Story here (via Insty).

Pull quote:

“I don’t think that that [bankruptcy] is necessary, because state governments have at their disposal the requisite tools to address their fiscal ills,” the majority leader said, before going a step further.

“I think some ... have mentioned this Chapter 9 equivalent for states is somehow going to stave off some kind of federal bailout — we don’t need that to stave off a federal bailout. There will be no bailout of the states,” Cantor said. “States can deal with this and have the ability to do so on their own.”

I don't share Cantor's belief that states have the "requisite tools" to solve their fiscal problems, or at least not states like California, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey. The level of austerity and new taxation required to crawl out of the holes they've dug themselves would impoverish the citizenry and degrade their day-to-day life. At the same time, states would have less incentive to deal with the problem of public-employee pensions and benefits, and less leverage with the public-employee unions.

Remember that "bankruptcy" is not simply a legal definition; it is a state of nature. Whether we allow states to formally declare bankruptcy or not, the fact is that many of them are now or soon will be insolvent. Structurally insolvent -- deep in a fiscal hole out of which their tax and fee-assessment power cannot retrieve them. States cannot print money, but they can issue new debt...which they will do until the bond markets force them to stop.

I've often thought that the real economic downturn, the one that will most affect an American citizen's day-to-day life, is when their city or state loses the ability to maintain services. The roads degrade, the streetlights go out, the trash goes uncollected, parks close -- all the appurtenances of civic life disappear, but the taxes keep on going up. At some point, people will simply stop paying. Why continue shoveling money into a hole that has no bottom? States will be desperate to repay bondholders lest they default, but not by beggaring their own citizens. (This is, if you recall, the same scenario playing out in Greece and Ireland right now, and their debts are unlikely to be paid in full for the same reason: the citizens will not stand to be beggared to pay off bondholders.)

The answer is not a federal bailout, certainly. Nor is the answer a grinding decade-long period of stagnant growth and declining quality of life as the various cities and states slowly grind to a halt, their backs broken by pension and healthcare obligations. The answer, whether anyone wants to hear it or not, is a way to repudiate and/or restructure state debt and get out from under the onerous union contracts: legal bankruptcy.

Posted by: Monty at 05:36 AM | Comments (135)
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Watch your mouth kid, or you're gonna find yourself floating home.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:57 AM | Comments (209)
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Another one under the bus.

...Carol Browner is leaving her position as White House "energy czar," and a staff shake-up is likely to eliminate her post altogether, according to Democrats familiar with events...

Carol Browner: victim of the reelection pivot strategy. With Billy Jeff, it was a lot easier for the electorate to swallow since he his ideological basis was always pretty soft to begin with. Bill is and was a babes and good times kinda guy, any ideology was strictly eyewash for scoring hot leftist babes.

If you're trying to convince businesses you're not completely hostile towards them, and maybe they should hire more people, this is nice gesture by Obama, but it comes long after the horse has left the barn. Nobody is going to respond to gestures and B.S. anymore like they did two years ago. They'll want something more substantial than the sacking of some ridiculous czar.

Not that many will be foolish enough to actually believe Obama of course, but teh one must keep up appearances and toss an occasional scrap to the rabble. Give the MFM something to masticate on for a while to distract them from other weightier issues.

more...

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 01:47 AM | Comments (49)
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The Awesomeness of Jack LaLanne

I've been meaning to write something about Jack LaLanne for a while but never got around to it. Well unfortunately he died yesterday at age 95 from pneumonia. He was a bit before my time so I mostly remember him from his occasional appearances on the Today Show in the 80s hawking his juices and vitamins. But he was quite possibly the original and greatest fitness guru of the entire twentieth century.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:52 PM | Comments (807)
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Maybe she didn't get any phone calls from Obama either. Or was that just the cabinet heads?

She's had her fingers in the negotiations for new auto emission standards, was a player in the GM and Chrysler theft bailouts, but she couldn't get Cap and Tax across the goal line. In the current political climate (see what I did there?), that's even less likely, so she's off to chase the next pretty colored balloon.

via JakeTapper on Twitter

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 05:32 PM | Comments (88)
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Give the Devil his due...Dave Weigel called it, "Michael Bay Presents: "Pawlenty""

If invasion by space aliens or a cataclysmic asteroid strike is your number one concern going into the 2012 election...you've go your man. There's also a good chance Bruce Willis will be his Vice President and Steve Buscemi will have a small but amusing role in the administration. No word on if Liv Tyler or Kate Beckinsale will play the love interest.

I know one of the knocks on Pawlenty is he's not the most charismatic guy in the world but I'm not sure this solves that problem. I really hope this is a tongue in cheek kind of thing to get some attention. If so, well played. If not...oh boy.

Posted by: DrewM at 01:30 PM | Comments (779)
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He is looking for a job at CNN. He has been working with Parker-Spitzer's executive producer on a new show.

A source told us, "Eric wants to be a talk-show host. He's been working with Liza to develop a show, but he has not yet been picked up by any network. . . . "Eric Schmidt has been looking for a TV job for over a year," said a CNN insider. "But the pilot he filmed with Liza was a complete disaster."

Remember his history of creepy, cavalier statements when faced with concerns about privacy? Reading the NY Post article, I see that I missed one. He said people concerned about pictures taken by Google Street View cameras "could just move."

I checked with the in-house Ace-o-Spades time travel agent and found some future quotes from Schmidt's new show at CNN:

• Isn't that dress a bit tight, Secretary Clinton?
• You don't have a case against the peeping tom. People in your building almost never shut their curtains. Especially those three women on the third floor.
• Sometimes when I don't change my shirt for a few days it smells like bacon. How about yours?
• Well, Mr. Krugman, perhaps if the New York Times wasn't a dreary, left-wing rag, run by an unqualified nepot, subscription numbers wouldn't be plummeting. Hmm?
• Mr. Trumka, did anyone ever tell you that you look just like a hog? You look just like a hog, dude. Or like some sort of a caricature of a hog-man. Do you ever get that?
• Mr. Zuckerman, do you like to fart at a board meetings? I sure did. Hah!

CNN should give him a shot. He couldn't do any worse than their current lineup.

Posted by: rdbrewer at 01:10 PM | Comments (45)
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I'm under the weather. Sorry.

Posted by: Ace at 01:02 PM | Comments (123)
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I think there's an old saying about a horse that can perform basic mathematics -- you are amazed not that the horse is good at math (it isn't) but that it can do some math at all.

Similarly, the MFM -- two and a half years late to the game, but amazing even a few of them showed up for it at all.

In the third of Rouse’s baskets was the failure to use Obama’s gifts as a communicator to full effect. He was overexposed. He was in the weeds. The thread got lost. “With these big legislative fights, he was almost like a prime minister or negotiator-in-chief,” says the same official. “The price for that was, we lost the vision, the inspiration.”

Though Obama grasped this last critique, he dismissed the charges of aloofness and insularity. When business complained that he was hostile, he cited all the times he had invited CEOs to the White House. When donors moaned about the fact that at the first year’s Christmas parties, he had done away with the tradition of taking pictures with the guests, Obama scoffed, “Big deal, they’ve all got pictures of me before.”

Emanuel’s ad-hocracy, meanwhile, didn’t faze Obama. The president’s friend and adviser Valerie Jarrett sometimes pointed out that not only had he never managed an operation, he’d never really had a nine-to-five job in his life. Obama didn’t know what he didn’t know, yet his self-confidence was so stratospheric that once, in the context of thinking about Emanuel’s replacement, he remarked in all seriousness, “You know, I’d make a good chief of staff.”

Those overhearing the comment somehow managed to suppress their laughter.

Thanks to Slublog, via Moe Lane.

Correction: That's New York magazine, not The New Yorker. My original headline pretty much fudged the difference ("The New Yorker Magazine").

Posted by: Ace at 10:42 AM | Comments (322)
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Well. Now we're talking, eh? That's trillions, I guess, over the usual budgeting window of ten years (or more), but that's a substantial bit of money.

Real? Kabuki?

Sens. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.) plan to introduce a dramatic spending cut bill aimed at reducing federal spending by trillions. Cuts under the bill won't exclude any area of spending such as defense, Social Security and Medicare, according to The Virginian-Pilot.

Warner and Chambliss hope to hold an up-or-down vote on the bill. According to Warner, the only way to reduce federal spending is through a bill like this — which dissatisfies everyone, at least in part.

"The only way you realistically can get there is if you get ... one package where everybody can say, 'I don't like a lot of it, but the sum of the good it does is worth the pain it will cost,' " Warner said. "At the end of the day, this is not going to be a painless process."

Meanwhile, Republicans are talking about cutting funding for the UN.

I have no problem with that, except to the extent people fantasize/lie to themselves that a balanced budget can be had with cuts in relatively small programs like that.

UN funding should be cut, dramatically, and so should everything else (cut, or dramatically cut, depending on program), and yeah, it will require reform of Social Security and Medicare and some defense spending too.

The UN cuts should be made, certainly. They are the no brainers, the easy cuts. But no one should confuse the easy cuts with the necessary harder cuts.

Posted by: Ace at 10:00 AM | Comments (109)
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