Month: December 2010

Defense spending critic Gordon Adams salivates:

[T]he White House is negotiating with DOD on a base defense budget number for FY 2012 which is below the number Secretary of Defense Bob Gates sought, when he wanted to hold the line at one percent real growth.   DOD officials are suggesting privately that the reality is starting to seep in.  Discipline is coming to defense and Secretary Gates' effort to hold the line is failing. And it will come in the framework of a broader effort at deficit reduction, one endorsed by a growing number of elected and former elected officials. … I predict that over the next two years the politics of deficit reduction will move center stage in Washington, DC and "everything will be on the table."

Yglesias tries to understand Andrew Exum's call for more localized good governance in Afghanistan:

A revealing double standard:

At this stage WikiLeaks has breached no international law and no laws of any country, but Mastercard, Visa and PayPal have all blacklisted it. Yet all three continue to enable the support of settlements that are in breach of international law, in some cases of Israeli law, and in defiance of US policy on settlements under successive Republican and Democrat administrations.

The Israeli far right goes there:

The Lehava organization issued a notice Sunday evening, inviting the public to call a voicemail service and record the names of Jewish Israelis renting apartments to Arabs. Lehava, identified with supporters of Meir Kahane, thus adds its weight to the recent call by 50 prominent rabbis to avoid renting to Arabs which, the organization says, amounts to no less than assimilation. According to the notice, the information given anonymously will be verified, after which the names will be published as a mark of disgrace "so the public can decide what to do with them."

In a response brimming with gratuitous hostility towards yours truly, Pejman Yousefzdeh nevertheless makes a few points worthy of response. I wrote that "several Democrats immediately supported [Bush's] massive tax cut – while no Republicans, in the wake of an Obama landslide – supported a desperately needed stimulus." I was thinking of the House vote, which attracted not a single Republican vote during what looked remarkably like the beginnings of a second Great Depression. Bush's tax cuts, on the other hand, got 28 Democratic votes in the House – with no economic crisis at hand and after the president was inaugurated with fewer votes than his opponent. Yes, in the Senate, "Arlen Specter (while a Republican), Olympia Snowe, and Susan Collins all supported the stimulus." And one has already been purged for it; and the other two hang by a thread. Furthermore:

[W]hen President Obama announced his Afghanistan policy–and got attacked for it by the Left – it was Republicans who came to his aid, and offered their full-throated support for the policy. Does this not count as a form of bipartisan cooperation initiated by the Republicans to assist a Democratic President?

Not really – since they were so already on the record behind both wars initiated by their own president that taking on Obama on this would have required taking on Bush. Pej goes on:

For that matter, has Sullivan forgotten that the very tax deal he celebrates this week with endless, meaningless, Baghdad Bob-ish, nauseating frequency, featuring one ludicrous “meep, meep” after another, is a tax deal that was crafted in negotiations with Republicans? That Republicans are supporting this deal, and are trying to save it–and the Obama Administration’s prestige–in the face of Democratic assaults so virulent that F-bombs have been thrown the White House’s way, and House Democrats have even stated that they will not bring the tax package for a vote? Why is all of this not equivalent to some Democrats supporting a Bush tax cut?

Pej has a point there. But the principle of low upper rate taxes is a Republican principle, and it is this for which the GOP fought. Lower taxes, in contrast, were definitely not a Democratic principle in 2000, when many, like Gore, urged that the surplus should go to shore up social security and pay down the debt. Pej goes on to argue that the ubiquitous Bush as Hitler smears during W.'s two terms are equivalent to the muck thrown at Obama, that cultural artifacts such as the image above prove the left's secessionist dreams, and that Vanity Fair's Bush Joker and Maclean's Bush Saddam are no better that Forbes' Obama with Stalin. My point is that the Bush-as-Hitler crap (which I decried at the time) did not start at the very beginning, but emerged after Bush's decision to go to war with Iraq, using torture as a method, adopting radical notions of executive power in a permanent wartime, and being responsible for an incompetently occupied country where hundreds of thousands were slaughtered. The high-level demonization of Obama began from the very start – with no real cause at all, except that he won an election easily.

But look: it's true that the left despised and demonized Bush. And I attacked them mercilessly for conflating him in any way with Saddam or al Qaeda and the like in a time of war. I stood up for the guy begging the left to give him a chance. 

But their complaints about legitimacy after Bush vs Gore were far more defensible, it seems to me, than the far right delusions about Obama's birth certificate. And after 9/11, there was huge support for the president by the vast majority of Democrats – something I encouraged (look at W's polling numbers in the winter of 2001 – and imagine anything like that for Obama since the Depression began.) I do not recall any major Democrat saying he hoped that Bush would fail in the war on terror, the way Limbaugh broadly hoped for the failure of Obama in the economic crisis. And the attempt to turn Obama into an un-American from the get-go was pre-meditated, and dabbling in dangerous racial waters.

Larison's two cents:

One thing that Tea Partiers definitely did campaign for was tax cuts. Once you add up the extension of all the Bush-era rates, the temporary payroll tax cut, the AMT provision, the estate tax provision, and the various tax credits included in the deal, there isn’t much left that really qualifies as stimulus spending. What I have seen so far from members of Congress associated with the Tea Party movement is hostility to the deal because it does not make all of the tax cuts permanent and fails to abolish the estate tax. Assuming that the deal is passed, what will “sink in” with the Republican rank and file is that approximately 93% of the deal took the form of tax breaks, tax credits or tax holidays. Looked at this way, the deal was designed almost perfectly to avoid making any difficult, fiscally responsible decisions and to indulge the fantasy that there is no economic or fiscal problem that cannot be solved by reducing taxes.

This last point remains to be seen. The real fiscal argument over long-term entitlement and defense cuts and tax reform will occur next year. If we see no realism over the need to raise revenues at some point, Larison will be proven right. I take this deal to be a temporary stimulus package before a more fundamental retrenchment.

Worth your, er, time. Seriously fascinating:

A reader writes:

Bill Kristol answered your question on Fox News:

KRISTOL: Yes. That's exactly what he did. We predicted this I think right at the Sunday, right after this show everyone was like oh, he's such an ideologue, he'll never move to the center, he can't do what Clinton did. Remember that debate that took place a couple of weeks after this election? Could Obama pull a Clinton? Obama's literally pulled a Clinton… he's standing there with Bill Clinton and they're accepting… Barack Obama and Bill Clinton stood up there and defended the Bush tax rates and the Republican estate tax proposal. Now just think about that for a moment. They weren't defending the Clinton tax rate. They weren't defending the Obama tax…

LIASSON: They were defending the payroll tax cut and…

KRISTOL: They were defending the payroll tax cut which is something Republicans have liked for a long time. Anyway, I'm saying this is from a policy point of view, this is a big move to the center by President Obama, following incidentally on his symbolic little freeze for government workers pay which is something Republicans have been for. The South Korean free trade agreement, something Republicans have been for. He's going to stay in the surge in Afghanistan. Remember that December review where Obama was going to begin pulling out. No way, no how. David Petraeus is in charge of Aghanistan.

So there you are. The voters won't hear, "We worked with the President," or, "We liked the President's ideas," The voters will instead hear, "See? You voted for us- and we stopped Obama from raising your taxes! Now throw Obama out- and see what we can REALLY do!" The Republican base, never strong on logically consistent positions, will eat it up. The Democratic base – that is, liberals – will agree and stay home, seeing no hope for their agenda in Obama. And the independents will compare the two parties' positions- and "tax cuts for the rich and cuts in Social Security" does not appear prominently on the Democratic platform. Net result: total Republican victory. And Obama on the unemployment line- along with a lot of other people in 2013.

Today a judge in Virginia ruled that the mandate in Obama’s health care law is unconstitutional. A Florida judge will hear a related case later this week. Aaron Carroll’s analysis from before the ruling was announced:

[T]here’s no way this won’t be appealed to the Supreme Court.  So the questions won’t be answered today.  If the judges rule the mandate is unconstituitonal, that still won’t be the final word.

Even if they do rule it unconstitutional, it’s unlikely they will place an injunction on the law.  The mandate doesn’t kick in until 2014, so there’s no reason to rush.  Especially since the decision will be appealed.

Even if the mandate is ultimately found unconstitutional, that doesn’t mean the whole law will be thrown out.  See this post.