Tag Archives: documentary

It’s Republicans, Not Obama, Who Want to Bust the Sequestration Deal

Mother Jones

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The LA Times reports today that we might be headed for another government shutdown. Big surprise. But these paragraphs are very peculiar:

President Obama has signaled his intention to bust, once and for all, the severe 2011 spending caps known as sequestration. He’s vowed to reject any GOP-backed appropriation bills that increase government funding for the military without also boosting domestic programs important to Democrats such as Head Start for preschoolers.

The Republican-controlled Congress is also digging in. Since taking control in January, GOP leaders had promised to run Congress responsibly and prevent another shutdown like the one in 2013, but their spending proposals are defying the president’s veto threat by bolstering defense accounts and leaving social-welfare programs to be slashed.

It’s true that Obama has proposed doing away with the sequestration caps. But his budgets have routinely been described as DOA by Republican leaders, so his plans have never gotten so much as a hearing. What’s happening right now is entirely different. Republicans are claiming they want to keep the sequestration deal, but they don’t like the fact that back in 2011 they agreed it would cut domestic and military spending equally. Instead, Republicans now want to increase military spending and decrease domestic spending. They’re doing this by putting the additional defense money into an “emergency war-spending account,” which technically allows them to get around the sequester caps. Unsurprisingly, Obama’s not buying it.

So how does this count as Obama planning to “bust” the sequestration caps? I don’t get it. It sounds like Obama is willing to stick to the original deal if he has to, but he’s quite naturally insisting that this means sticking to the entire deal. It’s Republicans who are trying to renege. What am I missing here?

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It’s Republicans, Not Obama, Who Want to Bust the Sequestration Deal

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Will the Tea Party Shoot Itself in the Foot Yet Again?

Mother Jones

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Paul Waldman notes today that although Jeb Bush is substantively pretty conservative, his tone on the campaign trail has remained resolutely moderate and affable. Waldman explains how this leads to Bush winning the nomination:

If you’re Bush, your path to victory looks like this: Trump soaks up all the attention for a while, but eventually gets bored (and hasn’t bothered to mount an actual campaign that can deliver votes), and either fades or just packs it in. Meanwhile, the conservative vote is split. Once the voting starts, the failing candidates will begin to fall away one by one. But by the time most of them are gone and their supporters have coalesced around a single candidate like Scott Walker, it’s too late — Jeb has built his lead and is piling up delegates, has all the money in the world, and can vanquish that last opponent on his way to the convention in Cleveland.

In other words, a repeat of 2012, when all the hard-core conservatives split the tea party vote ten ways while Mitt Romney quietly vacuumed up the entire moderate vote. By the time Rick Santorum was the last tea partier standing, it was too late. Romney coasted to victory.

This is the great conundrum of the tea-party wing of the Republican Party. What they should do is coalesce immediately around Scott Walker. He’s the most plausible winner among the tea partiers, and if the race was basically between him and Bush from the start, there’s a pretty good chance he could win. On the other hand, if he has to fight off a dozen challengers for months on end, it’ll just be rerun of 2012. He’ll get a share of the tea party vote, but it won’t be nearly enough to fend off Bush, who will have his own share of the tea partiers plus the vast majority of the wing of the GOP that’s disgusted that their party has been taken over by loons. And there are still quite a few of those folks around.

I guess this is where a smoke-filled room would come in handy. This is a classic collective action problem, but without party bosses who can step in and take charge, there’s really no answer to it. The tea-party candidates keep thinking that they can run and win because there are so many tea partiers among the Republican primary electorate. Unfortunately, there are too many of them who think so. The end result is that they tear each other to shreds and end up with John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Jeb Bush. And then they whine and complain about how “the party” has betrayed the conservative cause yet again.

This isn’t inevitable, of course. It’s possible that Walker or one of the other mean-boy candidates will break out and become the de facto tea party standard bearer. It’s just not as likely as it should be. It’s a shame the tea partiers can’t get their act together, isn’t it?

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Will the Tea Party Shoot Itself in the Foot Yet Again?

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ISIS Is Losing the War, But That Doesn’t Mean We’re Winning It

Mother Jones

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Zack Beauchamp says that ISIS is losing the war. His evidence is the map on the right. ISIS may have taken over Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria, but overall they’ve lost about 9 percent of the territory they controlled at the beginning of the year:

This points to one of ISIS’s most fundamental problems: It has too many enemies….ISIS’s fighters might be skilled, but they can’t fight everyone at once.

True enough. What may be more interesting, though, is who they lost that territory to. Here are the numbers for territorial gains:

+11% — Syrian rebels
+10% — Kurdish forces
+4.5% — Iraqi government

In other words, Iraqi forces were responsible for less than a fifth of the total gains from ISIS. Add to that their humiliating loss in Ramadi, about an hour’s drive from Baghdad, and there’s still not much evidence that the Iraqi government has a clue about how to fight ISIS. It remains unclear how and when that will change.

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ISIS Is Losing the War, But That Doesn’t Mean We’re Winning It

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Today’s Trivia Quiz

Mother Jones

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Quick trivia question: When was the last time one of the two major parties nominated a candidate for president who was neither a politician nor a former general?

The prize for the winner is that they get to relax about the possibility of Donald Trump becoming the 45th president of the United States.

UPDATE: Such smart commenters! The answer is Wendell Wilkie, 75 years ago. He lost, of course.

So who was the last person to win the presidency with no previous political or military experience? Answer: no one. The closest call is probably Herbert Hoover, whose only political experience before 1928 was eight years as the appointed Secretary of Commerce. And look what happened to him.

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Today’s Trivia Quiz

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Chart of the Day: The Economy Continues to Plod Along

Mother Jones

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GDP was up in the second quarter, but our economy is still not exactly a house afire. Preliminary results indicate an increase of 2.3 percent:

The BEA explains where last quarter’s growth came from:

The acceleration in real GDP growth in the second quarter reflected an upturn in exports, an acceleration in PCE, a deceleration in imports, and an upturn in state and local government spending that were partly offset by downturns in private inventory investment, in nonresidential fixed investment, and in federal government spending and a deceleration in residential fixed investment….Real personal consumption expenditures increased 2.9 percent in the second quarter, compared with an increase of 1.8 percent in the first.

Really, the chart tells the whole story. As you can see, 2.3 percent growth is about….average since the recession ended. Not great, not horrible. Every time we manage to get into third gear for a little while, we hit a bump and end up back in second. It’s now been eight years since the economy imploded, and we’re still just muddling along. It’s not clear what it will take to improve things.

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Chart of the Day: The Economy Continues to Plod Along

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There’s a New Planned Parenthood Video, But There’s Just Nothing There

Mother Jones

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Another day, another video hit job on Planned Parenthood. Apparently the strategy here is to release new videos every three or four days and hope that mere repetition is enough to convince people that something—something—must be wrong here. Over at National Review, Ian Tuttle is disturbed:

At the 10:22 mark of the Center for Medical Progress’s latest video, released today, there is a picture of a hand. By the curve of the thumb and the articulation of the fingers, one can see that it is a right hand. It was formerly the right hand of an 11.6-week-old fetus; it is now part of the various organic odds and ends being sifted through on a plate in the pathology lab of a Planned Parenthood clinic.

….I keep calling it a hand. Maybe I shouldn’t….But I see a hand — five fingers and lines across the joints, like you learn to sketch in art class. I see a hand in form no different from my own. Or no different from Horowitz’s hands, or Edison’s, or Michelangelo’s.

The most famous image Michelangelo painted was of hands: God’s hand extended to Adam’s….The sculptor Auguste Rodin spent much of his life fashioning hands….Rodin prefigured Heidegger’s observation: “My hand . . . is not a piece of me. I myself am entirely in each gesture of the hand, every single time.”….Galen of Pergamon, the great Greek physician, in his treatise On the Use of the Various Parts of the Body, noted that to man alone had the Creator chosen to give the hand, the only instrument “applicable to every art and occasion”:

….The gods, the arts, survival, history — all that we are has required, literally, many hands. In the hand, the whole man, and in the man, the whole cosmos.

Now, in a pie dish, for sale.

That’s very poetic, but like the video itself, tells us nothing. Yes, Planned Parenthood donates fetal tissue to medical research facilities. They charge enough to cover their costs, nothing more. Among the tissue they donate are hands. And this is not a sinister “black market,” as the video claims: It’s done in the open with the permission of the mother, and the tissue is transferred only to qualified researchers.

The idea behind the video, of course, is that it’s supposed to automatically trigger disgust in us. And it does. After all, most of us felt a little disgusted when we dissected frogs in 9th grade biology. It’s just part of human nature, and the Planned Parenthood haters are smart to take advantage of it.

But you know what? I’m an organ donor. I’m not sure my organs are actually safe for harvesting anymore, but if they are, then my body will be chopped up and used for its best and highest purpose when I’m dead. Some organs will be used for transplants, I hope. Some will be given to research laboratories. Some may end up as the raw materials for other stuff. If I were alive and watching, I’d probably feel pretty queasy. And yet, no one really blinks an eye at the routine job of harvesting organs and tissue from dead people who have given their permission.

This is no different. It’s every bit as altruistic and admirable as harvesting useful tissue from adults. Period.

So far, the worst anyone has come up with from these videos is that some of the Planned Parenthood folks caught on tape used a “tone” that was unfortunate. Give me a break. This is the way any doctor talks among other health care professionals. They’re experienced enough to talk plainly about their work in private, and they make jokes about it like any normal person. It’s simply wrong to pretend that this is anything ominous.

And that hand on the pie dish? Who knows? It might save someone’s life someday.

POSTSCRIPT: And I’ll repeat what I said before. If you think abortion is murder, then of course you object to the use of organs and tissue from aborted fetuses. If you don’t, then you think it’s fine. There’s nothing new going on here. It’s just a slightly different twist on the same fight between pro-lifers and pro-choicers that’s been going on for decades

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There’s a New Planned Parenthood Video, But There’s Just Nothing There

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My Un-Miracle

Mother Jones

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If a miracle happened on Friday, an un-miracle happened on Sunday. I was fine all day Friday, fine on Saturday, and fine Sunday. Until lunchtime. Then I collapsed again. Ditto on Monday around 10 am. Ditto again today.

As usual, no idea what’s going on. But I’ll blog whenever I have spurts of energy.

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My Un-Miracle

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My Day

Mother Jones

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Heart test. Check. EKG. Check. Chest X-ray. Check. Complete spinal X-ray. Check. 20 vials of blood drawn. Check. All that’s left is a lung test tomorrow and dropping off a stool sample. Then I get a week off before I visit City of Hope for an orientation and further instructions in preparation for the stem cell transplant in April. Progress!

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My Day

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Factlet of the Day: Mutual Funds Suck

Mother Jones

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Jeff Sommer summarizes the results of actively managed mutual funds over the past five years:

If all of the managers of the 2,862 funds hadn’t bothered to try to pick stocks at all — if they had merely flipped coins — they would, as a group, probably have produced better numbers.

I am not an investment advisor, so do whatever you want to do. But if you’re smart, you’ll invest in a few low-fee index funds and then just leave them alone. That is the path of wisdom.

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Factlet of the Day: Mutual Funds Suck

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Ides of March Catblogging – 15 March 2015

Mother Jones

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Et tu, Hopper? A few days ago I featured Hilbert draped over my sister, so I figured that turnabout is fair play: here’s Hopper draped over me to make up for the lack of normal Friday catblogging. Hopper is a Daddy’s girl, and will sit on no one’s lap but mine. Nor will she even do that very often. But once or twice a day she suddenly gets in the mood and plonks herself into the crook of my arm for an hour or so, purring loudly the whole time. Unlike the tubby Hilbert, Hopper weighs a svelte 11 pounds (up from nine when we first got her), so she’s no trouble at all to handle. A relaxing time is had by all.

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Ides of March Catblogging – 15 March 2015

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