“Christ on a cracker”

Crooks and Liars: Bush renominates Tomlinson for Broadcasting Board of Governors
By: John Amato @ 10:08 AM – PST Submit or Digg this Post

Please make it stop!

Steve Benen: ‘At this point, Ken Tomlinson’s partisan, ideological, and generally ridiculous work is legendary. By August, it became almost comical…..read on'”

Broadcast Chief Misused Office, Inquiry Reports – New York Times: “WASHINGTON, Aug. 29 — State Department investigators have found that the head of the agency overseeing most government broadcasts to foreign countries has used his office to run a “horse racing operation” and that he improperly put a friend on the payroll, according to a summary of a report made public on Tuesday by a Democratic lawmaker.”

What they don’t talk about is a dirty little secret everyone in Washington knows, or at least should. The vast majority of economists and budget analysts agree: The ship of state is on a disastrous course, and will founder on the reefs of economic disaster if nothing is done to correct it.
There’s a good reason politicians don’t like to talk about the nation’s long-term fiscal prospects. The subject is short on political theatrics and long on complicated economics, scary graphs and very big numbers. It reveals serious problems and offers no easy solutions. Anybody who wanted to deal with it seriously would have to talk about raising taxes and cutting benefits, nasty nostrums that might doom any candidate who prescribed them.
“There’s no sexiness to it,” laments Leita Hart-Fanta, an accountant who has just heard Walker’s pitch. She suggests recruiting a trusted celebrity – maybe Oprah – to sell fiscal responsibility to the American people.
Walker doesn’t want to make balancing the federal government’s books sexy – he just wants to make it politically palatable. He has committed to touring the nation through the 2008 elections, talking to anybody who will listen about the fiscal black hole Washington has dug itself, the “demographic tsunami” that will come when the baby boom generation begins retiring and the recklessness of borrowing money from foreign lenders to pay for the operation of the U.S. government.
“He can speak forthrightly and independently because his job is not in jeopardy if he tells the truth,” said Isabel V. Sawhill, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution.
Walker can talk in public about the nation’s impending fiscal crisis because he has one of the most secure jobs in Washington. As comptroller general of the United States – basically, the government’s chief accountant – he is serving a 15-year term that runs through 2013.
This year Walker has spoken to the Union League Club of Chicago and the Rotary Club of Atlanta, the Sons of the American Revolution and the World Future Society. But the backbone of his campaign has been the Fiscal Wake-up Tour, a traveling roadshow of economists and budget analysts who share Walker’s concern for the nation’s budgetary future.
“You can’t solve a problem until the majority of the people believe you have a problem that needs to be solved,” Walker says.
Polls suggest that Americans have only a vague sense of their government’s long-term fiscal prospects. When pollsters ask Americans to name the most important problem facing America today – as a CBS News/New York Times poll of 1,131 Americans did in September – issues such as the war in Iraq, terrorism, jobs and the economy are most frequently mentioned. The deficit doesn’t even crack the top 10.
Yet on the rare occasions that pollsters ask directly about the deficit, at least some people appear to recognize it as a problem. In a survey of 807 Americans last year by the Pew Center for the People and the Press, 42 percent of respondents said reducing the deficit should be a top priority; another 38 percent said it was important but a lower priority.
So the majority of the public appears to agree with Walker that the deficit is a serious problem, but only when they’re made to think about it. Walker’s challenge is to get people not just to think about it, but to pressure politicians to make the hard choices that are needed to keep the situation from spiraling out of control.
To show that the looming fiscal crisis is not a partisan issue, he brings along economists and budget analysts from across the political spectrum. In Austin, he’s accompanied by Diane Lim Rogers, a liberal economist from the Brookings Institution, and Alison Acosta Fraser, director of the Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
“We all agree on what the choices are and what the numbers are,” Fraser says.
Their basic message is this: If the United States government conducts business as usual over the next few decades, a national debt that is already $8.5 trillion could reach $46 trillion or more, adjusted for inflation. That’s almost as much as the total net worth of every person in America – Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and those Google guys included.
A hole that big could paralyze the U.S. economy; according to some projections, just the interest payments on a debt that big would be as much as all the taxes the government collects today.
And every year that nothing is done about it, Walker says, the problem grows by $2 trillion to $3 trillion.
People who remember Ross Perot’s rants in the 1992 presidential election may think of the federal debt as a problem of the past. But it never really went away after Perot made it an issue, it only took a breather. The federal government actually produced a surplus for a few years during the 1990s, thanks to a booming economy and fiscal restraint imposed by laws that were passed early in the decade. And though the federal debt has grown in dollar terms since 2001, it hasn’t grown dramatically relative to the size of the economy.
But that’s about to change, thanks to the country’s three big entitlement programs – Social Security, Medicaid and especially Medicare. Medicaid and Medicare have grown progressively more expensive as the cost of health care has dramatically outpaced inflation over the past 30 years, a trend that is expected to continue for at least another decade or two.
And with the first baby boomers becoming eligible for Social Security in 2008 and for Medicare in 2011, the expenses of those two programs are about to increase dramatically due to demographic pressures. People are also living longer, which makes any program that provides benefits to retirees more expensive.
Medicare already costs four times as much as it did in 1970, measured as a percentage of the nation’s gross domestic product. It currently comprises 13 percent of federal spending; by 2030, the Congressional Budget Office projects it will consume nearly a quarter of the budget.
Economists Jagadeesh Gokhale of the American Enterprise Institute and Kent Smetters of the University of Pennsylvania have an even scarier way of looking at Medicare. Their method calculates the program’s long-term fiscal shortfall – the annual difference between its dedicated revenues and costs – over time.
By 2030 they calculate Medicare will be about $5 trillion in the hole, measured in 2004 dollars. By 2080, the fiscal imbalance will have risen to $25 trillion. And when you project the gap out to an infinite time horizon, it reaches $60 trillion.
Medicare so dominates the nation’s fiscal future that some economists believe health care reform, rather than budget measures, is the best way to attack the problem.
“Obviously health care is a mess,” says Dean Baker, a liberal economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington think tank. “No one’s been willing to touch it, but that’s what I see as front and center.”
Social Security is a much less serious problem. The program currently pays for itself with a 12.4 percent payroll tax, and even produces a surplus that the government raids every year to pay other bills. But Social Security will begin to run deficits during the next century, and ultimately would need an infusion of $8 trillion if the government planned to keep its promises to every beneficiary.
Calculations by Boston University economist Lawrence Kotlikoff indicate that closing those gaps – $8 trillion for Social Security, many times that for Medicare – and paying off the existing deficit would require either an immediate doubling of personal and corporate income taxes, a two-thirds cut in Social Security and Medicare benefits, or some combination of the two.
Why is America so fiscally unprepared for the next century? Like many of its citizens, the United States has spent the last few years racking up debt instead of saving for the future. Foreign lenders – primarily the central banks of China, Japan and other big U.S. trading partners – have been eager to lend the government money at low interest rates, making the current $8.5-trillion deficit about as painful as a big balance on a zero-percent credit card.
In her part of the fiscal wake-up tour presentation, Rogers tries to explain why that’s a bad thing. For one thing, even when rates are low a bigger deficit means a greater portion of each tax dollar goes to interest payments rather than useful programs. And because foreigners now hold so much of the federal government’s debt, those interest payments increasingly go overseas rather than to U.S. investors.
More serious is the possibility that foreign lenders might lose their enthusiasm for lending money to the United States. Because treasury bills are sold at auction, that would mean paying higher interest rates in the future. And it wouldn’t just be the government’s problem. All interest rates would rise, making mortgages, car payments and student loans costlier, too.
A modest rise in interest rates wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, Rogers said. America’s consumers have as much of a borrowing problem as their government does, so higher rates could moderate overconsumption and encourage consumer saving. But a big jump in interest rates could cause economic catastrophe. Some economists even predict the government would resort to printing money to pay off its debt, a risky strategy that could lead to runaway inflation.
Macroeconomic meltdown is probably preventable, says Anjan Thakor, a professor of finance at Washington University in St. Louis. But to keep it at bay, he said, the government is essentially going to have to renegotiate some of the promises it has made to its citizens, probably by some combination of tax increases and benefit cuts.
But there’s no way to avoid what Rogers considers the worst result of racking up a big deficit – the outrage of making our children and grandchildren repay the debts of their elders.
“It’s an unfair burden for future generations,” she says.
You’d think young people would be riled up over this issue, since they’re the ones who will foot the bill when they’re out in the working world. But students take more interest in issues like the Iraq war and gay marriage than the federal government’s finances, says Emma Vernon, a member of the University of Texas Young Democrats.
“It’s not something that can fire people up,” she says.
The current political climate doesn’t help. Washington tends to keep its fiscal house in better order when one party controls Congress and the other is in the White House, says Sawhill.
“It’s kind of a paradoxical result. Your commonsense logic would tell you if one party is in control of everything they should be able to take action,” Sawhill says.
But the last six years of Republican rule have produced tax cuts, record spending increases and a Medicare prescription drug plan that has been widely criticized as fiscally unsound. When President Clinton faced a Republican Congress during the 1990s, spending limits and other legislative tools helped produce a surplus.
So maybe a solution is at hand.
“We’re likely to have at least partially divided government again,” Sawhill said, referring to predictions that the Democrats will capture the House, and possibly the Senate, in next month’s elections.
But Walker isn’t optimistic that the government will be able to tackle its fiscal challenges so soon.
“Realistically what we hope to accomplish through the fiscal wake-up tour is ensure that any serious candidate for the presidency in 2008 will be forced to deal with the issue,” he says. “The best we’re going to get in the next couple of years is to slow the bleeding

GAO Chief Warns Economic Disaster Looms

“The media continues to portray this contest as a one issue referendum on the war. While certainly the dominant issue, I think this view masks the widespread dissatisfaction with congress, not just the administration, and is reflected in a ‘zero tolerance’ attitude toward incumbents. People are looking for an excuse to ‘vote the bums’ out. Watching the debate, I was struck by several differences between the candidates – most notably on the topic of ‘earmarks’. I went into the debate with an open mind, expecting to retain my mild preference for Lieberman. Lieberman’s brazen support for the corrupt earmark process, and craven appeal to Connecticut voters based on his ability to bring home the earmark ‘pork’, completely changed my thinking. Lamont took a principled stand on earmarks, which resonated with me and I suspect resonates with Connecticut voters (which – full disclosure – I am not), even if he is more left of center than I would like. I posted a short video and transcript about this telling exchange in my blog post: ‘To earmark or not to earmark, that is the question’
mw | Homepage | 08.06.06 – 12:42 pm | #

Gravatar LV: Sorry. I hadn’t rea”

Jesus, Mary & Joseph. God save us from Democrats who could ever do the right thing by adhering to logic, usuing the most basic tenets of reason and last but not least, employ a morality that precludes blowing up children for nothing! That country had done nothing to us!

What the fuck do ya know, if we had real Democrats the war never would have started in the first place.

I hope everyone here understands that just the very existence of that rationale above is an empirical irrefutable demonstration of Democratic failure.

Utter total fucking failure, for the Dmeocrats to be thinking like that is ragingly disguting, incredibly fearful, and so fucking lame I can’t believe I spend time with politics in this goddamn country anymore.

Fucking pussies, I’m ranting and using using words I shouldn’t but jesus, let’s just take a look at ourselves. God, Hobbes was right.
paradox | Homepage | 08.06.06 – 10:21 am | #

Mackris v. O’Reilly: The Opera: ” In the book Sweet Jesus, I Hate Bill O’Reilly, we discussed the possibility of a musical theater
production. We even went so far as to throw together some lyrics. Well kids, in the race to the
stage, we’ve been beaten to the punch… and by a guy named Igor, no less.

Mackris v. O’Reilly is the new work by Igor Keller. The oratorio (which is basically an opera
without the scenery), is for a 31-piece chamber orchestra, 32-voice chorus and three soloists,
directed by Kris Falk.

The libretto is comprised of the original court document and O’Reilly’s on-air settlement
announcement. Imagine a two-hour neo-baroque extravaganza including seven chorales, two
madrigals, three choruses, four recitatives, two instrumental entrances and numerous arias
dedicated to the sexual exploits of the most popular man in cable news.

Order the book

Charles Robert Stephens – Baritone
as Bill O’Reilly

Stephens’ performances show ‘a committed characterization and a
voice of considerable beauty.’ (Opera News) He has been hailed by
The New York Times as a ‘baritone of smooth distinction.’

Signe Mortensen – Soprano
as Andrea Mackris

Mortensen’s roles include Musetta in La Boheme (Bellevue Opera),
“

Crooks and Liars » Joe Lieberman: By: John Amato @ 11:10 AM – PDT
Russ Feingold joined THIS WEEK and had a few choice words for Lieberman and Bush. He told the country the basic fact about Lieberman: ‘He doesn’t get it.’ Feingold also explained that Bush can fight terrorism without breaking the law and stick to the FISA court.
Video-WMP Video-QT (about six minutes)
Lieberman (on video): “If we just pick up as Ned Lamont wants us to do and get out by a date certain, it will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England, and it will strengthen them and they will strike us again.”
Stephanopoulos: “Senator Lieberman thinks that your approach will strengthen the terrorists and it’s a victory for terrorists. What’s your response?”
Feingold: “Well, I like Joe Lieberman, but I support Ned Lamont. Because Joe is showing with that regrettable statement that he doesn’t get it. He doesn’t get it. The fact is that we were attacked on 9/11 by Al Qaeda and its affiliates and its sympathizers, not by Saddam Hussein. And unfortunately, Senator Lieberman has supported the Bush Administration’s disastrous strategic approach of getting us stuck in Iraq instead of focusing on those who attacked us.
(Read the rest of this story…) “

Crooks and Liars » Joe Lieberman: By: RJ Eskow @ 2:02 PM – PDT
The NRSC has confirmed that it’s backing Lieberman:
“This morning, a source at the National Republican Senatorial Committee confirmed in a phone interview that the party will not help Schlesinger or any other potential Republican candidate in Connecticut, and it now favors a Lieberman victory in November.’
Adam Schlesinger is running on the Republican ticket. The NRSC, perhaps realizing its blunder, called back and tried to back off its original statement:
‘An NRSC spokesman just called to make clear the distinction between actively and openly supporting Lieberman, which they’re not doing, and merely opting not to support a Republican in Connecticut.’
Democrats should take a cue from Republicans, who flood Green candidates with money so that they can get on the ballot and draw votes from Dems. They should shower Schlesinger with campaign contributions (after donating as much as they’re allowed to Ned Lamont.)
(via David Sirota)”