Glenn posits that Chairman Simpson’s belligerence helps pull down a veil of secrecy around the deficit reduction commission  :

That’s why Commission co-chair Alan Simpson — with his blunt contempt for Social Security and and other benefit programs (such as aid to disabled veterans) and his acknowledged eagerness to slash them — has done the country a serious favor.  His recent outbursts have unmasked this Commission and shed light on its true character.  Unlike his fellow Commission members, who imperiously dismiss public inquiries into what they’re doing as though they’re annoying and inappropriate, Simpson — to his genuine credit — has been aggressively engaging critics, making it impossible to ignore what the Commission is really up to.

And he notes that the sources of the deficit were the twin policies of endless war and tax cuts for the wealthy that accelerate widening income inequality in America.  Should those who most need Social Security sacrifice to pay for wars and tax cuts?

One of the most significant developments in the U.S. is the rapidly and severely increasing rich-poor gap.  A middle class standard of living is being suffocated and even slowly eliminated, as budget cuts cause an elimination of services that are hallmarks of first-world living.  Because the wealthiest Americans continue to consolidate both their monopoly on wealth and, more important, their control of Congress and the government generally, we respond to all of this by enacting even more policies which exacerbate that gap and favor even more the wealthiest factions while taking more from the poorest and most powerless.  And now, the very people responsible for the vulernable financial state of the U.S. want to address that problem by targeting one of the very few guarantors in American life of a humane standard of living:  Social Security.

I think Greenwald often goes a bit too far, but in this case I agree with him. Social Security has nothing to do with current deficits in the first place and expecting the poor to pay for destructive policy choices of the past is just plain wrong. Another aspect of this if that defenders of Obama seem to find it necessary to support the goals of the Deficit Commission has a necessary hallmark of  “seriousness”.

Yup, they’re ever so safe. No need for any drilling moratoriums. After all that might cost some money.

The justification to ban the mosque is no more rational than banning a soccer field in the same place because all the suicide bombers loved to play soccer.

via Ron Paul to Sunshine Patriots: Stop Your Demagogy About The NYC Mosque! | Ron Paul .com.

CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET OFFICE STEPS ALL OVER BOEHNER’S MESSAGE…. In his exceedingly silly speech on the economy today, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) proudly proclaimed, “All this ‘stimulus’ spending has gotten us nowhere.”

And almost immediately thereafter, the CBO made Boehner look pretty foolish.

The oft-criticized stimulus plan boosted the economy in the second quarter by as much as 4.5%, the Congressional Budget Office said on Tuesday.

In a report published the same day as Minority Leader John Boehner’s criticism of President Obama’s economic policy, the CBO said the stimulus law boosted the economy by between 1.7% and 4.5%, lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 percentage points and 1.8 percentage points and increased the number of people employed by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million.

This seems pretty significant, so let’s look at it from a few different angles.

First, as a real-world matter, economic growth was pretty slow in the second quarter (April to June), but the CBO report makes clear that without the stimulus, it wouldn’t have grown at all. In other words, a stimulus helped lead to tepid growth — the absence of a stimulus would have been significant economic contraction.

Second, this CBO data, like reports from the Council of Economic Advisors and the Office of Management and Budget, should effectively end the debate about whether the Recovery Act did what it set out to do. The stimulus effort was too small — criticism from conservative Republicans is completely backwards — but as designed, it was intended to give the economy a significant boost, and save and create millions of jobs. It did exactly that. Anyone who argues otherwise is either not paying attention or is being willfully dishonest.

via The Washington Monthly.

Willful dishonesty is a feature, not a bug, of the modern GOP.

So what’s the choice now? The Obama administration wants to preserve those parts of the original tax cuts that mainly benefit the middle class — which is an expensive proposition in its own right — but to let those provisions benefiting only people with very high incomes expire on schedule. Republicans, with support from some conservative Democrats, want to keep the whole thing.

And there’s a real chance that Republicans will get what they want. That’s a demonstration, if anyone needed one, that our political culture has become not just dysfunctional but deeply corrupt.

What’s at stake here? According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, making all of the Bush tax cuts permanent, as opposed to following the Obama proposal, would cost the federal government $680 billion in revenue over the next 10 years. For the sake of comparison, it took months of hard negotiations to get Congressional approval for a mere $26 billion in desperately needed aid to state and local governments.

And where would this $680 billion go? Nearly all of it would go to the richest 1 percent of Americans, people with incomes of more than $500,000 a year. But that’s the least of it: the policy center’s estimates say that the majority of the tax cuts would go to the richest one-tenth of 1 percent. Take a group of 1,000 randomly selected Americans, and pick the one with the highest income; he’s going to get the majority of that group’s tax break. And the average tax break for those lucky few — the poorest members of the group have annual incomes of more than $2 million, and the average member makes more than $7 million a year — would be $3 million over the course of the next decade.

How can this kind of giveaway be justified at a time when politicians claim to care about budget deficits? Well, history is repeating itself. The original campaign for the Bush tax cuts relied on deception and dishonesty. In fact, my first suspicions that we were being misled into invading Iraq were based on the resemblance between the campaign for war and the campaign for tax cuts the previous year. And sure enough, that same trademark deception and dishonesty is being deployed on behalf of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

via Op-Ed Columnist – Bush Tax Cuts – Now That’s Rich – NYTimes.com.

Bill Gross, who runs Pacific Investment Management Co.’s $239 billion Total Return Fund, said that policymakers “should quickly re-engineer” a plan that would refinance all non-delinquent mortgages backed by the federal government. The rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged a record-low 4.44 percent in the week ending Aug. 12, according to taxpayer-owned mortgage giant Freddie Mac.

Taxpayers guarantee the mortgages of 37 million households, or two-thirds of all homeowners with a mortgage, according to a July 29 note by David Greenlaw, Morgan Stanley’s chief U.S. fixed-income economist. That includes government agencies like the Federal Housing Administration as well as twin behemoths Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Greenlaw estimates about 18.5 million taxpayer-backed mortgages are at rates higher than 5.75 percent interest.

By refinancing those mortgages at current, lower rates, Greenlaw believes those homeowners would save $46 billion a year. Gross said the refi scheme would spur some $50-60 billion a year in new consumer spending and raise home prices between 5-10 percent. Forecasters, including Fannie Mae, say home prices are set to decline the rest of the year and into 2011. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said this month that a so-called double-dip recession is possible “if home prices go down.”

via Famed Investor Bill Gross Calls For Massive Taxpayer-Backed Mortgage Refinance Initiative.

Ezra “don’t call me JD from Scrubs” Klein has more:

The politics of this plan are interesting: The difficulty with most housing interventions is that they help the family that took on too much housing debt, and that makes their neighbors — who didn’t take on too much housing debt — angry. This plan, by contrast, helps the people who aren’t behind on their mortgages. It helps the people who’ve been doing everything right, but are nevertheless stuck in a crummy economy.

I haven’t been able to find a re-fi deal for our house. Since the bottom dropped out of real estate here in the Tampa Bay area, my loan to value ratio isn’t good enough to get anything less than the 5.75% I have now. I’m not behind on mine so non or the other plans had any impact on our household budget. This would definitely inject some liquidity into my personal econoomy.

I hear the same claptrap from people claiming Obama is a commie, socialist, Muslim  who doesn’t have a valid US birth certificate.  When in truth they don’t know what the first three words mean and are apparently Google impaired. This passes for intelligent discourse on the right.

In many ways I’ve never been happier. I have a loving wife who’s been a source of joy, my personal fountain of warmth and comfort. I’ve never loved someone as much and had it returned by orders of magnitude, freely and gracefully. I feel blessed and humbled by knowledge that our little girls earliest memories will be wreathed by the peals of laughter that flow naturally from her mother, like the springs that dot the Florida landscape. An expression of Joie de vivre, of happiness to be a mother and wife. We have a small, but happy home. Think “Love Song” by The Cure.

This is stark contrast to this grinding, soul wearing and near constant pain, that entered my life just about the same time as my Jeng. I won’t bore you with the dreary medical details of medication, spinal injections, MRIs and visits to various doctors to consider the surgical options. Suffice it to say that it’s never far away, sometimes just dull ache lurking on the margins of my consciousness. Other times it blots out all else in a dull red brown cloud obscuring, smothering and dominating my life. It’s not like that all day, but it is like that for at least part of everyday.

It brings with it an inescapable awareness of the beginning of my own long slide into decrepitude. We all suffer in life, it’s a fate we share in one way or another in our descent to entropy. I’ve lived long enough to realize that all things pass. The one Marxian idea I find unqualified agreement with is that the only constant in life is change. This phase of my life, our little family will inevitably move on. Little girls grow up, leave home and find their own lives, families and if they’re very lucky a love that lasts. Parents get older and eventually get sick and die. This is as it should be. It is the rhythm of life and death.

I’ve lost loved ones in the last few years that I can’t help but miss in ways both large and small. At some point it will be my turn as well, to move on to seek what Francois Rabelais termed “The Great Perhaps”. I watch my parent’s decline in health and vitality and see a forewarning. I don’t want to dwell too long on the morbid.

If I could, I’d like to stop things as they are now. I would like to savor the moment and reveille in it, just for a little while longer even if it came with the pain. It’s a price I’d gladly pay.

Down in flames, appeals sure to follow. This really will need to go to the Supreme Court. The real fear for me is that the Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Kennedy wing of the court will see nothing wrong with  enshrining discrimination in a state or federal law. I’m sure the right will scream and cry about how popular it is to ban gay marriage. Much the same way slavery or the ban on interracial marriage was popular.

Not long ago I would not have been able to marry my wife in many states: Arizona, California, Maryland, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming all had anti-miscegenation laws repealed between 1948-1967. Georgia, Missouri, South Carolina and Virgina had their laws overturned by the aptly named Loving v. Virgina Supreme Court ruling in 1967. Prior to that a Caucasian was not allowed to marry an Asian/Filipino. The 13 states listed above specifically mentioned either Asians or Filipinos. All told 41 states had anti-miscegenation laws, mostly covering Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans. It was extremely popular.

Fuck popular, that simply does not make it right. This is why we have a constitutional democracy, to defend the rights of the minority against the tyranny of the majority. I find this debate to be very personal to me.

Rachel Maddow points out that the GOP is in strident, table pounding opposition to themselves on cap and trade, the health insurance individual mandate, aid to small businesses, a deficit commission and disclosure of corporate campaign donations. The really astounding part is they seem to get a pass on all this crass hypocrisy by nearly all of the press:

As Rachel says: “How do you campaign against people who are simultaneously both for and against every major issue facing our nation?”

This needs to be turned into a campaign commercial series. Slap them in the face with sound bites of them taking both sides of all these issues.

When the Financial Times thinks that income distribution and middle class wage stagnation are a problem, I’d say that means it’s a long standing crisis:

The slow economic strangulation of the Freemans and millions of other middle-class Americans started long before the Great Recession, which merely exacerbated the “personal recession” that ordinary Americans had been suffering for years. Dubbed “median wage stagnation” by economists, the annual incomes of the bottom 90 per cent of US families have been essentially flat since 1973 – having risen by only 10 per cent in real terms over the past 37 years. That means most Americans have been treading water for more than a generation. Over the same period the incomes of the top 1 per cent have tripled. In 1973, chief executives were on average paid 26 times the median income. Now the ­multiple is above 300.

The trend has only been getting stronger. Most economists see the Great Stagnation as a structural problem – meaning it is immune to the business cycle. In the last expansion, which started in January 2002 and ended in December 2007, the median US household income dropped by $2,000 – the first ever instance where most Americans were worse off at the end of a cycle than at the start. Worse is that the long era of stagnating incomes has been accompanied by something profoundly un-American: declining income mobility.

Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French chronicler of early America, was once misquoted as having said: “America is the best country in the world to be poor.” That is no longer the case. Nowadays in America, you have a smaller chance of swapping your lower income bracket for a higher one than in almost any other developed economy – even Britain on some measures. To invert the classic Horatio Alger stories, in today’s America if you are born in rags, you are likelier to stay in rags than in almost any corner of old Europe.

Combine those two deep-seated trends with a third – steeply rising inequality – and you get the slow-burning ­crisis of American capitalism. It is one thing to suffer ­grinding income stagnation. It is another to realise that you have a ­diminishing likelihood of escaping it – particularly when the fortunate few living across the proverbial tracks seem more pampered each time you catch a glimpse. “Who killed the ­American Dream?” say the banners at leftwing protest marches. “Take America back,” shout the rightwing Tea Party demonstrators.

I wonder what a m0dern day Alexis de Tocqueville would say about it now? The GOP would like to lay all of this on the doorstep of the Obama administration. Voters may well go along with the usual suspects from the noise machine on the right. After all, he’s (kinda) black and sounds foreign, that’s enough for some.

Adam Serwer Archive | The American Prospect.

Remarkable. An organization whose stated role is to “counteract hatred, prejudice and bigotry” nonetheless opposes people building where they please simply because of the faith they adhere to. Sure “bigotry is unfair and wrong”, the ADL says, but we should give the bigots what they want anyway. It is inconceivable that the ADL would argue such a position if the building in question happened to be a synagogue, and the builders happened to be Jews.

Let’s be clear. This is not about the proposed Islamic Center. There is already a masjid in the neighborhood, and it’s been there for decades. This is about giving political cover to right-wing politicians using anti-Muslim bigotry as a political weapon and a fundraising tool. By doing this, the ADL is increasingly eroding its already weakened credibility as a nonpartisan organization.

I learned a very important lesson in Hebrew School that I have retained my entire life. If they can deny freedom to a single individual because of who they are, they can do it to anyone. Someone at the ADL needs to go back to Hebrew School.

If you need a reminder of just how big China is—and just how important the Internet has become there—consider this stat: between them, two Chinese ISPs serve 20 percent of all broadband subscribers in the entire world.

Telegeography has updated its world Internet service provider database and finds that the sheer scale of China dwarfs just about everyone else. China Telecom is the largest ISP in the world, with 55 million subscibers. Second is China Unicom, with just over 40 million.

And both companies continue to grow, even as growth slows significantly in more developed markets. Telegeography notes that each Chinese firm added nine million users in the last year—”equivalent to the entire broadband subscriber base

OK, even by contemporary standards, this is rich: the official Republican stance is now apparently that Bush left behind a budget that was in pretty good shape. Mitch McConnell:

The last year of the Bush administration, the deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product was 3.2 percent, well within the range of what most economists think is manageable. A year and a half later, it’s almost 10 percent.

They really do think that we’re idiots…

…I’d like to think that the raw dishonesty of this latest Bush defense would be obvious to everyone. But after the past decade, I’ve stopped believing such things. They think we’re idiots — and they may be right.

If it’s not so obvious, check the chart in the NY Times link. It’s an old trick, they use fiscal years (which end Sept 30) instead of calendar years. McConnell conveniently leaves out the last quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009, both of which are before Obama’s stimulus package went into effect. It also cuts out the TARP bank bailout that Bush signed into law in the last quarter of 2008. By the end of first quarter of fiscal year 2009 deficits were already at 9% of GDP, before Obama’s stimulus went into effect!

I think this gets to heart of what irritates me so much about the modern republican party. They really do think the American public is as dumb as truck load of bricks. I believe most people simply aren’t interested enough to follow the ongoing national political conversation. Perhaps their too busy trying to make ends meet, working and raising families. Maybe they think the whole thing is a corrupt game where the scum rises to the top. All three (and more) are probably true to some degree. The press is horribly complicit in amplifying false narratives to curry favor and all important access to policy makers. They’re so caught up in hawking stories that drive ratings and advertising revenue, they often miss the truth. The recent Shirley Sherrod affair is a good example of what I mean. It was exceptional in one way: they got caught in a blatant effort to smear her. Usually no one notices.

As previously noted the GOP is schizophrenic about deficit reduction, insisting that $30 billion in unemployment benefit extensions be paid for with offsetting cuts, but $600 billion in expiring tax cuts should never need to be paid for because the tax fairy magically offsets it.

The Democrats favor leaving the cuts in place for individuals below $200k and families under $250k and allowing rates above that to revert to the 2001 levels. So we’re talking about a 4% increase in the highest bracket (from about 35% to 39%). The GOP casts this as economic apocalypse. I’m thinking the period of time when rates were at that level was a whole helluva a lot better economically than they are now.

Rush Limbaugh said Thursday on his radio show that Fox News and at least one of its anchors “caved” in its coverage of Shirley Sherrod, the former USDA employee who was fired in haste on Monday after an edited clip of her was posted on a conservative website.

“I have to go after it … because even Fox caved on this,” Limbaugh said. “Even Shep Smith. Even poor old Shep Smith went down there and said that everybody’s wrong on this, that [BigGovernment.com founder Andrew] Breitbart is wrong and so forth. There’s only a handful of us that have the guts to put this story straight. If we don’t hammer back nobody will.”

Limbaugh dismissed the story, saying he was bored by it.

via CNN Political Ticker: All politics, all the time Blog Archive – Limbaugh says Fox News ‘caved’ in Sherrod coverage « – Blogs from CNN.com.

“Caved” is a strange way to phrase it. Fox and Breitbart were utterly wrong and got a woman fired for no reason. When confronted with the entire unedited video and a statement from the white farmer the anecdote was about saying she helped them retain their farm and are still friends to this day, Fox was forced to walk back their breathless coverage about white discrimination in the Dept. of Agriculture. The only real story here is that there was successful push back. Usually these smears go unanswered and the injustice remains. They didn’t get away with it for once.

I’m disappointed that the White House and the Dept of Ag asked the woman to resign, without investigation of unsubstantiated allegations. Their appears to be some over sensitivity about racial issue in the Obama administration.

I’m certain el Rushbo finds the truth boring. It’s not what he’s accustomed to dealing with.

Republicans are feeling good about the midterms — so good that they’ve started saying what they really think. This week the party’s Senate leadership stopped pretending that it cares about deficits, stating explicitly that while we can’t afford to aid the unemployed or prevent mass layoffs of schoolteachers, cost is literally no object when it comes to tax cuts for the affluent…

…this past Monday Jon Kyl of Arizona, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, was asked the obvious question: if deficits are so worrisome, what about the budgetary cost of extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, which the Obama administration wants to let expire but Republicans want to make permanent? What should replace $650 billion or more in lost revenue over the next decade?

His answer was breathtaking: “You do need to offset the cost of increased spending. And that’s what Republicans object to. But you should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.” So $30 billion in aid to the unemployed is unaffordable, but 20 times that much in tax cuts for the rich doesn’t count.

via Op-Ed Columnist – Redo That Voodoo – NYTimes.com.

Four current and two former New Orleans police officers have been charged in connection with the killing of unarmed civilians on the Danziger Bridge in the chaotic days after Hurricane Katrina, federal law enforcement officials announced here on Tuesday.

via Police Charged in Post-Katrina Shootings and Cover-Up – NYTimes.com.

Why does this make me sad? Because it’s hard to see the country prospering when one of its two major political parties is this economically illiterate. McConnell isn’t some backbencher. He’s Senate minority leader. And he thinks there’s “no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue.”

There’s an ontological question here about what, exactly, McConnell considers to be “evidence.” But how about the Congressional Budget Office’s estimations? “The new CBO data show that changes in law enacted since January 2001 increased the deficit by $539 billion in 2005. In the absence of such legislation, the nation would have a surplus this year. Tax cuts account for almost half — 48 percent — of this $539 billion in increased costs.” How about the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget? Their budget calculator shows that the tax cuts will cost $3.28 trillion between 2011 and 2018. How about George W. Bush’s CEA chair, Greg Mankiw, who used the term “charlatans and cranks” for people who believed that “broad-based income tax cuts would have such large supply-side effects that the tax cuts would raise tax revenue.” He continued: “I did not find such a claim credible, based on the available evidence. I never have, and I still don’t.”

It’s like arguing with 3 year old, there just isn’t any point Ezra.