Month: January 2011

Their healthcare proposal? Nothing that would begin to cover what Obamacare would – but an increase in the deficit and debt. Their budget proposal? No cuts to entitlements or defense, no tax hikes, and pathetic squabbling over discretionary spending. I’m with James Hamilton:

If you have a concrete proposal to raise tax revenue or cut spending, then put it on the table. But if you simply want to grandstand on the debt ceiling as if it were a stand-alone issue, it is clear that you have nothing but contempt for the voters. And if so, then you deserve the same in return.

A reader chimes in:

You used to talk a lot about unseriousness in the GOP. It seems to me that’s the word we ought to keep front and center when we look at things like the HCR repeal bill. It’s an unserious action for a few reasons.

It can’t pass the Senate, and the President won’t sign it. So it’s just theater. And they’re going to suspend their own rules about paying as they go to cover the CBO’s $100 billion dollars of projected savings. That shows they’re not really serious about being fiscally responsible. It seems to me that unserious is really the best word, because it covers so much of what’s wrong. When they pander to Fox’s audience with theatrical bills that have no chance of becoming law, that’s unserious. When they talk about fiscal responsibility and then try to add $100 bn to the debt without covering it, in violation of their own grandstanding rules, that’s unserious. But at the same time, when they start investigating the President — when they say this is the most corrupt administration in recent history — that’s unserious as well.

This is going to be a revealing Congress, is it not?

Well, he is an economist:

Gene Sperling, who is rumored to be on President Obama’s short-list to head the National Economic Council, was reportedly paid $137,500 by Bloomberg for a monthly column. As Kevin Drum notes, that’s equivalent to $11,000 for an op-ed. Those must have been some columns!

Ticked that the NFL canceled a football game during the East Coast blizzard, Rush vents:

All I could think about was the Donner Party.  You know the story of the Donner Party.  A bunch of pioneers heading out to California got trapped in a blizzard in the Sierra Nevada mountain range out there near Lake Tahoe and they couldn't get to Harrah's, and they couldn't get to any of the casinos.  It was bad.  They resorted to cannibalism to stay alive.  If you read from the diaries that were kept by members of the Donner Party, you know what you find as a reference to the weather?  One, "It was an unusually cold winter."  There wasn't any complaining. There wasn't any whining.  There wasn't any moaning.  It's just what it was.  These are pioneers.  What would the Donner Party think if they knew that we were canceling a football game because of a forecast?

I imagine it might be difficult to think of anyone in American history who retroactively might have shown more deference to a forecast of heavy snow than the members of the Donner Party. But I regress.

Where was Limbaugh when all this happened? On vacation in Hawaii.

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg talks to voters at Asda supermarket ahead of the Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election on January 5, 2011 in Oldham, England. Clegg joined local Liberal Democrat candidate Elwyn Watkins to canvass for votes in the election to be held on 13 January. Money quote:

In the latest poll of polls, the Liberal Democrats, the junior partners in Britain’s coalition government, have sunk to their lowest level in public esteem since the party started in 1988, the Independent reported, citing its latest “poll of polls.” The poll put the opposition Labour Party on 40 percent, the Conservatives, who lead the coalition, on 38 percent and the Liberal Democrats on 11 percent, the newspaper said.

By Christopher Furlong/Getty Images.

To what extent is a state permitted to target another polity's civilian population for political and strategic reasons? It's a tricky question – because sanctions can sometimes be effective weapons against regimes, while hurting civilians. Think of the 1990s in Iraq. Now think of Gaza under Israeli siege. Here's a Wikileaks cable revealing the US's deep enmeshment in Jerusalem's policy toward Gazans:

"As part of their overall embargo plan against Gaza, Israeli officials have confirmed to (U.S. embassy economic officers) on multiple occasions that they intend to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge," one of the cables read. Israel wanted the coastal territory's economy "functioning at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis," according to the November 3, 2008 cable.

The public position of the Israeli government – best seen here – was that there never was a humanitarian crisis. Their actual position was to keep Gaza on the very edge of one. Is that a distinction without a difference? Or is it, in fact, a relatively civilized collective torment? Since it seems to me a policy designed to achieve the maximal pain for Gazans within Israel's actual international capacity I lean toward the former. There is a defense of sanctions against a terror state like Hamas' Gaza. And then there is a long-term war of attrition against an entire people's welfare.

Is Eric Cantor simply going to ignore the CBO's data or lie about it?

“The Republican leadership has committed to this $100 billion cut… I expect them to do everything in their power to enact it. They’re on the record, they ran on this, and if it’s brushed aside there would be harsh political consequences,” – Brian Riedel, Heritage budget-wonk, last November.

Allahpundit isn't quite buying the argument that it's all about the shorter fiscal year. He's surely right about this:

This is what we’ve been reduced to — the suspense of wondering whether the new Republican majority can achieve cuts that will barely make a dent in our annual budget shortfall. Hugely depressing.

But it's depressing, it seems to me, precisely because it is meaningless in terms of the real fiscal situation. To nitpick over $100 billion in discretionary spending – and to try and use this as a unifying theme for the opposition – is not just bad politics; it's a surreal diversion from reality. What's needed is an embrace of comprehensive fiscal reform – on the Bowles-Simpson model. And only the president can get us there – and is being given a golden opportunity by the GOP to own the issue they currently weakly claim.

A reader writes:

You are right to find the old man a tragic figure; in fact, I would disdain one who could look upon that old man’s fate with indifference or even contempt. The anthropologist Wade Davis has long been making a case that these traditional cultures being crushed and annihilated by modernity are in fact repositories of human knowledge that we’re fools to discard.

Check out his TED talk about it:

In his amazing book “The Wayfinders,” Davis makes the case that cherishing traditional cultures like that old Vanuatu chief’s is not mere sentimentality, but actually is of practical benefit to us.

I’m sure it is, because throwing stuff away without due thought for its existing purposes or what could replace it is always asking for trouble. But my point is not about the usefulness or otherwise of the old leader’s knowledge or wisdom or accumulated disposition. It is just that the kind of change you see as those young children greet a Western SUV for the first time is, to me at least, an instance of loss, and loss is inherently sad. Yes, a new car represents an amazing discovery but only at the expense of an irrecoverable loss. It is, history has shown us, an irresistible choice. The improvement of our material estate is not something one should even pretend to lament absolutely. Just get strep throat and have no access to anti-biotics.

But human society is not just material well-being. It is a form of communal, mortal living, and what makes it make sense is its internal coherence not its utility. That coherence will be mysterious, but if it has evolved over centuries or even millennia, it contains something incalculably important: a storage of human knowledge about how to live and die, which, in the end, is all we have.

When I think of a conservative disposition, this is what it comes down to. Sadness that reaches outward from love.