The Commentariat -- July 25, 2014
Internal links removed.
Look Out, Poor People. Paul Ryan Is Here to Help. Theodore Schleifer of the New York Times: "Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, outlined a plan to combat poverty on Thursday that would consolidate a dozen programs into a single 'Opportunity Grant' that largely shifts antipoverty efforts from the federal government to the states." ...
... CW: Sounds like a Tenther Plan to me.
... Paul Waldman in the Washington Post: "... it's hard to avoid the conclusion that it’s still driven by the longstanding conservative desire to limit the help we give to the poor.... Ryan's plan assumes that the same Republican states that rejected the federal government's offer to insure poor citizens through the expansion of Medicaid -- in other words, who would rather see poor people go uninsured than get coverage from the government -- are now going to be spectacularly committed and creative in working to help those same poor citizens through their time of need.... One of the real dangers of Ryan's approach is that it would render the programs unable to deal with economic downturns unless Congress stepped in and supplied more money, which would be unlikely as long as Republicans control at least one house." ...
... Steve Benen: "In the interest of magnanimity, let's acknowledge some of the good stuff. Ryan bucks his party, for example, by endorsing expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), an issue on which Democrats can and should welcome the opportunity to work with him. He's also prepared to embrace sentencing reforms, which is heartening, and his recommendations on occupational licensing aren't bad, either.... [And] Ryan doesn't include any of the deep spending cuts to the safety net that have helped define the congressman's far-right budget proposals." But then, a person who needs help has to sign a contract (promising to be a better, more responsible person, I guess, with a sort of life coach who evidently determines what measureable markers constitute better-personhood. If the impoverished person doesn't meet her part of the deal, she'll be subject to some kind of "sanctions." So demeaning, threatening AND weird. Great. ...
... Annie Lowrey, in New York, explains how this "condescending and wrongheaded" program is supposed to work. It "presupposes that the poor somehow want to be poor; that they don't have the skills to plan and achieve and grow their way out of poverty.... It isolates the poor. Middle-class families don't need to justify and prostrate themselves for tax credits.... It threatens to punish the poorest and most unstable families for their poverty and instability.... It does not address the core problem of a lack of jobs -- or the problem of a lack of jobs paying a living wage and affording a middle-class lifestyle." ...
... As Emily Badger of the Washington Post puts it, "the idea is fundamentally punitive. It betrays the fact that Ryan's latest thinking has not strayed all that far from the simplistic notion that people in poverty are solely to blame for their own circumstances. An incentive system like this assumes that end goals such as employment are entirely within the control of a poor people if they would just try hard enough." ...
... for a party that does absolutely nothing, Republicans are awfully concerned about how much work other people do. -- Akhilleus, in today's Comments (read his entire comment)
... See today's Comments for the context on this:
... AND, according to House Democrats, the Ryan plan is not "revenue neutral," as Ryan claims. Bernie Becker of the Hill: "Ryan ... cast his new initiative as a plan that wouldn't roll back resources for the poor but would change how the money is delivered and spent.... Ryan also insisted that his new grant plan, which would consolidate 11 separate federal anti-poverty programs into one funding stream for participating states, was not a block grant.... Van Hollen, on the other hand, said that's exactly what the plan was, and he was surprised Ryan would do little more than dress up his previous ideas.... Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) added that two-thirds of the cuts in Ryan's latest budget would hit low- and middle-income families, and railed against the Wisconsin Republican's idea to block-grant the Head Start program for early education.... The 11 programs that Ryan wants to consolidate would get hit with 20 percent cuts, Van Hollen noted, even as Ryan said he envisioned a deficit-neutral plan."
... In his critique of Ryan's plan (linked above), Paul Waldman writes, "The devil would be in the details; what if a state decided to take its entire block grant and devote it to giving lectures to poor people on why they should get married?" Florida doesn't need a block grant for that. We have Sen. Marco Rubio, who's providing the life-coaching advice -- while also serving as a role model -- for free! ...
... Melinda Henneberger of the Washington Post: In a address at Catholic University Wednesday Rubio said, "'I consider myself to be a child of privilege,"' because being 'raised by two parents who were married to each other ... led me to live my life in a sequence that has a proven track record of success.' Specifically, this sequence: Get an education, then a job, then marry and have children. Stick to that order and you'll be better off by virtually every measure, he said...."
Cristina Marcos of the Hill: "The House on Thursday narrowly defeated a Democratic motion to instruct House conferees on the Department of Veterans Affairs overhaul to simply adopt the Senate-passed bill. The motion offered by Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.) was rejected in a close 205-207 vote, with 13 Republicans voting in favor. All 207 no votes were from Republicans." ...
... Burgess Everett & Lauren French of Politico: "Democrats and Republicans are struggling to agree on how to pay for [VA overhaul] legislation that could cost between $25 billion and $30 billion. That logjam is transforming the VA debate from one that united both parties to yet another fiscal fight, prompting the same type of partisan finger pointing that has become familiar after years of budget showdowns." ...
... The Hill story, by Martin Matishak, is here.
Sarah Mimms of the National Journal: "House Speaker John Boehner said Thursday that the House will not deal with funding the government before the August recess.... Boehner told reporters that the House will pass a short-term continuing resolution to keep the government open sometime in September, avoiding a government shutdown that would otherwise occur on the last day of the month. The legislation would likely expire in early December, he said, punting decisions about the nation's spending to a lame-duck Congress just after the midterm election."
Lauren French: "The House Rules Committee approved a resolution Thursday allowing the full House to vote on authorizing a lawsuit against President Barack Obama accusing him of abusing executive authority. The 7-4 vote was split along partisan lines...." ...
... Paul Steinhauser of CNN: A CNN poll finds that "By a 57%-41% margin, Americans say House Republicans shouldn't file the suit. As with the question on impeachment, there's a wide partisan divide over the lawsuit.... Only 35% want Obama impeached, with nearly two-thirds saying the President should not be removed from office." ...
... CW: So why the suit? According to the poll (page 8), 75 percent of Republican respondents favor the suit.
Frances Robles & Michael Shear of the New York Times: "Hoping to stem the recent surge of migrants at the Southwest border, the Obama administration is considering whether to allow hundreds of minors and young adults from Honduras into the United States without making the dangerous trek through Mexico.... If approved, the plan would direct the government to screen thousands of children and youths in Honduras to see if they can enter the United States as refugees or on emergency humanitarian grounds. It would be the first American refugee effort in a nation reachable by land to the United States, the White House said, putting the violence in Honduras on the level of humanitarian emergencies in Haiti and Vietnam, where such programs have been conducted in the past amid war and major crises."
Nick Corasaniti & Jonathan Martin of the New York Times: "The United States Army War College determined in a preliminary review on Thursday that Senator John Walsh of Montana appeared to have plagiarized his final paper to earn a master's degree from the institution, and sent a letter to the senator instructing him that an investigative panel will meet next month to conclusively assess any culpability." The whole story is worth reading. ...
... CW: The paper was only 14 pages long. (I've never heard of a 14-page master's thesis, except perhaps in math & science fields where the "paper" might be one long equation.) He couldn't write 14 pages with plagiarizing half of it? I love the way Democrats are standing by this guy who IMHO did something just as bad, or worse, than did Anthony Weiner with his foray into dick pix. National Democrats couldn't dump Weiner fast enough. ...
... NEW. CW: Paul Waldman agrees with me here: "What the hell are the standards at the Army War College that you can write a 14-page paper and get a master's degree? Is it like that at the colleges the other services run? It might be OK if it was 14 pages of dense calculations for a degree in economics or something, but it reads like a paper written by a reasonably bright high school sophomore in his international relations class, not somebody getting an advanced degree. Not only that, there's no original research in it, which is usually a requirement of a graduate thesis." ...
... AND Waldman is with me on the PTSD "excuse" (see my comment to yesterday's Commentariat. Waldman write,
That's an insult to the thousands of veterans who have suffered from PTSD. It can be a terrible ailment, but one thing it doesn't do is make you plagiarize other people's work on your "thesis." What, did Walsh wake up in the middle of the night and think he was back in Iraq, in a firefight where the only way to save his comrades was to cut and paste a bunch of articles and then put his name on the top of the resulting paper? Give me a break.
... "Elvan," a commenter on Waldman's post asks a question I've had, too (but haven't expressed & would not have expressed as cleverly as Elvan did): "What faculty member couldn't detect such blatant plagiarism in this paper? Or is military science to science what military music is to music?"
... NEW. Aaron Blake of the Washington Post has a good piece on "John Walsh and how not to respond to a political scandal."
Paul Krugman: After years of dysfunctional government, the Democratic majority in the California state legislature grew large enough to override Republican obstruction & impose a mildly "liberal agenda." Conservatives predicted disaster; instead, California is doing very well. And then there's Kansas.
No Surprises Here. Paul Krugman Sen. Rob Portman (R-Wis.Ohio), rich guy & "debt disaster dead-ender," has written a Wall Street Journal op-ed on how we must curb entitlements, etc. "And it is an interesting piece -- it's a very good illustration both of the desperate desire to see a debt crisis, and what happens when someone (Portman, or more likely the staffer who wrote it) tries to be a Very Serious Person without actually understanding the numbers or having followed any of the analysis.... The main thing that struck me was the policy recommendations, written as if he knows nothing about the ongoing discussion of these issues over the past decade and more."
Winger Peter Suderman of Hit & Run (republished here in the libertarian Reason) thinks he has found the smoking gun in the Halbig anti-ACA case when he catches (via a commenter to another blog) Jonathan Gruber during a January 2012 talk saying, "... if you're a state and you don't set up an exchange, that means your citizens don't get their tax credits." ...
... The Long Arm of the Kochs. Steve M. points out, "This was found by a guy at the Koch-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute and published on the blog of the Koch-funded Reason magazine, in support of a lawsuit pushed by the partly Koch-controlled Cato Institute. The Kochs and their bleeding-edge wingnut billionaire allies can't wait.... Their goal is to win this war. And it's total war." ...
... Dave Weigel has the background: "By late Thursday night, the entire conservative/libertarian blogosphere/twittersphere was crowing about the video.... The timing of the speech is important. Gruber said this in January 2012. It wasn't until May 2012 that the IRS issued a rule, clarifying that subsidies would also be available to the states that joined the federal exchange.... But this bolsters the libertarians' case. Gruber is acknowledged, by everyone, as an architect of the ACA.... It just happens that in early 2012, when [Halbig architect Michael] Cannon was barnstorming states to get them to avoid creating exchanges, Gruber was telling them they had better create exchanges or they wouldn't get subsidies." ...
... Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post, who's usually fairly silly, makes a compelling prognostication that the conservative Supremes will pretend that they are preserving "legislative integrity" by taking literally the ACA phrase "an exchange established by the State." I also agree with her that if the Court takes the case, the law's best chance of survival lies with Justice Kennedy, because I think he may not be quite as mean-spirited as the other righty-rights on the Court.
NEW. Forgot this one. Caitlan MacNeal of TPM: "The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan and two other groups on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against the mayor of Warren, Mich., who banned an atheist group from setting up a station alongside one run by a prayer group in the city hall atrium. Mayor Jim Fouts (R) said that the group's 'reason station' would be opposed to prayer and compared atheists to Nazis and members of the Klu Klux Klan."
News Ledes
** New York Times: "Russia has increased its direct involvement in fighting between the Ukrainian military and separatist insurgents, moving more of its own troops to the border and preparing to arm the rebels with ever more potent weapons, including high-powered Tornado rocket launchers, American and Ukrainian officials said on Friday."
New York Times: "Secretary of State John Kerry has proposed a two-stage plan to halt the fighting in the Gaza Strip that would first impose a weeklong truce starting Sunday, an official involved in the negotiations said on Friday. As soon as the truce took effect Palestinian and Israeli officials would begin negotiations on the principal economic, political and security concerns about Gaza, with other nations attending." ...
... Update: "Israel agreed to halt its military offensive in Gaza for 12 hours starting Saturday morning amid intense international efforts to seal a broader cease-fire deal and a new explosion of violence in the West Bank.... The announcement by the military came early Saturday, hours after Israel's security cabinet rejected Secretary of State John Kerry's proposal for a seven-day cease-fire in Gaza and further talks...."
... AFP: "Israeli fire Friday pushed the Palestinian death toll in Gaza to above 800, as Washington pressed Israel and Hamas to agree a week-long umanitarian ceasefire and thrash out a durable truce."
AFP: "The United States on Thursday said it had evidence Russian forces were firing artillery from inside Russia on Ukrainian troops, in what officials called a 'clear escalation' of the conflict. Moscow is also planning to 'deliver heavier and more powerful multiple rocket launchers' to the pro-Russian separatist forces in Ukraine, US deputy State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said." ...
... AFP: "Ukraine's prime minister resigned after his governing coalition collapsed, plunging the former Soviet state into political limbo as it struggles to quell a deadly rebellion in the east.... Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said he was stepping down over the "dissolution of the parliamentary coalition and the blocking of government initiatives" after several parties walked out on the ruling group. The collapse of the ruling coalition paves the way for early elections to be called by President Petro Poroshenko within 30 days."
New York Times: "As a detachment of French soldiers reached the crash site in Mali of an Air Algérie jetliner, officials in Paris said Friday that the accident was most likely weather-related and that the distribution of the wreckage over a limited area suggested that the plane probably hit the ground intact."
Guardian: "The Washington Post's correspondent in Tehran has been arrested along with his Iranian wife and two American photojournalists. Iranian judicial officials confirmed on Friday that Jason Rezaian, who holds dual American and Iranian citizenship, had been detained and is under investigation."
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Reader Comments (23)
The earned income tax credit is a scheme to allow employers to maintain starvation wages. Niggardly wages allow those one percenters to maintain their status and the niggardly wages keep the peasants in place.
Those with a real concern for working Americans know that a significant increase in the minimum wage would help everyone and might even increase growth. The worlds other successful democracies have minimum wages equal to more than forty percent of their median wage. Our minimum wage is less than thirty percent of our median wage. An increase of three dollars could be easily afforded. The minimum wage is the base for all but the most technical jobs. Many companies keep one two or three dollars over the minimum so they can be more selective in hiring.
A three dollar increase in the minimum would have a tremendous impact on the economy. Compare this impact with the EITC designed to prevent a few Americans from starving while subsisting on low wages.
I suggest that the junior Senator from Texas should henceforth never be referred to except as Ted ("Tantrum") Cruz.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/07/georgia-governor-nathan-deal-ethics-commission
We can only hope. Patrick Caldwell writing in "Mother Jones" about our ethics-challenged governor. He was a crook when he was a Democrat, and now that he's switched parties, he still is. Apparently, he runs for office in order to benefit his private business.
Although Jason Carter and Michelle Nunn are hardly liberals, they're miles better than what the Republicans are offering.
@carlyle: Thanks for raising this important point. Of course employers (and, indirectly, consumers) would pay the costs of a higher minimum wage -- as well they should -- while the EITC is a taxpayer-funded subsidy for Walmart, et al.
Plus, as it stands, the EITC is serious social engineering: single workers get very little benefit; the more children a qualifying family has, the greater the benefit. Not surprisingly, the program is extremely popular with Roman Catholics. The New York Times' Emissary to the Vatican, Ross Douthat, has promoted it in several columns. Ryan (& Obama) is proposing to raise the credit for single workers.
But the child-friendly EITC is another way the GOP deals with its inherent xenophobia. Some of them realize that we need to increase our population to grow the economy. But, oh noes, we can't do it by inviting "those people" into the country. So in the alternative, we encourage Americans to have lots of kids.
Nonetheless, Republicans have a love/hate relationship with the EITC. They love it when they can use it to argue against the minimum wage; they hate it otherwise.
In a post published a couple of months ago, Jonathan Chait made another interesting point about the EITC:
"... one of the main reasons the Earned Income Tax Credit exists is to cushion the impact of state taxes, which often force workers on the bottom half of the income spectrum to pay higher rates than the rich. And why are state taxes so regressive? Well, a main reason is that Republicans want it this way. The states that raise the highest proportion of their taxes from the poor are Republican states. The EITC is in large part a way of using the federal tax code to cancel out Republican-led policies of taking money from poor people, so naturally Republicans at the national level oppose it, too."
Another great benefit of the EITC: It allows Republicans, & specifically Paul Ryan, to complain about the 47 percent moocher class & their hammocks & all. The ETIC is a campaign-friendly class resentment enhancer. Yay, it gets out the base, none of whom think they are moochers, even if they're actually among the so-called moochers.
(As Emily Badger pointed out (linked above), the underlying assumption of Ryan's proposed "reform" is that recipients of safety net programs are fundamentally lazy moochers. He thinks his plan with dissuade them from -- i.e., punish them for -- their "bad habits".)
Finally, we should listen to Democratic critics on Ryan's "revenue-neutral" claim. Apparently his plan is "neutral" only insofar as it wouldn't cut/raise taxes from the cuts he has proposed in his current budget plan.
Marie
I believe that Rob Portman is the junior Senator from Ohio...Ron Johnson is a Senator from Wisconsin.
@candleglow. Thanks. You're right. Corrected.
Marie
So, Smirk Daddy is back. And with a plan for the poors. How lovely.
He wants to help. Mighty white of him, eh? But hold on. Not so fast. There are conditions. First, you have to pick up your room, then take out the trash, then wash dad's car...
Those probably come later. For now, Smirk Daddy (don't you just want to slap that smirk off his face?), has other rules before those lazy moochers get any kind of help (and, based on how he's written his "plan" they could very well get nothing but still be held accountable and suitably punished. The Republican Way...).
For once, Ryan ain't lyin'. He really does want to punish the poor, if they break daddy's rules and don't behave like good little boys and girls.
You know, for a party that does absolutely nothing, Republicans are awfully concerned about how much work other people do. What if we took Ryan's Rules and applied them to his own party? How would they fare?
Let's see.
Rule number one: a contract outlining specific measurable benchmarks for success.
Could any Republican congressperson make this grade? First, they would never want any kind of measurable benchmarks. They might have to do something. Second, they already tried this contract idea. Remember Newtie's Contract on America. Complete bullshit and total bust. A complete failure. Oh, they made a contract alright, but it wasn't with Americans. It was with K Street. Just ask Jack Abramoff, Bob Ney, Tom DeLay and Ralph Reed. Okay, the GOP flunks Ryan's Rule number one. Let's try the next one.
A timeline for meeting these benchmarks.
(Urk!) Rule number two, fail. How 'bout three?
Sanctions for breaking the terms of the contract.
Sanctions! Holy shit. We can't be held responsible for not doing what we were sent to Washington to do! What kind of socialist crap is this anyway? Ted Cruz said that not only don't we have to do shit, we can shut down the government so nobody else can get anything done either. Sanctions are for people we don't like. Like Iran. And the poor.
Okay, Republicans can't do rule number three either.
Four?
Incentives for exceeding the terms of the contract.
Incentives? Yeah, baby, now you're talkin'. Where's the bag man? What do you mean we haven't done anything? Of course we have. We've....er...ah....oh fuck it.
No go on four.
Okay. Let's try the last one.
Time limits for remaining on cash assistance.
Oh....remember when term limits was a big thing for Republicans? Let's see, whatever happened to those guys? Jim Inhofe, Saxby Chambliss, Mike Dewine, and plenty of others who are still around or who completely ignored term limits once in congress, Helen Chenoweth, Bob Barr, Rick Santorum, John Kyl, Bill Frist, Fred Thompson, the list goes on and on. Paul Ryan himself has been on the public dole since 1992. So I guess when he says there's a limit to how long you can get monetary assistance from the government, he means decades, not years or months.
The big difference is, he expects poor people to work for what they get. Republicans don't do a lick of work and still get paid. Even when they shut down the government so no one else gets paid.
So neither Ryan nor any other Republican could meet Ryan's rules, but those lazy poors must, or else.
Smirk away, you piece of shit.
Excellent primer for the war in Gaza by John Judis––thorough and amazingly fair and balanced (those last two little words that are in such short supply lately).
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118846/israel-palestine-history-behind-their-new-war
I watched Ryan discussing his plan on MSNBC this morning. He made 3 or 4 points, the last one being that a neutral third party will monitor the states to insure compliance. That is so Repub. Let's privatize the supervision of the state's individualized plans. Where the hell does the money for that come from. So if the entire thing is revenue neutral he gets what he wants and that is take food out of the mouths of the poor. Everyone knows they are on easy street. You just cannot make this stuff up. So I suppose we will then need the Feds to at least monitor if the private "neutral" supervisors are doing their job in policing the states who are given the job of eliminating all the "graft and corruption" from those poor freeloaders.
I am so sick of this mess! And the mainstream news organizations let him blather on without raising any challenge at all!
However, I do enjoy the continued thoughtful comments from everyone. I cherish Marie's leadership.
Cheers!
Oh, Paulie, Paulie, thou art such a human with a heart wanting to help all those poor simple folk who are beset and besieged and you are trying, aren't you? But in the end you end where you started and fail to understand how you diminish and demean the very lot you mean to help. Remember what Arthur tells Guenevere how these simple folk cope: they whistle, they sing, and they dance. (Sort of like slaveowners talked about their slaves). But Guenie wants more–-surely they have other coping methods to help them when they are blue? Arthur concludes: "They sit around and wonder what royal folk would do and that's what simple folk do"
He has it on the best authority.
And we know what Ryan would do, don't we?
From the Laugh or Cry Department:
Good news ladies. Republicans really, really, really do care about your health. Oh, not enough to make sure you have healthcare, or have access to things like Planned Parenthood or have any control over your own bodies on a range of issues. But, geez, they really do care.
According to Think Progress,the GOP is making a move to demonstrate their concern for the biggest health issue facing women today. Osteoporosis. They throw in breast cancer too, but then with the other hand, take away the ability of millions of women to see whether or not they do, in fact, have breast cancer, and if so, their ability to do anything about it. But they care. Really.
And who's leading this charge to take ladyparts away from those awful Democrats and liberals, who only want to talk about sex (dirty, dirty, dirty Democrats!)?
A wingnut consultant named Kellyanne Conway, whose day job is helping anti-abortion groups stick it to women. But never mind. Oh, you don't think she has women's health uppermost in her itty bitty brain? I'll have you know that she worked for that staunch supporter of a woman's right to be legitimately raped, Todd Akin. After Todd's unfortunately misunderstood comment on that minor topic, Kellyanne compared him to Waco cult leader David Koresh.
It's not clear if she thought that was a good thing or a bad thing.
But, anyway, just the person you'd want leading your campaign to change people's minds about the misogynistic nitwits in the GOP, right?
And speaking of misogynistic nitwits, don't miss the line in this article that recounts how NH senate candidate, carpet bagging Scotty Brown, ducked into a bathroom to avoid having to answer questions about Hobby Lobby's attack on women.
Hope it was the men's room.
PD,
Thanks a lot.
Now I'll have "What Do the Simple Folk Do?" playing in my head all morning.
At least it's a good song. Maybe I can slide from that into "Take Me to the Fair" ("You'll open wide him? I'll subdivide him..." GOPers must like this song since it talks about turning Lancelot into a plate of French hors d'oeuvres--anything to stick it to the French ) or "If Ever I Would Leave You".
Okay, I guess it's not that bad.
And here is what the result was for Nebraska's effort at privatizing health and human services for children in Nebraska -- 1/22/2014: LINCOLN, Neb. – State Auditor Mike Foley said Wednesday the feds have given the state of Nebraska 30 days to repay nearly $22 million in misspent federal funds related to the state’s botched attempt to privatize the child welfare system. See, http://watchdog.org/124923/foley-repay-22-million/
Privatization sucked!
Fromtheheartland,
Conservative economic plans stink. I mean, like dead fish at low tide.
Big surprise.
Krugman, yesterday, compared the economic well being of California, where Democrats have jettisoned years of right-wing claptrap solutions based on blinkered ideological dogma, with Brownbackistan, which is still mired in wingnut economic schemes, and as dead in the water as a rowboat without oars. Or maybe one of those dead fish.
California, and it's more measured and largely non-ideological economic plans outperforms Kansas. By miles.
Another surprise.
GOP sponsored solutions, handed down by oligarchs like the Kochs and promoted ad infinitum, regardless of unbiased analyses of bad outcomes, by conservative "idea" factories like ALEC (really, more like propaganda mills), have never worked. Can I say that again? Never worked. From Ronald Reagan's trickle down (the picture I have in my head when I hear this term is Reagan pissing on all the middle and lower income Americans) economics, to Bush's absentee landlord malfeasance that allowed tens of millions of Americans to go under while saving big bankers.
The record of Republican economic solutions is staggeringly bad. But will facts--or lawsuits prompted by their incompetence and robotic fealty to toxic ideology--change their minds?
Don't bother answering that one.
Divers thoughts:
1. Ak, on California: Posted comment to PK's blog today: "From recent immigrants to NorCal from the Middle West: Spot on. We retired there precisely owing to the quality of life enabled by land use restrictions and environmental regulations which are, if anything, too lax, especially those on agribusiness and timber. Houston will learn, as so many of our cities have, it's pay me now or pay me later."
2. CW et al. Thanks for Simple Folks - nice lift to see such über talent at work.
3. CW: : Some of them "realize?" that we need to increase our population to grow the economy. I hope you meant that ironically.
@Whyte Owen: Nah, I wasn't kidding. If you asked Louie Gohmert how to improve the economy, his first 5 answers (if he could come up with that many) would be along the lines of
(1) More oil & gas drilling
(2) Deregulation
(3) Lower taxes
(4) Tort reform
(5) Repeal ObamaCare.
I really don't think "increase the population" would be in there. And if you asked him if increasing the U.S. population would help, he just might say no.
Marie
Election “surprises” and distrust of government.
http://tinyurl.com/q59s58p
@ PD Pepe:
I am afraid you are mistaken.
THIS is the most "fair and balanced" examination of the situation in the Middle East there is:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/israels-hamas-disregard-for-palestinian-life-align,36531/
The Onion gets it right so often it's scary.
Interesting take on the Ryan plan by Charles Pierce today - modern day sharecroppers. Sorry but can't cut and paste the link from my phone. (I knew I should have smacked that fucktard when I had my chance a couple weeks ago.)
@CW, My point, on my pet issue, as a biologist, not an economist: Asked what single step would most improve the economy, or human ecology to a biologist, "improve" defined as the most quality of life for the least cost to the individual and the group, my response would be this: decrease the population. By a lot, and of course globally. Else all else, including environmental redress, is whistling in the wind. I would only hope that the decrease occur by the gradual process of controlled reproduction rather than cataclysm, where it seems headed for now, as we skin our Earth for food, fuel and housing. The trivial errors by Malthus and Erlich were their assumptions for the exponent, which in any case remains > 1.
http://missoulian.com/walsh-thesis-paper/pdf_e70bfaaa-12c4-11e4-b0f3-0019bb2963f4.html. If you want to read one god-damn lame masters thesis by John Walsh. The Army War College ought to be embarrassed for their obvious support for grade inflation. I learned and thought more by reading the comments here than by reading the "work" of Max Baucus' replacement. Thanks. I bet Brian Schweitzer's phone is busy today.
@unwashed: Here is the link to the Pierce piece:
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/paul-ryan-new-scam
@ PD. Thanks for bailing me out. Finally back home with a keyboard and mouse after my week of cultural mortification in the reddest of red states. I'm happy again being back in the blue CT.