A Little Perspective Music, Please

To recap, the House has passed the Senate 2013 Continuing Resolution, with a couple of amendments.  The Senate CR bill makes the sequestration cuts permanent and makes several pro-gun NRA policy riders permanent.   Every Dem but two and both Independents voted for the CR (with the exception of New Jersey’s Frank Lautenberg, who didn’t vote and Jon Tester’s no vote) along with several Republicans.  You want to know what the Republicans were getting in exchange for Reid’s gun control bill even getting a vote?  Now you know.  That price came up front for the GOP, and they’ll probably find a way to kill Reid’s bill anyway.  Even if it does move through, it faces the House.

This means that Liz Warren, Tammy Baldwin, Bernie Sanders, Tom Harkin, Al Franken, all these bastions of progressive purity, voted for this in order to prevent a government shutdown next week, knowing that the gun control bill is in serious trouble and the GOP now has no real reason to negotiate in good faith.  It’s the price of doing America’s business, right?

Keep that in mind when President Obama signs the bill Congress gives him into law.  That sausage making machine is a pretty awful process to watch, ya know.  Tester and Lautenberg aren’t exactly the bluest of blue, either, if you’re planning on holding them up as more liberal than Liz Warren or anything.

And yes, this is me going after the usual suspects.  Nobody is pure in Congress.  They all play the game.  There are times when it doesn’t matter how liberal the Dems are if you don’t have the number of votes needed to win.  This is the result.  If you think the answer is the throw the impure Dems out and not the real bad guy Republicans, this result will continue to be permanent, too.

The Adventures Of Win The Morning, Jr.

Any questions about what Slugline BuzzFeed’s raison d’être is?

Gosh I’m shocked.  No sirens while you’re at it Ben?  Maybe that’s not in the budget.

President Obama’s enemies often accuse him, in the starkest political terms, of crudely acting to shift resources toward his political base: Green energy donors; single women; Latinos; African-Americans.

But the next 12 months are likely to reveal the opposite. Imminent elements of Obama’s grandest policy move, the health care overhaul known as ObamaCare, are calculated to screw his most passionate supporters and to transfer wealth to his worst enemies.

His worst enemies apparently being “BuzzFeed”, judging by the article.

More »

Droning On And On

Joan Walsh on droooooooones and wrestling with her unbearable guilt of being Joan Walsh:

There are (at least) two issues here: The use of drones generally, and their use to kill American citizens. Some values should apply to both. No doubt drone warfare is sometimes preferable to traditional combat – but can’t we debate when, and why? Isn’t it possible that removing the risk of losing American lives by using unmanned predators will make it easier for decision-makers to risk the lives of those who aren’t Americans? Shouldn’t we know more about when and why drone strikes are launched, as well as who’s been killed, at the cost of how much collateral damage, most important, the number of “non-combatants” — innocent people – who are killed?

On the question of targeting U.S. citizens: I’m proud of the extraordinary rights we enjoy as Americans, and I don’t know why so many people shrug at the notion that the president can abrogate those rights if he decides, based on evidence (which he doesn’t have to share) that you’re a terrorist. When it comes to Anwar al-Awlaki, who renounced his citizenship and made many public commitments to al-Qaida, those questions don’t keep me awake at night. But don’t we want assurances that the evidence against every citizen who winds up on that list is just as clear? Don’t we want more oversight, even after the fact?

Did I miss the part where American military action only started killing non-combatants on January 21, 2009?  Did I also miss the part where IEDs keep blowing off arms and legs and shearing off chunks of our soldiers’ skulls, creating a huge number of folks coming back home with truly awful injuries?  We’ve had this debate about people being killed in military action since this whole American experiment began, folks.  Here’s the thing, if we’re going to be over there doing this kind of thing, and right now that’s the policy, I’d rather see drones than boots on the ground.  You can go on and on about targeted killings of US citizens at a coldly impersonal distance without due process, and yet we’ve got 300 million devices in the country called “firearms” that quite often end up doing just that.  Due process is not always exercised in those situations either, guys.  People where you live can get killed guns without warning.  Maybe there’s an investigation, maybe there’s even a trial.  But there are plenty of times where who pulled the trigger is never found, and the killer never brought to justice.

Where’s your outrage over that?  Did I miss the part where Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was the only US teenager ever killed for bullshit reasons?  You know what else is a “targeted killing of American citizen?”  Any cops who draw their weapon on someone and pull the trigger, and guess what, they don’t always shoot the right person.  There’s oversight in those situations, but not always.  I’m a hell of a lot more worried about that than I am what’s going on in Waziristan, people.  If you’re going to perpetually scream “DROOOOOOOOONES YOU OBOT” at me, go to the nearest large metropolitan police department and make sure you personally solve every homicide that comes in the door.

Otherwise, have a darkened Superdome full of seats.

It is not endemic to the Obama administration, or Obama foreign policy.  Steve M. nails it:

But if you’re especially outraged at targeted killings of American citizens, if you think they’re more horrifying than everything else that’s been done in the wars we’ve fought, that strikes me as a sense of non-combatant privilege. Many of us — maybe only many white Americans? — not only assume we’re entitled to due process, we expect never to be on a battlefield. In other words, we expect never to be in a situation in which due process doesn’t apply.

To me that’s a sense of privilege. So I see what’s wrong with the drone program, but it’s a subset of what’s wrong with war. Some Americans expect to be shielded from this sort of suffering at all times, and are shocked that a few Americans aren’t.

War is hell.  The Pentagon is in the business of conducting said warfare in the most casualty-efficient way possible that still achieves the goal of ending the metabolic processes of The Bad Guys.  The problem isn’t drones, the problem is the perpetual war machine that’s predated this President for a very, very long time.  We’re screaming about al-Awlaki’s kid when My Lai, the bombing of Dresden, and Nagasaki and Hiroshima happened.  Let’s face it, for America, that’s effing progress.  We still need to move forward and I’d like to see drones not have to be used at all (because we weren’t in Af-Pak at all anymore) but let’s not pretend that President Obama somehow has the most blood on his hands of a US President, either, shall we?

Thanks.  Sorry to ruin your Sunday.

The Sun Shines, And People Forget

This Frontline episode I watched tonight is not for the faint of heart:

More than four years after the financial crisis, not one senior Wall Street executive has faced criminal prosecution for fraud.

Are Wall Street bankers simply “too big to jail?”

In The Untouchables, FRONTLINE producer and correspondent Martin Smith investigates why the U.S. Department of Justice has failed to act on credible evidence that Wall Street knowingly packaged and sold toxic mortgage loans to investors, loans that brought the U.S. and world economies to the brink of collapse.

Watch this episode and I swear to FSM you will want to choke Lanny Breuer.

It’s an eminence front. It’s a put-on.

Happy New Year… I Guess

Happy New Year… may next year be as good or better than than the last.

One thing that would make that possible is if the president rejects a deal that is worse than doing nothing. I know, 11th dimensional chess, he’s smarter than I am, etc… But the current deal being discussed sucks eggs. There is no two ways about it. Low commitment to new revenue. No commitments on debt ceiling. Nothing on protecting the safety net, unless you count a two month reprieve as significant.

Obama could get more on revenue by doing NOTHING. And he’s not actually getting anything in return. Nothing on debt ceiling. Nothing on the spending side other than kicking the can down the road two month.

Obama has maximum leverage NOW. And right now, it looks like he’s gonna trade that leverage for less than he’d get from doing nothing.

I’ve called my reps and begged them to vote against and demand a better deal.

Blowing It Up At The Austerity Bomb Range

Oh, this isn’t going to go over well with the usual suspects, but it’s going to be everywhere anyhow today.

Listen to top Democrats and Republicans talk on camera, and it sounds like they could not be further apart on a year-end tax-and-spending deal – a down payment on a $4 trillion grand bargain.

But behind the scenes, top officials who have been involved in the talks for many months say the contours of a deal – including the size of tax hikes and spending cuts it will likely contain — are starting to take shape.

Cut through the fog, and here’s what to expect: Taxes will go up just shy of $1.2 trillion — the middle ground of what President Barack Obama wants and what Republicans say they could stomach. Entitlement programs, mainly Medicare, will be cut by no less than $400 billion – and perhaps a lot more, to get Republicans to swallow those tax hikes. There will be at least $1.2 trillion in spending cuts and “war savings.” And any final deal will come not by a group effort but in a private deal between two men: Obama and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). The two men had what one insider described as a short, curt conversation Wednesday night — but the private lines of communications remain very much open.

The tax hikes on the rich are immediate.  The Medicare stuff is 10-20 years away, as far as Politico can tell.  That right there should tell you who’s winning this fight (and that’s if you believe this particular crew of Village Idiots, which is dubious at best) but I’m sure there’s going to be a holiday rush on scourges and flensing knives for the folks on the left anyhow.

So before you reach for that HE SOLD US OUT special, remember it’s Politico, in the Billiards Room, trying to Win The Morning(tm), and try to keep the blood off the floor.

Moldy, Rancid Leftovers In The Fridge Of Derp

Jennifer Rubin has a problem with President Obama’s “class warfare” on those clearing more than a quarter-mil a year, particularly with Susan Estrich not being happy about it.

I don’t mean to pick on Estrich. She’s a very pleasant, reasonable Democrat (and a former, fellow congregant of ours). But she is indicative of the problem facing Obama and fellow liberals. If you live in New York or Los Angeles and have an income of $250,000, two kids and a house in a nice but not ostentatious neighborhood, you are not living a lavish lifestyle and you already pay gobs and gobs in taxes. You didn’t inherit wealth and you worked hard in college and in your profession, only to find yourself living paycheck to paycheck. And now, you’re going to get socked with a tax hike.

You see, Obama’s class warfare game becomes far less effective when the targets aren’t a sliver of plutocrats but hardworking white-collar parents with school bills, aging parents and no idea how they are ever going to retire. (They’re not, as to the latter. In 20 years, offices will be filled with professionals age 70 and up, which creates a whole other slew of problems, but that’s for another time.)

I think if I ever met anyone making $250,000 a year who claimed to be living “paycheck-to-paycheck”, I think I would be compelled to smash them over the head with a 2×4 with the words “Get the hell over yourself” written on it in Sharpie until my arms fell off.  Little math here, top marginal tax rates going up only on income earned over that point would for a household earning $300K amount to about three-quarters of a percent in additional taxes total on that income.  My heart weeps tears of something something whatever.

The Republic has had much higher marginal tax rates over the last 100 years or so, and America has mysteriously avoided implosion and Mad Max mode.  Get over it, it’s going to happen.  Either that, or get a copy of Quicken and see where all your frigging money is going, then come up with one percent less.  Pink Himalayan salt and all.

Our Big Fat Gay Election

I thought witnessing the Great PUMA Tantrum of Aught-Eight in real time was fun, but it turns out that was just the bagged crudité tray before the grand schadenfreude banquet that is the Colossal Wingnut Bed-Shitting of 2012. Good times!

But among all the very many reasons to be happy today, one of my favorite things is the stunning progress we’ve made on LGBT equality, symbolized by a few of last night’s election results. NOM has a sad today, and that’s a Good Thing. They used to crow about their “36-0” record, and to give the devil their due, they were remarkably successful in advancing the cause of bigotry and defacing various state constitutions with anti-gay graffiti.

That streak is broken. Marriage equality won in Maine, Maryland and Minnesota (and maybe Washington state too). Tammy Baldwin is the first openly gay senator elected in US history.

This particular moral arc of the universe has been bending toward justice for a long time, thanks to the brave and tireless efforts of millions of people over decades. And although it has bent more sharply recently, we still have a long way to go.

But is there any doubt that having a sitting president come out in favor of marriage equality made a difference? Is there any doubt that President Obama’s successful drive to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell changed things?

Thank you, President Barack Obama. Well done, sir.

[X-posted at Rumproast]

With an Obama 2nd term now extremely likely, it’s time to get this out of the way.

Nate Silver over at 538 has probability of re-elect at 92.2%.  Sam Wang has probability of re-elect at 98.2% by random distribution and 99.8% by Bayesian Prediction.

If you haven’t already done so, make certain that you vote tomorrow.  Run the score up on the bastards.  Make sure you know your fucking polling place.

And now, with apologies to Pastor Dan, it’s time to ask “Is it too early to start speculating on all the ways Obama is going to sell out progressives in his second term?”

Oh, and Open Thread, also too.

When The Former Head Of Mossad Calls You a Moron…Or Why You Don’t Hand Over Foreign Policy To An Out-Of-His-Depth-Hack Guided By The Worst People In The World

So now another noted appeaser and Islamofascist sympathizer is beating up on poor Mitt Romney.

No, not the fellow above.  He just looks surpassing cool.

Instead, it’s former  Mossad chief (Mossad = Israeli intelligence service) Efraim Halevy who tells Al-Monitor how dangerous a Mitt Romney presidency could be: [via]

Striking a deal with Iran will be “extremely difficult,” Halevy said. “It needs a lot of creativity. And courage, political courage.”

“The perception is that Israel is going through the stages of sanctions, etc. not with the idea or conviction that at the end, the other side will yield,” he said. “If the purpose was to exert pressure to bring the other side to the table, the rhetoric should be different.

“Negotiating with Iran is perceived as a sign of beginning to forsake Israel. That is where I think the basic difference is between Romney and Obama. What Romney is doing is mortally destroying any chance of a resolution without war. Therefore when [he recently] said, he doesn’t think there should be a war with Iran, this does not ring true. It is not consistent with other things he has said. […]

He adds:

Obama does think there is still room for negotiations. It’s a very courageous thing to say in this atmosphere.  In the end, this is what I think: Making foreign policy on Iran a serious issue in the US elections — what Romney has done, in itself — is a heavy blow to the ultimate interests of the United States and Israel.  It is not as if, if he wins the election, and gets into the White House, he can back up. The Iranians are listening attentively to what he says. When he says, he would arm the opposition in Iran. They understand.

And for bonus points:  as Halevy sees it, Romney is botching more than just the Middle East:

Romney has been very costly on Russia [...] If you want to create a situation, where the only way to go about things is to go back to the Cold War, that is what is being done here. It’s very dangerous.

I don’t think the US public wants to go to another world war over values in this way. If it persists, it will be a slide down a very slippery slope.

It’s a question of concept. Where are we going in the 21st century? Are we going to try to propagate policies on the battlefields?

Well, that is the question.  If you’re  Romney foreign policy team….well, we’ve already seen their answer.

(BTW — Halevy has a history of pounding on what he sees as obvious stupidity.  Among his other services, he stands as a reminder that not all Israelis, including those who served in government or the security services, are lockstep Likudniks.)

But pay this no never mind.  It’s not as if the former Israeli spymaster and head of Israel’s National Security Council has more insight on such matters than the man who spent his war encouraging the French to give up wine and coffee.

Snark aside: The growing sense that Romney simply should never be allowed to be the man who decides when and whether to send Americans  into harms way may explain this: the (to me) unexpectedly happy distribution of political donations made by members of the military.

Image:  Unknown artist, Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun, Moorish Ambassador to Queen Elizabeth I, c. 1600

The Stern Visage Of Judgment

Frowny Bee is generally disappointed in the liberal blogothingy debate analysis stuff today.

This has made Frowny Bee mildly annoyed.  Look upon your works, liberal blogothingy.  Look at that face. F-Bee, being kinda roly-poly and sober for a bee, suggests chillaxing is in order, folks.

He is cheering himself up with some pretty even-handed debate stuff here and is secure in the knowledge that this too will pass.  Good advice.  Keep roundy and carry on.

Of course, Frowny Bee gets even more frowny when he sees obvious voter intimidation like this in Cleveland:

 According to Cleveland City Councilwoman Phyllis Cleveland, who took the photo, this sign is directly across from Arbor Park Village, a subsidized housing development of more than 600 units. It is also within a few blocks of three public housing estates and right down the street from Cuyahoga Community College Metro Campus.

“This is blatant voter intimidation,” says Councilwoman Cleveland. “A direct attack in the heart of African American community meant to scare people and keep them from exercising their right to vote.”

Frowny Bee would therefore like to remind you of what the hell really matters, and liberal blogothingy self-pissing with your hair on fire is not in that gorram category, understand?  Perspective, you see?

Good.  Frowny Bee, outro.

Sharpened Pencils or W-88s–when you really have to kill somebody, which is less impolite?

Arising out of the mega thread earlier, commenter Corner Stone noted, if I understood him correctly,  that the problem with discussing the use of military force by the US government tends to get diverted into frog-hair splitting about which technology we should use to kill people, versus the policies that lead us to killing people on the other side of the world in the first place. More »

I don’t give a flying fuck about Conor Friedersdorf. Open Thread

The BSOD fairy has hit the OKC VA Medical Center.  I’ve been busier than a one-legged-man in an ass-kicking contest.  So I haven’t had time to do anything other than lightly skim the whole thing here, at LGM, and at The Atlantic.

Honestly, I don’t give a flying fuck about Conor Friedersdorf.  I never thought much of him in the first place.  He’s a Koch-whore who makes shiny-happy people noises so that Liberals and Democrats will feel better about slitting their own throats.  Fuck him and the shetland pony he rode in on.

40 days left to vote for the guy who is right on 95% of the things I care about, and not as wrong as he could be on the other 5%.  For those of you who are disappointed that you can’t have your magic ponies, kindly DIAF.  I have friends and brothers who are counting on the American public to NOT elect the guy who would start a war with Iran just to try and fail to please the whackjob base of his party.  Politics, like football, is a game of inches, and it really is that important.  Suck it up, pull your heads out of your asses, and DO THE RIGHT AND SMART THING.

There’s a reason that smart and decent people still hate on swing-state Nader voters twelve years later.

You know what you have to do.

The Great American Blackout Of 2012

Apparently Mitt Romney getting statistically zero percent of the African-American vote is too much to prevent the issue of gay marriage from permanently dooming the Obama campaign, as the Associated Press has found a couple of black pastors willing to tell their congregations to stay home over the President’s support for same-sex matrimony.

The pastors say their congregants are asking how a true Christian could back same-sex marriage, as President Barack Obama did in May. As for Republican Mitt Romney, the first Mormon nominee from a major party, congregants are questioning the theology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its former ban on men of African descent in the priesthood.

In 2008, Obama won 95 percent of black voters and is likely to get an overwhelming majority again. But any loss of votes would sting.

“When President Obama made the public statement on gay marriage, I think it put a question in our minds as to what direction he’s taking the nation,” said the Rev. A.R. Bernard, founder of the predominantly African-American Christian Cultural Center in New York. Bernard, whose endorsement is much sought-after in New York and beyond, voted for Obama in 2008. He said he’s unsure how he’ll vote this year.

Luckily, not even the AP is able to completely escape the very real specter of GOP voter discrimination and suppression efforts and the new Jim Crow voter ID laws.

It’s unclear just how widespread the sentiment is that African-American Christians would be better off not voting at all. Many pastors have said that despite their misgivings about the candidates, blacks have fought too hard for the vote to ever stay away from the polls.

Black church leaders have begun get-out-the-vote efforts on a wide range of issues, including the proliferation of state voter identification laws, which critics say discriminate against minorities. Last Easter Sunday, a month before Obama’s gay marriage announcement, the Rev. Jamal-Harrison Bryant of Baltimore formed the Empowerment Network, a national coalition of about 30 denominations working to register congregants and provide them with background on health care, the economy, education and other policy issues.

Now anyone who has remotely been paying attention to my loud, snark-filled diatribes on Why The Hell You Should Vote knows that I agree with this latter position, especially when it comes to the African-American vote.  It stuns me that black pastors, themselves the key engines of the civil rights movement 50 years ago and organized into a real power as Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (an organization still run by his son today) would ever, under any circumstances, actively tell their congregations to abstain from voting.

It’s the most asinine, insulting, thick-headed, addle-brained non-solution to the problem I can possibly think of.  What the hell was the civil rights movement for if not to secure the right of all to vote, the single most powerful action you can take in a representative democracy?  If there’s any group that should understand that without the right to vote that you have no power whatsoever, it should be black pastors.

But no.  Apparently even with the Republican party actively trying to disenfranchise millions of black voters nationally here in 2012, it’s okay to say “Hey why should black folks vote?  TEH MORMONS AND THE GHEY just stay home.”

You could slap magnets on Dr. King’s grave and a have a large coil of copper wire and power half of the eastern seaboard from the spinning.  The fight is still going on, and we’re disarming because of the gall of one candidate wanting to expand civil rights to include another disenfranchised minority?  No, I’m going to need for these pastors to have all the seats in Great American Ballpark AND Paul Brown Stadium and sit the hell down for a second.

This is the AP looking for a story that doesn’t exist, and a scapegoat that won’t be needed.  Sick and tired of blah people getting the blame for LGBT problems in the country when the real bad guys vote and are Republicans.

Eyes on the prize, folks.

In Which I Simply Give My Account Information to Tbogg

Go read the whole thing.

The takeaway whole thing, stolen shamelessly:

This is how it works:
al Qaeda stirs shit up in the Middle East, because it is 9/11 – the anniversary of their greatest triumph, with a riot creating a ripple effect of protests springing up within other countries in the region.

Conservatives, led by RNC chair Reince Priebus seize the day and claim this all happened because Barack Obama is a weak-willed ‘Apologizer in Chief” because it fits their narrative about the cowardly Kenyan Muslim usurper which they feel will help them convince Americans to elect Mitt Romney who will save America from 10,000 years of darkness.

Progressives in turn explain that these events are a direct result of drone killings because it fits within their narrative that Barack Obama is a military strongman who has killed more people than Pol Pot and that Obama is an impediment to the election of Mitt Romney whose reign will be so disastrous that a billion Progressive blossoms will bloom and elect Noam Chomsky President in 2016.

In other news: today is Thursday.

BTW-my system spell checker wants to turn Reince Priebus into “rancid priest”.  There’s a message in that, I’m sure.

Open Thread

Also, check out this page from Fox News, h/t to commenters Southern Beale and Amir Khalid.  Fox Nation is the septic tank to the Fox News sewage line.  It all collects and concentrates there.  This is why we fight-so that “people” who think that this is an even remotely acceptable form of information dissemination will never get anything they want.  We fight so that the individual that spewed this without the personal moral courage to take credit for it will never have his fellow travellers near the levers of power.