Month: January 2013

What World do They Live In?

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These people are very sad, because their taxes are going up so much:

In the nick of time, and amid much political drama, Congress passed the American Taxpayer Relief Act on New Year’s Day—averting massive tax increases for nearly all earners that were slated to take effect Jan. 1.

 Even so, millions of people soon will feel something less than relief from the new law.
Tim Foley

 The bill approved in Congress to avert the fiscal cliff would bring the first major tax increase on high earners in 20 years. Laura Saunders breaks down how new tax increases will impact across different tax brackets. Photo: AP.

 While the top 1% of taxpayers will bear the biggest burden, many other families, affluent and poor, will pay more as well.

Yes, they all haz a sad, the single mom who makes 5x what the average household in the United States, the Family of 6 that makes 13x what the average household makes, and even the retirees, who pay no extra taxes, and make 3½x what the average household does, they haz a sad.

They all haz a sad.

Seriously, do the writers at the Wall Street Journal have even the vaguest idea of how most Americans actually live?

The 2016 Coup Attempt Begins

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The Republicans are looking to change electoral vote allocation to favor Republicans in 2016:

Earlier this week, Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus endorsed a Republican plan to rig the next presidential election to make it nearly impossible for the Democratic candidate to win the White House, no matter who the American people vote for. The election-rigging plan, which would allocate electoral votes by congressional district rather than by states as a whole in a handful of states that consistently vote for Democratic presidential candidates, would have allowed Mitt Romney to narrowly win the Electoral College last November despite losing the popular vote by nearly four points.

On Monday, seven Pennsylvania Republican state representatives introduced a bill to make this vote-rigging scheme a reality in their state. Under their bill, the winner of Pennsylvania as a whole will receive only 2 of the state’s 20 electoral votes, while “[e]ach of the remaining presidential electors shall be elected in the presidential elector’s congressional district.”

Under this scheme, Obama would have only gotten 7 electoral votes from Pennsylvania.

There would have been similar losses of electoral votes in Ohio, and Wisconsin, Florida, and Virginia.

This is part 94 of why the Electoral College sucks wet farts from dead pigeons.

This also explains why Republicans accuse people of acting like Stalin so often, they are projecting:  Because they try to act like Stalin, they think that everyone else does so too.

Stewart On Guns

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Best news analysis in the media

If you want to get a good background on the whole gun safety issue, you’d may not find a better primer than what Jon Stewart did last night.

He outlines the basics of the debate, and how the NRA has castrated both the ATF and the ability to collect meaningful data about gun violence.

Funny and educational.

I Blame the MBA Mentality

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The Boeing 787 Dreamliners fleet has been grounded worldwide:

Qatar Airways, Ethiopian Airlines and LOT Polish Airlines have joined the list of 787 operators that have stopped flying the aircraft following a U.S. FAA directive on Jan. 16. All 787 fleets worldwide have now been grounded.

………

The groundings were prompted by an incident on Jan. 16 in Japan, when an ANA 787 on a domestic flight declared an emergency and diverted to another airport. Pilots reported messages on cockpit indicators concerning the battery and other systems, and they also noticed an unusual odor in the cockpit and cabin. Inspections revealed that the main battery in the forward electronic equipment bay was discolored and its electrolysis solution had leaked.

The 787 has a lot of innovations, but one of its feature is a change in management strategy.

Boeing has outsourced much of the design and engineering to “risk sharing partners” (some of whom it was forced to buy to get things made right) .

To an MBA, it’s about cutting overhead.  In reality, it’s about losing control of the systems, some of which have never flown on a civil aircraft before, and losing the big picture on how that complex jigsaw puzzle all goes together.

The NRA are Contemptible Slime

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Yes, I know, and the sky is blue, but the just took out an ad going after Obama’s kids. I (for once) agree with WH spokesman Jay Carney:

Most Americans agree that a president’s children should not be used as pawns in a political fight. But to go so far as to make the safety of the President’s children the subject of an attack ad is repugnant and cowardly.

The NRA may be the most repulsive lobby in Washington.

Obama Makes Gun Control Proposal

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It is pretty much what I expected, with the high point for me, being the directive to the CDC to resume studies on the public health effects of gun violence:

The 23 executive actions Mr. Obama signed on Wednesday were largely modest initiatives to toughen enforcement of existing laws and to encourage federal agencies and state governments to share more information. Mr. Obama lifted a ban on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from conducting research on gun violence and directed that a letter be sent to health care providers saying doctors may ask patients about guns in their homes.

This, along with legislative proposals proposing closing the gun show loophole on background checks, and expanding the ability of federal agencies to track guns, are probably going to be the most significant.

By virtue of legislation (literally) written by the NRA over the past few decades, federal agencies have been prohibited from collecting date to examine the problem, or to determine which dealers are knowingly selling to criminals.

It was more than I expected.

Why the Half Measure on the Filibuster?

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Over at TPM, Josh Marshall wonders why, even though there appear to be the votes for requiring a full talking filibuster, that Harry Reid seems to be pushing for something weaker.

My take on this is that Reid, and other Senators of long tenure, are doing this because they have drunk the Koolaid* about the Senate being the, “World’s Greatest Deliberative Body.”

They want to protect what they see as the “unique character” of the Senate, and so they are leery of making more sweeping changes.

So, to paraphrase Alexei Sayle, they say “Worlds Greatest Deliberative Body”, and we say “Petri Dish for Narcissistic Sociopaths.”

The Senate ran for decades on tacit agreements that were never a formal part of the rules, and the social contract within the body has broken down, and so the formal rules need to change.

Word now is that the vote on the Senate Rules will be on the 22nd, and I am not optimistic.

*It was actually either Wyler’s or Flavor Aid at Jonestown, reports differ, not Koolaid.

Why Are We Supplying Arms to Bahrain?

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If anything, the crackdown on dissent in Bahrain is worse than in Syria, because of the overtones of ethnic cleansing against the Shia (At least the Syrians oppress everyone equally), and we are arming them:

Despite Bahrain’s bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, the U.S. has continued to provide weapons and maintenance to the small Mideast nation.

Defense Department documents released to ProPublica give the fullest picture yet of the arms sales: The list includes ammunition, combat vehicle parts, communications equipment, Blackhawk helicopters, and an unidentified missile system. (Read the documents.)

The documents, which were provided in response to a Freedom of Information Act request and cover a yearlong period ending in February 2012, still leave many questions unanswered. It’s not clear whether in each case the arms listed have been delivered. And some entries that only cite the names of weapons may in fact refer to maintenance or spare parts.

For all the evil that the rulers in Syria have done, they have not arrested doctors for treating protestors that came into their emergency rooms, and they haven’t demolished mosques of other sects, as the the Al Khalifa monarchy has done in Bahrain.

Both regimes should be replaced by something that better serves the needs of their citizens, but we are letting the House of Saud dictate our priorities, and surprisingly, they oppose a secular regime run largely by non-Sunnis, and they support a Sunni monarchy like themselves.

The real problem here is that the Arab monarchies will eventually fall, either violently in the manner of the Romanoffs of Russia, or peacefully, in the manner of the House of Windsor in the UK, and the more that we prop them up, the bigger the backlash when they fall.

Iran’s transition from US ally to foe, which derived directly from our unqualified support of a despot, would not suit our interests, nor the interests of the people in that part of the world.

My rule of thumb here is that if the House of Saud is for it, I’m against it.

The Fed’s Beige Book is Out

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Decent, but not great:

The U.S. economy picked up across much of the country last month, boosted by auto and home sales, even as the outlook for unemployment showed few signs of improvement, the Federal Reserve said.

“Economic activity has expanded since the previous Beige Book report, with all 12 districts characterizing the pace of growth as either modest or moderate,” the central bank said today in its Beige Book business survey, which is based on reports from the Fed’s district banks.

They Want Us Gone, Let’s Leave

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The Afghans want us gone:

Days after Afghan President Hamid Karzai and President Obama seemed to agree on the future role of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, a division has emerged over one of the American military’s most prized defense programs.

Top Afghan officials said Obama’s pledge last week to remove U.S. troops from Afghan villages should apply to Special Operations forces charged with training the Afghan Local Police. But U.S. officials said they assumed that the policy would apply only to traditional military operations and would include an exemption for the police trainers, whose mission they see as critical to security throughout Afghanistan.

The dispute underscored just how difficult negotiations over a long-term security partnership could be during the next year. The disagreement, like others before it, centers on the fundamental question of what will keep Afghans safe: U.S. officials say the local police program thwarts insurgents, but Karzai insists that it invites attacks.

The broader Afghan interpretation of the troop withdrawal, which Afghan officials said they believed would happen within weeks, would derail much of the Special Operations forces’ mission in Afghanistan and halt the expansion of the fastest-
growing Afghan security force, one that has cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

We’ve lost the war. Our allies don’t want want us there any more. It’s just time to go.

What a Surprise

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Another Obama administration foreclosure mitigation program has descended into a morass of corruption and self-dealing:

No wonder the Fed and the OCC snubbed a request by Darryl Issa and Elijah Cummings to review the foreclosure fraud settlement before it was finalized early last week. What had leaked out while the Potemkin borrower reviews were underway showed them to be a sham, as we detailed at length in an earlier post. But even so, what actually took place was even worse than hardened cynics had imagined.

………

There are some issues that are highlighted in the piece, others that are implication that get somewhat lost in the considerable detail. The first, as stressed by Sheila Bair and other observers, is that the reviews were never designed to succeed. This is something we and others pointed out; this was all an exercise in show. The OCC had entered into these consent orders in the first place with the aim of derailing the 50 state attorney general settlement negotiations. This was all intended to be diversionary, but to make it look like it had some teeth, borrowers who were foreclosed on in 2009 and 2010 who thought they were harmed were allowed to request a review. If hard was found, they could get as much as $15,000 plus their home back if they had suffered a wrongful foreclosure, or if they home had already been sold, $125,000 plus any equity in the home. Needless to say, the forms were written at the second grade college level, making them hard to answer. A whistleblower for Wells Fargo reported that of 10,000 letters, harm was found in none because the responses were interpreted in such a way as to deny harm (for instance, if the borrower did not provide dates of certain incidents, those details were omitted from the assessment).

Read the whole thing.

Republicans: Personal Responsibility for Thee, But Not for Mew

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A Republican Maryland Delegate Don Dwyer got drunk, and crashed his boat, fracturing the skull of a 5-year old girl.

His excuse was that gay marriage made him do it:

It is not funny that Maryland Delegate Don Dwyer drunkenly crashed his boat last year, fracturing the skull of a five-year-old girl. But it is funny that he is blaming gay marriage for the alcoholism that made him drunkenly crash his boat last year, fracturing the skull of a five-year-old girl! Oh, did we say “funny”? Well, seems like everything is funny to us! First, congratulations to Del. Dwyer for sitting down with the Capitol Gazette and making a searching and fearless moral inventory of himself. Second, the opposite of congratulations to Del. Dwyer for coming up with the positively Gingrichian “I was working too hard to protect the sanctity of marriage and that’s why I f%$#ed my aide drunkenly crashed a boat, fracturing the skull of a five-year-old girl.”

(%$# mine)

Seriously, do you have to be a self-involved psychopath to be a Republicans these days?  Because I don’t see any Republicans out there who don’t appear to have something missing in their basic humanity.

h/t Atrios.

OK, This Might Be Some Obama Eleventy Dimensional Chess

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As a result of Obama suggesting that he might issue some executive orders on the enforcement of federal gun control laws, a number of Republicans, including former Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese, are suggesting that Congress might impeach him for this:

Former Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese, now a prominent emeritus official at the Heritage Foundation, became the latest conservative to warn that President Obama could risk impeachment if he takes executive action on reducing gun violence in an interview Monday night.

Speaking with Newsmax, Meese said Congress may have to consider impeaching Obama if he were “to try to override the Second Amendment in any way” with an executive order. He did allow that there are some executive actions related to guns that Obama could take wouldn’t be impeachable.

I’m beginning to think that this is a response that Obama is encouraging, because, absent finding him in bed with a live boy or a dead girl, there is no way that the Republicans don’t end up with egg on their face if they pursue this.

Impeachment?  Over tighter enforcement of gun laws?  After some deranged lunatic murdered 29 people, including 20 children?

This is a level of stupid that simply boggles the mind.

Obama must be busy trying to stifle an evil overlord laugh.