Why give in to reality and public opinion (that now favors same-sex marriage rights) when you might be able to wring a few more votes by pandering to the anti-gay zealots? Never let it be said that Repubs left any doubt that their red-bloodedness is opposed to that whole gay thing that's sweeping the country.
Two last ditch stands:
1. The generals in charge of implementing the repeal of DADT reported to the House Armed Services Committee recently that their training of the troops for the transition is going very well and that they anticipate few problems in implementing the repeal.
Repub members of the committee didn't like it, in fact some simply refused to believe them. For example: one raised the question about the response rate to the massive survey they did of attitudes about repeal, which were surprisingly benign. The army general gave the percentage and said -- quite clearly -- that this was a typical response rate to such surveys. The next question from the dumb congressman was: "Why do you think the response rate was so low?" And, of course, then he demanded a new study (aka further delay), because this one obviously didn't get to the true feelings of the troops and their families (who essentially said: it's no big deal).
2. The Obama Department of Justice has made a determination not to defend the challenge in court to the Defense of Marriage Act, on the grounds that parts of it are deemed by legal experts to be unconstitutional. So the case would be heard without an official defense from the DoJ.
But John Boehner and his Repub troops ride to the rescue !!! They've got to save marriage as we know it !! (aka the votes of the right wing anti-gay zealots). Boehner has retained outside legal counsel to defend DOMA in court on behalf of the Legislative arm, with an expenditure of $500,000 of the taxpayers' money, and possibly more, to the prestigious King & Spaulding law firm.
Remember this at election time, folks: $500,000 for a futile defense of an unconstitutional law, but we've got to cut food stamp programs and health insurance for children. Remember !!
Ralph
Friday, April 22, 2011
Thursday, April 21, 2011
The complexities of war policy
Libya is a mess -- in and of itself with it's crazy dictator. It's also a mess in that its rebels are not like those in Tunisia and Egypt. They are not well organized or even united. Two top generals are arguing about which one is in charge of the other.
Our intervention plan is something of a mess too -- and maybe inherently so, given the conflicting goals that we're trying to pursue. Here's how HuffPost's David Wood describes it:
Our intervention plan is something of a mess too -- and maybe inherently so, given the conflicting goals that we're trying to pursue. Here's how HuffPost's David Wood describes it:
The White House wanted the Pentagon to come up with a low-cost regime-change plan for Libya. Ideally, this strategy would have toppled Col. Muammar Gaddafi without bogging the U.S. down in another inconclusive foreign adventure. And by no means could the plan have included young American infantrymen advancing under fire across the sand.The military kept insisting that no such option existed. A real regime-change operation, some officers argued, requires "boots on the ground." That was a cost the White House, given rising domestic pressure to bring the troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq, was unwilling to consider.
In long meetings and email exchanges, arguments over strategic details often led to more serious disagreements, the official told The Huffington Post. The White House thought the Pentagon was disrespecting the president by refusing to propose a politically acceptable action plan, while the Pentagon became furious that White House officials didn’t "seem to understand what military force can and cannot do,’’ the official said.
And this is in spite of having Robert Gates as the center of these disparate groups of civilians and military trying to work together. He has the respect of both. Unfortunately, he has announced long ago that he will be leaving the post this fall. And, at the same time, Adm. Mullen will be retiring from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The alternatives to what we're doing just don't seem to offer any better solution. Either doing nothing to help the Libyan populist movement or sending in our troops would have been political suicide for Obama, as well as a financial and moral disaster for our country.
It's a tough job. Having an opposition party doing everything possible to see that you fail makes it almost impossible. To those who are critical of Obama, I ask: whom would you choose to have in there in his place? John McCain? Newt Gingrich? Or, god forbid, Donald Trump?
Ralph
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
So, is it over then?
Today on "Good Morning, America," George Stephanopolis confronted Michele Bachmann with her statement on Fox News last night that Obama should come forward with his birth certificate.
Stephanopolis: "Well I have the president's certificate right here. It's certified, it's got a certification number. It's got the registrar of the state signed. It's got a seal on it. And it says 'this copy serves as prima facie evidence of the fact of birth in any court proceeding.'
Bachmann: Well, then that should settle it.Stephanopoulos: So it's over?
Bachmann: That's what should settle it. I take the president at his word and I think- again I would have no problem and apparently the president wouldn't either. Introduce that, we're done. Move on.
Yeah. But what does she know? When Stephanopolis confronted The Donald with the same information, The Donald said that just proves that he (Stephanopolis) had been "co-opted by White House minions."
Donald Trump doesn't believe that for a minute. He's not dumb. He's just pandering and making mischief.
My guess is that the Birthers will just turn on Michele. Sometimes you just can't convince people with facts -- or certified birth certificates -- when their whole raisin d'etre depends on believing the lie.
Ralph
Inner curmudgeon #2: Bring back censorship
I grew up in the days of censorship, back when it was sex that got people upset. Movie censors wouldn't allow a man and a woman to be in bed together, even with pajamas tightly buttoned to the neck, and even if the actual actors were married to each other in real life. The horror !! It might give the young people ideas. We're not even talking about nudity. This was when you couldn't show any leg above the knee and nothing more than a hint of cleavage.
Of course, Jane Russell's phenomenal chest development was just there, no matter how many layers of clothes she had on. And Lana Turner in a sweater? You just couldn't get much sexier than that. Countless teen-age boys could see right through those clothes in their imaginations.
No, it's not this kind of censorship that my inner curmudgeon wants to bring back. What I have in mind wouldn't try to control people's imaginations. It would be to impose some standards on what's accepted as truth -- no, let's go further -- what's accepted as fact.
I want there to be some universal loud buzzer that goes off every time a politician or preacher or pundit willfully misstates the facts. We don't even have to delete the statement -- just identify it as false right then and there, not later in some article that few people read.
The AJC has a version of this in its "Truth-O-Meter," a daily feature that investigates the truth of a statement made by such a person, and then they rate it on a true/false meter. Of course, this often appears a week later to a different audience. I want an immediate, on-the-spot buzzer that goes off to alert the listener in real time -- and to shame the liar, right then and there.
But the "Truth-O-Meter" is better than nothing. Here are two from recent days, both from Georgia Congressional Representatives -- both Republicans, as it happens, although the Dems are not immune. They just do it less often, less blatantly, and from less scurrilous motives.
1. In a 45 minute lecture to House members during the debate over the deficit, Rep. Paul Braun said that FDR sent his advisers to study socialism with Stalin so he could replicate it in the U.S.
Totally false, with hardly a traceable connection to the facts. AJC contacted Braun's office and even the book they cited as source didn't say what he said. When contacted, the book's author did say that some of FDR's advisers on The New Deal had, years earlier, studied the socialist experiment going on in Russia back during the 1920's, long before FDR was elected and long before Stalin's despotic purges were known. But FDR didn't send them to Russia. She also likened the intelligentsia's interest in socialism in the 1920s to our current, legitimate interest in China's economic developments. Braun's statement is false on the face of it, and misleading in its implications. It got a 0 on the Truth-O-Meter. Shame on Paul Braun, a serial liar -- and read into the Congressional Record at that.
2. Rep. Tom Graves put out a tweet claiming that America's wealthiest 25% pay 86%, and the wealthiest 5% pay 60%, of the total income taxes paid. AJC had to give this a 100% true rating, but went to lengths to point out how it misleads -- and you can bet it was willful misleading, because the tweet is obviously a rebuttal to the Dems correctly pointing out the increasing disparity between the soaring income of the top 5% and the static or declining income of the middle class, leading to the greatest class income disparity since the 1920's.
Here is what makes this so misleading. There are two types of federal taxes on individuals: the income tax and the payroll tax. Most of what wealthy individuals pay is income tax, while a much bigger chunck of what lower and middle income inividuals pay is payroll tax. Payroll tax is levied only on the first $106,000 of income; so a wealthy person pays no more of that than a middle class person. In addition, payroll tax is levied only on earned income, i.e. wages for work. Someone whose income is solely from investments pays no payroll tax, while a person of low income may pay no income tax but still pay payroll taxes.
So, if you mention only income tax, Graves' statement is correct. But if, like Michele Bachmann, you simply say that wealthy pay that percent of federal taxes, then you are incorrect. And most people hearing Graves' claim would not make that distinction; hence it's misleading.
For example, the top 1% did in fact pay 39.5% of all federal income tax in 2007; but they paid only 28% of all federal taxes in 2007.
It's good to have these belated corrections, but I want that immediate loud buzzer -- or maybe even the old-fashioned, vaudeville big hook that pulls poor performers off stage. Maybe some young IT genius could come up with a computer program that would automatically measure the factual truth of these statements and activate the Big Buzzer.
My inner curmudgeon does not like having this kind of slipperiness with the truth from our politicians, preachers, and pundits. Let there be a Big Buzzer in the sky to zap these liars -- the preachers, the politicos, and the pundits, all.
Ralph
Of course, Jane Russell's phenomenal chest development was just there, no matter how many layers of clothes she had on. And Lana Turner in a sweater? You just couldn't get much sexier than that. Countless teen-age boys could see right through those clothes in their imaginations.
No, it's not this kind of censorship that my inner curmudgeon wants to bring back. What I have in mind wouldn't try to control people's imaginations. It would be to impose some standards on what's accepted as truth -- no, let's go further -- what's accepted as fact.
I want there to be some universal loud buzzer that goes off every time a politician or preacher or pundit willfully misstates the facts. We don't even have to delete the statement -- just identify it as false right then and there, not later in some article that few people read.
The AJC has a version of this in its "Truth-O-Meter," a daily feature that investigates the truth of a statement made by such a person, and then they rate it on a true/false meter. Of course, this often appears a week later to a different audience. I want an immediate, on-the-spot buzzer that goes off to alert the listener in real time -- and to shame the liar, right then and there.
But the "Truth-O-Meter" is better than nothing. Here are two from recent days, both from Georgia Congressional Representatives -- both Republicans, as it happens, although the Dems are not immune. They just do it less often, less blatantly, and from less scurrilous motives.
1. In a 45 minute lecture to House members during the debate over the deficit, Rep. Paul Braun said that FDR sent his advisers to study socialism with Stalin so he could replicate it in the U.S.
Totally false, with hardly a traceable connection to the facts. AJC contacted Braun's office and even the book they cited as source didn't say what he said. When contacted, the book's author did say that some of FDR's advisers on The New Deal had, years earlier, studied the socialist experiment going on in Russia back during the 1920's, long before FDR was elected and long before Stalin's despotic purges were known. But FDR didn't send them to Russia. She also likened the intelligentsia's interest in socialism in the 1920s to our current, legitimate interest in China's economic developments. Braun's statement is false on the face of it, and misleading in its implications. It got a 0 on the Truth-O-Meter. Shame on Paul Braun, a serial liar -- and read into the Congressional Record at that.
2. Rep. Tom Graves put out a tweet claiming that America's wealthiest 25% pay 86%, and the wealthiest 5% pay 60%, of the total income taxes paid. AJC had to give this a 100% true rating, but went to lengths to point out how it misleads -- and you can bet it was willful misleading, because the tweet is obviously a rebuttal to the Dems correctly pointing out the increasing disparity between the soaring income of the top 5% and the static or declining income of the middle class, leading to the greatest class income disparity since the 1920's.
Here is what makes this so misleading. There are two types of federal taxes on individuals: the income tax and the payroll tax. Most of what wealthy individuals pay is income tax, while a much bigger chunck of what lower and middle income inividuals pay is payroll tax. Payroll tax is levied only on the first $106,000 of income; so a wealthy person pays no more of that than a middle class person. In addition, payroll tax is levied only on earned income, i.e. wages for work. Someone whose income is solely from investments pays no payroll tax, while a person of low income may pay no income tax but still pay payroll taxes.
So, if you mention only income tax, Graves' statement is correct. But if, like Michele Bachmann, you simply say that wealthy pay that percent of federal taxes, then you are incorrect. And most people hearing Graves' claim would not make that distinction; hence it's misleading.
For example, the top 1% did in fact pay 39.5% of all federal income tax in 2007; but they paid only 28% of all federal taxes in 2007.
It's good to have these belated corrections, but I want that immediate loud buzzer -- or maybe even the old-fashioned, vaudeville big hook that pulls poor performers off stage. Maybe some young IT genius could come up with a computer program that would automatically measure the factual truth of these statements and activate the Big Buzzer.
My inner curmudgeon does not like having this kind of slipperiness with the truth from our politicians, preachers, and pundits. Let there be a Big Buzzer in the sky to zap these liars -- the preachers, the politicos, and the pundits, all.
Ralph
Monday, April 18, 2011
The Repubs: You can't trust 'em
I'm sure the political landscape has been in this much disarray before, but it is enough to make you dizzy just trying to keep the conservative Repubs in some sort of consistent image -- because they sure do keep changing their spots. A few examples:
1. Mr. FlipFlop himself -- Senator McNothing. Makes "maverick" his trademark for decades; then, trying to woo the right wing vote in 2008, he claimed he'd never thought of himself as a maverick.
2. Mr. Ken Doll former MA governor: Mitt Romney. Championed and signed their forward looking health care reform -- which most everybody seems to like and which Obama says was the model for the reforms passed by Congress last year. Now The Mitter is trying to run away from any connection with the MA bill, feebly saying that what's right for one state might not be right for the country as a whole. The real story: progressive health care reform is not the right political meme to win the Repub's nomination for prez.
3. Newt? He gives a whole new definition to flipflop. He doesn't just change his tune over the years; he can do it almost in one news cycle. Most recently about the no-fly zone in Libya. He was for it until Obama did it, then he was against it. Notice that he's been pretty quiet lately; too much negative press and he needed to let it cool down, hoping his dismal support numbers will improve before he's forced to say whether he's running for prez.
4. The Donald? This self-proclaimed success story of the high rise buildings, hard-nosed businessman, gaudy resorts, and, it must be said, strange hair. Would anyone have thought he'd be concerned about Obama's birth certificate? Then he saw what catnip it is for the right wing vote he's toying with, so now he's pandering with the champs -- and making a fool of himself in the process. Even Karl Rove calls him "a joke candidate." But you know what? He's leading in some polls when Repubs are asked about their preference for presidential nominee. I hear that the political cartoonists are campaigning for him too -- think of the field day they'll have with his hair.
5. And then there's Jan Brewer, governor of Arizona. Her conservative credentials are in order: she signed the most aggressive anti-immigrant state law in the nation; she signed the bill allowing concealed weapons in bars; she signed the bill overturning Arizona's domestic partnership law; she signed the bill eliminating child health insurance programs; she called a special session of the legislature to challenge the constitutionality of mandatory health care insurance in Obama's reform plan. Need I go on?
So who would have though Jan Brewer would (1) veto the "birther bill" passed by the Arizona legislature; and (2) veto another bill that would allow concealed weapons to be carried onto college campuses?
Come on, folks. How can we peg you if you keep changing your stripes?
Ralph
1. Mr. FlipFlop himself -- Senator McNothing. Makes "maverick" his trademark for decades; then, trying to woo the right wing vote in 2008, he claimed he'd never thought of himself as a maverick.
2. Mr. Ken Doll former MA governor: Mitt Romney. Championed and signed their forward looking health care reform -- which most everybody seems to like and which Obama says was the model for the reforms passed by Congress last year. Now The Mitter is trying to run away from any connection with the MA bill, feebly saying that what's right for one state might not be right for the country as a whole. The real story: progressive health care reform is not the right political meme to win the Repub's nomination for prez.
3. Newt? He gives a whole new definition to flipflop. He doesn't just change his tune over the years; he can do it almost in one news cycle. Most recently about the no-fly zone in Libya. He was for it until Obama did it, then he was against it. Notice that he's been pretty quiet lately; too much negative press and he needed to let it cool down, hoping his dismal support numbers will improve before he's forced to say whether he's running for prez.
4. The Donald? This self-proclaimed success story of the high rise buildings, hard-nosed businessman, gaudy resorts, and, it must be said, strange hair. Would anyone have thought he'd be concerned about Obama's birth certificate? Then he saw what catnip it is for the right wing vote he's toying with, so now he's pandering with the champs -- and making a fool of himself in the process. Even Karl Rove calls him "a joke candidate." But you know what? He's leading in some polls when Repubs are asked about their preference for presidential nominee. I hear that the political cartoonists are campaigning for him too -- think of the field day they'll have with his hair.
5. And then there's Jan Brewer, governor of Arizona. Her conservative credentials are in order: she signed the most aggressive anti-immigrant state law in the nation; she signed the bill allowing concealed weapons in bars; she signed the bill overturning Arizona's domestic partnership law; she signed the bill eliminating child health insurance programs; she called a special session of the legislature to challenge the constitutionality of mandatory health care insurance in Obama's reform plan. Need I go on?
So who would have though Jan Brewer would (1) veto the "birther bill" passed by the Arizona legislature; and (2) veto another bill that would allow concealed weapons to be carried onto college campuses?
Come on, folks. How can we peg you if you keep changing your stripes?
Ralph
Simple math
For all the Sturm und Drang over cutting the budget, here's some simple math that could have made the solution so simple -- or rather could have saved the good programs, cut some things that needed trimming -- and come out ahead of where the draconian Republican budget axe points:
The amount saved by the spending cuts in the compromise budget for the remainder of fiscal year 2011:
The amount saved by the spending cuts in the compromise budget for the remainder of fiscal year 2011:
$ 38 billion
The amount that would have been saved by letting Bush's tax cuts expire for wealthiest Americans:
$42 billion
Do the math. We could have saved all the cuts and still come out $4 billion ahead.
What kind of mind or moral compass does it take to insist on the former and refuse to consider the latter? And I'm not buying that it has nothing to do with a moral position but rather stems solely from political philosophy about the role of government.
I argue that your philosophy of the role of government cannot be separated from your moral position about helping those in need.
Ralph
What kind of mind or moral compass does it take to insist on the former and refuse to consider the latter? And I'm not buying that it has nothing to do with a moral position but rather stems solely from political philosophy about the role of government.
I argue that your philosophy of the role of government cannot be separated from your moral position about helping those in need.
Ralph
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