The Republican-led House of Representatives plans to vote next week on legislation that would allow the US government to borrow above the debt ceiling, in a move meant to stave off default. But the “Full Faith and Credit Act,” which was adopted in committee last week, would allow the…
My Barbara Lee mistake
I’ve been so dispirited by the way Democrats caved on the FAA “fix” to the sequester bill that I got a fact wrong on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal Wednesday morning.Talking about how President Obama’s advisers dismissed the notion of a veto because the bill passed both the House and Senate with veto proof majorities, I listed some progressives who voted for the bill, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Maxine Waters. I also included Rep. Barbara Lee, which was really surprising to me. Surprising, because I was wrong, and she didn’t cave.My larger point stands: Although the White House blames the overwhelming Congressional vote for its inaction, had the president made voting against the bill a priority for Democrats, the bill would likely still have passed, but not with a veto-proof majority. It only got 41 “no” votes, 29 of them Democrats. (Here’s the final vote.) Now that the FAA’s been protected, we’ll likely see other carve-outs – but none will protect Head Start kids or Meals on Wheels recipients. Those of us who thought the August 2011 debt-ceiling “compromise” that led to the sequester deal was “a sugar-coated Satan sandwich” were right.Continue Reading… … Read More
Obama’s new brain-mapping project is already a Lilliputian disaster
Why? It’s simple. The scientists don’t know what they’re doing. They have no clear objectives, and the notion of building an accurate picture of a few trillion neurons in action is as far from reality as a flea painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. … Read More
Thatcher: A female icon, but not a feminist one
There have always been women like Margaret Thatcher in power. Never more than one or two at a time, of course. Thatcher was the embodiment of what Katha Pollitt memorably called “the Smurfette syndrome,” which is “a group of male buddies will be accented by a lone female, stereotypically defined.” She was not a feminist icon, nor any kind of feminist, as she took pains to remind people. “Some of us were making it before women’s lib was even thought of,” she once sniffed. To make it any more obvious, she might as well have literally kicked the ladder out from under her.For decades, Thatcher’s gender provided some public relations cover for her most noxious politics. That was true even today in the White House’s statement on her death, which included the following treacly sentence: “As a grocer’s daughter who rose to become Britain’s first female prime minister, she stands as an example to our daughters that there is no glass ceiling that can’t be shattered.”Continue Reading… … Read More
Mr. President, don’t negotiate with yourself!
President Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, Jim Messina, is a politics-over-policy guy. So it was interesting to hear him confess to ABC News last week that he only had two “white knuckle moments” during the reelection push – and one of them was after the awful August 2011 debt-ceiling deal (the other was Obama’s poor showing in the first debate, which rabid Obama defenders insisted was a fiction made up by Chris Matthews).Of course, Messina’s reaction to the debt-ceiling deal had to do with politics, not policy, but it’s still revealing. “After the August debt-limit crisis … our numbers were, you know, historically low,” the political whiz said.Indeed. After Obama and GOP leaders made a deal to avert a default – resulting in the ugly sequester cuts that are currently taking their toll on the economy as well as on Obama’s popularity – the president’s approval rating reached an all-time low. Gallup tracking polls had him at 39 percent in mid-August, which was the first time he’d dipped below the treacherous 40 percent mark as president.Continue Reading… … Read More
How Sequestration and the Fiscal Cliff Went Missing in the 2012 Campaign
Is there anything worse than
the
political and
journalistic discourse we’ve been hearing about tomorrow’s
sequester?
Yes–it’s the political and journalistic discourse we
didn’t hear about crucial fiscal issues during the
interminable 2012 presidential election.
Consider the
three 90-minute debates between President Barack Obama and
Republican nominee Mitt Romney, in which more than 50,000 words
were spoken (for perspective,
Obama’s State of the Union address this year clocked in at just
over 6,400). With a deadline looming just seven weeks after the
election, how many times did the candidates or interlocutors
mention the looming “fiscal cliff”?
Zero.
OK, surely they mentioned the “debt ceiling,” right?
Nope.
In fact, the word fiscal did not once pass through any
participant’s lips: Not the president who in 2010 said “we’re
facing an untenable fiscal situation,” not the standard-bearer
for the alleged party of limited government, not the newly
emboldened, fact-checktastic
press. Even long-term fiscal buzzkill
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) did not utter the F-word once
during his
debate with the equally reticent Vice President Joe Biden.
Sequestration may be all the rage this month, but it got
mentioned in precisely one exchange during the presidential
debates.
Here it is:
ROMNEY: [...] We need
to have as well a strong military. Our military is second to none
in the world. We’re blessed with terrific soldiers and
extraordinary technology and intelligence. But the idea of a
trillion dollars in cuts through sequestration and budget cuts to
the military would change that. [...]
Our Navy is older — excuse me — our Navy is smaller now than any
time since 1917. The Navy said they needed 313 ships to carry out
their mission. We’re now down to 285. We’re headed down to the — to
the low 200s if we go through with sequestration. That’s
unacceptable to me. I want to make sure that we have the ships that
are required by our Navy.
Our Air Force is older and smaller than any time since it was
founded in 1947. We’ve changed for the first time since FDR. We —
since FDR we had the — we’ve always had the strategy of saying we
could fight in two conflicts at once. Now we’re changing to one
conflict.
Look, this, in my view, is the highest responsibility of the
president of the United States, which is to maintain the safety of
the American people. And I will not cut our military budget by a
trillion dollars, which is the combination of the budget cuts that
the president has as well as the sequestration cuts. That, in my
view, is — is — is making our future less certain and less secure.
I won’t do it.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: ;Bob, I just need to
comment on this. First of all, the sequester is not something that
I proposed. It’s something that Congress has proposed. It will not
happen. The budget that we’re talking about is not reducing our
military spending. It’s maintaining it.
So the press never asked one debate
question about the sequester, Romney demagogued it (inaccurately)
as a crippling hit to the military, and Obama lied about not
proposing it (that is, if you believe
the reporting of Bob Woodward), while predicting, wrongly, that
it “will not happen.” And the next day’s headlines concerning this
exchange had to do with Obama’s follow-up joke: “you mentioned the
Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in
1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets.”
That pretty much sums up contemporary Washington, D.C.
In the July 2012 issue of Reason I pre-emptively
declared the presidential campaign as “Stupid
Season.” After the election, I marveled
at how “economic policy did not dominate the campaign season,” and
made this observation about the fiscal cliff:
Although this deadline of doom went all but unmentioned during
the general election, it is ;the ;public policy
issue going forward. Two days after the election, a banner headline
on the front page of ;The New York
Times ;proclaimed, “Back to Work: Obama Greeted by Looming
Fiscal Crisis.” It would have been nice if the candidates (or the
press) had talked about this impending disaster during the previous
two years.
… Read More
Here’s your sugar-coated Satan sandwich!
Bob Woodward is officially shaming himself trying to prove that the sequester standoff is President Obama’s fault. First he blamed Obama for the failed debt ceiling deal of July 2011, proclaiming in his incredibly biased book: “[P]residents work their will—or should work their will—on the important matters of national business. Obama has not.” How the president could have worked his will on the crackpot Tea Party GOP caucus, he doesn’t say.Then last week he kvetched that Obama was “moving the goalposts” by demanding that a deal to avert the $85 billion in budget cuts include some revenue. That’s baloney: The horrific sequester deal was always intended to force a more balanced approach to deficit-cutting.Now he’s claiming the president alone has the power to avert disaster by ignoring the sequester, particularly its steep defense cuts, and doing … I don’t know what. But here’s what he said on Wednesday’s “Morning Joe”:Continue Reading… … Read More
