Month: December 2010

You can watch live on C-SPAN here. Adam Bink, Marcy Wheeler, and Rob Tisinai are live-blogging.

A reader writes:

You wrote: "I don't see this as surrender. I see this as Obama's cold-blooded pragmatism." I disagree – it's a total capitulation and isn't good strategically, either.

Why? Because in two years, when the extension of the tax cuts expire, it will be the 2012 campaign season. So either Obama will be stuck between raising taxes then, or being slammed with accusations of being weak on the deficit/debt. Just as no one recalls that the Bush tax cuts are a huge part of why we're in this hole to begin with, no one will recall that extending them dug us even deeper. Americans have short memories – better to take the bitter pill now by letting all the tax cuts expire (and forcing Republicans to revisit the issue in 2011) and watch as the deficit eases and the economy improves over the next two years.

As for the "compromise" with getting unemployment benefits extended, I think Obama should play hardball there too – let them expire for a few weeks while going on the offensive and blasting Republicans for blocking an extension. Soon enough he'll get some movement.

David Link gets inside McCain's head:

McCain cannot seem to accept that the world might have changed around him, and that the transcendent importance he attributes to sexual orientation isn’t so widely shared any more.  And the context of the hearings couldn’t better illustrate the disproportion of the obsession with homosexuality.  However important – or not – DADT is, is funding the nation’s entire military really the secondary consideration?

Yes, attaching repeal to the funding bill was a political move — big surprise.  But it’s political mostly in the sense that it illuminates the self-indulgence of politicians who are hellbent on catering to a dying prejudice.

To McCain, it is the status quo – the institutionalization of prejudice – that is transcendently important.  He is defending DADT as if it were a principle, rather than a political compromise that no one liked in the first place, but everyone could agree on in order to extricate Bill Clinton from his failed political promise to gays.  

Leonhardt has genuine worries about the Bush tax cuts lapsing, while Chait wants Obama to reverse the Bush tax cuts during his next term – provided he has one:

If Obama is re-elected, he simply has to veto any extension of the upper-bracket tax cuts. If it means all the tax cuts die, so be it. Why, you might wonder, would he be willing to do that then but not now? Well, hopefully the economy will be in better shape. (If it isn’t he probably won’t be re-elected anyway.) On top of that, canceling all the Bush tax cuts would have a real depressing effect on the economy, which in turn would also harm his re-election chances.

It's called strategy; and it beats the Krugman-Rich purism that is pure tactics.

“I haven’t agreed so strongly with a statement from Lieberman’s office in quite a while,” – Steve Benen, agreeing with Senator Lieberman’s proposal that the Senate stay in session past December 17 to end DADT. Amen.

A reader writes:

My submission for the contest is "This One's for the Children." Check out the video for its gaudy display of righteous multi-culturalism. NKOTB is pretty serious about letting us know that this one's not just for American children, but all the children of the world. The song's lyrical gem: "Many people are happy / many people are sad."

(Full disclosure: As a kid, I definitely bought the complete NKOTB Christmas album from which this came.)

Another writes:

"This is a very serious message.  So, all of you, please listen."  Checkmate.

Apollo explains why a foreign force is never going to overrun the United States:

The state of Wisconsin has gone an entire deer hunting season without someone getting killed. That’s great. There were over 600,000 hunters. Allow me to restate that number. Over the last two months, the eighth largest army in the world – more men under arms than Iran; more than France and Germany combined – deployed to the woods of a single American state to help keep the deer menace at bay. But that pales in comparison to the 750,000 who are in the woods of Pennsylvania this week. Michigan’s 700,000 hunters have now returned home. Toss in a quarter million hunters in West Virginia, and it is literally the case that the hunters of those four states alone would comprise the largest army in the world.

So let's get this straight: at a moment when most acknowledge a fiscal crisis that requires sacrifice on both sides, such sacrifice means the GOP gets its budget-busting non-sunsetting of Bush's tax cuts, and the Dems get to extend unemployment insurance. The former is far more damaging than the latter to fiscal sanity, but both add to spending after an election in which the public allegedly stood up as one to demand fiscal restraint.

Here's why it makes sense for Obama. It certainly helps goose the economy for the next two years, which has got to help him win re-election; if done quickly, it can create room for the new START and repeal of DADT in this Congress; in the next Congress, Obama can focus on long-term debt reduction in the State of the Union, without being mau-maued on tax hikes.

I don't see this as surrender. I see this as Obama's cold-blooded pragmatism. Why is this still news?

(Photo: Andrew Harar/Getty.)

Ross claims the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission was a worthwhile exercise despite its failure to produce viable legislation:

The deficit debate has suffered, for some time, from a debilitating light-to-heat ratio. Liberals have accused conservatives of being irresponsible while turning evasive about the massive tax increases that their own vision requires. Conservatives have attacked liberals for being spendthrift without proposing any serious spending reductions of their own. Both sides have talked around the elephant in the room that is entitlement spending.

On all of these fronts, the debate over Simpson-Bowles — and the raft of alternative proposals the deficit commission’s efforts have summoned up — has been helpful, clarifying, and even occasionally surprising. Now we know that liberals can wax just as intransigent about entitlements as conservatives can about tax increases. We know what the left really wants, and what the anti-tax lobby would prefer. We know what Nancy Pelosi won’t stand for, and where Tom Coburn and Dick Durbin will consider compromising. We know where Paul Ryan and Alice Rivlin can find common ground. And we know that it’s possible for prominent right-wingers, Coburn now included, to stand up to Grover “better to risk a debt crisis than end a tax subsidy” Norquist, which is inherently good news for both conservatism and the country.

Yes, but … as long as the GOP is controlled by Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Beck and Levin, Ross's admirable hopes seem almost poignant. But they do offer the president a valuable opportunity to define himself as the anti-debt president, who, as with health insurance, refused to punt to his successor what could be tackled urgently today.