Priorities

By Mustang Bobby

Via NBC:

The House overwhelmingly passed a bill on Friday to give the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) flexibility to defray spending cuts from its budget as part of the sequester, allowing the agency to restore furloughed air traffic controllers whose absences had spurred nationwide flight delays.

The House moved quickly late Friday morning to follow the lead of the Senate, which unanimously approved legislation late Thursday evening to give the secretary of transportation increased authority to transfer funds from its existing budget to restore furloughed air traffic controllers.

The legislation heads to the White House next for President Barack Obama’s signature. White House press secretary Jay Carney said at his press briefing on Friday that Obama would sign the legislation.

Though some House Democrats griped on Friday that the air traffic controller furloughs should provide the impetus for Congress to address all of the cuts prescribed by the sequester, the House easily cleared the two-thirds procedural threshold it needed to approve the FAA patch.

So while it’s perfectly okay with the House and the Senate that hundreds of teachers get laid off from Head Start and cutbacks go into effect for other critical programs, dog forbid that some congressperson has to cool their heels at the Cinnabon at O’Hare for an extra hour because the FAA was short-staffed. Got it.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Liberal priorities

By Frank Moraes 

Maybe I'm just a cynical old guy. But Rachel Maddow spent the entire A section of her show talking about gun control. I'm cool with gun control. As I've argued before: by the time we notice that the government is coming for us, our guns won't do bit of good. (It is interesting that those most concerned about their guns being taken away, are not at all concerned about targeted assassination and executive overreach. Instead, they cheer it on: We're number one! We're number one!) So I'm fine with the government coming in and taking away all our guns. The idea that universal background checks will destroy our liberty is more than ridiculous.

But it isn't that important either. With tighter gun control, we might reduce the number of gun homicides by a thousand per year. That's a very big deal to those thousand people who don't get murdered. My question is just how big a deal it is more generally. Families USA reported that 26,000 Americans die every year because they lack health insurance. It is hard to say how many people die early because of poverty. We do, however, know that people in the upper half of income earners live six years longer than those in the bottom half of income earners. So I tend to think it is millions.

This isn't just about what's most important. I believe that Rachel Maddow is pushing the gun control story -- which she has been doing for months -- because it is one issue that looks like a winner for liberals. But is that really what liberals should be pushing? I find that liberals do this much too much for my tastes. There was much rejoicing after the Fiscal Cliff deal, "We made the Republicans cave on taxes!" The fact that the president didn't get a good deal didn't seem to matter. And now it looks like a Pyrrhic victory.

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Stupid and Evil, Inc.

By Mustang Bobby

I sometimes wonder if the racists and the bigots get their franchise like some Amway promotion: find one person, then get them to find another, and then that one finds another, and so on. That's about the only way I can explain how stupid spreads across the land. For example:

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) on Monday openly admitted that she opposed the latest reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) because it included protections for LGBT, Native American, and undocumented victims of domestic violence.

In an appearance on MSNBC, Blackburn pointed out that the latest iteration of the law protects "different groups" and thus dilutes funding for straight, non-Native American women with the proper documentation.

Because of course if you're a lesbian or Native American or undocumented, you probably deserved whatever happens to you because, well, you're just not one of us.

Not just to pick on Ms. Blackburn — she regularly turns up on cable TV as a second-string Michele Bachmann and entertains with all sorts of harebrained stuff, including birtherism — because I'm pretty sure that she didn't come up with this justification for voting against VAWA on her own. She's not that creative. Someone had to hand this talking point to her, or there's some website where she downloaded it.

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Could sequestration take down Dems?

By tmcbpatriot

It's here! Doomsday! Sequestration is upon us and its going to be BAD!!!! Or not.

This whole business of spending cuts, for what it's worth, may turn out to be a while lot of nothing, and that will not bode well for Democrats. Yesterday, for example, Janet Napolitano said that sequestration was causing airport delays. Oh no! The horror! But then "the Federal Aviation Administration reported Monday there were no significant flight delays in either Los Angeles or Chicago."

Okay, well, there must be something devastating happening as a result of the sequester because Republicans are running scared...

Americans for Prosperity, a conservative advocacy group founded by the Koch brothers, says that lawmakers should be commended for doing nothing to prevent billions of dollars in across-the-board spending cuts, known as sequestration.

"With the sequester, Congress made a promise to the American people to cut spending. They deserve to be congratulated for actually keeping that promise... It definitely wasn't easy given the pressure from the White House."

D'oh!

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Boehner's paradox of power

By Frank Moraes 

Jonathan Chait came out yesterday morning and said what we all know in our hearts: John Boehner's position on the Sequester is a teeny-tiny jobs program. Or to put it more bluntly: he doesn't care about 700,000 jobs that will be lost if the Sequester stays the law; he only cares about one job: his own as Speaker of the House. I don't think this is the only thing that is going on, but there is much to it. After all, a bipartisan plan could make it through the House; it is just that Boehner won't allow the vote. And that just makes the national brand of the GOP that much worse.

This is another example of the paradox of power. Boehner has basically taken his career hostage. He now has quite a lot of power. He could cut deals with the White House that are great for the Republicans and then, with the help of House Democrats, he could get them enacted. But if he does that, he will surely lose his speakership. And thus the paradox: he has power only so long as he doesn't use it.

Something like this goes on with every politician in the country. They make concessions for power. But they never really use the power (in the way they had wanted to when they started, anyway) because they are trying to get more power.

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So what if the American people are with Obama on spending?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The Fix:

For the past several years, congressional Republicans have focused relentlessly on a single message: Washington — led by President Obama — is spending too much money, and it needs to stop.

But according to new Washington Post-ABC News polling, that laser-like focus isn't helping Republicans win the argument over federal spending — with 67 percent of those tested disapproving of the "way Republicans in Congress are handling federal spending."

This is good news, of course, what with the sequester battle shortly coming to a head. But of course these polls do not take place within a vacuum.

The fact of the matter is, discretionary spending -- pretty much everything government does other than the military and entitlement programs -- is at an historic low thanks to the right-wing ideology that pervades both parties, if more the aggressively right-wing one than the other, along with the national media and most of the rest of the Beltway establishment.

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Waiting room

By Mustang Bobby

If you've been following the latest adventure in Beltway brinksmanship, you know that we are down to the wire with the sequestration. So far all we've heard is a lot of trash talk and tantrums from the Republicans because President Obama won't give into their demands that he does everything they tell him to. After all, who won the election last November.

Brian Buetler at TPM explains why the Democrats are content to let the GOP drive over the cliff:

The most important factor in this fight is probably the reality that Obama doesn't have to face voters again and thus is willing to veto sequestration replacement bills if they're composed of spending cuts alone. Congressional Democrats are fully aware of this, too, and that creates a powerful incentive for them to hold the line.

So sequestration will begin. Obama won't cave. And then the tension sequestration was intended to create — and in fact has created — between defense hawks and the rest of the GOP will intensify and actually splinter the party. If that doesn't happen quickly enough, then the sequestration fight will become tangled up in the need to renew funding for the federal government at the end of March. If Republicans don't cave before then, they'll precipitate a 1995-style government shutdown, public opinion will actually begin to control the outcome, and it'll be game over.

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Bob Woodward attacks Obama for "a kind of madness"

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Back when Bob Woodward mattered.

Honestly, it's hard to believe that anyone pays attention to this idiot anymore:

The Washington Post's Bob Woodward attacked President Barack Obama on Wednesday, saying the commander-in-chief's decision not to deploy an aircraft carrier because of budget cuts is "a kind of madness."

"Can you imagine Ronald Reagan sitting there and saying, 'Oh, by the way, I can't do this because of some budget document?'" Woodward said Wednesday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."

"Or George W. Bush saying, 'You know, I'm not going to invade Iraq because I can't get the aircraft carriers I need' or even Bill Clinton saying, 'You know, I'm not going to attack Saddam Hussein's intelligence headquarters,' as he did when Clinton was president because of some budget document?" Woodward added. "Under the Constitution, the president is commander-in-chief and employs the force. And so we now have the president going out because of this piece of paper and this agreement. 'I can't do what I need to do to protect the country.' That's a kind of madness that I haven't seen in a long time."

Let's address this in order:

First, no, Reagan likely wouldn't have, but that's because he was an extreme militarist who didn't give a damn about the budget, in fact exploding the national debt with outrageous military spending. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, though, one could say that he was right to do so at the time because, you know, there was that whole Cold War going on and it was important to ramp up the military spending and spread the military's reach far and wide. I won't give him that benefit, but, regardless, it's silly to say that what was necessary then is necessary now.

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Major media have sequestration all wrong

By Frank Moraes

I'm going to explain the Sequester to you and why most of the media have it all wrong. Back in 2011 when it was invented, the idea was to make something so horrible that neither side would accept it. Instead they would replace it with some bipartisan plan that the two sides disliked less and everyone would sing "Kumbaya." But even when pushed to come up with an "unthinkable" plan, the Republicans wouldn't go for any revenue increases. So instead, half the Sequester became military cuts.

Skip ahead a year and a half. Now everyone is standing around asking, "Will the Republicans really be willing to cut their beloved military?" My reaction to these people is: where in the hell have you been for the last 30 years?! We could be talking about the complete elimination of the military. Hell, we could be talking about the very destruction of the United States and Republicans would be against taxing rich people even a dollar more -- so long as those rich people would be able to keep their wealth after America was destroyed. The one overriding policy issue for Republicans is to keep the taxes of rich people down. (Note: when it came to the payroll take that is highly regressive, they had no problem letting it go back up.) The fact that major figures in the media think that isn't the case is a big part of the problem with politics in America.

Ezra Klein was surprised last week that Republicans didn't seem to understand what their own economists tell them: deductions are in fact government spending, just done in an unusual way. Think of the mortgage interest deduction. This allows homeowners to pay less in taxes. It would have exactly the same effect if instead the government had a program that gave homeowners money for owning a home. So what's the big deal with eliminating tax loopholes? They too are just government spending in another form. Ezra Klein thinks the Republicans just don't understand this.

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