"Reluctantly," you understand. As a last resort, you know.

This basic dynamic — Boehner cannot haggle freely with the president due to the intense opposition to a deal within his own ranks — has not fundamentally changed. What has changed is the president's hand. According to senior administration officials, Obama is not eager to go over the cliff, but he is willing. If no deal is reached by the end of the month, all the Bush tax cuts — for the rich and not-rich — will evaporate. Obama would then demand in early January that the new Congress immediately pass legislation to reinstate the lower tax rates for the bottom 98 percent.

Some in the liberal media are even willing to report that it's beginning to look like the Democrats are pretending to negotiate, while actually doing all they can to avoid a deal.

Over the last 96 hours, it’s become abundantly clear that any post-election momentum that was building for a deal to avert the fiscal cliff has abated and we are, in the words of House Speaker John Boehner, at a “stalemate”.

The more intriguing — and harder to answer — question is whether deadlock is right where Democrats want things to be and whether the President’s party has any real interest in finding common ground before Dec. 31.

Republicans have whispered for weeks now that they believe Democrats and the White House want to go over the fiscal cliff and that the PresidentÂ’s initial offer late last week... is blunt evidence that the White House is interested in making it appear as though they are willing to deal without actually being willing to deal.

...

And even the Democratic strategist set insists that their side isn’t interested in taking the leap — although they quickly note that if that was to happen, the party would be in position to benefit politically.

“I don’t believe the Dems want to go over the fiscal cliff — don’t believe it at all,” said Democratic strategist Paul Begala. “But they are prepared for it, and are in a better position than the Republicans should it occur.”

Posted by: Ace at 12:36 PM | Comments (243)
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The "new revenues" don't involve nominal rate increases but must include actual rate increases via reductions in deductions.

The Democrats are playing a very irresponsible game here. Republicans have agreed to tax increases so long as we call them something else and can argue that reducing deductions is a net positive for the economy as doing so reduces economic distortions. That's kind of a dodge, of course, but at any rate, the party seems to be willing to do that... so long as there's a dodge.

The Democrats, on the other hand, are insistent that the revenue increases come via tax hikes. They want the Republicans to know they've been broken and have no face-saving cover.

Raising revenue isn't the point of their maneuverings -- they are simply trying to break the Republican Party. And of course they're doing that because they need Republicans to walk away from a compromise-- the Democrats don't want a compromise. They want to go over the fiscal cliff. They just want to be able to blame Republicans for that.

I'll let Bob Costas explain how that's actually a kind of an unheralded sort of statesmanship and fiscal responsibility.

Posted by: Ace at 11:47 AM | Comments (244)
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Robert Samuelson asks "Who's not bargaining in good faith?"

Actually, only one side is even bargaining at all. Obama of course put up an absurd "offer" that was a walk-back of all the commitments he made to voters during campaign season. He had repeatedly claimed, in campaign season, he was willing to cut spending; his "offer" contained no cuts.

The "cuts" are a combination of cuts already made -- the $900 billion already agreed to -- and the "cuts" in military spending for wars we're not fighting in Iraq and soon Afghanistan. These aren't "cuts" to current spending -- it's assumed we won't be spending them, because we won't be.

Furthermore, he claimed repeated in campaign season that of course he was willing to look at entitlement reform; he claimed he just wanted it to be part of a "balanced approach." Well, he's more or less got the "balance" he wanted -- a tax hike on the rich -- but is no longer willing to entertain entitlement reform.

Meanwhile, Obama's demands on taxes have gone from:

$400 billion -- the figure Boehner agreed to before the debt ceiling battle, which Obama blew up by upping the ante after Harry Reid demanded he do so.

$800 billion -- the figure Harry Reid demanded, so that Republicans would refuse, and so he wouldn't be required to sell any entitlement reform.

$1.6 trillion -- the new figure, again created precisely so that Republicans can't accept it, thus putting off any need for actual reform.

Double, double, toil and trouble.

This is what America voted for. I'm in a DIAF frame of mind.

Posted by: Ace at 11:13 AM | Comments (193)
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I'm mostly posting this for myself. I have the sort of job where one can become very sedentary indeed, if one lets himself. Which I have.

[S]cientists have determined that after an hour or more of sitting, the production of enzymes that burn fat in the body declines by as much as 90 percent. Extended sitting, they add, slows the bodyÂ’s metabolism of glucose and lowers the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol in the blood. Those are risk factors toward developing heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.

“The science is still evolving, but we believe that sitting is harmful in itself,” says Dr. Toni Yancey, a professor of health services at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Yet many of us still spend long hours each day sitting in front of a computer.

The good news is that when creative capitalism is working as it should, problems open the door to opportunity.

I quoted that last line because this is the New York Times -- note all the qualifiers around the idea of capitalism working. "When" it works -- implying it frequently does not -- "as it should" -- implying it frequently fails to work as it should.

But when capitalism works as it should, you then have an article which is chiefly written to put money in the writer's pocket, highlighting one of those Big New Trends, in this case, desks designed to be stood at, allowing a treadmill to be parked beneath them.

The New York Times-- capitalism deniers.

Posted by: Ace at 09:35 AM | Comments (221)
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I cribbed that from Instapundit.

Costas revealed a series of flawed thoughts. I thought I'd note some of them.

The first flawed idea is the notion of mastery over the human condition, via the policy preferences of the dominant liberal elite class. Murders have been occurring for all 100,000 years of human history. And an especially ugly class of murders involve men killing their women when their women decide to leave.

No gun is needed for such murders, since men are generally much stronger than women. As the picture demonstrates, a man (especially an athlete!) doesn't need a gun to kill; he just needs a halfway decent cutlery set.

Bob Costas gets around this (he thinks) by suggesting it's not just about the gun, but about "gun culture," a culture, if I'm to understand this correctly, that encourages violent outcomes to personal disputes.

Responsible gun owners certainly don't believe that. Irresponsible gun owners and criminals do, but that's hardly a "gun culture" extending to responsible citizens.

Nevertheless, Bob Costas wants you to know that if you sign on for the cultural preferences of the monied liberal urban elite, we can finally have an end to this whole murder business.

This is an extremely arrogant idea, of course. But is as usually the case, people have the strongest opinions when they have the least actual knowledge.

Another thing Costas does here is to ignore three cultural matters that are less easily burbled about than his anti-"gun culture" kick, which of course safely targets White Republicans. Adam Carolla talks about this a lot -- it is a favorite posture of the liberal urban elite to discuss safe villains, White Republicans, who have nothing to do with the ills they're discussing, in order to avoid talking about things that aren't so easy to talk about. Things that actually do have something to do with the ill they're talking about.

The easiest of the other three cultures to discuss is the bubble that athlete heroes live in, in which most of their personal problems are "fixed" by a large and wealthy organization that has a lot of investment in them. This leads to the idea of action without consequences and all the evils that flow from that.

More difficult to discuss is the very violence implicit in football itself -- violence that leads to concussions and brain injuries (and brain injuries of course may well lead to defects in thought and judgement).

This is especially difficult to discuss because you can't have football without this. You cannot have what we know as "football" without the very real risk and frequent incidence of serious brain trauma.

Thus, we're all kind of complicit in this, or, putting it a different way, we've all accepted the violence as a necessary evil for a bit of entertainment. The athletes accept the cost-benefit tradeoff; the teams accept it; NBC accepts it; the public accepts it. We all accept that to have the game as we've had the game, and as we want the game, there are going to be some serious casualties along the way, the most serious of which involve the brain and spinal column.

And that's kind of a heavy, ugly idea. But it's true. Ninety percent of human thought is, I sometimes think, devoted to rationalizing why things which are obviously true are not true. And we reward people who give us the best, most plausible falsehoods denying the obvious truth.

The most difficult culture to talk about is a strain of black culture that is so rejectivist -- so knee-jerkedly oppositional anything "white" -- that it often throws out a lot of babies with the bathwater. That's a problem, because what we might call "conventional traditionalist white middle-class culture" happens to have seized on a great many extremely positive and useful mores, so any culture which is broadly oppositional to that culture is going to wind up rejecting many crucial moral guidances.

But while all of these are far more relevant to the murder-suicide than the "gun culture" Costas discusses -- his cowardice posing as a form of informed courage -- actually, none of them have much to do with the murder-suicide, either. Brain injuries may have something to do with it, but that's highly speculative. I'm just nothing them as having more to do with the murder-suicide than the Easy Dodge Bob Costa offers.

The main problem is really human wiring. Yes, for a 100,000 years men have frequently thought that killing a former lover was a good way to deal with heartbreak. (On the distaff side of the coin, women have also occasionally thought murdering a male spouse was a pretty good idea.)

People do in fact snap. Some brains snap under much lesser strains than others. And when people snap, they start thinking a lot of murder, and suicide.

And they don't need guns to do this, as they have never needed guns to do this. A knife works pretty effectively; a woman can use a knife, too. She's every bit a man's physical equal when a man is asleep, or pass-out drunk, or drugged. And beyond knives there is poison, and there are of course bludgeons and ligatures; and drowning people in bathtubs; and running them down with a vehicle; and dousing them with kerosene and setting them on fire.

A lot of these emotional-snap murders involve setting people on fire, including setting one's children on fire; nutty, murderous people seem to think that killing one's children is a great way to either spite the straying spouse even more, or a great way to clasp one's children to one's breast as one enters a fiery heaven. No idea what they're thinking, actually.

But I do know we're not talking about outlawing matches.

I have several problems with this sort of Automatic Liberalism, this sort of unthinking liberalism, but, confining my critique to the intellectual plane, my problem is that it is thoughtlessness passing as thoughtfulness and cowardice masquerading as courage. It's a very weak dodge, a manner of avoiding more difficult conclusions, but the Dominant Media/Informational Culture of the country has deemed these weak evasions to be Brave and Intelligent, and thus they are.

Costas will be praised for his guts-- but I notice he didn't discuss anything controversial, like the Athletic Bubble (that's something that's sort of easy to discuss for most-- but not when your job is promoting athletes and getting interviews from them), the broad Black Counterculture which is generally harmful to anyone who embraces it (and is unwillingly embraced by it) and, most of all, the sad and often violent state of the human condition.

This last one is the hardest one to discuss at all, because it offers no easy answers at all.

And that's precisely the thing that Jason Whitlock are looking for, easy answers, simple-minded statements they can posture as sages for speaking.

Posted by: Ace at 10:26 AM | Comments (348)
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Legal Insurrection starts looking the field over. Obviously, it would a good thing to have a majority in the Senate, to block Obama's nominees at least in his last two years.

Grover Norquist meanwhile threatens that the Tea Party will really come out in force if Obama forces us over the fiscal cliff, which he most likely will.

Posted by: Ace at 08:48 AM | Comments (187)
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If you only read one thing today, make it this post at Doubleplusundead by moronette extraordinaire Alexthechick:

Gentlemen: I see that you have chosen to use the horrific crime of the murder of Kasandra Perkins to express your belief that guns are the problem, not the men who wield them. I am utterly certain that you believe that you have the moral high ground on this matter. I am equally certain that such a belief is appallingly wrong, not to mention terribly misogynistic. Why do I say this? Because had your desires on gun control been in place, I would not be alive to be writing this now.

I couldn't agree more, Alex.

Posted by: andy at 08:04 AM | Comments (308)
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• Bob Costas Advocates For Gun Control During Sunday Night Football. NBC Is All Leftwing Politics All The Time
  
• Belcher Struggled With Head Injuries, Alcohol And Pills
  
• After Nearly Three Months Nobody Held Responsible For Benghazi Attack
  
• Obama Campaign Still Asking For Contributions
  
• Thunderdome In California?
  
• Please Read This If You Think Deficits Don't Matter And That Spending Doesn't Drive Deficits.
  
• U.S. Evicting Point Reyes Oyster Farmers
  
• Who Knew Alanis Morrisette Was A Big Supporter Of Israel
  
• Morsi Calls For Referendum, Egypt's Liberals Helplessly Protest
  
• South Asia Nuke Race Heats Up
  
• Isn't It An Odd Coincidence That All Journalists Turn Out To Be Left Wing When They're No Longer Constrained By Being A Journalist?
  
• Rachel Carson Was Wrong
  
• Girl "Bitten" By Dolphin At Seaworld, Dad Catches It On Camera
  
• Sheldon Adelson Reportedly Spent 150 Million Trying To Get Romney Elected
  
• It Turns Out Some Homeless People Are Homeless For A Reason And Deserve To Be Homeless
  
• Walmart Shifts Healthcare Policy Shifts Burden To Medicaid And Obamacare
  

Follow me on twitter.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:04 AM | Comments (453)
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Oh, man, it can't be December yet. I have things due in December.

I never understood why the states that just voted to decriminalize marijuana said they would seek federal guidance for what to do now. Before the vote, the feds said marijuana use and sale were still going to be illegal under federal law and that they'd still prosecute. What other guidance could there be? Anyway, Washington state isn't waiting for the feds anymore. Marijuana will officially be decriminalized under state law tomorrow.

Alanis Morissette visited Tel Aviv for a concert today. It provoked the type of measured response from Islamist and leftist scum that you've come to expect.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:51 AM | Comments (249)
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Reminder: When you do your holiday shopping, remember the Ewok and buy through the AoSHQ Amazon store.

Not Starving the Beast

Not only do we spend money we don't have on government but we're not even getting our borrowed money's worth.

The American species of homo economicus has been paying hundreds of billions to get rid of poverty for decades, what do we have to show for it? Poverty rate in 1975: 26 percent. Poverty rate in 2010: 26 percent. What a great return on the investment. Federal spending on education? Ahem:

Steyn: If You Want European-Sized Government, the Middle Class Must Pay European Style Taxes

Obama now wishes "the rich" to pay their "fair share" - presumably 80 or 90 percent. After all, as Warren Buffett pointed out in the New York Times this week, the Forbes 400 richest Americans have a combined wealth of $1.7 trillion. That sounds a lot, and once upon a time it was. But today, if you confiscated every penny the Forbes 400 have, it would be enough to cover just over one year's federal deficit. And after that you're back to square one. It's not that "the rich" aren't paying their "fair share," it's that America isn't. A majority of the electorate has voted itself a size of government it's not willing to pay for.

A couple of years back, Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute calculated that, if Washington were to increase every single tax by 30 percent, it would be enough to balance the books - in 25 years. If you were to raise taxes by 50 percent, it would be enough to fund our entitlement liabilities - just our current ones, not our future liabilities, which would require further increases. This is the scale of course correction needed.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:50 PM | Comments (689)
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