Thursday Reads

Good Morning!! Today is Veterans Day.

The big news of the day is the draft report of the co-chairs President’s Catfood Commission, which is not going over too well even with the other members of the commission. Below are a few more reactions to yesterday’s announcement by Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles–beyond the ones in Dakinikat’s post yesterday.

BTW, have you ever seen men who looked more dead inside than those two? As you would expect from such soulless men, they didn’t hesitate to advocate cuts to veterans’ benefits along with their attacks on the middle class, the poor, and old people.

So, on to those reactions.

At Huffpo, Dan Froomkin lists “Ten Flash Points In The Fiscal Commission Chairmen’s Proposal”

…taken as a whole, the plan authored by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson would have devastating effects on the government and its ability to help the most vulnerable in our society, and it would put the squeeze on the middle class, veterans, the elderly and the sick – all in the name of an abstract goal that ultimately only a bond-trader could love.

For a summary of the attack on veterans, Froomkin links to David Dayen at FDL:

They want to add co-pays to the Veterans’ Administration and TRICARE, as well as pushing individuals covered by TRICARE into an employer policy. They also want to freeze noncombat military pay for three years. And, they want to end schools for families on military bases, instead reintegrating soldier’s kids into the public school system (because that’s so easy for a military family that moves every other year).

The attack on old people and future retirement benefits for everyone:

Deficit Comm. Chairs’ Social Security Cuts Mean Seniors Pay for Wall Street Instead of Their Own Retirement, Says Bob Weiner, Ex-House Aging Committee Chief of Staff

The Deficit Commission “Chairmen’s Mark” proposal today for Social Security cuts, including raising the retirement age and reducing the cost of living, means that “Seniors will be paying for Wall Street instead of their own retirement, will be forced to work longer, and will be squeezed into poverty, despite the fact that the Social Security system has no debt for 30+ years based on what seniors have paid into it,” says former House Aging Committee Chief of Staff Robert Weiner.

“Social Security adds not a dime to the national debt for at least 30 years. What is really happening is cuts advocates are using the Social Security funds literally paid for by seniors to reverse other federal programs that do have deficits or are unpaid, and to pay for the tax breaks for the wealthy,” Weiner continues.

Michael Hiltzik: The deficit commission chairs’ lies about Social Security

Look out — the enemies of Social Security are locked and loaded for a renewed attack on the program.

The new volley comes from the co-chairs of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, the so-called deficit commission ginned up by the White House as a sop to conservatives. The co-chairs are the profoundly clownish former Sen. Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, a Democrat with his feet firmly implanted on Wall Street….

The co-chairs propose to gut Social Security under the guise of “saving” it, eliminate federal funding for services and programs that heavily benefit the middle- and working classes, and — surprise — steer even more income tax cuts to the wealthy.

The cuts to Social Security are subtle, and for that reason worthy of close scrutiny. The co-chairs’ key proposal is to raise the regular retirement age to as high as 69, and raise the minimum retirement age to 64. This imposes disproportionate harm on lower-income workers, whose working lives tend to be shorter than others’. They also want to reduce relative benefits for better-paid workers, and change the formula for cost-of-living increases to one that looks like it would customarily produce lower COLAs.

Bloomberg summarized a range of reactions: U.S. Debt Proposal Would Cut Social Security, Taxes, Medicare A few quotes:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California called the plan “simply unacceptable,” saying older Americans “are counting on the bedrock promises of Social Security and Medicare.”

House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio, who will become speaker in January, said before the plan’s release that he supported a freeze on federal hiring and the pay of U.S. government workers.

John Courson, chief executive officer of the Mortgage Bankers Association in Washington, said eliminating or reducing the mortgage deduction would drive down home values.

“Of all the times to do it, now is not the time,” he said in an interview.

Senator Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, called the plan a “starting point for the conversation.”

“We’re not going to have an up-or-down vote on this,” said Durbin. “There are proposals in there that are painful. I told them I said there are things in here which inspire me and other things which I hate like the devil hates holy water. I’m not going to vote for those things.”

Christian Science Monitor: Who will be upset by panel’s proposal on national debt? Nearly everyone.

The co-chairmen of President Obama’s deficit-reduction panel issued a draft proposal Wednesday outlining ways to achieve a nearly $4 trillion reduction in national debt over the next 10 years. Among other things, they urge deep cuts in domestic and military spending, raising the retirement age to 69, and ending or curbing popular tax breaks such as the deduction for mortgage interest.

Whose hair will light on fire as they peruse this interim report? Plenty of people. It includes something to make folks of almost every political persuasion mad.

The article then enumerates the groups who will be freaking out over the various proposals.

Some writers explained why the Catfood Commission proposals will probably come to nothing:

Talking Points Memo: Poll: Voters Would Rather Tax The Wealthy Than Cut Social Security

Voters last week sent Washington a strong message about fixing the federal budget, according to exclusive numbers from a new poll obtained by TPM: Raise taxes on the wealthy and cut the military budget before you touch the nation’s largest entitlement program, Social Security.

The survey of voters who cast ballots last Tuesday — conducted by Democratic pollster PPP and commissioned by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee — found that when respondents were given the choice between cutting the defense budget, raising taxes on the wealthy and cutting Social Security to reduce the deficit, just 12% said they’d like to see the entitlement program cut. Forty-three percent said they’d prefer to see taxes on the wealthy go up, and 22% said cutting the huge defense budget was the best way to go.

Of course Congress could try to pass some of these cuts in the lame duck session, but then those left behind would have to pay a heavy price at the ballot box.

Slate: Why the deficit commission’s proposal is unlikely to go anywhere.

First, this is only a “proposal” to the rest of the commission—for it to become official, 14 of the panel’s 18 members would have to agree to it. That seems far-fetched, given that the members of the commission have been at loggerheads since President Obama created it in February. And even if the commission does manage to issue a report, Congress is under no obligation to pass it. In fact, this deficit commission exists in the first place because a proposal to create a congressional deficit commission was filibustered in the Senate.

More detailed discussion of the Catfood Commission proposals follows.

Dan Eggen of the Washington Post notes that a number of Commission members have conflicts of interest: Many deficit commission staffers paid by outside groups

Many of its employees aren’t employed by the panel at all. Instead, about one in four commission staffers is paid by outside entities, many of which have strong ideological points of view about how to tackle the deficit.

For example, the salaries of two senior staffers, Marc Goldwein and Ed Lorenzen, are paid by private groups that have previously advocated cuts to entitlement programs. Lorenzen is paid by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, while Goldwein is paid by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which is also partly funded by the Peterson group.

The outsourcing has come under sharp criticism from seniors’ organizations and liberal activists, who say the strategy is part of a broader conservative bias favoring painful entitlement cuts over other solutions. The fears of some liberal groups appeared to come true on Wednesday, when the commission’s two leaders recommended significant reductions for Social Security and other social-welfare programs.

Sam Stein at Huffpo reports that two DINOs, Evan Bayh and Kent Conrad have joined a $20 million effort by ultra right winger Pete Peterson to destroy Social Security.

In what may be the first major move of the forthcoming Social Security debate, the Peterson Foundation launched on Tuesday a $20 million TV ad campaign to promote the need for a major discussion on debt and deficit reduction.

Titled “OweNo,” the campaign, which promotes a mock presidential candidate irreverently named Hugh Jidette (get it? Huge debt), doesn’t take on Social Security reform directly. But the connections are fairly obvious and it has the program’s defenders deeply wary about being outgunned. The Peterson Foundation, for one, has never shied away from its push to reform the entitlement program. And in introducing the $20 million effort, the organization’s founder, former Nixon commerce secretary and fiscal conservative Pete Peterson made it abundantly clear that Social Security is in his sights.

“Solving our fiscal issues without fundamental entitlement reform is a statistical impossibility,” he said. “Entitlement reform must provide benefits for the most vulnerable. But if we wait too long to reform and we confront a crisis, the politics may become brutal and even violent and in such a situation there would be no assurance that the safety net, even for the most vulnerable, might not be seriously frayed.”

THE RETURN OF DUBYA

As we all know, George W. Bush emerged from his well-deserved obscurity to promote his new autobiography, Delusional Me er, Decision Points. He’s been making the rounds of the friendliest, least challenging interviewers he could find, beginning with Matt Lauer. Here’s Greg Mitchell’s takedown of the Bush-Lauer love-fest:

There was no way to tell from the advance publicity and clips how poorly Matt Lauer would perform in his primetime interview with George W. Bush tonight, part of the ex-president’s book-flacking tour (which will now move on to Oprah and a lengthy embed at Fox News). Oh, we had our suspicions based on Lauer’s track record, but the reality was even worse than the fantasy….

Time after time Bush would offer a whopper and Lauer either said nothing, or expressed sympathy for the poor man who was subjected o such harsh criticism. It went that way, from Bush saying there was “no intelligence” prior to 9/11 about terrorists maybe wanting to fly planes into buildings, to stating flatly that lack of regulations had anything to do with the financial meltdown.

Bush said he had zero doubts about the WMD intelligence on Iraq, not one—and Lauer eagerly pointed out (doing his Judy Miller impersonation) that George Tenet called it a “slam dunk.” (See David Corn’s full takedown on this.) Bush said posing in front of the window when flying over New Orleans was a mistake but Lauer helps him finger local officials who had not done enough. Lauer even highlights Bush’s claim that he could not send in federal troops because it would have looked like a white president putting down an “insurrection” in largely black city.

Robert Scheer has a pretty good takedown of the book itself: The Life and Times of Bush the Clueless

But by far the most satisfying “review” of Bush’s book comes from Joseph Wilson at Huffpo: George Bush’s Deception Points.

Please Dubya, disappear again soon and don’t come back.

BARACK OBAMA WAS USED AND NOW HE’S USED UP

I came across this article by economist Robert Freeman–it’s a few days old, but still entertaining reading.

Barack Obama was used. Of course, he knew he was being used when he made the deal. But what he didn’t know was how quickly he would be used up. Now he has to face two years of humiliation knowing that he betrayed the people and the country he claimed to champion – and knowing that everyone else knows it as well – but also knowing that he’s gotten what’s coming to him.

Obama made a deal to get the job in the first place. The deal was that he would carry on with Bush’s bailout of the banks, with Bush’s two wars, with Bush’s suppression of civil liberties, that he wouldn’t prosecute or even investigate any of the enormous fraud that had brought down the country, or the lies that had railroaded it into war.

Even before he took office, he began fulfilling his end of the bargain.

The whole article is well worth reading, but here’s the final paragraph:

It’s hard to feel sorry for Barack Obama. When all the politics, posturing, posing and pontification are over, his party lost because he betrayed his base and they could not stomach voting for his people or his party again. He’s proven himself a duplicitous executive and a feckless “leader” who has “led” the Republicans to their biggest pick-up in the House in decades. Now he has to live with it. But the damage is incalculable. It will last for generations. It will be an embarrassment to watch him try to pretend to be effective the next two years, with everyone – himself included – knowing that he is used up. But he is. Good riddance.

We told you so, suckers!!!

A LITTLE COMIC RELIEF

Via Uppity Woman, Michelle Obama managed to get the better of a conservative Indonesian government minister a couple of days ago.

Once the wait for President Barack Obama’s return was over, Indonesian anticipation turned to another question: Would a conservative Muslim government minister shake the first lady’s hand?

He says he did, but not by choice. Footage on YouTube shows otherwise, sparking a debate that has lit up Facebook, Twitter and the rest of the blogosphere.

“I tried to prevent (being touched) with my hands but Mrs. Michelle held her hands too far toward me (so) we touched,” Information Minister Tifatul Sembiring told tens of thousands of followers on Twitter.

While Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world, the vast majority practice a moderate form of the faith. But Sembiring has flaunted his piety, making a point of avoiding contact with women who are not related to him.

Good for Michelle. I hope Barack didn’t apologize for her though…

What stories and blogs are you following today?

UPDATE: via Dances with Pumas on Twitter, Murphy has a wonderful post on the history of Veterans Day at Pumapac.