The Great Recession exploded the budget deficit generated by the Bush tax cuts, the Iraq war and the unfunded Medicare expansion. The last few years have seen constant alarming cries that America faced a debt crisis that would turn it to the next Greece. This was always a silly meme, particularly since the Greek crisis was exacerbated by its participation in the quasi gold-standard of the Euro.
The alarmism has resulted in a howling frenzy for policies that would have turned the recession into a depression (like the United Kingdom about to enter into a triple dip recession) rather than addressing the job losses that killed government revenue and blew up the deficit. The predicted hyperinflation has not occurred. The academics whose paper was cited by deficit peacocks as gospel were discredited by a basic Excel error. Now comes the CBO, which projects that the medium-term national debt has stabilized and the United States is not going bankrupt anytime soon. After a spike in 2009 from the stimulus, the budget has actually been dropping throughout the Obama presidency (contrary to Faux News reality). The CBO now projects that the 2013 deficit will be $200 billion lower than the projection 3 months ago.
In a rational political environment in a country with essentially negative borrowing costs the government would be implementing policies to accelerate the recovery, address infrastructure, fix (rather than shred) Medicare. But the Republican party and the establishment stenographers live in their alternate reality where we are still on a path to Greece.
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As Washington gets subsumed by faux scandals and a desperate Republican attempt to convert Barack Obama to Richard Nixon the entire political class has pretty much let Wall Street off the hook. Not a single banking executive has been prosecuted even with ample evidence of fraud. The fines inflicted on the for misconduct still leave financial institutions with a healthy profit from their illegal activities.
Elizabeth Warren has been one of the only legislators who has been highlighting this ridiculous state of affairs. She sent a letter to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Attorney General Eric Holder, and Securities and Exchange Commission Chairwoman Mary Jo White questioning the culture of a slap on the wrist for offenders. The whole letter is worth a read, but a key paragraph is quoted below:
I believe strongly that if a regulator reveals itself to be unwilling to take large financial institutions all the way to trial — either because it is too timid or because it lacks resources — the regulator has a lot less leverage in settlement negotiations and will be forced to settle on terms that are much more favorable to the wrongdoer. The consequence can be insufficient compensation to those who are harmed by illegal activity and inadequate deterrence of future violations. If large financial institutions can break the law and accumulate millions in profits and, if they get caught, settle by paying out of those profits, they do not have much incentive to follow the law.
This is not a difficult point to grasp. But in our corrupt bastardized capitalism our regulators don’t seem to get it. Elizabeth Warren does.
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As days go by it is becoming depressingly clear that the Republican Party has no interest in a functioning government. While they are not trying to crash the economy with nonsensical economic proposals or obsessing on manufacturing a scandal out of Benghazi, the pattern of obstruction of the last five years continues unabated. No judges have been approved for the D.C. Circuit Court of appeals. The Republicans have refused to let the NLRB acquire a quorum by not approving the required Republican members to the agency. In an unprecedented hissy fit the Republicans have filibustered the appointment of ANY head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unless the agency is eviscerted. Since the Republican policies of late are unhindered by data or reality, they are now trying to prevent the Census bureau from collecting economic data. After all why would the government want to use data before deciding how to allocate its spending.
Today come two more examples. The Republicans boycotted the committee hearing to confirm the new head of the EPA, preventing a quorum. In their latest effort to prevent the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, the Republican leadership has refused to recommend members to to Independent Payment Advisory Board which is supposed to make recommendations to reduce Medicare Spending and may filibuster any appointee. I wonder what it will take for Harry Reid to scrap the filibuster and get a functioning Senate.
Yet according to our establishment media stenographers things would be different if Obama sang Kumbaya and gave the Republicans a hug. The Republican Party is deadly unserious about governing and hostage to economically harmful policies….and they benefit from a natural desire of voters to shrug and call for a pox on both parties.
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After all the hype, the Republican whistleblowers simply did not deliver. The testimony was riveting and it showed the sense of urgency as the consulate was attacked. But after all that, Gregory Hicks did not challenge the Pentagon’s assessments that the F-16s would not have been helpful and the ballyhooed special ops team in Tripoli may not have saved lives either.
These decisions made in the heat of the moment may have been erroneous, but that does not a scandal make. While the Republicans have been desperately trying to “get” President Obama and Hillary Clinton they have been unwilling to consider whether their budget cuts to embassy security opposed by the State department may have been a factor (and to be fair it is not clear that it would have saved lives in Benghazi). It is still clear what exactly was covered up and the motive for doing so.
The administration really had no motive to hide Al Queda involvement, since their claims of success have been primarily against Al Queda Central. There are many regional groups claiming affiliation with Al Queda and they operate independently of the leadership hiding in Pakistan. If Benghazi was triggered by one such group it would still not undercut the administration’s claims of success in Af-Pak.
Jon Stewart continues to get under the skin of Faux News by pointing out how unhinged their coverage has been. Videos below:
Video 1
Video 2
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The news from Syria has been uniformly awful. While this blog is still firmly opposed to American military involvement in a civil war likely to end in an ethnic bloodbath, it still hopes for a solution that stops the human suffering and displacement. The photo below was posted on Reditt and Facebook over the weekend and shows a Jordanian soldier warming up the hands of Syrian refugee baby after making it to the border safely.
Yes, I am a sucker for cute baby pictures.
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I questioned earlier how Harvard University granted Jason Richwine a PhD for his racist thesis. Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal Constitution discovered another clip from 2008 with his racial IQ meanderings:
The argument that immigrants themselves are no different from the ones that came 100 years ago I think is quite wrong, and I think that the major difference here is ethnicity — or race, if you will. …. There are real differences between groups, not just trivial ones that we happen to notice more than we should. Races differ in all sorts of ways, and probably the most important way is in IQ. Decades of psychometric testing has indicated that at least in America you have Jews with the highest average IQ, usually followed by east Asians and then you have non-Jewish whites, and Hispanics and then blacks. These are real differences. They aren’t going to go away tomorrow, and we have to address them in our immigration discussions and debates.”
Absent anywhere in these comments is any mention of whether socio-economic, environmental and other cultural factors affecting the immigrant experience may affect the results of his sacrosanct IQ tests.
The remainder of the video contains a discussion about the assimilation of races on the intellectual level of Rand Paul telling a largely African American audience at Howard University that the Republicans were the good guys on race because of the Civil War but omitting the cynical Southern Strategy in the aftermath of the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Richwine dismisses the assimilation of Irish and Sicilians as being relevant to the assimilation of Hispanics and African immigrants. Of course there is no mention of the fact that non-white immigrants (including Asians who were forbidden to naturalize as citizens under the Chinese Exclusion Act) were subject to many statutory restrictions that made assimilation difficult until the 1960s. Naturally the assimilation rate was slower for these minorities, but the rate has picked up significantly since then – even among the big bugbear of the far right Spanish speaking Hispanics.
Richwine’s biggest sin may have been to say explicitly in print stuff that the right has learned to express in allusions where all but the dense know what they are talking about. As Charles Blow indicates it is almost an art form. Once he masters it he has a lucrative future ahead of him on Faux News, Glenn Beck and other votaries of racial resentment.
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In April the “Science” Test below from an unnamed South Carolina school hit the web.
Science Test Page 1
Science Test Page 2
The school was unverified, and there was some hope it was a hoax. It appears that the test was legit and the school was the Blue Ridge Christian Academy. Sadly, even league educated governors with science degrees peddle bullshit like adding creationism to science education curricula to “teach the controversy.” This nonsense is not going away anytime soon.
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The Heritage Foundation is already under fire for a questionable study asserting that immigration reform will cost trillions of dollars. Now it is trying to distance itself from the 2009 PhD dissertation from one of the co-authors of the study arguing for lower immigration because Hispanics allegedly have a genetic predisposition to lower IQ.
Jason Richwine’s dissertation abstract asserts:
The statistical construct known as IQ can reliably estimate general mental ability, or intelligence. The average IQ of immigrants in the United States is substantially lower than that of the white native population, and the difference is likely to persist over several generations. The consequences are a lack of socioeconomic assimilation among low-IQ immigrant groups, more underclass behavior, less social trust, and an increase in the proportion of unskilled workers in the American labor market. Selecting high-IQ immigrants would ameliorate these problems in the U.S., while at the same time benefiting smart potential immigrants who lack educational access in their home countries.
Dylan Mathews of the Washington Post who dug up Richwine’s thesis notes that Richwine believes intelligence is liked to race.
Richwine’s dissertation asserts that there are deep-set differentials in intelligence between races. While it’s clear he thinks it is partly due to genetics — “the totality of the evidence suggests a genetic component to group differences in IQ” — he argues the most important thing is that the differences in group IQs are persistent, for whatever reason. He writes, “No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.”
This reeks of the racist screeds that passed as academic analysis 100 years ago and appears to be the intellectual heir of Charles Murrays “The Bell Curve” from 20 years back.
The Heritage foundation has supported “high skilled” immigration arguing that this will be of greater benefit to the economy. Mathews notes that Richwine tries to use that policy as a cover to support his racist IQ-based selection.
How in the world did Harvard endorse this crap by issuing Richwine a PhD for this dissertation?
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Jon Stewart yesterday tackled the mortgage lenders who created the mortgage clusterfuck. They took an archaic but effective system where mortgages were recorded on paper with local county recorders of deed and came up with their own private online mechanism – MERS. There was no paper trail, the laws of mortgage assignment were not followed (good luck if you as a debtor who did the same) and they ended up with a situation where the people foreclosing on mortgages cannot prove they have the right to do so. Video below:
None of these assholes have gone to jail and the fines that the feckless regulators have assessed are a drop in the bucket for the amount of money they made. And having demonstrated the perils of unregulated banking and derivatives trading these pricks have been whining at the limited regulations that have been implemented since then. The people in charge of MERS may have been merely incompetent. But other cases of fraud like manipulating the LIBOR rate have seen almost no individuals go to jail. That is a real scandal. Preet Bharara where are you?
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Over the last few years the Republicans have made a mockery of parliamentary procedure and the notions of bipartisanship. Compromise means the Democrats accept all of the Republican positions while the Republicans change none of their own. If the Democrats actually do embrace a Republican position, the bill becomes an attack on our freedoms. The silly season has been on display for the budget.
The last few years the Republicans abused the filibuster process to make it impossible to pass a budget. Then they repeatedly passed the nonsensical Paul Ryan budget laden with pixie dust and calling for unidentified budget cuts (which of course must be identified by Democrats so Republicans can beat them on the head repeatedly). After blocking the Senate from doing its jobs they whined to the establishment stenographers that the Democrats were not following process and setting up a conference committee.
This year the plan went off the rails. The Democratic Senate actually passed a budget. Even worse the arithmetic in the budget (unlike the Ryan fantasies actually adds up…or at least comes much much closer to doing so). At this point the Republicans lost their appetite for a budget conference which would highlight just how nonsensical their plans are. It is much easier to hold the nation hostage over the debt ceiling.
On Monday, Majority Leader Harry Reid tried to get the ball rolling on appointing Senate commissioners for the Conference. At the end of the day freshman Republican bomb-thrower Ted Cruz rose to object calling for the Democrats to essentially concede defeat before the conference by agreeing to not raise the debt ceiling or taxes. The result to this ridiculous proposal (identified by Reid as such in the video below) was a smack down by the Majority Leader who noted Cruz was like a schoolyard bully who on losing and now wants to take his ball and go home and change the rules as well.
Cruz who is winning few friends in the Senate tried to whine afterwards in contravention of Senate rules and got smacked down again. The video above is worth a watch.
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So said Florida Rep. Matt Hudson proudly announcing the state rejecting the federally funded Medicaid expansion. He gave some lip service at the end of the video about taking care of Florida’s uninsured and promised some state based alternative to Medicaid expansion.
Almost 4 years since the Obamacare war started and the President ended up passing a Republican bill to cries of socialism, there still is no credible alternative proposed by Republicans to America’s health care crisis.
One cannot help but conclude Congressman Alan Grayson was right when he identified the Republican health care plan (video below):
1. Don’t get sick.
2. And if you do get sick, die quickly.
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The Republicans spent most of the first Obama term trying to find mythical Obama scandals – fast and furious, Solyndra, the Obama phone etc. all withered away once sunlight shone on breathless Faux News exposes. Then came the attack on Benghazi at the height of the Presidential campaign and the death of Ambassador Stevens.
Obviously things went horribly wrong in Benghazi. But eager to give Mitt Romney a silver bullet for the campaign, Senator Graham desperately burnishing his conservative credentials to head off a primary challenge and seeing the opportunity to hang a millstone around Hillary Clinton’s neck Republicans have been desperately flogging the Benghazi faux scandal.
So Senator McCain accuses the administration of a cover-up but cannot identify what was covered up. Witnesses were allegedly intimidated, but none can be identified. Even in front of the three stooges on Faux & Friends Republican Congressman Jassen Chaffetz struggled to identify what was covered up, why was there a need for a cover up and why would respected military officials stick their necks out to cover a lie. Video below:
Now the Republicans are producing two “whistleblowers” whose credibility is on the line by their choice of partisan brawlers as counsel. The problem for the Republicans is that they have so obviously played politics with their :investigation” and have repeatedly fallen for every right wing conspiracy theory on the subject that outside of their Faux News audience few are likely to take them seriously.
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As a sea of Orange descended on Amsterdam, the Kingdom of the Netherlands got its first King since 1890 – King Willem-Alexander upon the abdication of Queen Beatrix. After the death of Willem III in 1890, the Dutch have had 3 queens in a row – Wilhelmina, Juliana and Beatrix – all of whom abdicated in old age in favor of their successor.
William III of the Netherlands
King Willem-Alexander, Queen Beatrix and Queen Maxima
The Dutch have had a somewhat tortured history with monarchy. William of Nassau led the Dutch Revolt against Spain and his title as the independent Prince of Orange (in Southern France) gave him some protection as a sovereign prince. Yet he was never a King and merely the Stadtholder of most of the 7 provinces, his brother being the Stadtholder of the rest. Yet it was the title of Statdtholder of Holland and Zeeland that was key and gave William his title of Captain-General of the Dutch armies and essentially military dictator. It was also here where the Republican movement was strongest and the resistance to the quasi-monarchial aspects of the Stadtholderate was strongest.
The Netherlands went through two “Stadtholderless” periods in 5 out of the 7 provinces. The first from 1650 – 72 after the death of William II until the French invasion. The second from 1702-1747 after the death of William III (also King of England, Scotland and Ireland) until military failures in another war with France. The Stadtholders were packed off into exile during the French revolution but the son of the last Stadtholder was restored as King of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands (including Belgium and Luxembourg broke away in the 1830s. Luxembourg went to a male relative after the death of Willem III in 1890. In the Dutch remnant of the Netherlands, the House of Orange-Nassau has prospered.
Like most of the European monarchies the monarchy is largely ceremonial. Thanks to the business acumen of Wilhemina, the Dutch Royal House is one of the wealthiest.
The new Queen Maxima also becomes the second Latin American Queen in Europe – after Queen Sylvia of Sweden. The new King Willem-Alexander will only briefly break the chain of female rule in what should probably be referred to as a Queendom. He has only daughters and the new heiress to the throne and new Princess of Orange is his daughter Catharina-Amalia.
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And they are back. Barely a week after the orange hued one said that he would not hold the full faith and credit of the United States hostage to repeal Obamacare, Speaker Boehner and Senator McConnell both promised to require a dollar of cuts for a dollar increase in the debt ceiling.
The United Kingdom is heading to a triple dip recession from austerity insanity. Republican congressmen are squealing anytime their sequester cuts show up in their backyard. Yet the Congressional Republican leadership unable to control the extremists in their base has decided to hold the economy hostage for a third time to get unspecified spending cuts.
Don’t look for these deficit warriors to actually identify any cuts. Like Paul Ryan, erstwhile fiscal savant for the establishment media stenographers, they will not identify any unpopular cuts themselves. They will prefer Democrats to do the dirty work to attack them in the next election.
After the Republican capitulation a couple of months ago one had hoped that the Republicans would desist in their attempts to weaken a recovering economy. But a party swept by tax cutting hysteria seems oblivious to the fact that the fiscal deficit has actually been dropping, health care cost increases have slowed and it is essential to continue the task of reducing unemployment to complete this recovery.
But the madness continues. Paul Ryan’s nonsensical budget did not find as welcoming an audience in its second go around. One hopes that a third debt ceiling hostage crisis attracts the derision it deserves.
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The ten year anniversary of the commencement of the Iraq quagmire passed this week. I have been reading the assorted mea culpas of various stenographers journalists with some satisfaction and some dissapointment. Americans are famously ignorant of foreign affairs, but on Iraq so many journalists who should have known better blindly accepted the Bush administration’s bullshit.
I was not blogging at the time but and arguments at the time were made primarily on the ultra-conservative Texas A&M message boards. But I do remember the gist of my points.
First the rationale for the war had an element of “lets throw as much shit as we can and some of it will stick” quality to it. Saddam was a monster (no argument there, but hardly an argument for war), he is funding terrorists and Al Queda, he is about to get WMDs, taking him out will magically make Iraq an oasis of democracy in the region and (chuckle) an ally of Israel. This is about the same time George W. Bush gave his silly “Axis of Evil” speech. An axis implies cooperation…but tossing Saddam’s Iraq with the Ayatollahs’ Iran was always a joke. Worse that speech knee capped the moderate Iranian President Khatami who had been cooperating with America over Afghanistan.
The Al Queda links were always tenous and as we are finding out this week pretty much non-existent. The arguments that a foreign invasion would magically turn the Arab Yugoslavia into a beacon of democracy (not to mention a buddy of Israel) fundamentally misread the nature of the region and the effects of a foreign occupation. Many commentators at the time noted that while Iraqis may welcome the toppling of Saddam, a proud people would never stand for an indefinite occupation let along American military bases. And it is this element of the administration’s war chatter that bothered me even more.
I harbored no fondness for Saddam. Removing him in the right circumstances would have been a highly desirable act. Yet Bush Jr. ignored why Bush Sr. hit pause in 1991. An occupation of Iraq was always going to be an extremely difficult venture. Yet people like Condoleeza Rice were touting the successful reconstruction of relative homogenous and war exhausted Germany and Japan after World War II (with far more troops on the ground) as examples of how it could be done. Even the Bosnian peace happened after the combatants had exhausted themselves in their attempts to kill each other. And much smaller Bosnia had as many troops as the administration was proposing for Iraq.
Many American allies knew this was bullshit and unlike Bush’s poodle in London refused to play along. Their reward was to be tagged as “Old Europe” and “Cheese eating surrender monkeys.”
The worst part of Iraq was that we did not finish the job in Afghanistan. Afghan reconstruction faltered under the venal and incompetent Karzai. Bin Laden escaped to his Pakistani hideout. Pakistan merrily continued its two faced strategy in the region. Afghanistan will probably never be a stable country, but a genuine opportunity to harness the war weariness of the Afghan people in true nation building was lost.
Sadly the perpetrators of this disaster have somehow not recieved the full amount of derision they desrve. Messers. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Krauthammer, Bolton, Kristol, McCain etc. still pontificate on national media as if their views have any credibility and still beat the war drums for Syria. The corporate media still plays the role of stenographer over journalist. Small, broke and weak countries like Iran are still touted as existential risks. People who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
Sadly the perpetrators of this disaster have somehow not recieved the full amount of derision they desrve. Messers. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Krauthammer, Bolton, Kristol, McCain etc. still pontificate on national media as if their views have any credibility and still beat the war drums for Syria. The corporate media still plays the role of stenographer over journalist. Small, broke and weak countries like Iran are still touted as existential risks. People who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
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In a fairly quick conclave resulting from the surprising resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, the Cardinals of the Roman Catholic church elected a new pope. The choice was somewhat a surprise. A pope who was 78 at the time of his election and who resigned for ill health was replaced by a 76 year old. Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio is the first pope from Latin America, the first pope since 741 AD not born in Europe, the first Jesuit to become pope and the first Pope Francis.
Elderly popes are generally chosen as transitory popes (though that logic backfired once rather spectacularly). Yet Pope Francis inherits a church in turmoil. The priest sex abuse scandal continues to sap the legitimacy and credibility of the Catholic Church. Just before the conclave the United Kingdom’s most senior cleric (and notorious homophobe) resigned after allegations surfaced publicly that the cardinal had inappropriate relations with seminarians decades ago. The Curia itself is rife with feuds which may have encouraged Benedict to resign. The traditional heartlands of the Catholic Church no longer heed its teachings and the sex scandals have sapped the institution’s credibility. The heart of the Church is in the southern hemisphere and here it faces aggressive competition from evangelical protestants.
The challenges facing Pope Francis are daunting. His name may pay homage to either St. Francis of Assisi founder of the Franciscan Order (historically the rival of the Jesuits) or the Jesuit St. Francis Xavier (or both). The new Pope has a history of humility and working with the poor. Like Benedict he does not subscribe to the doctrine of government austerity indulged by the American religious right. Yet he is doctrinally conservative. Don’t expect too many changes in church policies regarding women and homosexuals.
The election of Pope Francis has already shone the light on the Catholic Church’s equivocal attitude to the atrocities committed by the Latin American military juntas in the 70s. Francis has previously apologized for the the Church’s failure to speak out on the subject. The record on his own activities during the period appears mixed.
The Catholic Church desperately needs a reformer who can clear out the muck that has accumulated over the past decades. It remains to be seen whether the (likely brief) papacy of Pope Francis will achieve that result.
Some lighthearted irreverence below the fold.
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This story from Lima, Peru is truly cool. Faced with a city with almost no rain, 98% humidity and a water shortage Peru’s University of Engineering and Technology literally made water out of thin (albeit humid) air. They put up a billboard that captured humidity from the air and turned it into water by reverse osmosis. For more details click here and check out the video below.
This could be panacea for water starved regions with sufficient humidity to generate water. However, before mass implementation of such techniques, studies should be performed to discover the impact on weather and rain patterns in other regions. Robbing Peter to pay Paul could merely shift the water shortage elsewhere. Yet this is a truly innovative solution that could help combat an issue that will cause more strife this century than oil – water shortages.
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Hugo Chavez lost his battle with cancer yesterday. The Venezuelan President who was recently re-elected to another term leaves behind a tumultuous legacy. A man who reveled in taunting the West and consorting with the rogues gallery of the world, he also was genuinely loved by many of Venezuela’s underclass.
It is hard not to review the reign of Chavez and come back with a feeling of a wasted opportunity. Chavez identified a legitimate problem in Venezuelan society. Like many resource rich countries Venezuela’s oil wealth did not trickle down to the masses. Under Chavez poverty levels in Venezuela dropped (as they did across Latin America) and the rise in oil prices allowed him to fund a number of populist policies. Yet a lot of the largesse was wasted in crony politics, subsidizing Fidel Castro, funding other leftist politicians across Latin America. The vaunted Bolivarian revolution is proving unsustainable (and hypersensitive to oil prices). Crime has risen, inflation has skyrocketed, corruption is high and nationalization policies have led to a brain drain in the professional class who have emigrated to more welcoming shores.
A bigger problem for this blogger was Chavez’s authoritarian instincts. He was a walking example of how winning elections does not make you a democrat. The judiciary was packed with his cronies, opposition press was muzzled and after losing a referendum on amending the constitution he issued decrees on those provisions in any case. Under the guise of leftist and anti-imperialist solidarity he funded terrorist movements like FARC and embraced tyrants like Gaddaffi.
As the Economist notes, now comes the reckoning. For now reflexive anti-Americanism will rule the day. Chavez may have squandered the opportunity to rebuild Venezuela’s infrastructure, but the oil resources are still available for a wiser ruler to use it for the benefit of the masses as Chavez originally intended. For that to happen Venezuela needs to avoid any other megalomaniacal Caudillos.
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Terry Lee of Cedar City, Utah who claims to have chosen two employees for layoff because they voted for Barack Obama.
Lee justified his decision on the alleged expenses his digital forensics business would incur because of “Obongocare”. Of course he could not identify these costs and his 9 employee business is well short of the 50 employees required for a business to comply with the Affordable Care Act.
So in addition to being an asshole Terry Lee appears to be an ignorant twit. Draw your own conclusions as to what his choice of phrase for Obamacare reveals about the rest of his character.
It is not an easy time to be a school administrator. The massacre in Newton highlights the risks kids face from mentally disturbed people with guns. Yet in a pattern that is profoundly tedious and disturbing, legitimate concerns are an excuse for a lack of common sense.
Over the last two decades schools have responded to safety concerns along with accusations of discrimination by taking the path of least resistance or thought. Zero tolerance policies have led to some really stupid decisions by administrators too petrified to exercise common sense.
This story from Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania has really left me pissed off. A five year old girl allegedly told a classmate that she would shoot her and herself with her “gun.” However, the gun in question was a Hello Kitty Bubble Maker. Someone seems to have contacted the Apparatchiks in charge of her elementary school who responded to a five year old behaving like a five year old by characterizing this a “terrorist threat”. It appears that a teacher may have told the bawling child that she could be headed to jail. Then these geniuses appear to have interrogated the five year old for three hours before contacting her parents. Then they suspended her for 10 days and required her to obtain a psychological evaluation. The suspension has now been reduced to 2 days.
To make it worse the parents of the child cannot enroll her in another school district because of the suspension branded into her record.
The school district has issued a typical mealy mouthed statement:
The Mount Carmel Area School District has investigated the issue and will continue to do so. When given the opportunity in the appropriate forum, we look forward to presenting information that will portray our school district in a more positive light….The statement continues, “The Mount Carmel Area School District takes the well-being and safety of students and staff very seriously. In discipline matters, all circumstances are taken into consideration when arriving at decisions. It is the vision of the Mount Carmel Area educational community to create a safe learning environment that nurtures the intellectual, social, emotional and physical well-being of each child.
This is insane. From the facts public so far the people who should have permanent reprimands in their record are the school officials and the teacher who may have traumatized the child with threats of jail time. It is unconscionable that school officials interrogated a child for so long before contacting the parents.
The parents are considering a lawsuit. I hope they follow up against these bubble headed Apparatchiks.
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Well it is official. Barack Obama’s second term has commenced. After an informal swearing in yesterday (to match the constitutional requirement of January 20), the President delivered his formal inaugural address today (along with retaking the oath of office in public). It appears Chief Justice Roberts did not botch the oath this time.
The tenor of the address is different. The fiscal crisis has abated. Even with the best efforts of the tea party wing of the Republican party to sabotage the economy, the recovery should continue. As a result this address set out a progressive vision of the President’s goals in the second term. Climate change, immigration, voting reform, gay rights, same-sex marriage and a slap down of Paul Ryan’s “nation of takers” by defending the vision of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security highlighted the speech.
This is a different President. The hopey-changey stuff has been tempered by the reality of knee jerk Republican opposition to anything the President proposes. The beltway media hacks will bemoan the lack of bipartisanship without the courage to assign the blame where it belongs.
So the term begins. Hopefully something can be achieved before lame duck status kicks in and the 2016 campaign commences.
Video of the innaugural address is below:
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“Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.” – Abraham Lincoln February 27, 1860
Lincoln could have been talking about the current members of the so called Party of Lincoln.
The fiscal cliff has been averted for now. But in two months the Republicans in Congress will hold the world economy hostage when it is time to raise the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling itself has nothing to do with government spending. It is a product of spending decisions made when Congress passes the budget and apportions money. For years it has provided an opportunity for Congressmen to pontificate on the deficit by symbolically voting to oppose raising the ceiling.
Things changed dramatically in the last two years when the nihilists controlling the Republican Party threatened to make a symbolic vote a reality. The result was the first ever downgrade of America’s credit rating.
Now smarting after losing yet another election and having to concede the tax issue to President Obama, the Republicans are threatening to blow up the economy if they don’t have their way. It is one thing to have a showdown when the budget is passed. However, the Republican posturing over the debt ceiling is akin to playing Russian roulette with the economy. Every serious economist, including Republican policymakers and economists not held hostage to the tea party wing for electoral or financial reasons, acknowledge that the debt ceiling must be raised. The Republican politicians promising a hostage crisis have themselves done so in the past.
For now President Obama has indicated that he will not negotiate on this issue. Hopefully he will deviate from his past practice and hold to that pledge. After all America supposedly does not negotiate with terrorists. And make no mistake this is a terrorist threat by a bunch of irresponsible petulant politicians.
And yet the Republicans while proclaiming their desire for a dollar for dollar spending reduction for the debt ceiling increase have not actually identified these spending cuts. The Paul Ryan budget last year had a similar oversight. In the fiscal cliff negotiations the Republicans tried to put the onus on Democrats to come up with the specific spending cuts to satisfy the Republican desire for recession inducing austerity. Why? Because the entitlement cuts Republicans want are deeply unpopular. While Republicans want to shred the social safety net they also want to attack the Democrats for making the cuts, i.e. have their cake and eat it too.
America sorely needs a responsible opposition party. Instead it has a party that abandons its positions the moment the Democrats embrace them – e.g. cap & trade, health care reform. The Republicans are focused on protecting the wealthy while suggesting cruel and foolish “solutions” to cut entitlement spending like raising the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare which do little to reduce the deficit and may actually increase health care costs.
If the Republicans continue in their intransigence it is time to consider the constitutional option or the coin minting option to raise the debt ceiling. America and the world economy cannot continue to be held hostage every time when the debt ceiling needs to be raised. This is not a legitimate political bargaining chip and the Republican Party should not be allowed to pretend that agreeing not to damage the economy constitutes some sort of sacrifice on their part. That is the conduct of terrorists. It is time to end this hostage crisis.
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As the new Congress gets sworn in, this blogger will not miss the following.
- The sanctimonious narcissistic warmongering prick.
- The batshit crazy lucky to not be court-martialed congressman.
- The child support dodging irresponsible flamethrower.
- The Waterloo seeking Senator Nyet about to ride the conservative grifter express.
- Congressman magic female body parts.
Yet there are still many loons still wandering the halls of Congress. In 2014 we place our hopes.
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The smiling visage of Johnny Heisman now stares out over Times Square, New York. Texas A&M’s archaic marketing department has really changed since Jason Cook came on board. Dear University of Oregon, you stick a billboard in Times Square after your quarterback wins the Heisman.
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