Second look at impeachment?

White House attorneys have concluded they have the legal authority to make a recess appointment despite Republican efforts to block the move, Democrats said Tuesday, and administration officials say they reserve the option to install Richard Cordray as head of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau without Senate approval.

...

...the White House has concluded that it can make the appointment even if the Senate has not formally recessed, said one Democrat familiar with White House thinking. “They have decided no one can stop them.”

If Obama does this it's not because he's all that concerned with getting Cordry in place, it's because he wants to provoke a fight with congressional Republicans. The GOP will be forced to vow to shut everything down they can and that would enable Obama to continue to run against "a do nothing Congress" (even though Democrats control half of it).

Obama would love it if the GOP House actually tried to impeach him. Failing that, his sticking it to the GOP will please his base.

The challenge for the GOP in Congress will be to fight enough to please the base and check Obama but not give him the mud slinging fight he wants/needs. I doubt it's something they will be able to pull off.

Ultimately this is the small ball politics Obama will have to play since he can't actually run on his record. And if has to shred the Constitution in the process? What's the Constitution compared to a God Who Walks Amongst Us?

In fairness, Obama is a miracle worker. He's the only person who could get me to vote for Mitt Romney.

Story via @davidhauptmann

Posted by: DrewM at 02:46 PM | Comments (101)
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A useful puncturing of a cherished myth.

McCain won in 2008 because voters disqualified most other candidates (or those candidates disqualified themselves) and because Huckabee wouldn't drop out, even after he was mathematically eliminated, and thus kept the anti-McCain vote split when only one man could mathematically stop him (Romney), which was his intention.

It's easier to just say "Teh Estabilshment." "Easier to say" rarely corresponds with "accurate to say," however.

The Republican Establishment, like the “international community,” is more of a figment than a reality. Whom did the so-called establishment support in 2008? Do conservative voters believe that Republican elites somehow engineered the selection of the least loyal and reliable Republican in the U.S. Senate? And how did that work exactly? John McCain was considered the frontrunner in early 2007. Yet by the summer he was languishing in the polls and so broke that he was forced to take out loans. Was it the establishment that earned McCain the nomination or was it the fact that Rudolph Giuliani ran a terrible campaign, Fred Thompson never got airborne, and Mike Huckabee undermined Mitt Romney’s Iowa sling-shot strategy?

What about 2000? Did the establishment pick George W. Bush? It might seem so, based on primogeniture. But the comfort with Bush came from the grassroots up, not from the top down. Bush himself acknowledged that he was enticed to run not by fat cats at a private club but by the polls. Yes, he was certainly aided in the money chase by his pedigree. But if money determined the outcome of primaries, weÂ’d have been treated to the nomination of Phil Gramm in 1996.

People have this weird impulse to claim that the results of highly complex contests with hundreds of moving parts and unknown variables are, at least in politics, engineered by some controlling elite, deftly pulling this lever and pushing that button to shape the result per their wishes.

Does anyone extend this curious bit of religion to any other highly complex endeavor? When a football games results in a wild fourth-quarter dogpile with multiple lead-changes and a heroic last second 55 yard field goal (as with that Broncos win a month ago), did anyone claim that this outcome had been essentially "scripted" by the League looking to inject drama and narrative storylines into the season?

No. Or at least no one but confirmed lunatics claim this. We understand that even in a rather simple thing like a football game, there are all sorts of unexpected things that can and sometimes will happen, and this will produce unanticipated results.

But when it comes to politics, people suddenly start imagining Cigarette-Smoking Men controlling their very own votes.

I quote this next bit not to boost Romney, but to knock down Paul. While every other candidate is vowing some kind of painful but necessary reform to FDR's arguably-unconstitutional entitlement programs, you know the one guy who's vowing to keep them fully funded?

Paul's plan is to get the money for them from Foreign aid -- a pittance -- and by basically gutting defense. Which also isn't enough, but it's Doctor Ron Paul, so we don't sweat actual facts.

This year, most of the Republican field is strongly conservative. But some disgruntled conservatives are convincing themselves that Ron Paul is a more authentic conservative than Mitt Romney. Really? On the one question that ought to define a candidate’s seriousness — grappling with entitlements — Paul is trafficking in fairy tales while Romney has proposed far-reaching reforms.

So the strict constitutionalist Ron Paul wants to take all the money from a function that is listed as a federal governmental responsibility -- defense -- in order to pay for two programs which are not mentioned in the Constitution, and which, in fact, the Brave Speaker of Truth Paul claims are themselves unconstitutional.

And that, by the way, isn't enough money to keep them funded, but who cares, it's Ron Paul, doing what he does bests, offering fantasy solutions and chickening out from discussing the actual problems facing us, preferring to focus on paranoid bugaboos such as the TriLateral Commission.

Posted by: Ace at 02:15 PM | Comments (224)
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If Keith Olbermann doesn't show up to broadcast tonight, it could literally affect the lives of tens of dozens of fans.

Keith Olbermann, who came to Current TV this year to remake the channel and compete against his old home, MSNBC, is sitting out the biggest political nights of the season.

Olbermann has been missing from various debates, too.

These absences suggest that there may be new tension between Mr. Olbermann and the managers at Current, who are trying to create a progressive-oriented cable news channel.

In the television industry, Mr. Olbermann is well known for fights with his bosses; stories abound about his refusal to speak to managers and executives. At Current, this behavior has continued, according to four people with knowledge of the situation, one of whom described Mr. Olbermann as “disgruntled.”

Olbermann? Disgruntled? Factory setting, no?

But Olbermann promises/threatens that he will actually report to work tonight:

@KeithOlbermann So is #Countdown back tonight?

@OwensC08 Headed into the office now in fact

How girlishly dramatic is Keith Olbermann? Just girlishly dramatic enough to make the routine reporting for daily work a tumultuous swirl of speculation and recrimination.

Via Johnny Dollar.

Estrogen

It's a wild ride.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:09 PM | Comments (211)
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If that sounds like the "People's Front of Judea" (splitters), it's unintentional; it's just that these groups always conform to the parody.

The reason for the split is optics. Some of the Occupiers were arrested for burning American flags, and this new group is supposedly against that.

We, the members of the Occupy Charlotte Movement are no longer affiliated with the camp at 600 East Trade Street. In light of the recent actions taken by a few anarchistic elements that we do not want to be associated with, we are moving on from the actual Occupation site. The flag burning incident in the early morning of December 30th does not reflect the people or the message of the movement.

Posted by: Ace at 12:55 PM | Comments (80)
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Bumping: Just giving it the college try. I added Perry's closing argument ad at the end.

There are two main sorts of primary voters: Those who know too little, and those who know too much. As for the former -- there's not much I can do about them. They don't read this site, or probably too much of any political source.

Maybe they read Time. Bless their hearts.

The online community consists mainly of the latter -- we know a lot about the candidates, and are each making complicated decisions about trade-offs between electability and agenda (and likelihood of advancing that agenda).

My belief is that we know so much that the secondary and tertiary level things we know are crowding out the primary things we know. That is, that we know a bunch of second- and third- order things and knowing so much is crowding out consideration of the top-level, major bullet-point, controlling facts.

I am in favor of Rick Perry because, while I am informed about the second- and third- orders of information, I remain focused on the first order stuff.

First, biographical and character details. Much of the More Informed cohort of the party seems to be giving these factors short shrift. I would suggest to such folks that a certain type of candidate tends to prevail in elections, and that type of candidate tends to have a positive narrative in biographical and characterological traits.

Rick Perry did not marry his high school sweetheart. He married his grade school sweetheart. He has never been divorced as as far as I know there haven't been any rocky patches in his relationship.

Those who discount the importance of that, especially to women voters, are making an error, I think.

I can only say so often that the swing voters in the center of the country are among the least-informed voters on the planet. Every survey demonstrates that, despite their claims to be all about "the substance" and "the issues," they know less about the substance and the issues than partisans on either side of the aisle.

Being apolitical, they're not very interested in politics. Stands to reason. This means, then, that they don't read much about politics.

Their decision-making is very superficial. Although I do not think that Newt Gingrich's affairs/divorces history is a disqualifier, I think it cannot be entirely discounted.

Some people think that because the media stressed Obama's intellect in the last election, they will do so again, and thus it is important to have an intellectual like Gingrich as our standard-bearer.

You don't the media very well if you accuse them of consistency. Let me suggest to you that if Gingrich is the nominee, the media will not be stressing intellect and brainpower (as, in their estimation, it's a draw).

No. They will be stressing Obama's faithfulness to his wife and their two beautiful children.

The media stresses whatever attribute the Democratic candidate trumps the Republican one in. In 1992 and 1996, the media ignored the virtue of military service in Republican nominees George Bush (the elder) and Bob Dole, and suggested it was relatively unimportant, championing the greater intellect and ideological flexibility of one William Jefferson Clinton, who, as you might remember, dodged the draft, using political connections to secure a higher draft number.

And yet in 2000, Al Gore was sold as a "veteran" of Vietnam, while George W. Bush was portrayed as a draft-evader, and the same in 2004, when John Forbes Kerry announced that he was "reporting for duty."

Dan Rather did a story about Bush's supposed failure to "report for duty" at the Texas Air National Guard.

I would suggest that we should not get too hung up on fighting the last war, because the media will simply change the rules of engagement. It is true that Gingrich can go toe-to-toe with Obama on policy wonkery; it is also true that that is the very reason the media will lose all interest in intellect as a basis for comparison or qualifier for high office.

Should Gingrich be our nominee, be prepared to do a lot of double-takes as faithfulness and devotion to family suddenly becomes the key trait in a president.

The media will call Rick Perry stupid, of course. And Perry has armed them with weapons to use on this front. However, his gaffes are now several months old, and he hasn't repeated them.

Further, the media has called our candidate "stupid" in every single race where it could be argued the Democratic candidate was a singe IQ point smarter than the Republican one. We're used to that, and we've won elections despite that.

After doing poorly in college, Rick Perry joined the Air Force. Not the guard, either. The actual active-duty Air Force. He is, then, a veteran, if not a combat veteran (as far as I know he never saw any engagement or action, as he was flying big transport planes).

Barack Obama did not serve in the military. That is perhaps the most understated sentence in the history of communications, but since people are interested in drawing contrasts, consider that one.

Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich did not serve in the military either. I do not wish to attack either man but both were of draftable age during Vietnam.

Both of these men are smart. And they're smarter than Perry. (They're also easily smarter than pampered princeling Barack Obama but the media will never credit them as such.)

And I cannot and will not say that brainpower is unimportant. I would however say that character matters too.

Several other bits and pieces of Rick Perry make him a central-casting type candidate -- I don't know if he grew up poor, per se, but he grew up modest, certainly. His background is that most Heartland of backgrounds -- hardscrabble farmer.

And he's America's longest-serving governor in America's second-largest state. Texas is no tiny little state. It has nearly the populace of California. He's served as governor there for 11 years (and for two years before that, as lieutenant governor).

The media and liberals (but I repeat myself) will attack Perry, predictably, as stupid, but there is a strong rebuttal to such a claim: If he can't perform the duties of Chief Executive, then how is he's been successfully performing the duties of Chief Executive?

America, and especially the Republican party, has long favored elevating governors to the presidency. Governors are, after all, the presidents of single states. They have nearly the exact same duties and functions (including even maintaining and controlling the state national guards). They have similar executive powers and set the agendas for their respective legislatures. In the case of border states such as Texas, they even require some foreign policy making duties.

No job in the world really prepares someone for the Presidency. But one job, more than any other, comes fairly close to doings so.

So Rick Perry cannot handle high executive office?

Then how is it he's been doing just that for 11 years?

(And if you want to object that Texas has a weak-governor system, with a lot of power vested in the lieutenant governor position -- well, they claimed that about George W. Bush, too. And claimed that Rick Perry actually was doing all the hard stuff in his then-position of Lieutenant Governor. So wherever the power lies in Texas, Perry has handled it, in both jobs.)

The stakes in this election are enormous. The next president may well appoint five justices the Supreme Court, essentially choosing our basic jurisprudence for the next 30 years. This will be the presidency in which we make fundamental decisions about debt, and spending, and entitlements. Decisions on those may decide our fiscal policy for the next 20 or 30 years, too.

But while those are the stakes of this election, the election will actually turn on... Jobs.

Unemployment is at 8.6%, with real unemployment around 16%. For the sake of comparison, unemployment during the Great Depression hit 25% at its high. We are not there yet, but we've consistently been at around 9% for years (with real unemployment higher).

Primary voters tend to be strongly ideological. We have very strongly held beliefs about abstract notions of government and "The Good."

But general election voters -- especially those swing voters -- do not have strong opinions about such matters. Otherwise they would be partisans for one camp or another. They tend to be pragmatic, rather than abstract, thinkers. They do not have any prevailing theory of governance, which is what gives them the flexibility to vote for George W. Bush in 2004 and then an all-but-declared socialist four years later.

They care almost entirely about results, because they have no underlying theory that might explain away failures (as Obama's endless theories explain away his failures, at least to his partisans).

I remember that, by the third debate, people were complaining that they were sick of hearing about Texas producing 45% of all jobs created in America the last two years, and sick of hearing that Texas has created one million jobs while America has lost two million plus in the last ten years.

I understand that High Information voters, who knew this before Rick Perry announced it, might be "sick" of hearing about it.

But the fact of the matter is: That should have been said more, not less. So here it is again:

Posted by: Ace at 11:55 AM | Comments (1044)
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Lacey says this might be the stupidest thing she's ever read.

Maybe. For now. They'll do something stupider in a month. They're on a collision course with reality and they're increasing to ramming speed.

The “informal discussion letter” from the EEOC said an employer’s requirement of a high school diploma, long a standard criterion for screening potential employees, must be “job-related for the position in question and consistent with business necessity.” The letter was posted on the commission’s website on Dec. 2.

Employers could run afoul of the ADA if their requirement of a high school diploma “‘screens out’ an individual who is unable to graduate because of a learning disability that meets the ADA’s definition of ‘disability,’” the EEOC explained.

The commissionÂ’s advice, which does not carry the force of law, is raising alarms among employment-law professionals, who say it could carry far-reaching implications for businesses.

It is the nature of bureaucracy to ever seek new missions to justify its funding. And there is apparently no one in government now to push back against this pernicious tendency.

Posted by: Ace at 11:31 AM | Comments (144)
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Conservative.

If you as an individual want to change your weight, you must change your whole life. Likewise, to reduce obesity in modern society, we will have to alter the way society is organized.

...

Want to change this? It's no small project. It would involve the redesign of cities, the relocation of schools, the reinvention of our modes of eating and amusement.

First lady Michelle Obama has made healthy eating her special project. Good for her, and let's hope her efforts lead to success. But if we are to succeed, we should understand: The campaign against obesity will have to look a lot less like the campaign against smoking (which involves just one decision, to smoke or not to smoke) and much more like the generation-long campaign against highway fatalities, which required the redesign of cars, the redesign of highways, and changes in personal behavior like seat-belt use and drunk driving.

The good news is that the campaign against highway fatalities has yielded real progress: down two-thirds since the mid-1960s. The bad news is that, for most of us, it will take more than a New Year's resolution. However, if you are seriously resolved, congratulations -- and see you on the jogging path.

@bdomench points out that Frum's central claim for this call for government control over our diets and exercise regimes is wrong. Frum claims off the jump--

Yet as we talk and talk about the issue, the country only becomes fatter and fatter.

-- just isn't true:

The percentage of Americans of "normal weight" has slightly increased in the past year, but overweight and obese people still command a solid majority, according to a new study.

In the third quarter of 2011, 36.6 percent of Americans were of normal weight, compared with 35.6 percent a year ago, the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index survey found.

Obese and overweight Americans combined for more than 60 percent of the population, it said.

"Although the majority of Americans are still overweight or obese, it is an encouraging sign that obesity rates are trending downward in the U.S.," the study said.

The government does have a role in this-- the government is actively promoting a theory of overweight (and weight reduction) for which there is almost no evidence, apart from a "consensus" of scientists, and which just might be the exact wrong theory, actually causing the increase in obesity it seeks to check. more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:49 AM | Comments (377)
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Today is the day when our quadrennial nightmare ends and Iowans can go back to doing what they do best...providing the rest of us with pork products and corn.

Here's the thumbnail version of how this works: After a year of being alternatively sucked up to and badgered by every GOP wannabe, Iowa voters go to fire houses, schools and community centers to tell us who may continue to run. Following that, the rest of us bitch about it and then turn our annoyance to New Hampshire and their primary next Tuesday.

I may have cut out a few details but that's the gist.

So...get your predictions in now and be eligible for fabulous prizes* if you correctly predict the order and percentage of the field in the final results.

Also he's my position on the post-Iowa landscape: If either Perry or Newt (my guy) come in 3rd or better, supporters of the other candidate should really give the 3rd place finisher a very, very serious look.

And no, there's no "but Ron Paul doesn't count so 4th is really 3rd" exception. If neither Newt or Perry get at least a top 3, resistance is futile, we will all be assimilated into the Romney Collective.

Also: Open thread.

*There are no prizes, fabulous or otherwise.

Posted by: DrewM at 08:11 AM | Comments (788)
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The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are boned.
- Stuff Shakespeare Said, 3rd. Ed.

With the primary vote casting coming quickly upon us, here's a reminder of where we find ourselves, with a huge hat tip to coblogger emeritus Geoff.

First, we continue to make unrealistic assumptions about future GDP growth.

People talk about 4 – 5% GDP growth as if it were the norm, and they base all their budget projections on the economy returning to that sort of growth rate. Absurd.

We havenÂ’t seen consistent 5% GDP growth for 35 years.

If it weren’t for the dot.com boom, we wouldn’t have seen consistent 4% GDP growth for 25 years. Our economy is settling in at 2 – 3% growth for the foreseeable future.

Second, even the most aggressive piece of legislation to deal with spending, the Ryan budget, is inadequate to the task of even dealing with just FY 2011's deficit, much less the additional like amount we'll run the debt up in FY 2012.

This is what the President and his crackerjack economic team have wrought. A one-year deficit that is so large that it can only be paid back if everything goes exactly right. And if everything goes exactly right, we're still looking at decades before we can get back to the debt level we had only 6 months ago.

Be sure to read the whole thing.

Since Geoff wrote the posts these graphs were culled from, we've had a few clear opportunities to address the problem. We whiffed on the FY 2011 continuing resolution showdown and the debt ceiling increase, choosing instead to punt to the "Super Committee" that failed miserably as it was designed to. Also, don't forget that we still don't have a FY 2012 budget thanks to the feckless Harry Reid.

Now the debt ceiling (and debt) has been raised to $15.2 trillion, with an additional increase of $1.2 trillion in the offing. We foolishly traded a theoretical $1.2 trillion of spending cuts over 10 years for an immediate increase in the new debt limit (ha!), and on the current path, we'll hit $16.4 trillion of debt by inauguration day 2013.

To bring these two pieces of Geoff's work together, does anyone care to hazard a guess as to the average annual GDP growth presumption in the Ryan budget? I'll save you the work; it's 4.7%. 4.7% per year for 10 years? Take a look at that first chart again and tell me how realistic that seems.

If you presume the Ryan budget achieves its spending targets on an absolute dollar basis but that revenues are a function of GDP - and then cut GDP growth to a realistic number, like, say, half of what's in his forecast - we'd add nearly $5 trillion of additional debt in the ten years over and above what's in his budget.

So the most aggressive spending reduction plan we have, that our candidates don't exactly shout their support for from the mountaintops, falls short of what's needed to keep us from ruin. And on the revenue side, everyone agrees that we have to grow our way out of the problem, but then they fudge the growth estimates beyond anything realistically achievable so they can avoid the pain of making adequate spending cuts.

But the fault lies not in the candidates; it lies in the electorate. Enough of us are content to let the cancer we know is there eat away at us because we feel o.k., if not entirely well, and will apparently continue to do so right up until the point that it kills us.

Posted by: andy at 05:50 AM | Comments (281)
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The Daily DOOM will be remaining on hiatus until next week at the earliest due to factors beyond my control. As much as I enjoy bringing stories of financial perfidy, failure, and catastrophe to the Moron Horde, real-life work intrudes and since that gig pays my bills, it only makes financial sense to screw you guys instead.

Happy New Year, Morons.

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Posted by: Monty at 04:43 AM | Comments (133)
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