It can be read in full here. The committee won't vote on the plan until Friday. Ezra Klein goes through it point by point. Yglesias notes:
Surely the strangest thing about the Bowles-Simpson debt reduction plan is that, relative to current law, it . . . increases the public debt load over the next ten years … Obviously starting around 2020 or so Bowles-Simpson starts doing better than current law, but it’s difficult for the current congress to tie the hands of future congress.
As noted earlier Bill Kristol is at it again, in an item titled "Whack Wikileaks." Says Matt Welch:
If the Weekly Standard editor is the voice of Establishment Republicanism, then Establishment Republicanism remains as flippantly authoritarian as it was back when it held executive power.
Kristol isn't the only one calling for blood.
Zarate, Argentina, 11 am
Ross sharpens his point:
Fallows makes the point, correctly, that most liberals haven’t suddenly fallen in love with the anti-terrorism measures — wiretapping and Guantanamo, drone attacks and assassinations — that Barack Obama has either accepted or expanded. (“I don’t know of any cases of Democrats who complained about these abuses before and now positively defend them as good parts of Obama’s policy,” he writes, “as opposed to inherited disasters he has not gone far enough to undo and eliminate.”) But what they’ve done instead — which many honorable exceptions, obviously — is downgraded the importance of those issues, in much the same way that conservatives downgraded the importance of being against “big government” when a big-government Republican occupied the Oval Office.
It wasn’t that most right-wingers explicitly changed their opinions on the wisdom of, say, expanding Medicare just because George W. Bush was championing a new prescription drug benefit: Conservative journals still editorialized against Medicare Part D, and conservative activists stored away the issue as an example of why Bush fell short of the Reaganite ideal. But if you followed the national political conversation from 2000 through roughly 2006, it was clear that most Republican partisans learned to live with spending and deficits that would have inspired, well, Tea Party-style activism if they had been the work of a Democratic administration. And the same thing has happened with many, many Democrats today: They aren’t happy, exactly, that Obama has expanded drone attacks (which are arguably more morally troubling than many “enhanced interrogation” procedures) along the AfPak frontier, but they seem to have downgraded these kind of policies from “grave threat to the very foundation of the republic” to “unfortunate failure that we have to learn to live with, because the Republicans are worse.”
On the last point, I don't believe drone attacks are morally more troubling than torture (if Ross reads his catechism, he'll come to the same conclusion) – and dismayed that Ross would use the Orwellian term, "enhanced interrogation" to justify what the church would describe as an absolute evil. The acquiescence of a movement premised in indivual liberty to the right of the executive to torture anyone he wants is of a different magnitude of betrayal and cynicism than anything we have seen on the left with respect to Obama and the war in Afghanistan (which, obviously, he promised in the campaign to wage aggressively).
Even so, this blog, for example, has clearly opposed the ramping up of the war in Af-Pak, and raised questions about the morality of drone attacks. And, frankly, the reaction of the left-wing blogosphere to Obama's centrism has been highly critical – light years more impressive than the supine silence of the intellectual right as Bush eviscerated every principle conservatives were supposed to uphold. Ah, yes, as Ross says, they "stored away" the criticism until later. Doesn't that tell you everything you need to know about the Washington right's utter lack of intellectual or moral integrity?
Ask yourself: what was the equivalent of the Huffington Post under Bush? Who served the equivalent role of, say, Glenn Greenwald in lacerating the president's policies?
Yes, Bartlett and yours truly qualify but – importantly – we were thereby stripped of any public identity as conservatives. Greenwald is not now derided as some kind of insane whackjob by the left. Where was the right's Marcy Wheeler under Bush? Where were the mass demonstrations from the base – like the gay equality march – that challenged the Bush administration's betrayal of certain principles?At what point did a key Bush supporter, on a key Bush policy, ever write blog-posts with headlines like "The Fierce Urgency Of Whenever" as I have done with respect to Obama.
Where was the Tea Party freedom-fanatics when the president ordered wire-tapping without warrants, the right to seize anyone he deemed an enemy combatant and torture them without due process? Where were the fiscal hawks demanding an end to the spending spree – unjustified by anything close to the kind of depression Obama faced in coming to office? Where was the outrage – not the token credentializing column – when Bush rammed through Medicare D, with parliamentary tactics that were Putinesque?
The notion that the right under Bush showed anything like the integrity of the left under Obama is preposterous. Ross would like to think so, because it would make his own acquiescence to torture, debt, nation-building and unfunded entitlements look particularly craven and partisan. But reality shows no such equivalence, and I say this with great dismay.
The American right has proven itself more cynical, more power-hungry and less principled than any equivalent group on the left in this past decade. No amount of pirouetting now will erase that fact.
I’ve heard the impact of these releases on our foreign policy described as a meltdown, as a game-changer, and so on. I think – I think those descriptions are fairly significantly overwrought. The fact is, governments deal with the United States because it’s in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets.
Adam Serwer adds:
[T]his kind of statement makes the "Wikileaks strikes a blow against American Empire!" and "Assassinate Julian Assange!"crowds look equally ridiculous.
A reader writes:
I assume you're not a fan of the Monkees, but I'd hazard to guess that you're largely unfamiliar with their canon and their place in pop music history. I'll leave it up to you to do the research if you're curious, but suffice to say, the Monkees were essentially a repository and an opportunity for some of our greatest pop songwriters of the 1960s (Goffin/King, Sedaka, Diamond, Nillson, etc.), not to mention a result of some of LA's best players (you've heard of the Wrecking Crew?).
In contrast, Kid Rock, while respectfully and sincerely representing Michigan and a midwestern working-class sensibility, is a lousy singer and rapper, and mediocre pop star. He's mostly a good-willed representative of Rock for the Reality TV era.
I love the Monkees and grew up on them, including a pubescent crush on Peter Tork. More on the Monkees' "impact and legacy":
They found unlikely fans among musicians of the punk rock period of the mid-1970s. Many of these punk performers had grown up on TV reruns of the series, and sympathized with the anti-industry, anti-Establishment trend of their career. Sex Pistols and Minor Threat both recorded versions of "(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone" and it was often played live by Toy Love. The Japanese new wave pop group The Plastics recorded a synthesizer and drum-machine version of "Last Train to Clarksville" for their 1979 album Welcome Plastics.
A reader writes:
I've been reading your blog for about three years now and I've never written in. I've been hoping for so long that somebody would pick up on the tragedy of this part of DOMA, but I've felt a little selfish about it because it involves me too.
In 2005, my dream came true, and I was accepted to Oxford to do my DPhil and granted a pretty nice scholarship to boot. In 2006, I met my partner there, and we had a civil partnership ceremony in 2008. I finished my DPhil in 2009, and I would like to stay in academia; teaching has always been my passion. Unfortunately, there are not so many opportunities for teaching at the university level in the UK, and with the budget cuts – which I understand but loathe – it doesn't look like there are any on the horizon.
For the last two years I have taken some temporary posts, first in Italy, now in the US, and lived apart from my partner. But soon this won't be feasible because my partner will have our child in February. I have published, I have paid my dues, I have done everything I'm supposed to do to get a position in academia in the US, and the truth is that probably I would be able to get one despite the fierce competition here.
The trouble is that my partner cannot come to the States on a spousal visa. So I am left with the horrible decision of giving up on what I love, what I have worked hard for, what I am really good at, and what a lot of people (UK and US governments included) have paid a lot of money for to be with my wife and future child in the UK. I am so desperate for work in the UK now that I applied for two secretarial posts this weekend, but you can imagine that I don't get too many looks because I am "too qualified". To tell the truth, I don't want our daughter (who will be a US citizen from birth thanks to UK law, but anchor babies are myths) to grow up in a country that would treat her parents like this.
I don't think you've picked up on really the cruelest part of all. Some of my friends have said that they will marry my partner in order for her to move to the States. The hard-line right wingers are always saying, "Well, you can have the same rights, you can marry a man." But immigration will care that my partner was married to me. And immigration will care that she does not want nor will ever want to sleep with a man, despite (potentially) marrying one, so it isn't true that you can just "marry a man." They will check to make sure that the two of them are having sex; they will care that they are having sex; the US government will not give her a visa unless they are. So when they say "marry a man", that's not what they really mean.
I don't feel like I've done a very good job explaining the ludicrousness of this part, but Dan Savage had a good post on it a few weeks back. I implore you to continue shining a light on this issue as much as you can.
Another writes:
Don't know if you listen to your local public radio station, but Rebecca Sheir (of WAMU's beautifully revamped Metro Connection show) did a heatbreaking story on The Spousal Diaspora a couple weeks ago. The segment is called "Till Death — or Deportation? — Do Us Part".
Gregory Johnsen makes his case against killing al-Awlaki:
[I]sn’t it possible that knowing what we know [al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP )] and its development that as the Obama administration talks about al-Awlaki and as the media focuses on him, AQAP continues to push him forward, hoping to take advantage of all the free advertising? Basically, hoping that his name and association with AQAP can bring them more western recruits.
This would explain his “poorly veiled coming out” and the reason AQAP didn’t talk about him prior to the attempt on Muhammad bin Nayyif and the Christmas Day plot, because he wasn’t integral to either one, including the one on the US. But as the Obama Administration focused on him, AQAP kept pushing him more and more to the front and now, after the parcel bomb plot we have a “Foreign Operations Unit” that he may or may not be the head of.
Now, as I said in the NYT, the Obama administration is in a bind.
Both Thomas and I agree that al-Awlaki is a threat, we just disagree on how significant of one he is. I have often said that there is no “magic missile solution to the problem of AQAP in Yemen.” I still believe this to be true and in much the same way I don’t think there is a single target answer to attacks on the homeland. The US would be mistaken to think it can make the homeland safer by killing Anwar al-Awlaki.
Jonathan Bernstein defends himself. He insists that what he's saying is not that economically or fiscally that deficits don't matter – merely that politically, they don't. But that of course is exactly what Cheney and Rove were saying. Because deficits don't matter politically, there is no reason to tackle them. Now, I know Jonathan wasn't claiming we should ignore fiscal balance as a matter of principle – merely as a matter of political fact. But that's a core part of the problem. If our political elites only ever respond to short-term political interests, then the deficit will never be tackled. And it has almost never been tackled, except in the early 1990s, because of the heroic efforts of the first Bush and Clinton – against the gale-force wind of supply-side Republicanism.
What I get frustrated by is the use of such political realism/cynicism to mitigate against action. When Jonathan does it, he is merely presenting the facts of political science. When Rove and Cheney did it, they were engaging in the kind of deep cynicism that has helped destroy America's fiscal standing and economic future.
C'mon, everybody. We've got quiltin' to do!:
The Dish 