Al Gore's marital problems caused the failure of climate change legislation.

According to Illinois Senator Mark Kirk.

"The consensus behind the climate change bill collapsed and then further deteriorated with the personal and political collapse of Vice President [Al] Gore," Kirk said in a brief interview last week.

Between alleged anthropogenic global warming (now "climate change") and the effect of Al Gore's marriage on legislation, I think it's safe to say these people have a congenital problem with confusion of correlation and cause and effect.

Somewhat related: Al Gore explains how snowmageddon is related to AGW.

Posted by: rdbrewer at 12:22 PM | Comments (84)
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And yet Obama is at 50%.

Obama will not be a lock in 2012 because of these awful numbers. They may get better by 2012, but not by much.

But the fact that he remains at around 50% even with the worst economy since the Depression means he's not going to be easy to beat, either. For whatever reason, right or wrong, the public thinks the GOP (or at least Bush) is largely responsible for this and Obama is just a bit hapless in being unable to fix things.

Putting politics aside: Not only is that unemployment rate very high but it has been very high for a long, long time. We're not talking about people being out of work for six months, which is bad enough. We're talking about our fellow Americans being out of work for two years or so and diminishing chances of finding work in the next year or two besides.

This is just horrible.

People don't blame Obama. They should. The crisis was falling on the country as he assumed office (and he was partly responsible himself, anyway, having been a Senator for four years before the crisis), and, instead of addressing that, he used it to force through a bunch of political agenda items the Democrats had sought for decades.

So here we are. You don't have a job but in 2014 you may or may not have a really shitty version of Medicare for the Young.

"It Didn't Have To Be This Way": My suggestion for a three minute ad. Show the choices Obama made or didn't make, and how he made them or didn't make them (like subcontracting out the Stimulus to noted economists Nancy Pelosi, PhD., and Doctor Harry Reid), and what other choices were on the table -- talked up by conservative economists who you know are smart because they're filmed behind a desk with books behind them. And how things could have been different.

It's time to start pinning the Tale on this particular Donkey.

Posted by: Ace at 11:51 AM | Comments (150)
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Well. We seem to have had a bad case of mission un-creep, haven't we?

Not enough. I was willing to defend the proposed $60 billion cuts on the theory that 60 billion is ballpark pro-rata 100 billion for the remainder of the fiscal year. (Until March 4, the government's spending is controlled by that Continuing Resolution we passed late in the lame duck.)

But $32 billion? Not enough, not nearly enough. Given that the Senate will reduce any cuts still further, this represents such a massive pre-capitulation that most will wonder if this wasn't the plan all along, and it's not a capitulation at all, but Kabuki.

Try again. $60 billion was the number many of us already generously allowed you to negotiate us down to. $32 billion? It's a nonstarter.

Posted by: Ace at 11:25 AM | Comments (129)
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The term "feudal" is, I am thinking, fairly commonly used in libertarian circles. I don't read libertarians very often, though, so to me the term is novel. (I hate admitting I'm way behind on knowing something I should have known long ago but that's the truth of it.)

Anyway, Reason magazine drops the f-bomb (feudal, I mean) so casually I have to think this is a common criticism. For me it's a bit of a (embarrassed to say) revelation, because I hadn't conceived of the socialist/corporatist model of Obamanomics as being, among other things, essentially feudal in nature, involving a raft of special privileges for baronial elites (and the reciprocal promise of those barons to support their liege in war).

But it's completely apt. It's spot-on.

reason: Is it politically plausible to expect Congress or the president to actually act that way and say, “Look, the bailout stops here”?

Epstein: ItÂ’s very, very hard to do it, to put it mildly. But itÂ’s going to get worse. So what you really want to do is reverse the earlier situation. You want to get Washington Mutual out from underneath Chase and have them as a separate bank with a fairly substantial size. The market depends on having a large number of intermediate-sized players. Something like BB&T bank has about $150 billion of assets. ThatÂ’s plenty big to do virtually any transaction that you need, but itÂ’s not going to create systemic risk. The real systemic risk that you create is having five major banks which amongst them have $10 trillion worth of assets floating around in their coffers.

What you want to do is to encourage new entry by smaller banks in a specialized niche, so that every time somebody gets big, fat, and happy, thereÂ’s some competitor whoÂ’s coming in there. To the extent that you make it difficult to charter new banks, youÂ’re going to only increase the dominant position of those banks that are already in effect.

You want to tell the bankruptcy courts to do their jobs, not to pull another stunt like they did with Chrysler and General Motors. If you had some degree of regularity in your political and social institutions, then the environment for private banks to operate will be a bit more wholesome, and without those perturbations the risk of failure starts to go down.

I wrote a book called Simple Rules for a Complex World. When you’re dealing in small families and intimate social arrangements, you can have a special deal for every one of your children, right? But when you’re trying to deal with a nation, the single largest mistake you can make is treating it as one large but rather dysfunctional family. You want to be able to establish ways in which people could act impersonally with strangers and very cooperatively with their intimates. So you don’t want a credit card system to essentially depend on all sorts of personal verifications—I can’t get this money out of the bank until I tell the teller what I’m going to do with it, and so forth.

Take the two markets that matter the most in many ways for long-term stability: real estate and labor. Both of them are overregulated at both the federal and the state level. Every regulation should have to be justified, because the moment it limits gains from trade you have to explain why it’s needed. But Obama’s guys treat these regulations like they’re candy going down the throat of a 2-year-old. “They just taste sweet; we’d better do more of it.” The Republicans are guilty of it in the sense that they don’t fight it very hard. And the Democrats are guilty of it because they think it’s a real panacea.

reason: In shifting from a rule by fiat, where you come and plead your case and get your special single deal, to a government of rules, you shift from a kind of feudal mentality to a republican one. What do you do to spread that and make that more persuasive to people?

Epstein: You show people that all of the ingenuity of gimmicks fails. We have more debt, more unemployment, and less happiness in this country now because hope and change turn out to be discord and confusion. And thereÂ’s no way that you can stop that. You cannot stop the blunders of one government program by putting another one on top of it.

That’s what I learned in Yale Law School. You don’t like what the minimum wage does, you create a welfare program. You don’t like what a welfare program does, you have a back-to-work program. If you just got rid of the minimum wage, you’d get rid of three programs and you’d free up lots of economies. Mies van der Rohe was essentially a political theorist when he said “less is more.”

This lens of a new feudalism gives me a new understanding of what is going on with Obama's waivers on health care for all his bestest baronial buddies and Obama's very special waiver for very, very powerful baron GE as regards global warming rules.

Reason puts the feudal system (personal favor-banking and influence peddling) as the opposite of a "republican" system, a system of laws not barons, where everyone stands equal under the law -- everyone subject to the punitive compulsions of law and no afforded special monarchial dispensation from the law.

In that context, I'm wondering at what point a system of waivers becomes actually unconstitutional -- because anyone not granted a waiver is being burdened by a restrictive and possibly punitive law that others aren't. Isn't he?

That is, there is no difference, effectively, between saying "All people are subject to 80% taxation rates, but a special category of Friends of Obama shall be waived from this general rule and only pay 35%" or directly making a law of specific persons (all conservatives) who will have to pay taxes at the 80% rate. The latter would be a clearly illegal, punitive law -- but the former would be allowed (or is being allowed now, at least) while accomplishing the exact same goal, penalizing some while privileging others.

A system of waivers from the basic law is no different than a system of legal burdens being legislated against specific named persons.

It's feudal. It's unconstitutional. It's bad law and bad policy, and it's time for the special Friends of Obama star chamber to be dismantled.

Another Example: Obama is being held in contempt by a judge for defying his ruling that the administration end the moratorium on drilling permits. They are pretending to comply by putting in place a permit process, but then, not actually granting any permits.

That's kind of feudal, the king above the judges and such. But that's not the feudal part I am thinking of.

The feudal part is the Obama Administration's report on the spill. BP caused it and almost every other oil company has been criticizing BP's unsafe practices for a long time. They seem to be a serial offender.

But BP is a major patron of Obama.

So the report blamed the entire industry, and the entire industry is being punished. Baron BP was spared. Everyone suffers for their misdeeds.

Feudalism.

Posted by: Ace at 11:03 AM | Comments (114)
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I hate this type of proposal as it offers the appearance of a fix while doing nothing to actually fix anything. Everything will supposedly happen in the future; nothing happens now.

That may not be exactly fair because supposedly this proposal does have some teeth in it (in theory, at least), by dictating a smooth reduction in federal spending from the current high of 24.7% of GDP down to 20.6% of GDP in ten years, with mandatory across the board budget reductions by the OMB in any year that Congress violates the guideline.

(1) Put in place a 10-year glide path to cap all spending – discretionary and mandatory – to a declining percentage of the country’s gross domestic product, eventually bringing spending down from the current level, 24.7 percent of GDP, to the 40-year historical level of 20.6 percent, and

(2) If Congress fails to meet the annual cap, authorize the Office of Management and Budget to make evenly distributed, simultaneous cuts throughout the federal budget to bring spending down to the pre-determined level. Only a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress could override the binding cap, and

(3) For the first time, eliminate the deceptive “off-budget” distinction for Social Security – providing a complete and accurate assessment of all federal spending.

But we've seen this gimmick before -- the Gramm-Rudman budget reduction bill was supposed to do this too, but didn't, because they used fake accounting practices (such as pushing back spending into, supposedly, previous years, and previous years can't be modified by rules about current spending) and calling other spending "off-budget."

Spending cuts require real spending cuts. Something like this might be useful, but only in combination with real, current spending cuts. Otherwise this is just putting cuts off into a vague future than never actually comes.

I'm also pretty sure the threat of the OMB cutting Congressional spending is unconstitutional -- I don't believe Congress can delegate to the executive such a huge portion of its core constitutional responsibility and power. Plus, the OMB can always itself fudge the numbers, if the political will exists in DC to just lie in order to keep spending -- which it almost always will.

PAYGO II? I didn't have to reach back to Gramm-Rudman for a similar "law." Supposedly Nancy Pelosi's Congress abided by PAYGO rules, which were supposed to strictly match new spending to either cuts or (more likely) new taxes.

PAYGO was a wonderful success, as you can see from our current $1.4 trillion deficit. They just declared whatever they wanted to spend outside of PAYGO rules.

I don't see how Congress can ever lack that power -- the power to just say "We're voting to do what we want, now, no matter what 'rules' are supposedly in place." Congress actually can do that. And I don't see anything short of an amendment that can stop them. Any Congressional legislation can be overturned or suspended by a later Congress. That's the point of Congress, to change the law and write new law. They can evade any limits they supposedly put on themselves.

There may be some minor salutary effect of Corker's proposal but it's more than outweighed by the fundamental tendency of such fake, hypothetical maybe-someday type "cuts" to always be offered in place of real, tangible, right-now cuts.

Thanks to Vic for pointing that out.

Posted by: Ace at 09:58 AM | Comments (107)
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A long time ago I posted embedded vids on the main page and the site began loading too slowly. So now I usually only post them under the fold.

I had forgotten this lesson, and so never thought to mention to rdbrewer that there were too many videos in the sidebar. I just thought, "Oh, cool, little videos in the sidebar."

Anyway, a commenter spotted the likely problem and noted it and now the sidebar is cleaned up. The slow-loading problem should be fixed.

Posted by: Ace at 08:48 AM | Comments (163)
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I think it should be called "ABCNews or Something." The "or Something" is the main component.

This is actually teased for PrimeTime live, which is I guess a magazine show ostensibly part of their news division.

They set up a fake sting in Arizona to see if a bad actor can convince a restaurant to aid him in trying to deport other bad actors for "looking Mexican."

They were hoping to catch Whitey engaging in racial profiling.

What actually happens is that a woman accuses the fake cop of racial profiling but then suggests she can help them get away in their car. She is lauded for her progressive views on illegal immigration.

But, um, didn't she just racially profile herself? Her belief was that they were illegals; she didn't dispute that. She just agreed to help them continue evading the law.

And that, for ABCNews or Something, Is laudatory.

Now, if this had gone the other way, of course, Whitey would have been evil. Evil, I guess, for racially profiling but then acting in comportment with the law. Whitey who engages in racially profiling but then helps criminals break the law is good.

Either way, it's stupid: No one's being deported "just based on how they look." The fact is we have tens of millions of illegal immigrants, most from south of the border, and a high percentage from Mexico. This isn't racial profiling so much as it is reality profiling, which is always a controversial technique to a liberal.

Thanks to Tony.

Posted by: Ace at 08:39 AM | Comments (82)
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This is important-- Andrew Cuomo is cutting the New York state budget by exposing the fraud of "baseline budgeting," wherein budgets are planned to grow by x% every year and any reduction from that high planned level is called a "cut," even if more money actually winds up being spent.

It's important because Republicans need to defeat this jackass assumption of a permanently growing budget in all the states and of course in the federal government, and Andrew Cuomo is providing a Nixon Goes To China example for the media and other Democrats. Democrats and the media, but I repeat myself as always, cannot demogogue this very much when their own fair-haired boy in liberal New York is making his rent on it.

This is not a Democratic innovation. Republicans have been contending for a change in this budget-busting assumption for... decades now. But a True Blue Believer in the Democratic camp advances the idea more than a hundred Newt Gingrich speeches could.

After all, The Royal We of the media doesn't listen to Newt Gingrich. He is evil, by defintion.

Worth reading. Real hope and change from the Democratic Party, at long last?

The budget that Mr. Cuomo unveiled this week closes a gaping deficit with major budget reductions, calling for spending cuts in state hiring, education, health care, aid to universities and payments to cities. The plan would balance the Empire State's $135 billion budget without a dime of new taxes or borrowing. Remarkably, if his budget passed, the state would spend $3.5 billion less than it did last year.

...

These cuts are impressive on their own, but Mr. Cuomo's real conceptual breakthrough is to expose the rigged-game of "baseline budgeting." This is a gambit by which spending increases automatically each year even before a Governor submits his budget. The "baseline" grows each year due to spending formulas that legislatures build into the law even before they take a single vote.

...

The Governor is proposing a reform that would deflate these baselines with more reasonable and affordable spending projections....By fixing this fraudulent convention, Mr. Cuomo's budget reduces spending for years to come without having to fight political battles every year.

There's a vital lesson here for House Republicans because the same baseline games have long prevailed in Washington. The Democrats who wrote the budget rules also built in formulas that increase spending each year before Congress even takes a vote. Those same Democrats are now lying in wait for Republicans to propose their budget, and they will describe even increases in spending as brutal "cuts." The media will dutifully play along.

I often forget how important the rulemaking power is to the ultimate outcome of the game itself. A lot of times big battles on substantive matters are won -- sometimes even won without a battle at all -- just by changing the rules.

That's why I'm not discounting Boehner's various procedural reforms in the spending process as window-dressing and Kabuki theater designed to appease the Tea Party while ducking important fights over substance. If you, ahem, rig the rules to your advantage well enough you can win without a huge fight. The rules say you win; end of battle.

I don't think we've gotten this rule changed yet but we need to get it changed ASAP. And we can point to the wonderful example of second-generation dynastic liberal Andrew Cuomo for why this doesn't mean grandma eats dogfood.

Posted by: Ace at 07:46 AM | Comments (100)
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The guy that wants to send Thomas back to the fields? He's the nice guy...a couple of other peace and love types want to lynch him.

Content warning for language. Some of it is definitely NSFW. The "fun" stuff begins about 50 seconds in.

Where were these lovely people? Protesting the dangerous Koch Brothers who seem to be war criminals because they are conservatives and dare to participate in the democratic process.

You can read more about the protest here.

I'm sure this will lead to a major presidential speech on the need to bring civility back into our national discourse. Well, if not that, I'm sure each and everyone of these people will be hearing from the President...when he asks him to contribute to his reelection campaign.

Posted by: DrewM at 07:44 AM | Comments (75)
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The new Prime Minister apologizes for yesterday's outbreak of violence.

The army, which stood by yesterday during the clashes, has moved in to keep the pro and anti-government forces separated.

There are reports that several former minsters have had their assets frozen and are under a travel ban.

The new Vice President says Mubarak's son will not run to replace his father in the September elections.

The Egyptian government is hunting down journalists.

The curfew is back in force, at least in name and the crowds are still in Tahrir Square. Al Jezzera English has a live stream running.

Oh and George Soros would like you to know that the Muslim Brotherhood are the good guys helping to bring democracy to Egypt while the main obstacle is...wait for it....Israel.

Related: Algeria has canceled it's 19 year long "State of Emergency". Gee, I wonder what changed?

Posted by: DrewM at 06:10 AM | Comments (192)
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