Headlines - Sunday July 17

 

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No Class Warfare Here!

 

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How appropriate.

Newt Gingrich's presidential campaign is over $1 million in debt, nearly half of which -- $451,946 -- is attributable to his preference for private jets.

That's how much the Gingrich campaign owes to Moby Dick Airways, the same company he used for flights paid for by his former 527 group, American Solutions. In April, May and June of last year, American Solutions gave $677,539 to Moby Dick Airways.

Adding in the $41,453 and $10,478 payments Gingrich's campaign already made to Moby Dick in April and May brings the total amount he paid the private plane company over the half-million mark. His list of campaign expenditures includes 30 separate travel-related payments, most of them for thousands of dollars each.

Man of the people, indeed. What a douchebag.

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Gravity is for losers.

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As if we haven't already had enough "persecuted Christianity" nonsense lately ...

AFA's Bryan Fischer: Criticizing The Bachmanns Is An Anti-Hetero Hate Crime

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World Net Daily today runs an editorial from former SNL cast member Victoria Jackson, who says that the president is exactly like Hitler. And he's going to kill you.

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Republicans - holding the world hostage

Anyone possessing a shred of rational thought understands that Republicans are playing with fire in threatening to let the U.S. default on its payments. With the August 2nd deadline looming, economists across the country have warned of the disastrous effect to the economy should the debt ceiling not be raised from its current level of $14.3 trillion. Moody's and Standard and Poor's are now both talking of cutting the country's AAA credit rating.

Despite major concessions by a Democratic President with his proposal to make huge spending cuts to social programs, Republicans have still refused to raise the debt ceiling. They have been adamant in blocking any proposal which calls for tax increases, no matter how minor they might be – a case of pure insanity compliments of Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform – a gathering for the rationally challenged.

As Paul Krugman points out in a piece titled Getting To Crazy, no one who has seriously followed Republican's 40 year slow climb into madness should be surprised by any of their behavior. At the root of it all, lies this basic thought:

…the modern G.O.P. fundamentally does not accept the legitimacy of a Democratic presidency — any Democratic presidency. We saw that under Bill Clinton, and we saw it again as soon as Mr. Obama took office.

As a result, Republicans are automatically against anything the president wants, even if they have supported similar proposals in the past. Mitt Romney's health care plan became a tyrannical assault on American freedom when put in place by that man in the White House. And the same logic applies to the proposed debt deals.

And now, the debt crisis saga finds global financial markets beginning to panic. At stake here is much more than the collapse of the U.S. economy. The entire world's economy has been put at risk by Republicans refusal to compromise. Der Spiegel has compiled German reaction to the ongoing craziness on the American side of the Atlantic. Here's a sampling.

"Playing poker is part of politics, as is theatrical posturing. That's fair enough. But what America is currently exhibiting is the worst kind of absurd theatrics. And the whole world is being held hostage.

"Irrespective of what the correct fiscal and economic policy should be for the most powerful country on earth, it's simply not possible to stop taking on new debt overnight. Most importantly, the Republicans have turned a dispute over a technicality into a religious war, which no longer has any relation to a reasonable dispute between the elected government and the opposition."

"If it continues like this, the US will be bankrupt within a few days. It would cause a global shockwave like the one which followed the Lehman bankruptcy in 2008, which triggered the worst economic crisis since the war. Except it would be much worse than the Lehman bankruptcy. The political climate in the US has been poisoned to a degree that is hard for us (Germans) to imagine. But we should all fear the consequences."

No, it's not hard to imagine at all as to how the American political climate has been poisoned. You just had to be paying attention for the last few decades and been witness to Republicans "getting to crazy". Any people which believe that a Michele Bachmann would make a credible president, deserve what they get. Unfortunately, the rest of the world must also pay the price.

 

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One of Murdoch's top confidants has been arrested. From the Guardian.

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Murdoch cuts off news anchor who asks about the News of the World scandal

Fair and balanced, of course. Meanwhile, Fox News whines about the "piling on" by the media during the hacking crisis. Yes, because we never, ever saw Fox News pile on when it was a Democrat involved in a scandal. During the Clinton-Lewisky affair the public showed limited interest in the story yet it was non-stop. Fox News has been one of the worst offenders when it comes to piling on.

Related is the news that Murdoch has been donating large amounts of cash to the US Chamber of Commerce who are fighting against anti-bribery laws. Considering the recent events, these laws could have a significant impact on Murdoch's News Corp which may be facing bribery charges.

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That sound you hear is a progressive netroots primal scream as anonymous sources claim Obama has given up trying to get Warren confirmed as the head of the CFPB.

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And that would be the same Senate that won't vote on his nominees, right? "The House on Friday approved an amendment to a 2012 energy and water spending bill that would cut off the salaries of recess appointees to several agencies. ... The amendment sponsored by Rep. Jeff Landry, R-La., passed 227-193, and is attached to a 2012 spending bill that still has a long way to go before being signed into law. ... But the message of the vote was clear -- House Republicans want President Obama to stop appointing officials to his administration without Senate approval."

 

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Another glimpse of our future, because climate change victims will not stay put and die quietly. "East Africa's hunger crisis has been described by a US official as one of the worst humanitarian crisis in decades amid stepped-up efforts by Western countries to provide relief aid and a decision by Kenya to open a fourth camp for starving refugees. Tens of thousands of Somali refugees are flooding camps in Ethiopia and Kenya - at a rate of more than 3,000 new arrivals per day - in search of food after several seasons without rain killed livestock and destroyed crops in Somalia. "There are many seasoned relief professionals who would tell you we haven't seen a crisis this bad in a generation," Reuben Brigety, the deputy assistant secretary responsible for state department assistance to refugees and conflict victims in Africa, said on Saturday."

 

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Tell us again how climate change is a "hoax" "It was in 1985 that Apa Sherpa, who scaled Mount Everest for the 21st time in May 2011, came face to face with climate change. His entire village Thame was washed away in a massive glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) of the Dig Tsho (Tsho-lake), in the western section of the Sagarmatha (Mt. Everest) National Park, Khumbu Himal, on August 4, 1985. ... The veteran mountaineer, who dropped out of school at 12 to work as a porter for expeditions to support his family, told The Hindu that the lake burst at 2 a.m. and he had a narrow escape. Now his worry is another glacial lake in the Everest region, Imja, which is growing bigger. "Imja Khola is a threat to the entire region and I can't say if it is as safe as is made out to be. We have to do something before it bursts." Imja, located in the Khumbu region close to the Everest base camp, did not exist in photographs taken in the 1950s, but now has rapidly expanded to 1.012 sq km. "

 

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Biblical theme park couldn't pass up Ky. offer

 

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Our last balanced budget was 11 years ago

 

It's only republicans who are incapable of balancing a budget, Mitchie-poo.

Steve Benen:

We're facing a jobs crisis, weak economic growth, and the prospect of voluntarily default, created entirely by congressional Republicans, in less than three weeks.

With this in mind, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) took to the Senate floor this morning to talk about what he considers to be really important: a constitutional amendment that has no chance of being ratified.

"The time has come for a balanced budget amendment that forces Washington to balance its books. If these debt negotiations have convinced us of anything, it's that we can't leave it to politicians in Washington to make the difficult decisions that they need to get our fiscal house in order. The balanced budget amendment will do that for them. Now is the moment. No more games. No more gimmicks. The Constitution must be amended to keep the government in check. We've tried persuasion. We've tried negotiations. We're tried elections. Nothing has worked."

What a beautiful summary of a spectacularly dumb idea.

McConnell's pitch is beautiful in its own way. He's come to believe that policymakers - including, apparently, himself - are no longer trustworthy with public resources. To prevent irresponsible politicians from doing what they want to do, McConnell wants a constitutional straightjacket. That McConnell decried gimmicks while touting a gimmick was just the cherry on top of an inane sundae.

Now, this would ordinarily be about the time that I mention that the balanced budget amendment is easily the worst proposed amendment since Prohibition, and has accurately been described as a "pathetic joke." I might also note that this version of the BBA is actually worse than the old one.

But instead, I thought I'd focus on one specific part of McConnell's pitch: the notion that "nothing has worked."

If McConnell were right about this, we could at least have a reasonable conversation about the constitutional merits of his idea. In other words, if policymakers really had tried everything to close the budget gap, and every idea failed, leading to deficits that only went in one direction, it'd at least be the basis for a coherent debate.

But here's the part McConnell doesn't remember: the 1990s.

It really wasn't that long ago - McConnell was in the Senate at the time - that the deficit didn't exist. When Bill Clinton left office a decade ago, we not only had a large surplus, we were paying off the national debt for the first time in a generation. Those debt clocks we occasionally see? They had to be shut down - no one had ever programmed them to run backwards.

We were on track to eliminate the national debt in its entirety within just 10 years. Republicans of the Bush era - including a guy by the name of Mitch McConnell - reversed course, created huge deficits, and added several trillion dollars to the debt.

The point, though, isn't just about blame, it's about reminding McConnell of recent history. He's certain that "nothing has worked," but reality shows otherwise.

Liberals balance budgets the quickest and most economy-growing way: raising taxes on the rich and increasing spending to create jobs.

 

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QOTD: "The people who are threatening not to pass the debt ceiling are our version of al Qaeda terrorists." (Paul O'Neill, former Bush Treasury Secretary, April 2011)