Like many I was distressed the the effort to reform the filibuster collapsed.
But now, with the Hagel filibuster, I’m beinning to see that this is going to be something that will really, really hurt the GOP in 2014.
So maybe Harry Reid was just giving the GOP enough rope to hang itself with.
Is this what we’ve come to?
Since 1980, America’s Gross Domestic Product has risen from roughly $3.5 trillion to roughly $15 trillion. On the other hand, Americans pay less in taxes than they have since the 1950s.
But according to Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clark, we need to arm ourselves, since we can’t afford sufficient law enforcement to respond to 911 calls.
Our national wealth has increased five-fold, but now we can’t afford cops?
Of course we can. One reason we don’t is as most Americans’ wealth declines, they are reluctant to provide the necessary revenue (i.e., taxes). And those who have taken the lion’s share of our increased national wealth largely feel they shouldn’t have to accept a higher tax burden.
So, buy a gun, I guess.
Abraham Lincoln wisely pointed out that you can’t fool all the people all the time, which explains the impending demise of the conservative revolution.
The conservative program of activating white voters out of fear of non-whites, patriarchists out of fear of abortion, and I-don’t-know-what out of fear of gays is at last showing signs of terminal disintegration in our national elections.
Having lost its electoral advantages, the GOP is now desperately seeking to maintain its political advantages with measures at the state level that will utterly ruin the party for a generation. Republicans are attempting to distort elections through voter restrictions, gerrymandering and even a program to game the electoral vote. As people come to see how fundamentally un-democratic (small D) these measures are, voters will develop an abiding distrust of the party that has promoted them.
Ironically, the Republican attempt to reapportion the electoral vote could lead to greater democracy, by making people aware of both the troublesome nature of the electoral college and an elegant way to render it obsolete.
Anyone who wants to make the electoral vote process more democratic (again, small D) should look no further than the National Popular Vote movement, whose aim is to ensure that presidential elections can only be won by candidates who win the votes of most Americans. (You can get details at nationalpopularvote.com.)
If state Republican legislators are serious about democracy, they will join this movement, which will ensure that Wisconsin’s electoral votes go the person who wins the votes of the majority of all Americans, not to the person who wins in gerrymandered districts.
Conservatives have not been able to convince Americans of their failed ideas. If they attempt to retain political power by rigging elections, they will reap the whirlwind.
Don’t take it from me. Take it from the most famous Republican of them all.
Guns designed to kill humans should not be in the hands of ordinary citizens. I’d rather they weren’t in the hands of police or the military, but that would be a different world altogether.
I’m confident that the intention of the Second Amendment is not to arm citizens for the purpose of killing fellow citizens, but that is basically the argument we’ve been hearing from “guns everywhere” advocates.
The private ownership of handguns and assault rifles — weapons designed and created almost exclusively to kill human beings — should be illegal. To remove the tens of millions of such guns already circulating in society, we should establish an aggressive buy-back program. If we have to sweeten the deal, every illegal weapon thus returned would be replaced with a sporting weapon — a rifle or shotgun.
I leave it to others to critique the arguments about training and freedom — my space is limited here. I would only point out that comparing handgun prohibition to the prohibition of prostitution and intoxicants is an attempt to compare an urge that few people act on to urges that virtually everyone acts on.
We can debate, I suppose, whether sex and intoxication are wrong, but I think most of us agree that killing humans is almost always wrong.
So, let’s get the means to do so out of the hands of ordinary citizens.
So, you take a pay cut because someone said it’ll make the business better — in fact, business will be so good, you’ll end up making more money. But despite a loss of income, you keep spending money on rent, medical expenses, saving for retirement, and so on, as if nothing has changed. In fact, you even buy a couple of new cars.
But a funny thing happens: Your debt soars and the business doesn’t do better — it does worse – so you really need the money you lost in the pay cut. (And of course, it was foolish to buy those cars.) But you’re told that you don’t deserve a raise!
If you want government to be run like your household, the scenario above pretty well describes the sort of household the Republicans have been running. The Republican-led government created a big tax cut and two unfunded wars — and now their solution is cutting Social Security and Medicare?
Let’s get one thing straight: The wrangling we’re seeing over the so-called fiscal cliff is really just a skirmish in the larger war against the social safety net, dating back to the creation of Social Security in the 1930s.
The conservative game plan for decades has been to manufacture crises like the current one by cutting revenues to the federal government. Restore taxes to a sensible level — and stop fighting foolish wars — and the crisis goes away.
And let’s stop talking about the revenue solution as though we’re raising taxes. Let’s call it the end of a tax holiday for the wealthy.
Some of my thoughts on the election
I’m convinced Obama wants to do the right things, but that requires that his supporters become effective advocates for his policies, and polices like them at every level of government. The fact that Romney won the money game but lost the election can’t have been lost on elected officials, who will continue to pay attention when they hear from informed, organized citizens. We still count votes, not dollars, on election day.
Paul Ryan: “It’s clear the stimulus didn’t work.”
News Item: “Mitt Romney accused President Barack Obama in person and in TV advertising Tuesday of cutting Medicare “to pay for Obamacare.” (JSonline/AP)
Why would anyone in their right mind believe that Obama is more likely to destroy Medicare than Romney/Ryan?
Of course, re: global warming, why would anyone believe Exxon Mobile rather than disinterested scientists?
When I was born in 1954, a Republican President was embarking on the most ambitious peacetime infrastructure in American history, the Interstate Highway System. The top marginal tax rate was 91%.
When I was 12 years old, Voting Rights Act finally ensured that African Americans enjoyed the franchise they’d been denied for hundreds of years. CEOs were paid 24 times what their workers were paid
By the time I graduated from grade school, Medicare guaranteed a minimum level of affordable health care for the elderly. Before my 12th birthday, Americans walked on the Moon.
When I graduated from the University of Wisconsin – Madison my tuition accounted for 20% of the cost of my education. Public funds made up most of the difference.
But then something happened. I tend to think of it as Reaganism, but it has since metastasized into something even more grotesque.
Since the 1980s
Baby-boomers have enjoyed better pay, more equal distribution of wealth, well-funded public education, ever-improving infrastructure, a more progressive tax system, and better health care than the generations before them.
Following generations are losing all these things, in large part because their elders are have been fighting for lower taxes.
Seems to me we’ve climbed a ladder to prosperity and are now pulling it up behind ourselves. Following generations be damned!
It’s shameful, really.
You have to give the Republicans credit: They know how to create problems.
Take the current fiscal mess. Republicans have cut revenues — notably by cutting taxes for people who don’t need tax relief — spent billions on unpaid-for wars, deregulated us into a financial meltdown (thereby lowering tax revenues) — and now are hollering about the looming deficit.
This is not an accident. Republicans have created an enormous deficit as part of a larger plan to eliminate the programs of the New Deal and the Great Society. These programs were created because capitalism, for all its wealth-creating virtues, tends to unequal distribution of wealth, concentration of power in private hands, and ultimately the brutalization of society. In order for capitalism to survive, society must mitigate its negative effects.
To put it in a slogan, big government counterbalances big business.
Now, it may be that Paul Ryan does not see all this, and sincerely believes that American government is somehow more pernicious than say, the government of Germany, which somehow manages to have a large government and a thriving private sector.
Or it may be that all the deficit hawkishness is a trojan horse to establish an old-school oligarchy in the U.S.
For my part, I think a social system controlled by the voting public is better than one controlled by people who are simply better at making money than most people.
But to return to the fiscal crisis, all we need to restore the country’s finances is responsible taxation, avoiding costly wasteful wars, and putting a bridle back on the financial sector.
And we can do it without putting the elderly out on the street.
Since everyone’s speculating about what’s in Mitt Romney’s tax returns, I’ll take a quick stab.
Let’s stipulate that Romney paid no taxes for the last 10 years. Let’s further stipulate that he broke no laws to avoid paying taxes.
Fine. If someone told me how to legally avoid paying any taxes, I probably wouldn’t send a donation to the IRS. I’m not saying I shouldn’t, I’m just confessing to a selfish streak in myself.
However, I would also say that a tax code that lets a multimillionaire pay no taxes is crazy and needs to be fixed. It’s as though we are deliberately saying, “If you’re rich, you’re above taxes.”
No one likes taxes, but responsible people agree that they are necessary.
So, hold your nose and pay some goddam taxes like the rest of us, Mitt!
So now the right wing is trying to gin up the charge that Obama wants to destroy jobs with the sequestration agreed upon by all parties during the debt ceiling debate of 2011.
Leaving aside the question of whether this is just whining by people who don’t want to take their medicine, it seems fair to ask why the defense jobs — essentially public works jobs, since they’re paid for with public dollars — are more valuable than the public sectors jobs that have been lost by budget cuts at the state and federal level (and local, by virtue of the loss of shared revenue suffered by municipalities).
I would argue that, salaries being equal, they are of equal value economically, though of course politically they are not.
So, the GOP gets to cut jobs to save public dollars, but now they are trying to wriggle out of an agreement by blaming Obama for losing jobs.
And by the way, we’ve been told that government spending doesn’t create jobs, so why should government cuts cost jobs?
A man walks into a crowded theater and starts shooting, killing 12 and wounding scores.
We can learn two important about our society from this horrifying event
First, the fact that no one returned fire suggests that, while many or most of the theater-goers could have chosen to arm themselves before going to the theater, they chose not to. They rejected the notion that they ought to prepare to kill other human beings before leaving their homes.
That is, they are like the vast majority of Americans.
Second, their assailant was enabled by a small group of people who take the opposite view, that people should be prepared to use deadly force against their fellow citizens. They believe that it s a constitutional right of persons to arm themselves to the teeth with weapons designed for attacking groups of well-armed and prepared enemies. (That is what assault weapons are.)
James Holmes was not a member of “a well-regulated militia,” yet he was legally armed like a soldier going to war.
This does not make sense to me, nor to most Americans. Yet it was so, and a terrible thing resulted. And why? Because the National Rifle Association has captured our government.
We need to have a discussion about how a well-funded minority can warp the national will, but for now, it behooves Americans to put their local, state and national legislators on notice that the NRA has led us to an unacceptable state of affairs.
Until we do, more families will soon be burying loved ones slaughtered like those in Aurora Colorado.
What do you call people who are against people collectively determining their working conditions and who are for more restrictive voting regulations?
I don’t think you call them lovers of democracy or popular will.
Re: Voter ID, we’re going to disenfranchise thousands of people to prevent voter fraud which numbers at best a few tens out of millions of ballots cast?
Those concerned about voter fraud ought to spend their energy on making sure that voting machines are above suspicion.
It seems our open season on human beings is just getting started. A shooting of a robber in Milwaukee, the killing of an unarmed young man in Florida and the killing of another unarmed man in West Bend are appalling and disturbing.
They are also the consequences of an unholy alliance between the NRA and ALEC.
It’s bad enough that the messengers of the GOP have constantly provoked fear and hatred among Americans. Now they are putting guns into the hands of those they’ve disturbed.
None of these shootings were in defense of human life; they were in defense of property at best, and at worst the tragic consequences of overblown, unrealistic fears.
There is a profound immorality at work here. The makers and promoters of handguns — whose true purpose is to allow humans to kill their fellows – should be called to task for the lust for money and power that is motivating them.
We are approaching a point of no return: Either we increase taxes, or we abandon the New Deal (i.e., Social Security) and the Great Society (i.e., Medicare/Medicaid).
Make no mistake, the deficits are essentially the product of the relentless drive to reduce taxes. Every tax cut beginning with Reagan led to enormous deficits. The difference now is Tea Party intransigence (or irresponsibility) on raising taxes.
And what have we gotten from lower taxes (principally for the very wealthy)? Lousy roads and schools, stagnant wages for most Americans, and a few people getting insanely wealthy.
We would do well to recall the destitution that typically accompanied old age before Social Security. We’d do well also to recognize that, with all its faults, Medicare is the best-run, most cost-effective health insurance enterprise in the United States.
The problems of most people in this country stem not from high taxes, but low wages, not from big government, but big business.
Eventually, even the Tea Party folks (well, not all of them) will probably figure this out. The question is whether it will be too late by then.
So some Tea Party candidates got elected to Congress. Good for them. I could pretend I respect their views, but why bother? I’ll only concede their right to hold those views.
What I won’t concede is that they have such a perfect vision of the truth that they get to destroy everyone else’s economy.
The Tea Party is welcome to their irrational devotion to tax breaks for the richest Americans. But common sense and the America way of government demands that they recognize and respect the views of the majority of Americans who realize that enough is enough already.
In other words, compromise. The freshmen hardliners need to understand that their view is not the only view, and is in fact a minority view. (That is, if you’re counting voters; if you’re counting dollars I suppose you get a different result.)
Tax breaks for the wealthiest simply have not benefited most Americans. Polls show that 60% of Americans recognize this. But rather than accepting a return to historically normal rates of taxation on the wealthiest Americans, the Tea Party is willing to bring economic ruination on America and the world.
It’s a bitter disappointment to me that President Obama is not hammering on this point every hour of every day.
What are the leading causes of the deficit?
1) Bush’s wars
2) Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy
3) the economic meltdown.
So what are the solutions?
1) Eliminate tax cuts for the wealthy
2) Stimulate the economy
3) Get out of Afghanistan and Iraq ASAP.
Job done.
This, of course, isn’t happening. Discuss.
I usually abhor psychologizing by amateurs like myself but it hit me just now that there’s a kind of timidity in Walker’s constitutional* refusal to negotiate.
I think he’s afraid he’s not smart enough to handle himself in a serious policy discussion.
I think he’s a political idiot savant, but when comes to policy, he’s quickly out of his depth, and at some level he knows it.
So he just takes a position and sticks to it, even if he has to resort to lies — perhaps even to himself — to justify it.
* Not in the sense of rules of governance, but in the way his personality is constituted.
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