

According to the CBO’s estimates, we’re facing an output shortfall of almost 14% of GDP over the next two years, or around $2 trillion. Others, such as Goldman Sachs, are even more pessimistic. So the original $800 billion plan was too small, especially because a substantial share consisted of tax cuts that probably would have added little to demand. The plan should have been at least 50% larger. Now the centrists have shaved off $86 billion in spending — much of it among the most effective and most needed parts of the plan. In particular, aid to state governments, which are in desperate straits, is both fast — because it prevents spending cuts rather than having to start up new projects — and effective, because it would in fact be spent; plus state and local governments are cutting back on essentials, so the social value of this spending would be high. But in the name of mighty centrism, $40 billion of that aid has been cut out. My first cut says that the changes to the Senate bill will ensure that we have at least 600,000 fewer Americans employed over the next two years. The real question now is whether Obama will be able to come back for more once it’s clear that the plan is way inadequate. My guess is no. This is really, really bad.

I also keep hearing that Obama’s going to be able to come back and ask for more money for all those important things down the road, and I wonder if I’m living in the same country as these people. If the Republicans were willing to defy Obama at the moment of his greatest power, coming off a nearly hysterically euphoric inauguration, in the middle of a crisis with a clear mandate to change the country, what in God’s name makes anyone think they will be less likely to block this kind of “spending” down the road?
Obama’s going to be coming to the congress for God knows how many more gazillions in bailouts for the financial system. There are two wars that continue to burn vast amounts of money, not to mention the US global military empire in general. There is the massive federal police state apparatus that has been built up over the past seven years that has to be funded or the terrorists will kill us in our beds. All of these things are sacred and will be funded no matter what, although the Republicans may put up some kind of a token fight against the finacial system bailout and the Democrats may put up a token resistence to military spending. (Sadly, nobody will raise a question about the police state funding.) Those are things that are considered absolutely necessary and vital government expenditures that can’t even be touched, particularly by a Democratic majority, and the Republicans will use them as examples of their responsible leadership. They will say they just have to draw the line at “pork” and “entitlements,” which the country just can’t afford, what with all the unemployment and all.
They have shown their cards — they are cynically banking on the economy failing to get themselves back into power. And they have the media (and possibly even the administration) helping them.
Newsweek’s cover this week is “We Are All Socialists Now.” The article calls it a “center-right socialism” which is just funny. But then the whole piece is bizarrely oxymoronic and contradictory, just like the economic debate in the congress. It says that we are inexorably moving toward a European style mixed economy and that George W. Bush is the one who killed Reaganism with his prescription drug benefit and bank bailout. (Conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed.) But it all sounds almost reasonable until you get to this:

Now comes the reckoning. The answer may indeed be more government. In the short run, since neither consumers nor business is likely to do it, the government will have to stimulate the economy. And in the long run, an aging population and global warming and higher energy costs will demand more government taxing and spending. The catch is that more government intrusion in the economy will almost surely limit growth (as it has in Europe, where a big welfare state has caused chronic high unemployment). Growth has always been America’s birthright and saving grace. The Obama administration is caught in a paradox. It must borrow and spend to fix a crisis created by too much borrowing and spending. Having pumped the economy up with a stimulus, the president will have to cut the growth of entitlement spending by holding down health care and retirement costs and still invest in ways that will produce long-term growth. Obama talks of the need for smart government. To get the balance between America and France right, the new president will need all the smarts he can summon.

That is the state of elite American thought right now. Total incoherence.
We may need to make the government grow in order to deal with the massive problems, like deep recessions, global warming and an aging population, but it will create a big welfare state which will deny our high growth birthright. (That birthright, by the way, hasn’t actually been realized in more than 30 years for the vast majority of Americans.)
The president is faced with having to do what nearly every economist in the world says he must do — boost spending. But it requires borrowing and that’s bad. So we will need to cut all those big, nasty European welfare programs after all. And Gawd knows there can’t be any more spending that isn’t “investment” (as defined by conservatives as tax cuts and bridges to nowhere.) The most important thing, as always, is to not be French.I’m sure some of them thought they were being boldly unconventional when they “diagnosed” Obama’s problems, but the truth is that they are defending the status quo. Instead of using their space and influence to explain some rather basic facts about Keynesian theory they present the so-called paradox of stimulus to cure a problem caused by borrowing and spending as something that will have to be “paid for” almost immediately by destroying the safety net. Apparently, they think this makes sense, both economically and politically.
I know that I’m beating the drum in boring fashion about the impending “entitlement reform” agenda but it’s really got me spooked that they are talking about it while we are fighting a major recession. I guess it’s supposed to make wall street and banking concerns feel confidence that they still own the government, but to people who are retired or about to retire (and there are a boatload of them) it makes them want to take their money and either move to another country or hoard it under the mattress. At the very least it scares the hell out of people who are already living on very little, losing their jobs and insurance and see their futures slipping away. It’s hard to see why any progressive would put this on the table right now, particularly as some sort of “Grand Bargain” with people who want to destroy it.
And I doubt that calling health care reform “entitlement reform” is going to lead to a positive outcome. “Entitlement reform” by its very name implies that social security and medicare are unearned benefits, and to “reform” them under the rubric of saving money, which seems to be the plan, is a recipe for getting punk’d. If there is some super-duper Machiavellian plan that Rahm and his Blue Dogs are cooking up to protect social security and create universal health care, then the first order of business needs to be to ditch the word “entitlement.” (But I don’t think Rahm and his Blue Dogs are actually trying to do that, do you?)
Like most Democrats of the past three decades, they believe that if they can just get issues like social security, health care, abortion, trade, unions, crime, defense, tort reform, regulation etc “off the table” then nobody will ever have a reason not to vote for Democrats again and everything will be wonderful. And they’ve been successful to some degree — they have agreed on the death penalty, gun control, tough criminal sanctions, the drug war, defense spending and to never raise taxes on the rich above the historically very low agreed upon level of the Clinton years. And with the stimulus debate, they’ve now pretty much succeeded in defining most government spending that directly helps people as “silly,” so they’ve made even more progress in just the last two weeks. Their strategy has been to try get people to stop arguing about issues by capitulating rather than by trying to win the arguments. I guess they feel it worked.
There is some other, overarching logic to the stimulus debate and entitlement reform, though, and it’s important to keep it in mind. It’s the logic of disaster capitalism and there has never been a more perfect storm in which to apply it. “Entitlement reform”and “Grand Bargains” in this environment, particularly with a perceived mandate for compromise with wingnuts at all costs, looks very much like a form of shock therapy.
Perhaps the administration sees it more as a Nixon goes to China kind of thing, but that assumes that passing legislation with Republicans is the same thing as a president acting as a head of state (and that they don’t actually agree that social security and medicare must be cut to balance the budget.) If “entitlement reform” is on the agenda, I can’t see how universal health care happens — or anything else that costs money, for that matter (unless it involves war or imprisonment.) This first skirmish, over the stimulus, has already defined necessary spending as that which Susan Collins and Ben Nelson approve of. That doesn’t bode well for expansion of the safety net.I’m hopeful that this is a lesson for the administration and the Democrats in congress. Despite a big electoral victory and a mandate for change, they are not going to get cooperation from the Republicans and Presidents Nelson, Snowe and Collins aren’t the kind of people who have the imagination or necessary boldness to lead us out of this mess. Obama is going to have to be a much different leader than he wanted to be. Post-partisan mediation isn’t going to work. He’s going to have to get the people behind him on the specifics and enlist them in the cause.

Update: I was totally remiss in not mentioning the other reasons why the Newsweek title is utterly stupid. It’s a play on a famous quote from Milton Friedman: “We are all Keynesians now.” The fact is that everyone is still Keynesian — except for the neanderthal, conservative know-nothings in congress (and at Newsweek) who insist that all spending on anything but guns and prisons, even in an economic crisis, is socialism.

The title really couldn’t be more stupid in the context of the actual debate that’s going on. In fact, considering that they don’t even mention it in the story, I’m not even sure they recalled the reference when they came up with it. If they did, they sure did miss the point.

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Hack Attack

by digby

Apparently the holocaust denying Bishop was unavailable this morning, so Fareed Zakaria had Bjorn Lomborg on his CNN show to “debate” global warming.

Of course, they let Republicans on TV to talk about fiscal responsibility and freedom all the time too, so it’s not exactly unprecedented …

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What Is The Appeal Of Conservatism?

by tristero

On some New York Times server, Tobin Harshaw wastes valuable hard drive space rounding up, and lightly discussing, the opinions of some of the people who were dead wrong about everything in the past eight years. And it left me with the question in my title: What on earth is the appeal of conservatism?

I only have the stomach to go through a little of it. Harshaw types;

Defeat tends to bring out the best in so-called movement conservatives, the ideologues like William F. Buckley who provided the intellectual framework for the Reagan ascendance.

Is that the same oh so cultured William F. Buckley whose “intellectual framework” for dealing with the scourge of AIDS was to tattoo the buttocks of every sufferer? And who later changed his mind only when he found out his pal.Roy Cohn, had contracted AIDS, a world-class sleazebag who was fucking as many guys as he could and never told them he was infected? We’re supposed to believe there is a “best” side to a man like Buckley who was so morally bereft he would have branded the diseased, and who enthusiastically drew to his bosom some of the most odious men who ever disgraced America? What healthy political discourse would ever take the opinions of a lamebrain like Buckley seriously?

Harshaw continues, now summarizing an article by Tanenhaus. Here, the discussion focuses on classic conservatism:

To make his point, he offers his reading of Edmund Burke’s original conservatism — which he sees as being based “on distrust of all ideologies” and dedicated to the “ideal of replenishing civil society by adjusting to changing conditions”; that is, to compromise. He also stresses that the second great conservative figure, Benjamin Disraeli, “advocated ‘just, necessary, expedient’ policies — that is, the policies the public demanded even when they contradicted his own ideological certitudes.”

Anything strike you as odd about this? Why yes, this is very odd indeed. That’s because a distrust of ideology, a dedication to renewing civil society by adapting, and a street-smart pragmatism aren’t the values of any conservatism I”ve ever encountered in my life. These are, and have been for at least 56 years, liberal values.

Here, Harshaw quotes some Corner clown who gives us the real conservatism that’s created the mess we’re in and that we’ve all grown to loathe:

It’s true Burke believed political change should occur gradually, building on what works about the existing order to address what doesn’t work about it. But the reason was that it should avoid undermining the foundations of future progress, which were political order, family stability, and social peace. The trouble with the welfare state and with aggressive progressivism is precisely that they do undermine these foundations (and often intentionally so, because they see them as unjust) —

That’s right. Aggresive progressivism – you know, the theory of politics that is unalterably opposed to extralegal measures like torture, that advocates extending marriage rights to all loving couples, and which is famous for its opposition to putting semi-automatics in the hands of any deranged nut who wants to buy one – undermines political order, family stability, and social peace. Yup, that writer celebrates the conservatism I know: completely wrong on everything.

Go ahead. Read the article. Every positive value, or nearly every one, is a hallmark of modern liberalism. And every single one has been trampled on by the beings who call themselves conservatives. And yet, Harshaw invites us to discuss conservatism as we know it as if it potentially has something good to offer.

Conservatism – the real kind, the kind we’ve endured at least since Nixon – isn’t an intellectual movement in need of reform. It is extreme right thuggery epitomized by the bloated face of a fat, cigar-chomping, drug addict who makes fun of Parkinson victims and proudly boasts that he wants the president of the United States to fail.

I”m sick and tired of these sober, ever so thoughtful, discussions of the direction of modern conservatism. There is only one direction I care to discuss for such an utterly dildo pseudo-philosophy: its journey to defeat. Conservatism in the 21st Century has no intellectual history worthy of discussion – Edmund Burke, my ass. Today’s conservatives, like the incredibly influential religious nuts called The Family, are so unbelievably mush-brained they approvingly lump Hitler in with Jesus. Real conservatism is a haven for bigotry, stupidity, ignorance, bad ideas, and an unlimited obsession with violence that is symptomatic of profound deviance. It rots this country’s economic, scientific, artistic, and moral health. As the 2000 election, and now Norm Coleman show, It is deeply inimical to democracy,

Conservatism as it is practiced today is not something to reform. It is something mightily to oppose.

Saturday Night At The Movies

Welcome to the Hotel Babylonia

By Dennis Hartley

The late great George Carlin had an absolutely brilliant routine concerning his disdain for the rampant use of euphemisms to sugarcoat hard truths. As an example, he traced the metamorphosis of the term “shellshock” throughout the course of 20th century warfare:

There’s a condition in combat. Most people know about it. It’s when a fighting person’s nervous system has been stressed to its absolute peak and maximum. Can’t take anymore input. The nervous system has either (click) snapped or is about to snap.

In the First World War, that condition was called “shell shock”. Simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables, shell shock. Almost sounds like the guns themselves.

That was seventy years ago. Then a whole generation went by and the Second World War came along and the very same combat condition was called “battle fatigue”. Four syllables now. Takes a little longer to say. Doesn’t seem to hurt as much.” Fatigue” is a nicer word than “shock”. (Stridently) “Shell shock!” (Subdued) “Battle fatigue”.

Then we had the war in Korea, 1950. Madison Avenue was riding high by that time, and the very same combat condition was called “operational exhaustion”. Hey, we’re up to eight syllables now! And the humanity has been squeezed completely out of the phrase. It’s totally sterile now. Operational exhaustion. Sounds like something that might happen to your car.

Then of course, came the war in Viet Nam, which has only been over for about sixteen or seventeen years, and thanks to the lies and deceits surrounding that war, I guess it’s no surprise that the very same condition was called “post-traumatic stress disorder”. Still eight syllables, but we’ve added a hyphen! And the pain is completely buried under jargon. Post-traumatic stress disorder.

I’ll bet you if we’d of still been calling it shell shock, some of those Viet Nam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed at the time. I’ll bet you. I’ll bet you.

A rose by any other name. Whether you want to call it shellshock, battle fatigue, operational exhaustion or PTSD, there’s one thing for certain: unless you are a complete sociopath and really DO love the smell of napalm in the morning…war will fuck you up.

In a new animated feature called Waltz with Bashir, writer-director Ari Forman mixes the hallucinatory expressionism of Apocalypse Now with personal sense memories of his own experiences as an Israeli soldier serving in the 1982 conflict in Lebanon to paint a searing portrait of the horrors of war and its devastating psychic aftermath. A true visual wonder, the film is comprised of equal parts documentary, war diary and bad acid trip.

The film opens with the deeply unsettling sequence of a terrified young man being relentlessly pursued by a pack of raging, snarling hellhounds, nipping at his heels as he flees through a war-torn urban landscape. This turns out to be the visualization of a recurring nightmare that haunts one of the director’s fellow war vets. While lending a sympathetic ear to his pal as he props up the bar and continues to recount his psychic trauma, Forman has a sudden and disturbing epiphany: his own recollections of his tour of duty in Lebanon are nowhere near as vivid; in fact they are virtually non-existent.

This leads Forman on a personal journey to unlock the key to this selective amnesia. He confides in a psychiatrist friend, who urges him to seek out and interview as many of his fellow vets as he can. Perhaps, by listening to their personal stories, he will ultimately unblock his own. It soon becomes clear that the answer may lie in the possibility that he may have had a ringside seat to the horrific Sabra and Shatila refugee camp massacres, in which a large number of Palestinian non-combatants (including women and children) were rounded up and summarily executed by members of the Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia while Israeli Defense Force troops stood by. What follows is an affecting rumination on repressed memory, circumstantial complicity and collective guilt.

The director generally steers clear of making any heavy-handed political statement; this is more of a “soldier’s story”, a universal grunt’s-eye view of the confusion and madness of war, in which none are really to blame, yet all remain complicit. This eternal dichotomy, I think, lies at the heart of the matter in trying to understand what it is that snaps inside the mind of the walking wounded (or “shell-shocked”, if you will). How do we help them? How do we help them help themselves? With the recent distressing news about the ever-escalating suicide rates of our own American Afghanistan/Iraq war veterans, I think these questions are more important than ever, for a whole new generation of psychically damaged young men and women. In the meantime let’s continue to hope for a day when the very concept of war itself has become but a “repressed memory” for the entire planet.

War is cel: Persepolis, Grave of the Fireflies, Hadashi no Gen, Millennium Actress.

Previous posts with related themes:

Stop-Loss

Johnny Got His Gun/Rolling Thunder

Minority Veto

by digby

California is in deep trouble. The state’s bond rating is now the worst of all 50 states. They are furloughing workers. The place is coming apart at the seams.

And why? Because the anti-tax zealots have achieved their goal — a government that is held hostage to conservatives whether in the minority or the majority —conservatives who will ensure that the government can never function in a way that gives the citizens confidence that it can actually work.

It’s useful to think a little bit about that as we see the federal government likewise rigged, and increasingly dysfunctional. Conservatives masquerading as centrists having veto power when the government needs to raise revenue or spend it on anything that might make government seem like a useful institution for anything other than war, prisons and (sometimes) police, is a recipe for chaos.

Last night I heard the used car salesman Bob Corker and several other Republicans parrot a common GOP talking point, which will be their fall back if the Democratic program helps turn the economy around — they are already saying the economy is turning around on its own as part of the business cycle. Therefore, everything the Democrats are doing is wasteful pork at the expense of the deficit. In fact, John Kyl is already fretting about the recession that Obama’s plans are going to create down the road:

“If you knew a bill in the U.S. Senate would cause a recession in 10 years, would you support it?” asked Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Arizona. “That’s what the Congressional Budget Office, the bipartisan office that supports our efforts in the Congress, says about this legislation. … There will be negative [gross domestic product] in this decade as a result of this legislation.”

But the recession that has been going on or over a year and is getting worse as we speak isn’t something worth worrying about. Over and over again I hear how the Democrats blew thing thing by putting condoms and honeybees in the package. But let’s face it, when it comes to spending the Republicans will pull anything out and call it a boondoggle. Any hope of getting the kind of help to people they need to ride out this recession is getting whittled away by sharp Republican cant — and I see no hope that the Dems will get another bite of the apple. (The knew that, which is why they wanted to get as much relief money in this package as they could.)

So, when (if) the economy turns around, the lack of response will be seen as another example of government ineptitude. For conservatives, it’s all good.

I know I’m a broken record, but the fact remains that the Democrats have to start actually running against Republican ideology and not just saying they’ll be better Republicans or making promises to change the tone and the process. The people in this country don’t understand that most of what Republicans say with such arrogant assurance is malignant, discredited bullshit. Why would they? Nobody ever challenges it on the merits.

Here’s the result. When Republicans talk it makes “sense” to people because it’s what they’ve been hearing for thirty years. And they figure the other side must be the ones who don’t get it:

After all the Democratic bowing and scraping, and all the phony baloney GOP sturm and drang about fiscal responsibility, the American people still think all the partisan bickering is the Democrats’ fault. That’s the paradox of the hissy fit.

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It’s Like, Totally, Boring

by digby

It’s really great to see the media finally sobering up and taking their duty seriously:

The casual contempt for Obama–an unheard of phenomena for the press eight years ago when Bush arrived in the Beltway–has already become impossible for many within the media industry to hide. Specifically the WaPo Lisa de Moraes and her unnamed television industry “suits” quoted her news article, “Obama’s Preemptive Strike.” The premise is pretty simple: Obama may address the nation three times in primetime during the month of February. The Post’s television writer treats this as a really big deal and inserts a how-dare-he attitude, as she wrings her hands wondering how many millions of dollars the networks might “lose” by, you know, handing over the public airwaves for relatively small blocks of time to the POTUS so he can address a national crisis. “President Obama’s desire to talk — and talk, and talk — to the American public could cost broadcast networks millions, and millions, and millions of prime-time TV dollars,” wrote de Moraes. And yeah, good luck uncovering that kind of contempt when Bush addressed the nation in 2001 on network TV, even before the 9/11 attacks. The idea that it’s newsworthy or unusual or a crisis for the TV networks when a president uses the public airwaves to address the nation is just absurd.

That’s from Eric Boehlert. More at the link. These people are living in denial. Perhaps they don’t think the economic crisis is as sexy as when they got to dress up like GI Joe and play war, but this is a hell of a lot more relevant to their actual lives than the fantasy that Saddam was sending drone planes to kill us all in our beds. We are still living in bizarroworld. The entire media became hysterical, nearly speaking in tongues, at the prospect of going to war against someone who hadn’t even attacked us. Now that we have a real crisis on our hands, they are so,very, very booored with it all. It’s infuriating.There’s an underlying reason for this particular kvetching, however. Franklin Roosevelt spoke to the nation weekly during the depression and it helped him keep the country on his side as the administration tried everything it could think of to bring the country back from the brink. I think it’s pretty clear that the last thing the elites want is for Obama to maintain the kind of connection to the people that could undermine their control of the political dialog. It can only hurt their ball team.
Along those lines, if you didn’t get a chance to see Jay Rosen and Glenn Greenwald discussing this very topic on Moyers last night, check it out. Very good stuff. And Boehlert actually got to discuss this topic on CNN yesterday, which I think may be a first.
baby steps …
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Blogging The Origin: First Performance

by tristero

I’m a little under the weather so I’ll let this one be short. It’s just a nasty head cold, nothing serious, but I have nearly zero strength to do much more than listen to Parthenia on my computer and zone out in my hotel room.

The first performance of The Origin went extremely well. Eric Johnson’s performance of his solo “Difficulties On Theory” hit the perfect blend of humor and passion and mezzo Jacqueline Horner’s performance of one of the central movements, A Great Tree, was absolutely spectacular. I had rewritten her part for that piece that morning and she performed it as if she had been practicing it for months! KITKA, the female Balkan vocal group which represents the character of Charles Darwin were simply unbelievable. It will be a long time before I can get the incredible animal sounds they came up with for “The Voyage of the Beagle.” Bill Morrison’s films looked great and were loved by all (especially me), Julie Pretzat conducted brilliantly and the orchestra and chorus shone. We got a packed house and a standing ovation. Thanks to all for all the hard work.

There’s another performance tonight so it’s back to the sickbed for me until then. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

The Lowdown

by dday

(I am well aware that this post assumes a functioning Congress. Indulge me. Throwing up your hands and saying Ben Nelson is President is fun, and I like doing it too, but if we can improve this thing, here’s what can be done.)

OK, with a day to sit back and figure things out, here’s what’s going on.

The Senate is going to pass their version of the bill by noon on Tuesday at the latest, depending on how much Republicans want to obstruct. There will be a cloture vote on Monday at 5:30ET. Here’s a list of what the Axis of Nelson-Collins cut out of the bill to make room for more tax cuts.

$40 billion State Fiscal Stabilization
$16 billion School Construction
$1.25 billion project based rental
$2.25 Neighborhood Stabilization (Eliminate)
$1.2 billion in Retrofiting Project 8 Housing
$7.5 billion of State Incentive Grants
$3.5 billion Higher Ed Construction (Eliminated)
$ 100 million FSA modernization
$50 million CSERES Research
$65 million Watershed Rehab
$30 million SD Salaries
$100 million Distance Learning
$98 million School Nutrition
$50 million aquaculture
$2 billion broadband
$1 billion Head Start/Early Start
$5.8 billion Health Prevention Activity.
$2 billion HIT Grants
$1 billion Energy Loan Guarantees
$4.5 billion GSA
$3.5 billion Federal Bldgs Greening

The $40 billion for state aid is astounding. You’re not going to see an economic recovery if the states are having to cut budgets at the same time the feds expand them. They’ll cancel each other out.

What you don’t see in there are the three big tax cuts that the Senate put in this bill that has crowded out this spending, not for reasons of effectiveness, but purely because squishy moderates couldn’t live with a $900 billion dollar bill. They are:

1) $70 billion dollars for a patch so that the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) doesn’t affect high-middle-income earners making under $1 million dollars a year. This is passed annually because Congress is too cowardly to rewrite the tax code. But it doesn’t belong in a stimulus bill, as no less than House Minority Whip JON KYL just said in a floor speech. People making $400,000 a year aren’t likely to spend money they get to keep as a result of fixing the AMT.

2) At least $35 billion dollars for a $15,000 home buyer’s tax credit, which will only go to people who have enough money to buy a house. This is a craven attempt to reinflate the housing bubble before prices have settled, and because there’s so much inventory on the market it will not spur hardly any new home construction.

3) Around $11 billion for a tax credit for car buyers, which will only go to people who have enough money to buy a new car. This is not tied to greening the US fleet and will be implemented before fuel economy standards have changed over, so it doesn’t even reward fuel efficiency or reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

These are tax breaks for suburbanites, which in all likelihood won’t get spent at anywhere near the rates that they would in the hands of the poor or middle class. And they won’t create jobs, either.

Arlen Specter, one of the moderate squishes, said this is the best they can do. The above tax cuts are most certainly not. In particular, the House is piqued about the AMT patch in the bill.

House moderates oppose including the AMT provision in the stimulus package, arguing that the issue should be addressed in the regular budget process so that its cost can be offset by spending cuts or tax increases. But until yesterday, House leaders appeared willing to accept the provision, which was added at the urging of Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), the senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee.

With AMT in and some of House Democrats’ top spending priorities out, the package could become much more difficult for many House members to swallow, Democratic aides said. House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) said House Democrats will push hard to restore the Senate’s deletions. That means, lawmakers said, that the overall cost would grow to around $900 billion to accommodate the AMT fix.

This is the next step. The bill will go to a House-Senate conference. According to Kagro X in a must-read post, the Senate wants the House to swallow this bill whole, claiming that they cannot pass the bill if anything is deleted.

Assuming passage on Tuesday, the House will then have the option to accept the Senate package as is, to make still more amendments and send it back to the Senate, or to agree to the Senate’s request for a formal conference to resolve their differences. It is the Senate’s announced intention (also included in the unanimous consent agreements from last night) to insist on its version of the bill in conference. If the House acts immediately either to pass the bill or to go to conference, they would have an opportunity to do so Tuesday afternoon. The self-imposed deadline for clearing the bill for the White House falls prior to the scheduled adjournment for the President’s Day recess at the end of next week. That doesn’t leave a lot of time, and increases the pressure on the House and the likelihood that they’ll be forced either to accept the Senate bill, or make only minor changes.

You’re going to see a lot of House-Senate wrangling. The Senate could adjourn prematurely and stick the House with the bill. They’ll create a sense of urgency through an artificial deadline. And they’ll try to ram this flawed bill down the House’s throat.

The question is whether or not the Senate moderates would be willing to sink the economy if the House makes changes to the bill in conference that are more than cosmetic. Obviously the rump faction of the Senate isn’t going to alter their stance, you can’t compromise with crazy. But the Snowe-Collins-Specter-Nelson faction kind of knows that something has to be done. The President is talking up job creation and will be hitting the road this week to increase the pressure. If you want more jobs, you have to eliminate the AMT patch, which can be reconciled through a regular process with offsets, and add back the spending to the states, school construction, and more, which will probably add a million more jobs. Otherwise, you’re going to see cops, firefighters, nurses and teachers out on the street (John Kerry is explaining this very well on the Senate floor).

Will the House force the moderates in the Senate to eat a shit sandwich? Will the moderates do it, or will they vote against the bill and sink the economy? There can be no amendments to a conference report, but the bill will need a 3/5 vote. Again, Kagro X:

Just as the bill was subject to a budget point of order in the Senate, so will the conference report be. So the Senate will need 60 votes, filibuster or no, to pass any conference report. That, too, will increase pressure on the House to defer to the Senate position. Senate conferees will no doubt insist that nothing but their Perfect and All-Wise version of the bill could ever muster the necessary 60 votes, and House conferees will have to measure any changes they propose against the likelihood that the Senate’s claims are true.

This is a big game of chicken, but if the President and House Democrats can generate enough grassroots support, they may have the cover to swap state spending in and the AMT patch or some of these other suburbanite amendments out.

The other thing, as I’ve said before, is that the Senate can help themselves by immediately confirming Judd Gregg for Commerce Secretary. Gregg is now recusing himself from all recovery package votes, which is the same as a no vote under the circumstances. Confirming him would reduce the number of Senators to 98, which would mean only 59 votes would be needed for passage. It reduces the moderates needed to eat the shit sandwich by one. If Bonnie Newman then came to the Senate to be seated, she could be blocked unless Al Franken is seated in a compromise action, which would get us 59 Democratic Senators and again keep the number of moderate squishes needed to one. I have no idea why Harry Reid isn’t doing this. If he’s afraid of Republican bleating he could schedule the Gregg vote immediately before the final vote on recovery and shock doctrine them.

That’s basically what’s going on. I think the pressure points are Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. Tell Reid to allow a real conference instead of forcing the House to make changes, and tell Pelosi that we’ll have her back if she strips the AMT patch and adds back aid to the states.

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Presidents Nelson, Collins Upbeat After Saving Bipartisanship

by dday

Washington (BP) – Presidents Susan Collins, the historic first female President, and Ben Nelson, the historic first Nebraskan President (OK, Ford, but he was only born there), were reported in good spirits after working long into the night to save bipartisanship on the $780 billion dollar stimulus package. Just three weeks after their inauguration, they were able to avert the bipartisanship crisis and come together to restore the faith of everyone working as on-air or print talent in the media industry in the vicinity of Georgetown, Bethesda, MD and Arlongton, VA.

Sen. Ben Nelson, a Democrat from Nebraska and one of the chief negotiators of the plan, said senators had trimmed the plan to $827 billion in tax cuts and spending on infrastructure, housing and other programs that would create or save jobs.

“We trimmed the fat, fried the bacon and milked the sacred cows,” Nelson said as debate began.

According to several senators, the revised version of the plan axed money for school construction and nearly $90 million for fighting pandemic flu, among other things.

Remaining in the plan are tax incentives for small businesses, a one-year fix of the unpopular alternative-minimum tax and tax-relief for low- and middle-income families, said Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who was the most prominent Republican negotiator in the bipartisan talks.

“Our country faces a grave economic crisis and the American people want us to work together,” she said. “They don’t want to see us dividing along partisan lines on the most serious crisis facing our country.”

Making the recovery bill safe for tax cuts and free of wasteful spending like $40 billion in aid to states which will now have to lay off hundreds of thousands of workers was “a very liberating process,” Presidents Nelson and Collins said before repairing to separate corners of the White House with their families. “It feels good to have that sense of accomplishment that comes with kicking firefighters and teachers out onto the street and seeing others slip into poverty,” Nelson and Collins said in unison. “They said it couldn’t be done!” The Presidents offered a list of wasteful nonsense that was excised:

In addition to the large cut in state aid, the Senate agreement would cut nearly $20 billion proposed for school construction; $8 billion to refurbish federal buildings and make them more energy efficient; $1 billion for the early childhood program Head Start; and $2 billion from a plan to expand broadband data networks in rural and underserved areas.

Collins and Nelson’s chief of staff, former Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel, was singled out for praise:

Obama endorsed the moderates’ effort and brought its leaders — Sens. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) — to the White House to discuss their proposed cuts. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel attended the final meetings in Reid’s office last night to work out lingering differences. Before Emanuel arrived, Collins said, Democrats were advocating $63 billion in cuts. “Then Rahm got involved, and a much better proposal came forward,” she said.

Once the expected Senate passage is completed, the bill will move to a conference committee with the House of Representatives, whose leader, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, called the new package “very damaging” and said she was very much opposed to the cuts. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn was quoted as saying, “I don’t think much of what the Senate is doing.” In response, Presidents Collins and Nelson retorted, “Who died and elected them President?”

In other news, state Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) and his team won the Illinois Legislature pick-up basketball game last night by the score of 65-53.

Schmart As A Whip

by digby

Here’s Andrew Leonard at Salon on one of the shining intellectual lights of the modern conservative movement:

On Friday afternoon, Grover Norquist posted the following explanation of why the U.S. economy is sliding into the deepest recession since World War II at the National Review Online’s group blog, The Corner.

The economy as measured by the market and businesses’ willingness to hire does not sound very excited by the Reid/Pelosi/Obama spending spree.

The economy began to collapse when the Democrats captured the House and Senate and we then knew that the lower tax rates on individuals, capital gains, and dividends would end after 2010.

It’s not the first time that Norquist, president of the anti-tax lobbying group Americans for Tax Reform, has unburdened himself of such breath-taking imbecility. But to do so in response to the news that the economy lost 600,000 jobs in January is bold, even for him — (and of course, stunningly wrong, even in the narrowest sense — at the very moment Norquist wrote those words the stock market was rebounding, on hopes, theorized by none other than that shining beacon of leftwing propaganda, the Wall Street Journal, that the stimulus bill would pass. If Norquist wants to see a real market panic, wait and see what happens if the Senate fails to pass a stimulus bill.)

Leonard points out that even one of the Zombie Cornerites, Ramesh Punnuru, wasn’t buying Norquist’s economic insights, and that’s saying something.

I think the best thing I’ve seen lately to put Republican concerns about excessive spending in perspective is this chart, courtesy of FDL:

For some reason we still aren’t allowed to mention that. Even though everyone in the country agrees that Iraq was a complete and total cock-up.

Last night The Daily Show featured John Boehner saying this in June 2008, about one of the monstrous Iraq appropriations bills:

The cost of this bill, frankly, is high but it’s a price for freedom. And I don’t think you can put a price on freedom and security in our country.

I guess it all depends on how you define freedom and security. That is if anyone can possibly believe that fulfilling some crazed, neocon fantasy by starting an unnecessary money pit of a war that enrages the entire Muslim world is enhancing our freedom and security — while helping Americans deal with the worst economic downturn since the 1930s is nothing but wasteful spending.

Then, again, these are the people who fiddled while Katrina drowned New Orleans, so we know what their priorities are.

“We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.” –Rep. Richard Baker (R-LA) to lobbyists, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal (Source)

Not that we want to look in the rear view mirror and play the blame game or anything, but why should anyone listen to them now?

Update: credit where credit is due to Wolf Blitzer for this interview:

BLITZER: Just a little fact check right now.

Joining us is Mark Zandi.

He’s the chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com.

Mark, thanks very much for coming in.

What’s a better way to deal with this economic crisis — cut people’s taxes or spend government money given to the states to build infrastructure — roads, bridges?

MARK ZANDI, MOODY’S ECONOMY.COM: Well, I think you need both. The infrastructure spending has a bigger economic bang for the buck. It creates more jobs. But the problem is it can’t get into the economy quickly. So I think you do need tax cuts. That doesn’t have the same bang for the buck. It’s not as efficacious. But you can get that into the economy quickly.

So a plan, like the current plan, that has both tax cuts and spending increases, I think, is the best plan.

WOMAN: The Republicans say they want more tax cuts for the middle class, but only tax cuts for those individuals and families who actually pay federal income tax, not for those who don’t pay any federal income tax.

Are the Republicans right?

ZANDI: Well, I think that would reduce the effectiveness of tax cuts because people who are in lower income groups that, in fact, probably don’t pay income tax — look, if they got a tax break, would spend it and would spend it very quickly and that would raise the stimulus.

So, to make it more effective, I think it should go to lower income households, who, in fact, don’t pay income tax.

BLITZER: And they would, presumably, spend it very quickly. And that would help to stimulate the economy.

That’s the theory right?

ZANDI: That’s the idea. And I think it works. I mean people who are in lower income groups, they’re under more financial stress. If they get a dollar, they’re going to spend that dollar and they’re going to spend it very quickly. And that’s exactly what we want to see right now.

BLITZER: It passed the House at about — a little bit more than $800 billion. Now it’s ballooned to more than $900 billion in the Senate. And the Republican leader, the minority leader, Mitch McConnell, says, you know what, it’s going to cost a whole lot more than that.

Listen to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL (R-KY), MINORITY LEADER: And when you include interest, the bill before us will cost nearly $1.3 trillion. At some point, the taxpayers will have to pay all of this back. And they’re worried.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: Is he right? Is his math correct?

ZANDI: Yes, he’s right. If you throw in the interest costs from borrowing all the money necessary to finance the stimulus, it will ultimately cost about $1.3 trillion. That’s correct.

But another point to consider — if we don’t do stimulus, in my view, I think the economy will weaken very substantively. And that means we’re going to lose a lot of tax revenues. If people aren’t working, they’re not paying taxes. If businesses aren’t energy money, they’re not going to pay corporate income tax. And we’re going to see more spending to help all those people who lose their jobs.

So the deficit is going to rise anyway if we do nothing. So I think it’s better to take a shot at it — and a big shot at it — and see if we can’t make this work and get the economy going again.

BLITZER: What’s wrong with just pumping money in that’s going to create jobs right away?

Why do you need to put into this legislation money that’s going to create jobs two, three, four years down the road?

ZANDI: Well, a fair amount of the money is for jobs now — helping people who lose their jobs…

BLITZER: But a big chunk is only for two or three years down the road.

ZANDI: Yes, that’s right. But I think everyone does realize that in this economy — it’s not coming back quickly. So if it gets help in ’09, that would be wonderful and great. But if it gets help in 2010 and 2011, it’s going to need it then, as well.

BLITZER: When President Obama says you’ve got to pass it right now because every day is critical — we heard David Axelrod say that, his top adviser, in the last hour.

Are they right or is there time to make sure they do it better?

ZANDI: Well, we have to do it right. But time is of essence here. We just got a sense of that today with the jobs numbers. We lost almost 600,000 jobs in one month. We’ve lost 3.6 million jobs in a little over a year. The unemployment rate is rising very quickly.

We are getting trapped in a very negative cycle and so we need to break it. So we need this stimulus plan and we need it very quickly.

BLITZER: How quickly?

ZANDI: Now, that doesn’t mean we should do…

BLITZER: How quickly?

ZANDI: I think we should pass it in the next couple, three weeks. I think it’s very therapeutic what we’re going through — the debate. I think the Senate is going to make this a better bill. We’re going to get rid of the spending that makes very little sense as stimulus.

But I think, ultimately, we need to get this passed in the next couple, three weeks.

BLITZER: Some economists say this is a waste of money, a waste of time and it could be a disaster. And they point to the Japan model in the ’90s, when the Japanese government did a stimulus plan and they pumped tons of money into their economy and they say it was a lost decade for Japan, because it really didn’t turn their economy around.

Is there a parallel between what Japan went through in the ’90s and what the U.S. is going through now?

ZANDI: Well, there’s good lessons from the Japanese experience. What the Japanese did is they did their stimulus over a period of a decade. They took their time about doing it. They didn’t try to stem the downturn right up front with a lot of spending.

Moreover, they spent only on bridges and roads. And, ultimately, they built so many roads and bridges that they literally were building bridges to nowhere. And they — that wasn’t very effective.

So I think the lesson is we need to have a plan that includes spending, tax cuts, help for people who are losing their jobs, aid to state and local governments, a diversified set of stimulus and also do it up front and in a big way.

BLITZER: Bottom line, even though you were an adviser to John McCain during the campaign, you say support what Barack Obama is doing right now. You say that to members of the House and Senate.

ZANDI: I absolutely do. I — you know, I fear that the economy is slipping away. We need to act aggressively and quickly.

This isn’t a perfect plan, by any stretch, but it is a good plan — a good enough plan. It will create jobs and it will make a difference and we need to pass it quickly.

BLITZER: Mark Zandi, thanks very much for coming in.

ZANDI: Thank you.

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