Decisions, Decisions

There’s an old joke that says that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. Another says that the intelligence of any group can be determined by dividing the lowest IQ of any member by the number of members in the group. Both aphorisms are entirely validated by the United States Congress.

Much of the media is castigating the Tea Party for the current imbroglio, but I would point out that Democrats are now saying that Congress should just bail out of the process and let President Obama solve the problem by invoking the 14th Amendment to the constitution. They want to abdicate their financial responsibility in much the same way they have done with their responsibility for making decisions with respect to wars.

I have been critical of what I refer to as a lack of leadership on the part of Obama in his refusal to demand specific actions from Congress, but Alex Knapp at OTB points out that it really is not his responsibility to do that, that the failure here is in Congress and not Obama’s, and he makes some good points.

More and more, Congress has been willing to simply forego its role in making policy to the President. This trend has only been highlighted during the Obama Administration, because Obama, more than any President in recent memory, has been deferential to Congress’ role as policymaker. We saw that in the Health Care Bill and Stimulus Packages, and we’re seeing it now in the debt ceiling fiasco. The result is an almost desperate flailing by Congress to get the President to do something. That’s a bad thing for Constitutional governance.

That is actually a valid and pretty powerful point, I think. Obama, based on that viewpoint, is being more faithful to the constitution than most recent presidents, although many examples can be provided of ways in which he is most certainly not. The war in Libya comes to mind, for instance, and drone strikes in Yemen and Somalia, so the issue is certainly not a simple one.

Clearly, however, Congress is failing its responsibility and that is the point which Alex makes. I see the point and agree with it, but if they aren’t going to get the job done somebody has to. If the car isn’t starting it doesn’t make sense to just stand around wringing your hands, get a damned crank.

Why Congress is failing is probably not entirely simple, either, but my view would be that it has to do with reelection.

Consider the point that the Tea Party is basing its revolution upon, “spending cuts and no tax increases.” Their opponents have reframed this as “no tax increases on the rich,” making it an issue that polls as highly unpopular, and the Tea Party has not backed down. Many of them say, in fact, “I did not come to Washington to get reelected, I came here to change things.” It’s an interesting viewpoint, and certainly different than the equivocal statements of the career politicians.

I'm not crazy about the “spending cuts and no tax increases” thing, but I rather like the, “I did not come to Washington to get reelected.”

Indeed, what made negotiations for the Health Care Bill and Stimulus Packages so lengthy and laborious was 535 career politicians seeking benefit for their constituencies in the interests of their own reelections. Delay after delay was caused due to seeking the vote of one Senator or a handful of Representatives, and bargaining the contents of the bill to secure those few votes. It wasn’t about the legislation, it was about reelection in the upcoming election year.

Members of Congress are not going to stick their necks out and do anything that might jeopardize their reelection, so if they can palm the difficult decisions off on the president that makes life easier for them and, up to now at least, that has been working for them. Even with popularity ratings in the low teens, they have been getting reelected at a rate of 90% or so in most election years.

It’s not good for the nation, though. As Alex points out, “One of the reasons that Rome went from being a Republic to an Empire is that the Senate kept abrogating its authority to Caesar.” And we all know what happened to Rome.

Thinking Big

President Obama is reportedly considering a standard for automakers which would require cars to get 56 miles per gallon. An article suggests that for the cost of building a nuclear reactor we could retrofit 1.6 million homes for energy efficiency, thereby saving the amount that the nuclear reactor would generate, and in the process create many more jobs. It doesn’t point out that the jobs would be temporary.

That’s what passes for "thinking big" today. It’s nothing of the sort. These are small minds thinking inside the box. There is absolutely nothing new in either of those ideas.

Thinking small, mere tinkering with what we have, is not going to solve the problems that face this planet. This kind of thinking is not going to allow 7 billion people to live on a planet that was probably designed to house, maybe, 4 billion people.

Instead of a “retrofit,” a word meaning backward thinking, for existing homes we should be looking at ways to design our cities in a whole new paradigm which redefines the need and manner of transportation and the use of energy. We need a lifestyle in which it doesn’t matter how many miles per gallon a car gets because we don’t use cars much, if at all. We need thinking which is the difference between oxen and the John Deere tractor. Our society is dying here, and to avoid being in the box we need to think outside of it.

Stock Market Comedy

Much hair pulling and shirt rending over the stock market "plunge" of the past two days, a whopping and hair raising 2% drop, attributed to the "debt crisis" in Washington. Today we read that new unemployment claims were below 400,000, not by much, but below that magic number, and the stock market no longer cares about the "debt crisis," which has not changed, and is buoyed by a "rising economy" and is up today. Sheesh.

Comparing Apples v. Moons

Andrew Leonard is still playing the "blame game," honking about our economic problems being all the fault of George W. Bush, as if that was somehow going to solve anything. It might get Obama reelected, but as to solving anything...

He points out that Bush policies have added $5.07 trillion to the debt, while Obama's have added a mere $1.44 trillion. He fails to mention that Bush was in office for eight years, while Obama has been in office for only two, so Bush added $0.63 trillion per year, while Obama has added $0.72 trillion per year. Given the state of the economy, that's a pretty ridiculous comparison, but so is the entire "blame game" exercise, so I'm not going to retract it.

Besides which, the chart only includes "programs" and doesn't include wars. Bush started two and escalated one, Obama has started three (Libya, Yemen and Somalia) and escalated two (Afghanistan and Pakistan). Bush ended the one in Iraq, Obama has ended none. Before you start screaming, troops are leaving Iraq on a schedule established by Bush, and the Obama administration is trying to extend that timetable.

And what is the point of merely examining "programs" anyway? We're talking about costs incurred here. When I go to the bank can I deduct accidental costs from the debts that I include on my balance sheet? No. The costs I incur are owed whether I planned to incur the costs or not.

Much is made about the disastrous effect of the "Bush tax cuts" on the economy, but Democrats controlled Congress for four years and the White House for two and never made the slightest effort to revoke those tax cuts, and only attempted to revoke a minute portion of them after they lost control of the House. Obama extended those tax cuts for two full years, so they are no longer properly the "Bush tax cuts," they are now the "Obama tax cuts." Democrats also cut other taxes repeatedly while in control of Congress, and Obama proudly cut the Social Security payroll tax.

None of that makes our current economic problems Obama's fault.

Failure to address those problems is the issue. Blaming is wasted energy, an exercise in useless remorse. Our time and effort needs to be directed at finding and implementing solutions.

Supporting The Troops

Andrew Bacevich has a rather brutal piece about “supporting the troops” at Tom Dispatch. Read it for yourself, but I’ll provide you with my version of it.

My nephew and I went to a stock car race up in Perris, CA and before the feature race that announcer says into the PA system, “If you have ever served in the armed forces, stand up now and remain standing.” I was a bit surprised at how few of us were standing as the announcer went into a little speech about how these are the men and women who have “defended our freedom and made it possible for us to be here tonight,” and said to give a big cheer and applause.

That’s how Perris, California “supports the troops.” It’s easy to clap your hands and cheer at an auto race, but that’s not supporting the troops.

Supporting the troops means making sure that they have a job when they come home. It means making sure that not one military veteran sleeps on the street tonight. It means making sure that they get the care that they need when they come back from battle; every form of care, and when they need it, not too late to help.

CBS News did a nice little puff piece on the closing of Walter Reed Hospital last night, one which featured testimonials of veterans praising the loving care they received there. They failed to mention the decades of neglect and shoddy treatment that institution delivered in decrepit and moldy buildings before a public furore forced reform.

Supporting the troops means applying that same energy to the issues of today; to jobs, and homelessness, and the prevention of wasted lives and shattered families.

Most of all supporting the troops means electing a civilian government which doesn’t send them on multiple tours of combat in endless wars of futility.

Two Simple Questions

If the deficit is so important, and Democrats are so adult and responsible, why did the Democrats make not the slightest effort to deal with the deficit during the four years that they were in control of Congress? They did not even try; not even for the slightest reduction. Why not?

If raising taxes on the richest 1% of Americans was so important, and of such vital interest to the well being of the nation, why did the Democrats not make the slightest effort to do that during the four years that they were in control of Congress? Why did they not even raise the subject until now?

Babbling Bubbleheads

The deficit discussion in Washington has not gotten any more intelligent this week and, in fact, is actually deteriorating. We now have three plans being discussed, assuming that the “Gang of Six” plan is dead and that Obama has a plan. His last plan, remember, failed in the Senate 97-0.

Boehner’s plan calls for $850 billion over the next ten years, or $85 billion per year, which amounts to 0.05% of the current deficit. In other words, 2000 Boehner plans combined would balance the budget. Oddly, Eric Cantor has told the Tea Party to “quit grumbling and get behind” this plan.

According to Jay Carney, Obama’s plan is not on paper. He doesn’t want to put anything on paper because he doesn’t want to “polarize the discussion.” I think that ship has already sunk.

Reid’s plan is interesting. I call it the “vapor plan,” which fits in more ways than one because Harry Reid has always looked to me like he is about to have a case of the vapors. It bases the financial projections on a continuation of “surge level” spending in Afghanistan and on current military spending in Iraq and Libya, and then uses the reductions from those spending levels as a major part of its “spending cuts.” Is that clever, or what? It also bases revenue projections on GDP growth rates in the 4.6% range over the next three years. To call that optimistic would be an understatement, since it is about 2% now and declining. Despite all of that optimism, it only cuts $2.7 trillion in ten years, or about 1.5% of the current deficit. So it would take 67 Reid plans combined to balance the budget. Well, that and some Alice in Wonderland economics.

The media is not the place to look for clarity, either. Chris Matthews was horrified that Michele Bachmann would accuse legislators of having “anti-American tendencies,” and considered the accusation itself to be a violation of good taste and sanity, but he is accusing the Tea Party and many Republicans of wanting to see this nation “go off the cliff into financial chaos in order to destroy the President,” which is about as anti-American as a person could be. Apparently the accusation coming from him is okay.

Lawrence O’Donnell is proclaiming that Obama and the Democrats have been negotiating in no better faith than the Republicans and have not been serious with any of their proposals, putting them out only for the purpose of letting Republicans reject them and thereby look bad. Neither side is attempting to solve the problem, each side is merely trying to make the other side look bad, and he seems quite proud of how well the Democrats are succeeding with their deceit.

I think this game is being played the same way the “health care reform” bill was. They will yammer at it until the public is so angry and fed up, so disgusted with the whole stupid subject, that we will not even care what the actual resolution is. We will be so glad to stop talking about it that we will happily accept whatever shitty solution they finally pass.

Another Comment

This one from The Democratic Underground:

Oh, the MELODRAMA!!!
Obama gets MAD
Boehner tags Cantor
Obama body slams Cantor
Boehner gets MAD
Boehner comes back in and picks up a metal folding chair
Cantor limps out of the ring and collapses on sideline to distract the ref.
Obama gets MAD again.

Last Night's Speeches

I listened to both speeches last night, and was unimpressed with both. The “analysis” afterward said that Obama was “stern” and “angry,” but he just looked wooden to me, and he certainly didn’t say anything that he hasn’t already said a dozen times or so. He said that the Republican plan was a piece of crap, and he was correct.

Boehner looked like he had just woken up from a bad nap, and talked about a “bipartisan” House bill that was supported by a whopping five Democrats. He said that the Reid plan was crap and was full of gimmicks, and he was right about that. For inatance, $1 trillion of the proposed cuts is from "ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Obama said to call my representative, but I’m not about to do that. If not because of my aversion to “direct democracy” as I discussed earlier, I’m not going to tell them to vote for any of the plans on the table, because none of the plans on the table are worth the paper they are printed on. Oh, wait, they aren’t on paper. My evaluation stands.

Direct Democracy Doesn't Work

When the Central Arizona Project began bringing water to Tucson in the 1980’s it was decided by our elected representatives to put that water into the ground and remove it as needed using the existing groundwater system. Filtering it down through the ground would help to clean it up and putting it into the existing groundwater would help alleviate the problem of its “hardness,” as it would be mixed with the greater volume of groundwater.

Some “concerned citizen” became worried that the CAP water would not stay in place, but thought that it might move underground southward into Mexico, and a heated public discussion erupted about not letting the Mexicans get our water, that we should inject it directly into Tucson’s water system. Our elected officials reminded us that this was water which had come across 330 miles of desert, evaporating on the way and becoming much “harder” in the process, and that a great many animals had fallen into the water and died with the consequences you can imagine, and that we really should recharge it.

The public, of course, did not trust our elected officials and did not listen to them and demanded a public vote. They got it and voted to inject the water directly into the city water system. The result was disastrous. The water was so bad that people would not even bathe in it let alone drink it or cook with it. You could not wash your car with it, as it would eat the paint off your car. It was good, actually, only for watering your lawn, and very few people in Tucson have lawns.

Within a few months the recharge plan was revived, but not before the water did $millions of damage to the city’s water delivery system and cost the citizens $millions more in the purchases of bottled water.

This is one small example of why direct democracy doesn’t work. The state of California is approximately 2000 square miles of illustration of the disastrous effects of direct democracy, in this case $19.3 billion of red ink. Right now there’s a guy in front of the grocery store with a petition to “stop internet sales tax.” I’m sure local merchants are thrilled with him.

When we elect officials to represent us, we need to leave them the hell alone and let them represent us, not organize massive call-in campaigns to tell them what to do every time some “concerned citizen” thinks they know how something ought to be done. If they are doing it wrong, then vote them out of office at the next election. This nonsense of repeatedly calling and telling them how to vote on issues, and then reelecting them at the next election cycle is ridiculous, and it’s not working.

We don’t elect these people to be poll takers or vote counters, we elect them to be decision makers. If they won’t make decisions then why are we reelecting them again and again and again? Boot them the hell out and elect someone who will. But when you hire someone to do a job and he doesn’t do it the solution is not to do the job for him, it’s to fire him and hire someone who will do the job.

It’s clear to me that we need to elect 435 new representatives to the House and as many new Senators as we can. Fire all of them, regardless of party affiliation, and start with a new crop. God knows, a new crop can’t be any worse than what we have.

Pressure Cooker

Based on title, could be politics but isn't. I cook things in a pressure cooker quite often. Two or three times a month probably. I have a routine which never varies. I put the stuff in the pot, put the lid on and light the fire, and then go in the living room and sit down. When the hissing starts I freak out completely, caught entirely by surprise. I am never ready for it and always think something is blowing up somewhere. It usually takes five minutes to get my heart rate below 100.

Liveblogging the Debt Crisis

Friday night and Saturday we were being told that a deal would have to be done during the weekend or we would see disaster in the stock markets when they opened on Monday morning. Something on the order of Henry Pauson's "tanks in the streets" warning in 2008.

The Dow is -34.32 (0.29%) right now, S&P -2.24, Nasdaq -1.34. Yawn.

We seem to have something in the streets, okay; kiddie cars.

No Short Term Deal

President Obama will veto a short term debt ceiling increase because it "could put our credit rating at risk and leave the cloud of uncertainty over the American people." His threat has nothing to do with his reelection campaign, despite his earlier phrasing that any deal would have to extend "past the 2012 elections." He has dropped that unfortunate terminology and is now saying it must extend "into 2013."

Let me find my hip boots, because it is getting deep in here.

Heroic Stupidity

I wonder if Lawrence O’Donnell is going to be crowing tonight about the masterful Republican rout that President Obama has pulled off, as he has been doing for the past several nights on his show, applauding Obama’s beautifully deceitful performance in pretending for the “grand bargain” while achieving his real purpose of driving the Republicans away from the bargaining table and forcing impasse. I wonder if he still thinks that what we have now continues to look like total Democratic, or democratic, victory.

How does Obama look like a knight in shining armor after saying that he will veto a short term deal and throw the nation into default because it would interfere with his reelection campaign? How does that make him “the adult in the room” that is being claimed for him?

If he gets the “clean” debt limit increase that O’Donnell thinks would be such a heroic achievement, he will still be “the president who killed an opportunity to reduce the deficit.” How does that play out in his favor, either in the election next year or in history?

No, there are no winners here, because as stupid as are claims for Democratic victory, the Republican claims are even worse. They are coming up with methods which have the President vetoing a Congressional negative to raise the debt ceiling, abdicating their own role in governmental responsibility altogether.

The one thing that is known for sure is that there will be a last minute deal, but I’m not so certain. When you back someone into a corner and give him no alternative to surrender, sometimes he just pulls the pin on the grenade and blows everyone up. Right now it sounds to me like both sides are becoming quite capable of doing just that.

"Super Congress"

We're going to see how my "single source" thinking works out, I think. A whole bunch of people are freaking out over some "Super Congress" plan that seems similar the the Military Base Realignment and Closure business, but everyone is pointing to an article in The Huffington Post. So not only is it a single source, it's not even a very reliable or reputable source. I will reserve comment for now.

Cowboys and Aliens

The movie premiered, apparently, at ComicCon here in San Diego and is getting rave reviews. I'm looking forward to it, as it combines science fiction, westerns and Harrison Ford, three of my favorite things. I used to think that a movie starring Harrison Ford could not be bad, until I saw Random Hearts. In that screen debacle he played the role of a widower, but I got the distinct impression that it was him who died rather than his wife. Even Harrison Ford can utterly stink up a movie, but it is really rare that he has done so.

Angry Birds

Angry Birds is available free with Google's Chrome browser. It is a stupid, annoying ridiculous game that is played only by children and idiots.

And, perhaps, by old retired guys in San Diego.

Mutually Assured Destruction

Interesting day yesterday. Obama appeared to be righteously pissed off, although according to Lawrence O’Donnell that was mere pretence since he is brilliantly accomplishing exactly what he is attempting to do. More on that thought a bit later.

The Republican position is, of course, idiotic. George the First did not lose because he raised taxes, he lost because he made far too big of a crusade about not raising taxes before he raised them. Dozens, hundreds of politicians of politicians have been reelected after raising taxes. Every politician who has been reelected has been reelected after breaking promises. What causes loss is making major crusades out of promises, and then breaking them, and this crowd is making one huge hell of a crusade out of not raising taxes which will eventually be raised.

I’m not seeing Obama in all that much better light, though, because there is evidence that he did deliberately blow up the “grand bargain” talks, if not by moving the goal posts then by simply throwing too many ingredients into the stew. Or too many cooks into the kitchen. Or a monkey wrench into the gear train. Whatever.

Indeed, Lawrence O’Donnell pontificated at length last night about how brilliant Obama has been throughout this entire process by proposing a “grand bargain” which was entirely a bluff, a proposal on which he never had the slightest intention of making good, and how every time he had Boehner at the point of accepting it he would add new terms to it to assure that Boehner could not accept it.

There’s no way to know if any of that is true, because Obama never put anything in writing, although he has promised to provide all of it in written form retroactively. Heh.

O’Donnell is simply awestruck by the President’s brilliance at having “forced John Boehner to walk out” of the talks, so that Obama will not have to “make any of the painful moves” necessary to achieve the proposed grand bargain. That will result, according to O’Donnell, in the President getting what he asked for to begin with, which is “a clean bill raising the debt ceiling, with no deal on the deficit at all.”

Or it could result in a deadlock, by O’Donnell’s own statement created by Obama, which results in default and the second Great Depression. O’Donnell rules that out, but I’m not so sure. If you back someone into a corner and give him no options at all, sometimes he just pulls the pin on the grenade and blows everyone up.

Assuming O’Donnell is right and Obama gets the debt ceiling increase without “having to make any of the painful moves necessary to achieve the proposed grand bargain.” That leaves him with an ongoing deficit, and eating a lot of words he has uttered about how urgently we need to deal with that deficit. He is then “the president who refused to cut spending and reduce the deficit.” I’m not sure how easily even he is going to talk his way out of that in an election year, and that’s the best possible outcome for him.

Pretty hard to say he has the Republicans on the ropes as of yet.

1937 Redux

Paul Krugman is now displaying the full lack of credibility of his mantra that the “New Deal” spending led to the booming economy of the 50’s and 60’s or that, in fact, it did much of anything, as he screams that we are “doing 1937 all over again.” He points out that current “austerity plans” will throw us back into recession just as it did in 1937, “until World War II finally provided the boost the economy needed.”

Don’t misunderstand: I’m not in sympathy with this “deficit reduction” nonsense in Washington at the moment. I’m fiscally somewhat conservative and would like to see us with a balanced budget, but the timing and method of this is all wrong in many ways, and it should most certainly should not be done under the “pointed gun” of the debt ceiling debate. We should be dealing with something that would attempt to produce jobs.

I’m also not opposed to spending to spending money in recessions to help those who are out of work, and making jobs for them is better than paying them money to do nothing. But I believe we are kidding ourselves to believe that such spending is going to “stimulate” the economy.

To that point, when government spending of the “New Deal” was cut back in 1937 the nation promptly slid back into recession, and Paul Krugman sees no lesson to be learned there.

I still find it somewhat amusing to think that World War II sent us into some sort of spending spree that lasted for twenty years after the war ended. We apparently were so pumped up from the adrenaline from destroying the world that we just could not control ourselves and had to turn that energy into something and the momentum carried us for two decades.

The most destructive five years in the history of the world as the basis for a domestic economic growth just lacks something as a reasonable economic model, somehow. The war did not make us rich or create enormous wealth which needed to be spent. In fact, it left us heavily in debt.

Paul Krugman looks at a world that is mostly rubble and says it didn’t affect us for the next two decades because it had destroyed our market; no one could buy from us. If that were true the world would still be mostly rubble.

I look at a world that is mostly rubble and say that is one hell of a market; nobody has anything, and we are the only ones with manufacturing capacity, so it is an unlimited market of huge demand with no competition.

I think history tells us which viewpoint makes sense, but the war created the booming economy not by “building momentum” but by destroying our competition, literally, and creating demand by turning the existing infrastructure into rubble. I’m not sure that’s something we dare to repeat.

Cool Particles

I have no idea what these particles are, but I like them a lot.

Protons contain two "up" quarks and one "down," while neutrons have two "down" quarks and an "up." The newly discovered particle contains a "strange" quark, an "up" quark and a "bottom" quark. The bottom quark is called a "heavy bottom" quark, making the neutral Xi-sub-b about six times heavier than a proton or neutron.

I think my cat ate a "strange quark" yesterday, and threw it up on the rug.