Boehner? Boehner?

I wonder what's going through John Boehner's orange tinted, tear sodden head right about now.

Orange John is pretty much a classic pol.  More savvy than intelligent, he sees the angles without really knowing how they might eventually play out.

But he has to know that shutting down the government will be bad for the GOP.  Democrats and Independents pretty much both want to see a compromise that keeps government funded.  Republican do not.  It runs around two-thirds of Democrats and Independents want a compromise and a little more than half of Republicans do not.

And the crazy assed Republicans who make up "the base" of a lot of these GOP House members want to see the government shut down more or less for good (as long as they keep getting their Medicare and Social Security).

If Harry "It's Not A Porn Star Name" Reid is to be believed, the sticking point are riders within the budget that will dramatically attack all spending on all family planning anywhere that a federal dollar might be seen and a desire to gut environmental protection.

It's not really about the budget at all, but about the screwed up priorities of the Wingnut Caucus.

If Boehner was really "courageous" and "serious", he could likely get a budget passed today.  All he would need is about a third of the GOP caucus and two thirds of the Democratic caucus.  Or even half and half.

But the GOP seems perfectly willing to sabotage both the operations of the government, the fiscal reputation of the United States and the economic health of the entire frakking country in order to prove that they can bully that Kenyan in the White House.  Because if Obama and Reid agree to some of the lunatic demands that Boehner brings from Louis Gohmert and Michelle Bachmann, they'll just change the demands.  Apparently that's happened already.

The shutdown is coming.  Not because America can't pay its bills, but because a bunch of Teatards want it that way.  And screw the rest of the country from feeling differently.

I Like EJ Dionne, but...

This is not balance.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/for-moderates-no-more-fence-straddling-on-the-budget/2011/04/06/AFdQaPrC_story.html

In his column, Dionne makes some good points about how the GOP budget under Paul Ryan is a radical document and pretty much everything most sentient people with fourth grade reading and math skills have been saying since it came out.

But he falls victim to the Myth of the Moderate.  Many political scientists, when evaluating the political spectrum say that there is no such thing as "moderate".  There is "radical", "liberal", "conservative" and "reactionary".  But "moderate" is not a political viewpoint but an attitude.  An aloofness.

Many "moderates" simply don't pay attention.  These are the fabled independent swing voters that we obsess about every four years.  Another phrase for them is low information voter.  They get fed a steady stream of "horse race" stories as they half heartedly watch the evening news waiting for Wheel of Fortune to come on.  They see a bunch of He Said/She Said stories that suggest tht a pox on both their houses.

Dionne's point, and it might be right, is that the GOP, Medicare killing budget should strip the blinders from their eyes.  That they should see the naked extremism of the GOP for what it is.

But then you get Mark Halperin praising the "courage" of  Paul Ryan and Andrew Sullivan praising its "seriousness" because it has (non-sensical) numbers in it.  You will get horse race and process stories on the looming shutdown.  A few people will point out that the Tea Party hates government and wants it shut down anyway.  That the GOP kept changing their numbers whenever Democrats moved in their direction.  That they're holding the budget hostage to defund Planned Parenthood.

But those moderates... They either won't notice or won't understand.  Not at the levels the evidence thrust into their face would suggest.

Maybe those socially conservative Midwestern union members will finally wake up and realize that every time they vote for a "Pro-Life" conservative, they're really voting for a Pro-Plutocrat ideologue who wants to shower benefits on the rich and cut everyone else's benefits and wages.

Maybe.

But the defining characteristic of the "moderate" is their desire to be above the fray.  Their desire to declare a pox on both houses.

The fact that their own house is being razed seems not to enter their mental picture.

The Hijacking Of The Party Of Lincoln

Lincoln fights off fellows from the Cato Institute.

If this comes off as concern trolling, so be it.

I've been studying America's "Second Party System", the division between Jacksonian Democrats and the Clay-Adams-Webster Whigs.  At the end of this - which concerned my reading What Hath God Wrought over the past six months (sumbitch was LONG) - I concluded that I am a Whig.  The Whigs were the progressive party advocating sane financial institutions, infrastructure improvements, moral and political reform and equality.  The Democrats were laissez faire, state's rightist, conservative and white supremacist.

But Whigs and Democrats, despite their real differences, agreed on certain principles in American democracy.  The issue of slavery, however, became an issue that the Whigs couldn't find a way clear on.  They eventually dissolved and were replaced by the Republican party.  The Republican party was the liberal party of the mid-19th century.  Lincoln even advocated women's rights in the Illinois statehouse.

From those liberal roots, there emerged divisions between the old Lincoln wing of reformers and the pro-corporate model ultimately typified by Mark Hanna and William McKinley.  This tension between the old progressive/Teddy Roosevelt/Abraham Lincoln wing of the party and the Old Guard/William Taft/Warren Harding wing of the party led to the rupturing of the party in 1912.  It was this rupture that helped push Woodrow Wilson to the left, as he tried to capture the Bull Moose vote for 1916.  It was FDR that finally swallowed most of the progressive Republicans into the New Deal coalition.

But there were always a few legacies from that progressive Republican past.  Famously, John McCain tried to aspire to that legacy and was smacked down for it.  So he reinvented himself as an Old Guarder for 2008.  But there were always a few Lincoln Chaffee/Bob Michel/Olympia Snowe types rumbling around the caucus.

Now, we have three left.  And they are all from within an hour of Fenway Park, and they are all effectively hamstrung by their party's ideological core.

And even the Old Guard of corporate friendly, Coolidge-esque Republicans are muscled aside by these new ideological shock troops.  I don't think Boehner and McConnell really want a shutdown.  I just don't think they have a choice.

What we have is the complete takeover of a political party by the political fringe.  In Lincoln's day, the Garrison abolitionists -the radicals in their coalition - weren't given a real seat at the table.  Now, the radicals write budget proposals that would drag American back into a pre-New Deal laissez faire plutocracy.

And they are lauded for being "courageous" and "serious" because apparently the political press is incapable of reading or simple math.

The GOP budget proposed by Paul Ryan would gut the safety net, not control health care costs but rather shift them to people who can't pay for them, leave defense spending intact while cutting just about every other aspect of the government and then cutting taxes for corporations and the rich.  It would "balance" the budget by assuming that these tax cuts for the rich would be offset by 2.8% unemployment.

This "serious" budget the GOP is proposing is as radical and fanciful a document as you are likely to see.  It rests on ideas that have been objectively shown to be false - tax cuts for the rich create jobs - and ridiculous assumptions - 2.8% unemployment and an American polity that will allow every single elderly person who is not rich as hell running through their savings in order not to die earlier than necessary.

This is a terrible farce.  It's an assault on the very idea that we exist as a commonwealth, with a social contract that guarantees a subsistence standard of living in your old age.

The new Old Guard is scared of this, I think.  I'm not sure Boehner likes the idea of blatantly ending Medicare, because he can read a poll.  But the hijacking of the Party of Teddy Roosevelt by the Rand Paul/Michelle Bachmann wing is now complete.

Their budget proposals, combined with their willingness to shutdown the government in the middle of a recovery and their assaults on unions in the midwest, demonstrates for anyone paying attention that they have abandoned all pretense to "compassionate conservatism" (which was itself largely a pretense).  They have become the party of libertarian extremism.  The party of the laissez faire, red in tooth and claw.

They are unfit to govern.

Style Note

From now on, the "Ryan plan" is now the "GOP plan".

Your Wednesday Morning Takedown

http://www.ginandtacos.com/2011/04/06/bundled-mediocrity/comment-page-1/#comment-55935

This is a truly epic and righteous rant.  Good for insight, good for a chuckle.

Priorites

Your modern GOP at work.

The Ryan plan pisses me off mightily, because it would make retirement effectively unaffordable for me, and frankly, I'm better off than most Americans, so it would make retirement unaffordable for everyone.

I'm also pissed at the "courageous" talk in the media.  Yes, this is politically more risky than not doing it.  But "courage" is a virtue.  "Courage" does entail taking from the poor and powerless and showering MORE TAX CUTS on the rich.

That is where Ryan lost his opportunity.  Cutting Medicare/Medicaid is likely a non-stater politically.  My hope is the GOP pays for it for at least two elections cycles but...LOOK!  Snooki fell off a barstool and her boobs popped out!

Anyway... Where was I?  Oh, yeah, if Ryan had avoided YET MORE TAX CUTS for the rich, he could have made at least a plausible case that he was serious about the deficit.  Personally, I and a majority of Americans would rather see the Defense budget cut than Medicare, but that's at least a debate to have: Cut Medicare or cut Defense.

But that's not what the GOP's plan does.  It cuts Medicare in order to transfer more wealth to the rich and ultimately does not address the deficit in enough of a way to compensate for the pain it will cause.

The GOP has revealed - in Wisconsin, in Ohio, in Michigan and now in Washington - what their priorities are.  They want to strip the middle and working classes of whatever few protections they have and create a plutocratic oligarchy that will rule this country and run it into the ground.

And any Democrat who can't see this and can't elucidate it is an idiot.

UPDATE:  Or, what Dean Baker says.

Even The...Er.. Liberal Forbes Magazine

E.D. Kain, formerly of League of Ordinary Gentlemen and Balloon Juice ombudsman, lays out how to balance the budget without gutting the social safety net.  Here.

I'll give you the highlights: cut the defense budget back to Clinton era levels and return the tax rate to Clinton era levels.  Basically, Clintonize the damn thing, because, you know, it worked the last time.

There are some other important points about the tax code and other issues.

But here's the thing: this is at least as "serious" a budget as Paul Ryan's.  It does the same thing Ryan's budget does, but it does not involve plunging future generations of retirees (me!) into penury.

I would LOVE to see the Democrats put forward such a budget proposal.  It would be just as "serious" and politically much more popular, if polls are to be believed.

Of course, neither are likely to become law so...

UPDATE: The CBO scores the Ryan plan and...... It doesn't reduce the deficit!  It will however take a shiv to grandma and grandpa's retirement savings.  Yay!  Paul Ryan is very serious and courageous!  Or ideological and cruel.  One of those.

Class Warfare

Time for the gloves to come off.

Here's what the Ryan plan does:

It effectively ends Medicaid and Medicare.  Medicaid - which benefits mostly children and the elderly - will be squeezed into irrelevancy by block grants.  States will commence a race to the bottom.  I'm guessing Mississippi will lead the way.  Medicare will be phased out and replaced with vouchers to be used to buy health insurance.  This was the plan behind Medicare Advantage, and it proved to be LESS efficient than single payer Medicare.  Once you get older and sicker, it is tough to see $15,000 buying much insurance at all, especially in 2022 (the number does not appear to be adjusted for inflation in health care costs).

That was outrageous.

But it gets worse.

Ryan's plan cuts taxes for businesses and the wealthy.

On the one hand, it's unlikely to pass the Senate, and good Lord, I would hope if it did, Obama would veto it.  So it's unlikely to become law.

At the moment.

What needs to happen is a real debate, which Obama promised us at Christmas, about taxes and the deficit.  The GOP has now just laid its marker down: less benefits for the poor and elderly, more tax cuts for the rich. Again, the Democrats need to demagogue the living shit out of this.  They got hit with Death Panels in 2010, so turn about is fair play.

And they need to do so quickly and forcefully.  Already, the news media is buying the line that this is a "courageous" budget, because it attacks sacred cows.  When ACA put reforms in place to limit Medicare's growth, it was "risky" and "socialism", but Republicans are courageous.

But what's so courageous about rich Republicans cutting other people's benefits?  They aren't going to get hit with this.

Here's the terrifying scenario:  You're 67 and you have a massive heart attack and need triple bypass surgery and a regimen of drugs for the rest of your life.  You think $15K will cover that?  Bullshit.

So before you know, you've run through your savings, your depleted 401K, which took a hit because we deregulated Wall Street again under President Bachmann and they tanked the economy again.

You lose your house, your savings and you're forced to move in with your kids who are already struggling because all the good jobs have been outsourced to Chindia.

What am I missing here?

This is class warfare.  This is the minions of the malefactors of great wealth destroying the social safety net.

And it's patently unfair (which matters in politics).  I have paid into Medicare my whole working life.  I subsidize a generation of retirees, and will subsidized another one before I myself retire.  For that, I am promised that my kids and my students will subsidize my Medicare.

That's the social contract of the post-New Deal America.  And the GOP wants to tear it to pieces, urinate on it, light it on fire and feed the ashes to the swine.

I am having trouble managing my outrage over this, also because I am aware that there will be little outrage in the comfortable halls of Washington.  This won't hurt them.

It would hurt me.  It would hurt my kids.

Fuck you, Republicans.  This is personal.

UPDATE: What Josh Marshall says.

Cue The Clown Car...

Ryan releases his Medicare/Medicaid plan.

So, as I was saying all the way back in time yesterday, the GOP - given the opportunity to address long term costs in Medicare and Medicaid - decided to go full retard.

Paul Ryan's plan is cynical and ineffectual.  He basically has decided to end Medicare for anyone under 55 and replace it with - let's pause for the irony here - Obamacare.  It would be a system of subsidies that eliminate the single payer, worker subsidized plan we have now with private plans.

Because private plans work so freaking well at keeping costs down.

The problem has always been that most of your medical expenses will occur around the time you die.  And you will die once you get on Medicare.  Ryan's plan will force people to cover additional medical expenses - ie end of life care - from their own pocket.

Or to put it another way, the grinding poverty that typified old age prior to Social Security and Medicare is coming back if the GOP have their way.

And these are the bastards who ran on "death panels"?

TPM has a run down on the plan here.

This is Social Security privatization all over again.  This is bowing down to the Free Market Fairy again.

And if the Democrats don't demagogue the living hell out of the GOP on this, they deserve to lose the next election.

I always said that Republicans were good at politics and lousy at policy.  This is bad at both.

I'd say it was unbelievable, but it's harder to be stunned by anything the GOP Tea Party is doing these days.

UPDATE: The always wonkiriffic Ezra Klein looks at it here.  Basically, the GOP achieves health care reform by not paying for health care.  Wow!  Problem solved, thanks Paul Ryan.  I hear he has a similar plan for world peace whereby we no one goes to war.

Medicare

So, the GOP wants to cut Medicare.

Medicare costs are a huge long term problem, and if the cuts are responsible, I could see them being of some merit.

The problem is that the GOP has not shown much inclination towards responsibility.  They have - for the past two years especially - been absolutely draconian in their attitudes towards the poor and the middle class.  See Wisconsin.  See their desire to gut student loans.  See any fiscal proposal they have floated recently.

The GOP is still in thrall to the Magical Market Fairy who makes everything OK with a wave of its Invisible Hand Wand.

My guess is that the GOP plan will eliminate programs that honestly help people and wind up funneling money to private insurers.  They have already compared it to Medicare Plan D - a plan that was a boon to private insurers and Big Pharma but disastrous to Medicare and confusing to seniors.

Put simply, I bet this plan sucks.

The good news is that if - by some miraculous accident - there is a nugget of gold in the coming mound of feces - Obama will likely embrace it.  Simultaneously, the Democrats running for Congress can use it to recapture the House and Senate.  Given that any plan for fiscal sanity involves raising taxes, we are going to need a Democratic Congress to start balancing budgets.

So if Ryan and Cantor have indeed found a legitimate way to control rising Medicare costs without putting people in financial risk, I think Obama will work with them.

Finally, it's worth remembering that no effort will succeed in reducing Medicare's long term costs more than the full implementation of ACA.  Remember, the Death Panels?  That was what the GOP called the cost control methods in ACA.

So, when Ryan says, this could put us at electoral risk if the Democrats lie about it, you can feel free to fling poo at him.

April

Have one of these, you'll feel better.. For a while.

April is the cruelest month.  Eliot's line is well traveled, to say the least.

Here in New England, it is especially cruel.  You have tantalizing glimpses of spring, then snow, then days of sodden rain, then sunny, windy days.

Everything but the warmth your body is craving for.

But one day it will be 65 degrees and sunny and kids will be playing frisbee and you will be able to sit outside on the deck in the sun without a coat on.

But while it might be a week away, it feels so much longer.

In some ways, we are stuck in metaphysical April.

Everything seems stuck in limbo.  The economy is getting better, but it's not good.  We are getting out of Iraq slowly, but we are inching into Libya.  We might have a deal to avert a government shutdown, but we might not.

We know spring will be here by May in New England.

Here's to hoping that spring will arrive for the world at large.

Oh God, These Men of God

Lot of that going around...

Wow.

What to make of this.

That jackass "minister" Terry Jones presided over a Koran burning at his church.  Word eventually made it to Afghanistan where a mullah exhorted his listeners to take revenge.  They stormed a UN compound and killed at least 12 people.

I am trying to be a religious person.  I find church a comfort, a solace and - with the right minister - a source of wisdom in a world that rarely values it.

When I see people like this, I understand why people turn their backs on religion.  I understand why it's difficult to believe that God exists if It allows things like this to go on in It's name.

But more than that, I am struck by the pessimism that this incident engenders.  We have spent hundreds of lives and billions of dollars to try and turn Afghanistan into something resembling the 21st 20th 19th century.

That the actions of one self aggrandizing asshat can in turn enflame some other hate monger on the other side of the world to inflame a bunch of idiots into committing mass murder... Where do you go from here?

There was a sociological study that notes when the rules and norms of a society break down, the first people to notice and act upon it are the sociopaths and psychopaths.  Normal people than have to emulate those sociopaths and psychopaths in order not to be victimized by them.

What do we do when we can't rescue a whole country from the sociopaths?

I would leave, but that's just me.

Ezra: The Worst Idea In Washington

I haven't linked to Ezra Klein in a while, because something went wrong with the feed on the blogroll.  But I fixed it finally, and he talks in two posts about the GOP's new "Balanced Budget Amendment".

This atrocity would require two-thirds majorities in both houses of Congress in order to raise taxes.

This would make the United States the budgetary equivalent of California.  Maybe there aren't enough Republicans left in California for them to know what that would look like, but it's not pretty.  You have roughly 60% of the legislature in Democratic hands, but they still can't raise taxes, despite a massive budget shortfall.

The result is that taxes in California are very regressive.  Sales taxes are very high, while taxes that pinch the rich are impossible to raise.  The same thing would happen if the GOP were to get their way on this awful amendment. (Luckily they won't.)

There are three important political trends since the 2010 midterms (and Ezra has a chart to show the demographics of that election):

First, Governors Scott Walker, John Kasich and Rich Snyder all launched attacks on public service unions.

Second, the GOP went to the mat for tax cuts for the rich.

Third, the GOP has a single minded dedication in the House to creating jobs pushing right-wing social issues.

The result of all this has been a lost opportunity for the Democrats.

There is a lot of merit to the No Drama Obama model, but he has to pick a fight with these guys!  Even if it is a calm, professorial type fight, he has to make the case that the GOP is a captive party to the rich and the socially conservative.  Neither of those positions are majority positions.

I suppose there could be a plan to give the GOP a lot of rope between now and the beginning of the silly season next winter fall.  Let them create their own oppo ads.  Maybe the plan is to wait for the inevitable government shutdown.

But there are a host of socially conservative union members in the midwest who are ripe for the picking.  There are a host of socially liberal fiscal conservatives, who acknowledge the need to raise taxes, especially on the rich.  While the union members are paying attention, I'm not sure the suburban 40 year old woman who works part time in the school system, generally supports liberal social causes, wants to see some responsibility in the federal budget and never watches the news is really hearing what's going on.

She likes Obama and will likely vote for him anyway.  But he needs to get her fired up about the assault on sanity that the modern GOP currently represents.  That's how you realign the country.

Obama is said to be fortunate in the list of potential candidates he will go up against.  Fine.

But he's really fortunate in the ideology that he's going up against.  And he needs to make that clearer.

Baby Boomers Finally Do Something Good

Boomer To Do list...

So, hiring and unemployment numbers are out.  They're not bad.  Hiring is OK, but it will likely be revised upwards, because that's the way economists roll.

What is MORE interesting is the unemployment numbers.  Traditionally, we have to add a bunch of new jobs just to keep pace with the expanding workforce.  But we are on the cusp of another demographic moment courtesy of America's Greatest Most Narcissistic Generation.

See, the Boomers are retiring.  That will mean troublesome things for Medicare and - one day - Social Security.  But at the moment, it means that with 10,000 Boomers a day heading off to Florida to play shuffleboard, we are going to see a gradual decline in unemployment beyond what hiring would indicate.

This likely has more of a political implication than an economic implication, but overall, post 65 Boomer will be able to consume without impinging on the job market.

Oh, and WalMart will have a whole new crop of geezers to "welcome" their customers.

Excellent April Fool's Day Joke

To you, too, buddy...

I walked into my office after class and there was a certified, autographed copy of Karl Rove's Courage and Consequence on my desk.  Since Rove had already benefitted from the sale of this book, I feel that no Americans were harmed in this prank.

Well played, anonymous eBay prankster.