Suspicions

Because the Congressional Republicans never acquiesce, I'm suspicious of the debt ceiling deal they've floated and voted. The press, true to its fetish for agreements, no matter how awful, is happy.

Of foremost concern to me, it's not clear what's in the deal. The New York Times has reported it badly, as if it's a standard cooling off move that leaves everything unchanged for three months. To careless readers, the story looks like a debt ceiling increase:

House Republicans said Friday that they would agree to lift the federal government’s statutory borrowing limit for three months.

and, sure enough, past debt ceiling increases are recalled with identical phrasing:

The change in tack represented a retreat for House Republicans, who were increasingly isolated in their refusal to lift the debt ceiling.

But there's no dollar amount anywhere, which ought to make everyone as suspicious as I am.

Turns out, this omission should have been central to the story, as it was in the Washington Post, for the GOP has merely agreed to suspend enforcement of the debt ceiling to a specific date:

[E]ven as House Republicans voted to suspend enforcement of the debt ceiling through May 18, their budget chairman [Paul Ryan] vowed to use the coming deadlines to force President Obama and Senate Democrats to deliver “a big down payment on the debt crisis.”

Not only did Jonathan Weisman of the Times get the mechanism wrong, he got something as simple as the time frame wrong - four months, not three.

I haven't yet figured out how the House Republicans will use the change to their negotiating advantage, but you had better believe they will. What was once a soft date that the Treasury could maneuver around is now a hard date that the Obama administration has already pledged to respect, when it announced that it would not use the Fourteenth Amendment debt guarantee to abrogate the debt ceiling statute, nor vastly expand the platinum coin authority of the Mint.

Hacks like Weisman will be back on May 17 with pressure for a deal, no matter how bad.

Rmoney takes a dive

Hilarious ineptitude:

Mr. Rhoades also credited the addition of Rep. Paul Ryan to the ticket for being “invaluable” in scaring off potential voters: “Mitt knew he could get booed off the stage at the N.A.A.C.P., but it takes someone special to get booed off the stage at the A.A.R.P.”

We Democrats and liberals need to aid and abet Rmoney's implosion. The Republicans are showing us who they really are, but it's up to us to let everyone else know.

Bad news in Ayn Rand's vintage haberdashery

Click image for full John Branch/San Antonio Express-News cartoon.

Shaking the Etch-A-Sketch

Paul RAyn (R-fudge the numbers) gives Mitt Rmoney (R-fudge everything) enough cover from teabagger wrath that he can once again claim parentage of Romneycare and bring it from exile back into the big house.

ROMNEY: Well, absolutely. I am very proud of what we did, and the fact that we helped women and men and children in our state… And then with regard to contraceptives, of course Republicans, myself in particular, recognize that women have a right to use contraceptives. There is absolutely no validity whatsoever to the Obama effort to try and bring that up.

Unbelievably cynical!

Suddenly, Rmoney will be taking all sorts of reasonable-sounding positions. Mitt is completely insincere, and the truth is unimportant to him. He says whatever he thinks he needs to say, regardless of what he's said before. He's the most consistent liar I've ever watched in politics, even worse than Richard Nixon.

More Teapublican ignoramuses

You don't have to look far:

Take a look around key committees of the House and you’ll find a governing body stocked with crackpots whose views on major issues are as removed from reality as Missouri’s Representative Todd Akin’s take on the sperm-killing powers of a woman who’s been raped.

The GOP has embraced stupidity in order to lower taxes for the very wealthy. That's why Mitt Rmoney and Paul Ryan are perfect nominees.

What Republicans want

Disaster for America...

Teapublicans have to lie

The truth would kill their chance of election:

[I]f we add up Mr. Ryan’s specific proposals, we have $4.3 trillion in tax cuts, partially offset by around $1.7 trillion in spending cuts — with the tax cuts, surprise, disproportionately benefiting the top 1 percent, while the spending cuts would primarily come at the expense of low-income families. Over all, the effect would be to increase the deficit by around two and a half trillion dollars.

Yet Mr. Ryan claims to be a deficit hawk.

Once they've increased the deficit yet again (see the maladministration of Duhbya and Darth), they'll be back for yet another round of budget-busting tax cuts for the very, very wealthy.  And the wingnut morons who vote Republican while living in the shrinking middle class will be fooled again.

GOP priority couldn't be more obvious

It sure as hell isn't the deficit:

The tax reform plan that House Republicans have advanced would sharply cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans and could leave middle-class households facing much larger tax bills, according to a new analysis set to be released Wednesday.

If the Teapublicans came right out and admitted that they want whatever benefits the wealthy and the huge corporations they own, would that be enough to dope slap the teabagger base off its stupid self-abuse?

Of course not.

(h/t ThinkProgress)

Life imitates legislation

Click image for full Rob Rogers/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette cartoon.

Like leeches for anemia

America, incredibly, has fallen again for the same old Republicans and their same old bullshit:

[M]y mind wanders over the past ten years. Republicans got the tax cuts they wanted. They got the financial deregulation they wanted. They got the wars they wanted. They got the unfunded spending increases they wanted. And the results were completely, unrelentingly disastrous. A decade of sluggish growth and near-zero wage increases. A massive housing bubble. Trillions of dollars in war spending and thousands of American lives lost. A financial collapse. A soaring long-term deficit. Sky-high unemployment. All on their watch and all due to policies they eagerly supported. And worse: ever since the predictable results of their recklessness came crashing down, they've rabidly and nearly unanimously opposed every single attempt to dig ourselves out of the hole they created for us.

There are two possible outcomes of the debt ceiling negotiations. Either President Obama gives the insane Republicans everything they ask for in their worst temper tantrum, or America will default.

Why would the results be any different? Republicans already know that they can kneecap the economy and not only escape all blame for their irresponsibility but in fact they can pin the blame on Democrats. For the simple reason that the American polity is sick, probably mortally wounded. The voters are balky, panicky, irrational. The media are by and large stupid and determined to pretend that stupidity has an equal call on our attention and respect, while intelligence and information are as despised as they were by jocks in middle school.

A default would shake our economy to the core. America derives huge benefits from the dollar and the T bill being the world's reserve. A reckoning on that score is coming anyway, but this would accelerate the world's departure to a broader basket of currencies, including the renminbi. Since the wealthy investor class would be inconvenienced (in their net worth if not in their daily lives), Obama will probably cave.

Thus again the middle class will suffer, the plutocrats or their lobbyists will buy $350 bottles of wine for the likes of Paul Ryan (R-austerity is for others), and the economy will go to hell.

Yet Americans, misinformed and goaded toward the right by a bought and paid for media, will vote for and scream for more Republican bullshit.

Hot breath of doom

America is choosing to slurp up plutocratic bullshit:

[H]ow do you revise the historical narrative when the evidence of what led to economic catastrophe is so overwhelming and the events at issue so recent? You and your political allies just do it. And you bet on the old axiom that a lie is halfway around the world before the truth can tie its shoes.

If you are Rep. Paul Ryan, you ignore the fact that our federal budget deficit has ballooned more than $1 trillion annually since the financial collapse. ... Instead of focusing on the real cause of the deficit, you conflate today’s budgetary disaster with the long-term challenges of Medicare so you can shred the social safety net.

If you are Alan Greenspan, you retreat from your 2008 epiphany in which you acknowledged your “state of shocked disbelief” that “the whole intellectual edifice” of your deregulatory ideology had collapsed. ... [A]fter driving the economy over the cliff, you offer to give driving lessons.

If you are JP Morgan’s chief investment officer, you refute the statement that your chairman and chief executive, Jamie Dimon, made to the FCIC in 2010 blaming the failures of major financial institutions on “the management teams 100 percent and . . . no one else.” ...

If you are most congressional Republicans, you turn a blind eye to the sad history of widespread lending abuses... You refuse to acknowledge what went wrong and then try to stop efforts to make it right.

Societies that fail to learn true and hard lessons from events, fail. Failure is the path that our richers and betters have chosen for us. They have propagandized vast portions of the population into believing that liberals are blame, when we are the exact people who have been most right about how to structure an economy to nurture the middle class and grow the fastest. Instead, like the Russians before us, we are destined for oligarchy, authoritarianism, and the end of the American dream.

I think we're past the tipping point. After the Bushists fucked up everything, and Democrats swept into office in droves, Karl Rove's thousand-year permanent majority for government by wealth is tantalizingly within reach for the forces of reaction. And all Democrats can do is dither and cave.

Republicans will buy the 2012 election, the Supreme Court has put it on the block. They will own all three branches of government. They will kill the filibuster, as we should have, and consolidate their already firm grip on the federal judiciary. They will sweep away the twentieth century to restore the Gilded Age, despite the repeated clear and dismal failures of their economic policies. But this century's Vanderbilts and Rockefellers will be ecstatic. That's what they're buying.

A lot at stake

Click image for full Rob Rogers/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette cartoon.

Medicare-less

You're a senior citizen under Republican health care vouchers.  The price of medical care has continued to escalate at a rate higher than inflation, but the buying power of your voucher is capped by law, so you're losing ground.  For a while you can scrape together enough to buy private insurance, but your needs are greater every year.

Insurance companies are not there to be anyone's friend.  Patients?  They exist to care for their shareholders, and the mutual companies can't afford your annual costs.

At age 70, you have to choose between cancer treatment and heart treatment.  You know your PSA level has increased thanks to the home analysis kit you bought at Walgreen's.  At least you think you know; those things have a 30% false positive rate.  But most prostate cancers are slow, so you pick the cardiovascular insurance.  It only costs you $50,000 a year, which means you need a reverse mortgage and the entire annual payment from the privatized account that replaces less and less of Social Security with each passing year.  (And just try to get what you have left invested in a no-load index fund.  No one makes any fees off that, and your dwindling nest egg is too small to interest anyone anyway.)

A year or two later, still feeling pretty hale but in need of several medications, you can no longer afford any insurance without a low-dollar lifetime cap.  Basically, the only use you get out of your insurance company is to negotiate volume discounts on routine care.  Surgery beyond office procedures is out of the question, and even those mean a lean year at the kitchen table and skimping on your maintenance medications.  Arthritis?  Suck it up and suffer so you can keep taking your blood pressure meds.

With the level of care you're getting - minimal - your life expectancy drops.  The closer you get to that last year when the bills really pile up and your ability to promise to repay your debts slides off in the five stages of grief, the less willing any reputable insurer is to cover you.  Sure, there are companies that will take your premiums, but their policies have huge on-line PDFs filled with pretexts for denying your claims.  It seems as if all they care about is your voucher.

At a time when your life expectancy under the old Medicare program would still have been ten years, the private insurers all expect you to die soon in a way that's very unprofitable for them.  You can't get insurance coverage at any price.  You're a pay as you go customer.  With no money left.

With a touch of pneumonia, you get a friend to drive you to the ER.  A course of azithromycin would only cost $200, but the physician on duty won't prescribe it without $1000 in fees for the ER and the exam, so you leave untreated.

You should have planned better. 

Instead, the free market is so efficient that it doesn't need a death panel to end your useless, uneconomic life.  Those last 10 years you could live that you don't?  All profit for America.

The America of deserving titans of business, anyway, not unproductive freeloaders like you.

That's Republican health care for the aged.  If you're a teabagger who buys into Paul Ryan's bullshit, there's a certain harsh justice there.  You thought that harsh justice was for other people, and it catches you too.

That Kenyan Muslim socialist

The Daily Show - Slashdance - Obama Hurts Republicans
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

I really object to Paul Ryan's objections to President Obama's tone. Did you see the evil ideologue's dead, unblinking eyes in that guy's face? Ugh.

Republicans live in early puberty, where any mild criticism can set off a crying jag.  Crank up the tears, boys.  We're coming to git ya.

Republicans incensed that Obama calls their bullshit bullshit

The big media is full of co-opted fools.  Paul Krugman makes them look bad almost every week, and yesterday he shovelled the covering bullshit off of the so-called work of his so-called colleagues:

Last week, Mr. Ryan unveiled his budget proposal, and the initial reaction of much of the punditocracy was best summed up (sarcastically) by the blogger John Cole: “The plan is bold! It is serious! It took courage! It re-frames the debate! The ball is in Obama’s court! Very wonky! It is a game-changer! Did I mention it is serious?” 

The truth is that Republicans have nothing to offer but lies marinated in bullshit to make them, oddly enough, more palatable.  Krugman's losing competitors love nothing more than to dish out copious, self-composting dumpster loads of nonsense well-aligned with the Republican marketing of snow to Eskimos.  No, stop me, marketing snow to Eskimos would be better than what the GOP does.  Republicans market laetrile to men with erectile dysfunction.  Or lawn service to gila monsters.  Or bicycles to fish.

Clear-eyed as always, Krugman is of course more serious than my arrant dismissal, though no less dismissive:

Then people who actually understand budget numbers went to work, and it became clear that the proposal wasn’t serious at all. In fact, it was a sick joke. The only real things in it were savage cuts in aid to the needy and the uninsured, huge tax cuts for corporations and the rich, and Medicare privatization. All the alleged cost savings were pure fantasy.

On Wednesday, as I said, the president called Mr. Ryan’s bluff: after offering a spirited (and reassuring) defense of social insurance, he declared, “There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. And I don’t think there’s anything courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill.” Actually, the Ryan plan calls for $2.9 trillion in tax cuts, but who’s counting?

Again, the Republicans don't give the slightest shit about deficits, except as leverage to reward the wealthy with further spoils of their total victory in class warfare.

Update (4/16): More from the estimable Dr. Krugman:

It’s not nice to say this (but the truth is rarely nice): whatever they may say, Republicans are not concerned, above all, about the deficit. In fact, it’s not clear that they care about the deficit at all; they’re trying to use deficit concerns to push through their goal of dismantling the Great Society and if possible the New Deal; they have stated explicitly that they want to reduce taxes on high incomes to pre-New-Deal levels. And it’s an article of faith on their part that low taxes have magical effects on the economy.

Read it all. He also hits our shared point about the misuse of civility.

Suborning perjury

What Paul Ryan (R-more for the rich) demanded of the Congressional Budget Office: bullshit projections based on fatuous nonsensical assumptions.  Normal people call this lying.

We liberals will never ever get heard and understood until job one for us is saying this about Republicans:

• You can't trust their facts.
• You can't trust their analysis.
• You can't trust their good faith.

Organic saffron over the flavor of bullshit

Most of our big media pundits are worse than useless.  They are actively contributing to the decay of America into banana Republicanism.

They are lazy- Reading the commentary from Sullivan and Brooks and Klein and others, aside from being completely wrong, what stood out to me was how simply predictable it was, regurgitating the coalescing villager CW about Ryan: The plan is bold! It is serious! It took courage! It re-frames the debate! The ball is in Obama’s court! Very wonky! It is a game-changer! Did I mention it is serious? The math demands it! We need to have shared sacrifice! This puts us on the right course! It’s serious and bold!

Read any one of their pieces the last couple of days, and it was like conventional wisdom/villager mad libs. Actually reading the bill, realizing it isn’t serious, it isn’t bold, that it won’t set us on the right path because it gives away as much in taxes as it cuts from the needy, realizing the only people sacrificing are the poor while the well-off are lavished with trillions in tax cuts- well, doing that and actually thinking, like Bruce Bartlett, James Fallows, Paul Krugman, Dean Baker, and others managed to do, that would be just way too much work. Better to roll with the conventional wisdom, churn out a load of bullshit, and when confronted by people that you are wrong, have a hissy fit about the hard left, whine about being picked on and someone using four letter words and capital letters, and dig in. Instead of absorbing what people are telling you, link to the National Review and McMegan, and don’t even bother to figure out basic math such as 22-18. There is a word for this behavior- it is lazy. These guys are on autopilot, have their narrative, and they are sticking to it.

Why Republicans have to lie

Republicans want to bring back the old deal, the 1929 deal:

Among other changes, the Ryan Roadmap proposes:

• Raising taxes only on those Americans making between
  $20,000 and $200,000, while slashing taxes in half
  for the wealthiest Americans. The middle class would
  pay higher average tax rates than millionaires – an
  unprecedented reversal of progressive U.S. tax policy.
• Eliminating taxation of corporate income and replacing
  it with a consumption tax that would disproportionately
  hit middle-class Americans.
• Placing the entire burden of deficit reduction on
  spending cuts. The Ryan Roadmap prioritizes dismantling
  social insurance programs, not balancing
  the budget.
• Replacing Medicare and Medicaid with inadequate
  vouchers to purchase health insurance in a broken
  marketplace.
• Privatizing Social Security for wealthy Americans
  and ending Social Security’s role as universal social
  insurance with benefits tied to lifetime earnings.

The GOP wants you to be all alone and on your own.  If you deserved help, you wouldn't need it, not even if you were actually paying for it.

Republicans don't give a shit about the deficit either:

The hefty tax hikes on the middle class included in the
plan do not go toward deficit reduction. Nor does the
Roadmap’s overall revenue plan improve the long-term
fiscal outlook. The plan actually reduces federal revenue
relative to either current law or current policy.

Republicans use the deficit as a way to perpetually cut taxes on the wealthy.  If there were no deficit, you middle class peons might actually expect something from your government.  And they can't have you expecting that!

Unless there's a war (to protect their lifestyle).  Then you can expect a draft notice.

(h/t Meteor Blades at DailyKos)

Update: In case you imagined that Paul Ryan (R-plutocracy and penury go together) might become unpopular in the Republican caucus because of his proposals, he's giving the GOP response to President Obama's State of the Union address.  In an attempt to make Ryan look moderate, Michele Bachmann will lip-synch a Glenn Beck monologue in an unofficial Teapublican response.

Can you trust anyone?

Fact-checking is a good thing, right?

Here Factcheck.org calls President Obama a liar (again!). Oh, they use the word whopper so as not to use the political press's bête noire and oh so rude lie. But a synonym, no matter how cutely colloquial, still has to answer for the small matter of its meaning.

Here's the gist of Factcheck.org's report:

President Obama claimed that Republican leaders are pushing to make "privatizing Social Security a key part of their legislative agenda".

...

Few if any Republicans now in Congress have ever pushed for total "privatization"....

Only one Republican "leader" is currently pushing publicly for Bush-style private accounts, as part of an overall budget plan. He is Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the senior GOP member of the House Budget Committee. His plan currently has only 13 cosponsors, none of them in the GOP House leadership.

First, there's the little bit of goal-post moving in "total privatization." Republicans seldom advertise their desired end state, but it's clear from their arguments in favor of private accounts that they fully expect the social insurance of Social Security to wither away, leaving our descendants again free to achieve elder penury.

In any case, Obama didn't say 'total'. But that's minor.

No one who has covered politics in Washington for forty years, as the Factcheck writer has, could possibly have missed Republican hostility to Social Security, especially in the past twenty years. But even if he had, a very small amount of googling yields the 2008 Republican Party platform, complete with this on p. 19:

We believe the solution should give workers control over, and a fair return on, their contributions. No changes in the system should adversely affect any current or near-retiree. Comprehensive reform should include the opportunity to freely choose to create your own personal investment accounts which are distinct from and supplemental to the overall Social Security system.

While they don't use the word private, they're clearly talking about private accounts, not social insurance. It would be a foolish and glib quibble for Factcheck to claim that private accounts are not privatization. That's the standard Republican framing, but it's nonsense and should never convince a fact-checker.

Still, it's just a party platform. Who gives a damn about those? It's a document for the national conventioneers who aren't sociable enough to get invited to parties to fight over and feel good about hammering rightward.

Right? There are still no Congressional leaders who advocate privatization, right?

I only had to look at one, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-orange pekoe):

Republicans, led by Rep. Paul Ryan, have proposed a better budget solution that curbs spending, creates jobs, cuts taxes, and controls the debt. [emphasis in original]

Whoops! By Factcheck's own estimation, Ryan is proposing Social Security privatization, and Boehner is visibly and audibly supporting his budget proposal. Choosing sponsorship of a bill as sole criterion of support in an election year is too obviously wrong-headed to be merely naive. It's either lazy or dishonest.

Obama's "whopper" turns out to be much more accurate than Factcheck's analysis. What's a citizen to do?

Never turn off your bullshit detector. Bullshit is the characteristic of our media age.

So, why can you believe me?

Credibility is earned, not given. Read what I post. Evaluate my evidence. Check my facts. Over time, I'll either gain your credence or not.

That's the point. Exact a penalty from the credibility of those who bullshit you. Brooks Jackson may have a big media pedigree, but he didn't treat Obama fairly here, and he didn't hold Republicans to account. Why would you believe his next "fact" check? I won't.

Eat your broccoli and shut up

How Republicans consider the needs of ordinary people:

Republicans admire the boldness of Mr. [Paul] Ryan’s vision, even if his proposals are a little too bleak for the campaign trail. “He’s not saying the world’s going to be full of butterscotch sundaes,” is how Jeb Bush described the plan to me recently. “He’s saying: ‘Eat your broccoli. And then maybe you don’t get to eat at all for a few days. You don’t get steak — ever.’ ” [emphasis added]

More steak for them! More broccoli too.

Update (8/13): More bullshit purveyed by the big media straight from Ryan to you discerning palate.