US POLITICS SPRING 2011: Let's just call off this country.

people who work in politics are horrible

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/06/13/lisa-baron-s-salacious-memoir.html

yikes

"When people find out that I worked for Ralph Reed during the 2000 Republican presidential primary in South Carolina, they always ask the same thing: Was it true Ralph told voters that Senator John McCain fathered a black child?" she writes. "And my answer is always the same, 'How would I know? I was in a Greenville hotel room giving Ari Fleischer a blow job.'"

^^^ Henry James would kill for this opening sentence.

I'm also thinking about the kind of mouth that would receive Ari Fleischer's dick.

big deal, ari fleischer fucked us all in the face

amirite

x-post from yesterday

The point was to highlight a $3 billion perk available to those who buy these jets — a perk Republicans won’t touch because it would count as a (cue scary music) tax increase.

There's been some nitpicking of this item--some Republicans are claiming this deduction was part of something that Dems created and others are suggesting that is only a minor part of the deficit. Neither of those points is really much of a defense of keeping this item.

love sullivan's fierce line on gop dogma and obstruction

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/06/boehners-economic-terrorism.html

"That's the nature of today's GOP. It needs to be destroyed before it can recover."

damn!

The second option is to bypass them, invoke the 14th Amendment, and order the Treasury to keep paying its debts

wait waht

like, how does that work

desperation

no I mean I don't understand what the 14th Amendment has to do with superceding Congress and the President "ordering" the Treasury to do anything.

also lol

Well, read the link:

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2011/04/29/The-Debt-Limit-Option-President-Obama-Can-Use.aspx

Furthermore, it’s worth remembering that the debt limit is statutory law, which is trumped by the Constitution which has a little known provision that relates to this issue. Section 4 of the 14th Amendment says, “The validity of the public debt of the United States…shall not be questioned.” This could easily justify the sort of extraordinary presidential action to avoid default that I am suggesting.

Some will raise a concern that potential buyers of Treasury securities may be scared off by a fear that bonds sold over the debt limit may not be backed by the full faith and credit of the United States. However, given that the vast bulk of Treasury securities are 3-month bills that will turn over many, many times before this issue ever reaches the Supreme Court, it is doubtful than anyone will be concerned about that. And the Federal Reserve could assure investors that it will always be a buyer for such securities.

People smarter than I am tell me that the Treasury has an almost infinite ability to avoid a debt crisis. I hope they are right. But I am hypothesizing a situation in which the Treasury reaches the end of its rope and a day comes when it needs $X billion to pay interest and it has less than $X billion in cash. Under those circumstances, when default is the only possible alternative, I believe that the president and the Treasury secretary would be justified in taking extraordinary action to prevent it, even if it means violating the debt limit.

Constitutional history is replete with examples where presidents justified extraordinary actions by extraordinary circumstances. During the George W. Bush administration many Republicans defended the most expansive possible reading of the president’s powers, especially concerning national security. Since default on the debt would clearly have dire consequences for our relations with China, Japan and other large holders of Treasury securities, it’s hard to see how defenders of Bush’s policies would now say the president must stand by and do nothing when a debt default poses an imminent national security threat.

Given that the Supreme Court in recent years has been unusually deferential to executive prerogatives –I feel certain President Obama would be on firm constitutional ground should he challenge the debt limit in order to prevent a debt default. Should the Court rule in his favor, the debt limit would effectively become a dead letter. Is that really the outcome Republicans want from a debt limit showdown?

Etc. etc.

I don't understand what the 14th Amendment has to do with superceding Congress...

Shakey, the way it works is, Obama must call up Boehner at midnight and shout "I call fourteensies!" before Boehner can shout "I block fourteensies!" Then Obama has fourteen days during which he may bribe every member of the Supreme Court with cream-filled pastries and bags of T-Bills. If, at the end of that time the Supreme Court Justices have not absconded to the Bahamas, a ruling is issued that states "Boehner is a poopyhead".

lol

thx Ned I never noticed that clause

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/30/the-wageless-profitable-recovery/#

Bruce Brtlett been terrific the last month explaining the fiscal wrinkles:

Bruce Bartlett.

Take home quote from linked article, above:

With regard to corporate profits, the report noted that the preliminary estimate for the first quarter of 2011 was $1.668 trillion, an increase of $465 billion of just under 40 percent since the recovery began.

“Aggregate employment still has not increased above the trough quarter of 2009, and real hourly and weekly wages have been flat to modestly negative”...

brooke jarvis ran it as "corporate profits=88% of real income growth. Wages/salaries=1%."

cable news sideshow:

Following up on an earlier item, Time’s Mark Halperin appeared on MSNBC earlier to critique President Obama’s press conference. With a smile usually reserved for children who’ve learned a new vulgarity, the pundit said of the president, “I thought he was kind of a dick yesterday.”

He apologized, and soon after, MSNBC announced it’s suspending him.

“Mark Halperin’s comments this morning were completely inappropriate and unacceptable. We apologize to the President, The White House and all of our viewers. We strive for a high level of discourse and comments like these have no place on our air. Therefore, Mark will be suspended indefinitely from his role as an analyst.”

Sargent otm:

I’m sorry, but this is crazy. Halperin’s crack was crude and dumb, but it doesn’t deserve indefinite suspension. Halperin’s use of an expletive is trival when compared with the degradation of our political discourse we witness on a regular basis from Halperin and many others — degradation that is seen as perfectly acceptable because no curse words are employed. Suspending Halperin only reinforces a phony definition of “civility” in our discourse, in which it’s unacceptable to use foul language and be “uncivil,” but it’s perfectly acceptable for reporters and commentators to allow outright falsehoods to pass unrebutted; to traffic endlessly in false equivalences in the name of some bogus notion of objectivity; and to make confident assertions about public opinion without referring to polls which show them to be completely wrong.

I care less about Halperin’s use of the word “dick” than I do about the argument he and Joe Scarborough were making — that Obama somehow stepped over some kind of line in aggressively calling out the GOP for refusing to allow any revenues in a debt ceiling deal. This notion that Obama’s tone was somehow over the top — when politics is supposed to be a rough clash of visions — is rooted in a deeply ingrained set of unwritten rules about what does and doesn’t constitute acceptable political discourse that really deserve more scrutiny. This set of rules has it that it should be treated as a matter of polite, legitimate disagreement when Michele Bachmann says deeply insane things about us not needing to raise the debt limit, but it should be seen as an enormously newsworthy gaffe when she commits a relatively minor error about regional trivia. This set of rules has it that it should be treated as a matter of polite, legitimate disagreement when Republicans continually claim that Dems cut $500 billion in Medicare in a way that will directly impact seniors, even though fact checkers have pronounced it misleading, but it should be seen as “demagoguery” when Dems argue that the Paul Ryan plan would end Medicare as we know it.

yep

We strive for a high level of discourse

get my revolver

Rather, a “bipartisan” bill is a bill that the opposing party treats as bipartisan, while a partisan bill is a bill that the opposing party treats as partisan. That puts the agency where it belongs: on the minority party. The idea that the president can “be bipartisan” is dead wrong. He can be partisan, designing bills that the opposing party would never want to vote for, but he can’t be bipartisan unless the opposing party lets him. And knowing that any reputation he gets for bipartisanship will be used in his reelection campaign, why would they do that?

klein

I thought bipartisan simply meant the issues where lobbyist have bought off both parties.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/images/climatechange8wide.jpg

^ these dudes meeting in DC this week

pederasts?

pederasts with fetishes for adult feet

stupid motherfuckers arrrgh blind with raaaaage

The "Reply To Our Critics' page on Heartland's website is some Class-A denial work:

http://www.heartland.org/about/truthsquad.html

Wow, that poster seriously seems like it was put together by someone looking at the list of Most Used Skeptic Arguments on SkepticalScience.com!

http://i52.tinypic.com/30tierb.jpg

(people who haven't seen that site should check it out, btw. It has dozens of common skeptic arguments, including all of the ones on that poster, and then provides a response to each of them, and usually with multiple levels of technical lingo - one response will be a quick, simple summary paragraph, another will be much longer, with many citations, graphs, etc. it's a wonderful resource.)

you really don't have to do a lot to that poster to have a picture of an adult leg forcefully kicking a child. just in case it's useful to know that you can turn some of their promo materials 90 degrees and steer away a few curious attendees, hoos

huh

"global warming: kicking childhood dreams in the solar plexus"

2.

is all.

well 2 out of 100 detainees. and those are the 2 dead guys. (I dunno if there were any other deaths)

tbh I think its odd that there are any prosecutions at all. seems like something they could just has easily have buried/denied.

^ the world isn't ever as simple as it seems

i'm just...you're telling me a president authorized systematic torture of prisoners and enabled rendition to black sites around the world, and we're getting two fucking prosecutions out of this?

i know this is not important (i am in favour of a dedicated thread for all the joe biden e-mails i get) so i shouldn't interrupt, BUT, it's so funny to get an e-mail from BHO without even a friendly subject line & with a perfunctory More soon sign off.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/cutline/birthers-sue-esquire-more-100-million-over-satire-163444777.html

smh

hi, i'm new here but have enjoyed reading this and other threads for some time. but xp to hoos,i agree that these prosecutions are way too little and too late, but do you think that they could possibly portend more serious efforts on the part of the administration to curb detainee abuses in the future? or am i being hopelessly naive? that article sort of struck me as a tepid step in the right direction.

i'm not sure if i used "xp" right, btw. i think it means that i am responding to someone who posted further up in the thread, but i'm not totally familiar with the etiquette/conventions of this messageboard.

hmm

hi

welcome, Pat!