Month: August 2011

Some thoughts on how to cut Medicare.

Apparently, his manifesto was a "false flag Sharia" operation. I kid you not:

Via ThinkProgess, who helpfully compiles a list of those Gaffney believes to be tainted by Sharia (it includes David Petraeus and Herman Cain). And this man is one of Michele Bachmann's key foreign policy influences.

A New Jersey politician resigns for Weiner-esque reasons. I notice, in contrast, that congressman Joe Walsh, who has been sued by his ex-wife for $117,437 in child support, is still happily in office. The tea party has backed him to the hilt, as has the GOP. The New Jersey pol is even single!

It is a strange country where someone unmarried sending consensual sexting pictures to another adult is forced to resign, while a man who is alleged to have abandoned his children is secure.

Strange – but so American.

"It's just crazy, and I'm tired of dealing with the crazies. It's just unnecessary to be accusing this guy of things just because of his religious background. I'm happy that he's willing to serve after all this baloney," – New Jersey governor Chris Christie, sticking by his appointment of a Muslim-American to New Jersey's Superior Court Bench.

God bless governor Christie.

Here's a story as fascinating in its detail as in its headline:

On Monday, the Suquamish Tribal Council formally changed its ordinances to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples. The Suquamish ordinance means gay couples are afforded all the rights heterosexual couples are allowed on the reservation and other places in which gay marriages are allowed.

Now: the democratic process in action:

Heather Purser, a 28-year-old who lives in Seattle but was raised in Kitsap County, has been trying to get the tribe's law changed for about four years. She made the most progress at the tribe's general council in March.

During that meeting of the tribe's entire enrolled membership, she stepped to the microphone asking for recognition for gay couples. The tribe's leadership said they would continue to consider it, she said.

When Purser sat down people around her told her she needed to get up again and request a vote of the entire audience. "One of my cousins said, 'They're just going to keep dragging their feet,'" Purser said. She once again made her request, this time asking for a vote and expecting some opposition. "I was expecting a major fight. I didn't think anyone would support me," she said.

If there were any dissenters, they were not loud enough for Purser to hear them.

That, I think, is the worst aspect of the phone-hacking Murdoch scandal (although the practice almost certainly occurred in other parts of the press). You saw what they tried to do to smear and intimidate Louise Mensch MP because she stood up to Murdoch. Tom Watson, the hero MP of the affair, was similarly targeted for years:

"I had one particular chilling conversation in 2006," he says, "when I was told that she would never forgive me for doing what I did to 'her Tony'.

When I was made an assistant whip under Brown, the Sun did a story saying it was an outrageous I'd been awarded a job. Whenever I moved, there was a dig. It's painful and it's not easy, but that's the job, and the culture we operated in. It's when it's scaled up that those attack pieces take on a greater significance."

How was it scaled up?

"Well, there was the Red Rag week, where they ran stories for six or seven days, accusing me of lying and worse, on the basis of a story that wasn't true. [He was falsely accused of involvement in the infamous plan to set up an unseemly website for anti-Tory political gossip known as "Red Rag".] And then things like . . . people coming back to me, reporting conversations. Bob Ainsworth [then Labour defence secretary] met Brooks for a lunch and said she spent 15 minutes slagging me off before they could talk about defence policy. Those things end up coming back to you."

If you ever harbored any sympathy for Rebekah Brooks, a brutal bully, give it up. What she may be getting is nothing compared with what she regularly dished out.

What to make of this assertion:

By affirming liberalism’s lodestar — the principle that government’s grasp on national resources must constantly increase — Obama made himself a spectator in a Washington more conservative than it was during the Reagan presidency.

He's talking about Obama's insistence that revenues be a part of the debt solution. Now revenues have emphatically not kept increasing over the last thirty years, and right now, have hit a fifty-year low, as a proportion of GDP. To quote Reagan adviser, Bruce Bartlett:

Revenue has been below 15 percent of G.D.P. since 2009, and the last time we had three years in a row when revenue as a share of G.D.P. was that low was 1941 to 1943.

Revenue has averaged 18 percent of G.D.P. since 1970 and a little more than that in the postwar era. At a similar stage in previous business cycles, two years past the trough, revenue was considerably higher: 18 percent of G.D.P. in 1977 after the 1973-75 recession; 17.3 percent of G.D.P. in 1984 after the 1981-82 recession, and 17.5 percent of G.D.P. in 1993 after the 1990-91 recession. Revenue was markedly lower, however, at this point after the 2001 recession and was just 16.2 percent of G.D.P. in 2003.

So Will is simply empirically wrong. Obama is not arguing that "government's grasp on national resources must constantly increase", he's arguing that when government's grasp has fallen to a fifty year nadir and an ageing society requires funding, revenues should be on the table.

You know: like the radical left government running Britain right now. Will wants to make Obama a commie when he's really only a Tory. Not that Will would remember what it was once like to be one of those.

(Photo: Wiki.)

Palin's hairdresser gets a reality show

I hear a great deal about the awfulness of the debt ceiling hostage-taking as a procedural precedent. I agree it was a form of economic terrorism and highly damaging to all involved. But part of me is happy that there is an actual ceiling, as we head past $14 trillion in debt, and am not so sure the experience of the last few weeks has made it easier to do it again. A reader notes:

The Tea Party contingent in Congress has managed something quite extraordinary in American politics, and it wasn't establishing a precedent for holding the country hostage. Rather, they have managed to horrify almost the entire nation, including liberals, centrists, independents, conservative traditionalists, the Republican leadership in Congress, and even, according to NYT's reporting, many of their own constituents.  I think the eleventh hour "hold our noses" bipartisan pragmatism that finally got the deal done is the precedent that, when push comes to shove with the Tea Party, has been established.  For all of the above-cited political factions the take away attitude is "never again."

If interest rates rise, and if the economy falters as a result of this (the stock market loss yesterday will be noted by many), people will begin to see that some ability to compromise is a virtue, not a vice. The trauma and damage of the last month may make it harder next time for any party to get away with this. And the taint is likeliest, in my view, to hang around the fanatical GOP rather than the pretty much helpless president.

An even more brutal upping of the ante by Assad occurred this morning as tanks (see above) fired directly into civilian areas:

The Local Coordination Committees said in an e-mailed statement that the shelling was concentrated in two neighborhoods that have been the scenes of large protests, Janoub al-Mala’ab and Manakh. The group said that security forces were firing at residents attempting to flee the city, and that one building and several houses had collapsed from heavy shelling.

There was some speculation that the Syrian forces deliberately timed the invasion of Hama to coincide with the trial of Mr. Mubarak, which was being held in Cairo and covered live by most satellite news channels, some of which have given heavy coverage to the Syrian popular uprising that started in mid-March. “It’s obvious that they used the Mubarak trial to distract the public from the attack,” said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human rights, reached by phone in London. “We might be witnessing another massacre in Hama.”

A horrifying image of a civilian with his head blown off here. More video from the streets: