Friday Reads

Posted: July 8, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: abortion rights, black women's reproductive health, Catfood Commission, Democratic Politics, Economy, Federal Budget and Budget deficit, fetus fetishists, fundamentalist Christians, John Birch Society in Charge, morning reads, religious extremists, Reproductive Health, Reproductive Rights, Republican presidential politics, right wing hate grouups, U.S. Economy, We are so F'd | Tags: , , , , , , | 51 Comments

Good Morning!!

It’s hard not to be be completely discouraged these days.  Our Washington deal-makers are permanently stuck in opposites day.  No amount of reality is going to bring the lot of them out of whatever place they strategically reside.  This Reuters piece stands as a hallmark to the current lunacy.  We shouldn’t have any financial problems.  Social Security is solvent and it’s not part of the federal budget are deficit problem.  Why am I reading this then?

If Treasury were to decide to delay some payments, one option could be to postpone a disbursement of more than $49 billion to Social Security recipients that is due on August 3.

It would be a politically explosive step but one that could allow the government to temporarily pay bondholders to try to avoid foreign investors dumping U.S. Treasuries and the dollar.

The administration has warned that any missed payments, including those to retirees, veterans and contractors, would be default by another name, and the Treasury team still has concerns that any contingency plan would prove unworkable.

Steve McMillin, a former deputy director of the White House Office of Management and Budget under Bush, said Treasury has options but most of them are “pretty ugly.”

If Treasury were to decide to delay payments, it would need to re-program government computers that generate automatic payments as they fall due — a massive and difficult undertaking. Treasury makes about 3 million payments each day.

Do they figure that seniors aren’t going to riot in the streets effectively like that episodede of South Park called Grey Dawn? I can pretty well imagine that they won’t stop payments to their corporate bosses.  After all, that option would soothe the bond vigilantes.

Here’s the issues under study now according to that same Reuter’s article.

– Whether the administration can delay payments to try to manage cash flows after August 2

– If the U.S. Constitution allows President Barack Obama to ignore Congress and the government to continue to issue debt

– Whether a 1985 finding by a government watchdog gives the government legal authority to prioritize payments.

The Treasury team has also spoken to the Federal Reserve about how the central bank — specifically the New York Federal Reserve Bank — would operate as Treasury’s broker in the markets if a deal to raise the United States’ $14.3 trillion borrowing cap is not reached on time.

I’m teaching an MBA Corporate Finance seminar this summer.  Every single asset pricing model that prices securities, bonds, loans,options or whatever basically uses the US treasury bond as the risk-free asset.  I feel like I have to asterisk everything I’m teaching right now which is basically the same thing that was taught to me back in the 1980s.  It’s like these folks are purposefully trying to tank the financial markets and bring on another crisis.  If they manage to raise the debt ceiling, then it appears likely to be done by ‘austerity’ measure like $4 trillion dollars in cuts.  Start your backyard gardens now.  The next depression is bound to be a big one. I have just have no idea why they’re trying to blow up our economy.  It’s just frigging unbelievable. Of course, Orrin Hatch wants us all to suffer more, because after all, people that aren’t filthy rich are obviously defective in gawd’s eyes.

So, tell me, who is the real practicioner of voodoo economics?

So, here’s a nifty graph on the left from Ezra Klein showing the mix of spending cuts vs. tax increases the last few times we’ve had these debt and deficit discussions.  Looks like the real practitioner of voodoo economics wasn’t Ronald Reagan but is Barrack Obama.  Just more of the alternate reality forced on us by media and politicians that make up news, history, and economic theory.

As you can see on the graph, in each case, taxes were at least a third of the total, and in Reagan’s case, his massive tax cuts were followed by deficit-reduction deals that actually relied on tax increases. Today, tea party conservatives would be begging Sen. Jim DeMint to primary the Gipper.

Bush also included taxes in his deal, and Clinton relied heavily on taxes in his first deficit-reduction bill, which passed without Republican votes. In 1997, when he was working with Republicans, he actually cut taxes slightly while passing spending cuts. But of course the economy was in much better shape then, and Clinton had already increased revenues substantially.

The one-third rule doesn’t break down until you get to the deal Obama reportedly offered Republicans in the first round of debt-ceiling talks: $2 trillion in spending cuts for $400 billion in taxes, or an 83:17 split. And that, if anything, understates how good of a deal Republicans are getting. Tax revenues and rates are much, much lower than they were under Reagan, Bush or Clinton. And next year, Obama is pledging to extend most of the Bush tax cuts, which amounts to a $3 trillion-plus tax cut against current law.

Meanwhile, the polls–like this one from Pew Research–show that people overwhelmingly want to maintain social security, medicaid and medicare and would support tax increases to do so.  So much for government of, for, and by the people.

As policymakers at the state and national level struggle with rising entitlement costs, overwhelming numbers of Americans agree that, over the years, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid have been good for the country.

But these cherished programs receive negative marks for current performance, and their finances are widely viewed as troubled. Reflecting these concerns, most Americans say all three programs either need to be completely rebuilt or undergo major changes. However, smaller majorities express this view than did so five years ago.

The public’s desire for fundamental change does not mean it supports reductions in the benefits provided by Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. Relatively few are willing to see benefit cuts as part of the solution, regardless of whether the problem being addressed is the federal budget deficit, state budget shortfalls or the financial viability of the entitlement programs.

Jim DeMint is one of the people that should be the first in line to be charged with treason and gross stupidity. Where was Senator DeMint when all the votes were taken to spend all this money to start out with? Plus, all those irresponsible revenue cuts back in the early 2000s when we basically had a balanced budget?  He was a congressman from 1999-2005 so certainly he must’ve tried to stop Dubya Bush from all that spending!

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) said Wednesday night that Republicans should maintain their hardline position in the debt-ceiling debate even if it results in “serious disruptions” to the economy.

“What I’m advocating here is, let’s use this as a point of leverage, give the president an increase, but don’t come away without real cuts from real caps and spending, and without a balanced budget,” DeMint said on FOX Business Network.

“We’re at the point where there would have to be some, you know, some serious disruptions in order not to raise [the debt ceiling],” he said. “I’m willing to do that.”

The president pushed the economy into “crisis” mode, according to DeMint. He said the president has been “burning time” with the deficit negotiations led by Vice President Biden, when the looming debt ceiling and budget deficit could have been addressed last year.

DeMint, well-known for speaking out in favor of limited government and balancing the budget, told host Andrew Napolitano that if Republicans and Democrats couldn’t vote in “something permanent” that would limit government spending, “we’re going to continue to spend [until] the total country collapses.”

Warren Buffet says  the GOP is Threatening To ‘Blow Your Brains Out’ Over Debt Ceiling

Republicans are playing a dangerous game by refusing to raise the debt ceiling, according to Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett.

“We raised the debt ceiling seven times during the Bush Administration,” Buffett told CNBC on Thursday. Now, the Republican-controlled Congress is “trying to use the incentive now that we’re going to blow your brains out, America, in terms of your debt worthiness over time.”

If Congress fails to raise the borrowing limit of the federal government by August 2, the date when the U.S. will reach the limit of its borrowing abilities, it will likely begin defaulting on its loans.

Buffett, who according to the Washington Post has helped raise money for Democratic candidates like Hilary Clinton in the past, has been highly critical of the actions of the Republican-controlled Congress. In May, Buffett stated at a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder’s meeting that if the Congress failed to raise the debt ceiling, it would constitute “the most asinine act” in the nation’s history, reports Reuters.

Other political news is equally disheartening.  Most of the governments in the states are as crazy–if not crazier–than the US Congress.  Planned Parenthood in North Carolina is suing the state over budget cuts designed to cut access to much used and cost saving preventive health care.

One of North Carolina’s two Planned Parenthood affiliates filed a federal lawsuit Thursday to invalidate part of the new state budget that cuts it off from federal or state funds for family planning.

The budget, written by Republicans in control of the General Assembly for the first time in more than a century, states that Planned Parenthood and its affiliates are forbidden from receiving any contracts or grants from the state health agency. The lawsuit filed in Greensboro’s federal court by Planned Parenthood of Central North Carolina contends the group is being punished for its abortion-rights advocacy, saying that violates its free-speech protections.

The organization is barred by law from using public money to perform abortions and uses the government contracts to provide family planning or teen pregnancy prevention services, yet is being singled out because Planned Parenthood supports abortion rights, the lawsuit said. Efforts to cut off funds to Planned Parenthood affiliates in North Carolina are similar to those in Kansas and Indiana, which were also met with federal lawsuits, the group’s attorneys said.

“Their sole purpose is to single out, vilify, and punish Planned Parenthood as a particularly visible provider and advocate — even though, ironically, the eliminated funds have nothing to do with abortion, but will only deprive low-income people of desperately needed health services and teen pregnancy prevention programs,” the lawsuit said.

Planned Parenthood of Central North Carolina received $287,000 in federal, state and matching local funds in the year that ended last week for teen pregnancy prevention and family planning programs that provided contraceptives to poor women, according to the state Department of Health and Human Services. The non-profit operates from locations in Chapel Hill, Durham, and Fayetteville.

Some of the most extremist pastors are signing on to Texas Governor Rick Perry’s Pray-a polooza.  Talk about a hater-thon.  Remember, Perry is supposed to be the ‘electable’ Republican.

And we already knew Perry didn’t care much about including, or even not offending, non-Christians: his personal letter announcing the event calls on the entire nation to pray to Jesus Christ. But the news, reported by Right Wing Watch, that a radical pastor named C. Peter Wagner has signed on as an official endorser of The Response deserves more attention.

The Colorado-based Wagner, who is featured on the website of The Response, is the head of Global Harvest Ministries.

His brand of evangelicalism, known as the New Apostolic Reformation, is characterized by extreme hostility to other religions. In this passage from his book “Hard-Core Idolatry: Facing the Facts,” Wagner praises the burning of Catholic saints, copies of the Book of Mormon, voodoo dolls, and other “idols”

Yup, welcome to the new surreality.  All we need is Rod Serling introducing the morning reads today and I’d say that would be about right.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

President Hornswoggle and the Debted Hallows

Posted: July 7, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Barack Obama, Catfood Commission, Democratic Politics, Economy, Federal Budget, Federal Budget and Budget deficit, Global Financial Crisis, John Birch Society in Charge, legislation, Psychopaths in charge, Surreality, The Great Recession, U.S. Economy, voodoo economics | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 39 Comments

So, you know me.  I’m out looking for exactly how bad this debt ‘deal’ is going to austere our economy in to the Great Recession Redux.   BostonBoomer has been writing about President Hornswoggle putting Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security–not even part of the federal budget–on the table.  I’ve searched and searched and can’t find the details on the great American Give Away other than a few articles showing a beaming Boehner saying we’re at a 50-50 chance of reaching a deal now.   If Boehner is beaming, all but the richest among us should be holding on to our personal liberties and wallets.

We know that the President has caved on a bunch of things during both the HRC negotiations and the extension of the Dubya Tax Breaks for Billionaires pogrom.  However, the Democratic leadership was aware of this, grumbled some, and backed his usurpation of responsibility for our future.  Imagine my surprise when I watched Chuck Schumer on Andrea Mitchell say that he had no idea about the details of the current deal so he couldn’t really comment on it.  The most noticeable detail was his face that said “I’ve got a sick tummy, mommy”.  Senator Schumer is on the Senate  Committee on Finance that handles all of these things and is supposedly a key person on the budget deal.   You would think he would know.  But, he doesn’t and neither does any other Democratic Senator or Congressman.  It appears the press told them what Obama was handing over to the Republicans.

Senate Democrats reacted angrily Thursday to a report that President Obama has proposed significant cuts to Medicare and Social Security in closed-door talks with GOP leaders.

Democratic lawmakers said they were dismayed to read about Obama’s offer in the press rather than hearing it from the president himself. Their frustration is exacerbated by Obama’s snub of their invitation to speak to the Senate Democratic caucus Wednesday.

Instead, Obama is meeting with Democratic and Republican leaders from both chambers Thursday morning.

“We would have preferred to hear it from the president instead of from the press,” said Sen. Barbara Mikulski (Md.), a senior member of the Senate Democratic conference. “We first have to go after tax earmarks.”

Mikulski said cuts to Medicare and Social Security should be a solution of last resort. She said closing tax loopholes and pulling back from Libya should be considered before entitlement cuts.

She said Obama should not assume Democratic support for a deficit reduction plan that cuts entitlements.

I now fully expect President Cave-in to hand the keys to the nation over to a bunch of punch-drunk Republicans.  What I don’t get is why the Democratic members of Congress continue to let him get away with it.  They are the very face of “sound and fury signifying nothing”.  Let me ask you if you’d want to be a congress member from some solid Democratic district facing re-election by having to defend a Democratic President that’s happy to cut Medicare and Social Security?  Social Security doesn’t even need to be on the table.  He’s just offered it up for some reason that I can’t fathom. How on earth could you face your electorate and back such a  deal?

Let me remind you, all of the economic data gathered in the last 80 years tells us that this austerity agenda is just going to tank the economy. We continue t0 enact the very same crap that put us in the worst economic position we’ve seen since the Great Depression.  Why oh why are they doing this to us?  Here’s a taste of Noble Prize winning Joseph Stiglitz for some perspective.

A decade ago, in the midst of an economic boom, the United States faced a surplus so large that it threatened to eliminate the national debt. Unaffordable tax cuts and wars, a major recession, and soaring health care costs—fueled in part by the commitment of George W. Bush’s administration to giving drug companies free rein in setting prices, even with government money at stake—quickly transformed a huge surplus into record peacetime deficits.

The remedies to the U.S. deficit follow immediately from this diagnosis: Put America back to work by stimulating the economy; end the mindless wars; rein in military and drug costs; and raise taxes, at least on the very rich. But the right will have none of this, and instead is pushing for even more tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, together with expenditure cuts in investments and social protection that put the future of the U.S. economy in peril and that shred what remains of the social contract. Meanwhile, the U.S. financial sector has been lobbying hard to free itself of regulations, so that it can return to its previous, disastrously carefree, ways.

Here’s a thorough, peer-reviewed, strong methodology-based  IMF study–cited by Paul Krugman–that provides evidence that austerity programs are recessionary and bring on worse budget problems.

The paper corrects this by using the historical record to identify true examples of deliberate austerity — and it turns out that they are contractionary. The multiplier is less than one, but that may reflect the fact that these austerity programs did not take place in the face of a zero lower bound, so they were partly offset by monetary expansion.

The paper also provides a tentative answer to the apparent tendency of spending cuts to be less contractionary than tax increases: it looks as if central banks take more aggressive action to offset spending cuts than tax hikes, reflecting some combination of inflation concerns, belief that spending cuts are more durable, and (the paper doesn’t say this) bankerly ideology.

If we were discussing a politically neutral subject, the evidence here would long since have been considered definitive: expansionary austerity is a doctrine that failed. But since we’re in the political realm, of course, such a convenient doctrine can’t be abandoned. On the contrary, it now seems to be the official doctrine of both the GOP and the White House.

Also, let me remind you that Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are very successful programs.  They have successfully stopped the elderly from being the poorest segment of society.  Just as an example, the majority of single, elderly women would be in poverty without Social Security.

Elderly unmarried women — including widows — get 51 percent of their total income from Social Security. Unmarried elderly men get 39 percent, while elderly married couples get 36 percent of their income from Social Security. For 25 percent of unmarried women, Social Security is their only source of income, compared to 9 percent of married couples and 20 percent of unmarried men. Without Social Security benefits, the elderly poverty rate among women would have been 52.2 percent and among widows would have been 60.6 percent.

Here’s a recent,  powerful, academic study showing the benefits of providing Health Insurance for the poor.

When poor people are given medical insurance, they not only find regular doctors and see doctors more often but they also feel better, are less depressed and are better able to maintain financial stability, according to a new, large-scale study that provides the first rigorously controlled assessment of the impact of Medicaid.

While the findings may seem obvious, health economists and policy makers have long questioned whether it would make any difference to provide health insurance to poor people.

It has become part of the debate on Medicaid, at a time when states are cutting back on this insurance program for the poor. In fact, the only reason the study could be done was that Oregon was running out of money and had to choose some people to get insurance and exclude others, providing groups for comparison.

I continually feel as though we’ve all been drug down the rabbit hole. It is like the President is purposefully enabling  joblessness, poverty, and public health problems.  No amount of research, historical data, and polls appear to be able to penetrate the Washington, D.C. group think these day. The biggest issue is that the President himself believes in the confidence fairy, the bipartisan elves, and the high priests of voodoo economics.  He’s not just part of the problem, he is THE problem.  Can  just one or two members of the Democratic caucus please stand up to this man and his notion that bipartisanship that surrenders the country to right wing reality-deniers is better than any form of principled leadership?   Can at least one of the please be brave and start talking some sense and representing the will of the people for a change?

Invoke the 14th Amendment and end the damned sell outs now!

Boehner’s VooDoo Economics Memes

Posted: May 11, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Domestic Policy, Economy, Federal Budget, Federal Budget and Budget deficit, John Birch Society in Charge, Republican politics, voodoo economics, We are so F'd | Tags: , , , , | 27 Comments

Bloomberg is reporting that “Boehner’s Views on Economy Contradicted by Studies”.  It’s about time some business magazine did this.  Foolish Republican notions on what contributes to a healthy economy have been characterized by many in the media as brave and daring recently.  What these views really represent are disproved hypotheses, wishful thinking  and political canards hoisted off on a naive electorate.

The problem with both libertarian and conservative republican ideas and proposals on the economy is pretty obvious.  They have no basis in fact or data what-so-ever.

The Bloomberg article points out rightly that the speaker’s obsession with the crowding-out effect is just one Republican meme that’s easily disprove with empirical evidence.  Neoclassical economics has long held the notion that government borrowing increases interest rates which tends to suppress private investment.  Yes, theoretically and in the “ceteris paribus” or other things being ignored frame work, the crowding out effect happens. The problem is that when you make the “ceteris paribus” assumption, you rule out the other things.  The other things are what’s important here.  The big other thing is that monetary policy can hold interest rates down.  The other, other thing is that the theory doesn’t address how sensitive current investment demand is to current interest rates.  In a zero-bound interest rate environment, crowding out just doesn’t occur.  Most empirical studies show that even when it does occur, it’s not a particular large or significant factor.  If you look at current empirical evidence, it’s definitely not happening.

Boehner said in his May 9 speech to the Economic Club of New York that government borrowing was crowding out private investment, the 2009 economic-stimulus package hurt job creation, and a Republican plan to privatize Medicare will give future recipients the “same kinds of options” lawmakers have.

With Democrats and Republicans sparring over legislation to extend the government’s $14.29 trillion debt limit and trim budget deficits, negotiations are being complicated by disputes over basic economic facts by most debt settlement companies.

“We’re in this Alice-in-Wonderland world around government-shutdown conversations, the debt-ceiling conversations,” Senator Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat, said yesterday at a breakfast at the Bloomberg News Washington bureau. The debate “has not established a shared understanding of the facts” about the nation’s economic problems, he said.

Boehner’s statement in his Wall Street speech that government spending “is crowding out private investment and threatening the availability of capital” runs counter to the behavior of credit markets.

Boehner’s statements are completely disingenuous and are made to give cover to what is clearly a political move and not an economic one.  Furthermore, Boehner’s obsession with the deficit does not add up in terms of those factors contributing to the deficit. Ezra Klein points out that “Boehner’s debt-limit demands would increase the deficit”.  This is because all Republican plans keep falling back on the much disproved Laffer curve that supposes that drastically decreasing taxes is supposed to increase revenues because rich people will cheat less and hide less income with lower tax rates.

John Boehner’s new line on the deficit negotiations is that raising taxes — by which he appears to also mean closing tax expenditures — “is off the table. But everything else is on the table.” This is a bit like telling your doctor, who’s worried that you’ve gained weight and are out-of-shape, that exercise is off the table, but everything else is on the table. Well, it’s nice that you’re prepared to diet, but you need to exercise, too. Otherwise, you’re not going to get where you need to go.

And without revenue, we’re not going to get where we need to go — at least if you think where we need to go is towards a balanced budget. Over the past 10 years, the Bush tax cuts have increased the deficit by about $1.3 trillion. They’re the single largest policy contributor to our recent deficits. Due to the growth of the economy and the creep of the alternative minimum tax, they’ll cost the Treasury closer to $4 trillion over the next 10 years. They’re the single largest policy contributor to our projected deficits.

Extending the Bush tax cuts over the next 10 years, which Boehner favors, will increase the deficit by twice as much as the $2 trillion in spending cuts he’s calling for will reduce the deficit. Conversely, adding the revenue increases in the Simpson-Bowles plan to his spending cuts would bring the deficit reduction to more $3 trillion. But Boehner isn’t using the debt-ceiling vote to reduce the debt. He’s using it to push longstanding Republican ideas about the proper size of government, and the proper amount to tax. This has been clear for awhile, of course, Remember CutGo? But it’s worth being straightforward about it. Boehner’s plan doesn’t get our finances back in shape. He wants us to spend less, but he also wants us to cut taxes by more. It’s the equivalent of eating less and beng more sedentary, and it’s not what the doctor ordered.

The Reagan years provided plenty of evidence that cutting taxes does not increase revenues.  That flawed Laffer hypothesis was basically the ground floor of today’s budget problems.  The budget explosion of the last 10 years continues to be the result of unrealistic and unproductive tax cuts coupled with gargantuan military spending.  Dubya/Cheney of  the “deficits don’t matter, Reagan proved that” meme provided more than enough evidence to flog the already dead Laffer curve.

Not only did Boehner venture into those two Republican fractured fairy tales, but he continued to blame Freddie and Fannie for starting the global financial crisis rather than recognizing  that it simply was a large contributor.  Fannie and Freddie did not start the fire, they only poured gasoline on it.  This oversight allows Republicans to gloss over the real instigators.

Boehner also repeated familiar Republican political criticisms that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government mortgage companies, “triggered the whole meltdown” of the U.S. financial system.

That differs from the conclusions earlier this year of the Democratic majority on the congressionally appointed Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. It reported that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “participated in the expansion of subprime and other risky mortgages, but they followed rather than led Wall Street and other lenders in the rush for fool’s gold.”

Three of the panel’s four Republicans, while faulting Fannie and Freddie, didn’t place the blame squarely on the two mortgage giants.

“They were part of the securitization process that lowered mortgage credit quality standards,” said a dissenting report by Keith Hennessey, Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Bill Thomas, former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. In a Wall Street Journal essay, the three said laying primary blame on government intervention is “misleading” and cited 10 reasons, taken together, for the crisis.

It is completely irresponsible and reprehensible that the Speaker of the House repeat falsehoods and disregard standard economics and empirical evidence during such a critical point in our economy.  We have a jobs crisis.  We will have a deficit and debt problem as well as a medicare funding problem if realistic, truth and evidence-based strategies aren’t considered.  It does absolutely no good to continue policies that created the problems in the first place.  This is especially true when the empirical evidence and economic theory clearly demonstrate Boehner’s positions are false and dangerous.

Here’s an example of the data rather than the meme.

The speaker didn’t mention a 1993 tax increase that raised the top individual marginal rate to 39.6 percent, where it stood until 2001. In 1998, the government recorded its first budget surplus in almost 30 years.

The U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of 4.1 percent in 1994, the year after Congress passed the second tax increase of the decade. The growth rate dropped to 2.5 percent in 1995, and thereafter rose to 3.7 percent in 1996. The economy grew more than 4 percent a year from 1997 through 2000.

Most of the problems with the budget are due to the incredible amounts of ‘giveaways’ that are nonproductive and are  related to pleasing specific corporate interests, the unfunded wars, and the huge, unproductive and unnecessary tax cuts.  Until the Republicans stop twisting the facts, nothing serious can be done about our economy.  Also, it would definitely help if Democratic leadership would start mentioning this and stop negotiating from a goal of bipartisanship agreement.  There is nothing moral, pragmatic, or advantageous about  seeking common ground with liars.

Monday Reads

Posted: May 9, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: abortion rights, American Gun Fetish, Barack Obama, Economy, fetus fetishists, GLBT Rights, Global Financial Crisis, John Birch Society in Charge, New Orleans, PLUB Pro-Life-Until-Birth, religious extremists, Reproductive Rights, the villagers | Tags: , , , , , , | 18 Comments

Good Morning!!!

Hopefully, you had a great weekend!  The weather’s been nice here but we’re mostly focused on all that water coming down the Mississippi towards us.  The Bonnet Carrre Spill Way opened today at 8 am to release some of the river water in to Lake Pontchartrain.  The Corps has requested that the Morganza Spillway be opened too.  The last time it was opened was in 1973 when Nixon was still president. That’s more controversial because it will flood farms and land but will help maintain the levees in Baton Rouge and New Orleans.  We’ll have to see who wins that one.

If granted, the Corps plans to open the Morganza Thursday.  This could create water up to 25-feet deep in spots.

In Terrebonne Parish, low-lying areas in the Western end are vulnerable to flooding, up to five feet.  Parish president Michel Claudet tells FOX 8 he’s worried people don’t realize what could happen.  Claudet says there’s a plan to sink a giant barge in Bayou Chene.  Essentially, it would serve as a temporary dam to reduce the backflow of water into St. Mary and Terrebonne Parishes.  Bayous and creeks are already filling up and public works crews were out, looking for low areas to reinforce.

Opening the Morganza Spillway would require the evacuation of people and livestock in the Atchafalaya River Basin.  About 30 miles Northwest of Baton Rouge, West Feliciana Parish is bracing for the worst.  If the Morganza opens, the Corps projects possibly 25-feet of water in some areas.

“We’re going to do what we can you know,” said Brad Smith of St. Francisville.  He was rushing to his Cat Island hunting camp to shore it up, hoping he can get it higher than the water.  “I mean you have money invested in a camp, you know your heart’s there, and you want to save it,” said Smith.

Friday, residents in the Stephensville-Belle River area North of Morgan City built walls of sandbags around their properties.  Saturday, they were being urged to self-evacuate.

Governor Jindal believes that the flooding is certain anyway.

Land and structures in the Morganza Spillway will flood, even if the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers does not open the gates, Commissioner of Agriculture Mike Strain and Gov. Bobby Jindal said today.

“It is inevitable that Morganza will flood and the system will top, regardless of whether they open the system,” Strain said at a press conference at the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security.

Jindal said he has asked the Corps of Engineers to provide maps of areas that are anticipated to flood, with and without opening the gates. He said he wants people who would be affected to be able to prepare before the water starts rising.

“Even without opening the spillway, folks can expect flooding comparable to 1973,” the governor said. “If they decide to open the spillway, it will be more water.”

This will be historical either way.  I remember when they had to open the Bonnet Carre Spillway last spring because the river was so high.  I live a few blocks from the Mississippi.  The river was so high the boats were riding on the river at about the same level as the street.  It look like the oil tankers were traveling on the next road over.  I usually only see the very tops of these ships.  It’s a strange  feeling to think you’re sharing the road with huge ships.

So, since we’re talking about the Nixon years, I might as well offer up the Daily Mail’s first glimpse at the biography of Vanessa Redgrave. In part 2 of a three-part excerpt from the book, the Mail covers Redgrave’s political career.

Vanessa Redgrave as a Workers Revolutionary Party parliamentary candidate in 1974

The article’s interesting title is Vanessa Redgrave and the red sex slaves: How her bid to start Marxist revolution plunged her into bizarre scandal.

Never a shrinking violet, Vanessa Redgrave knew exactly what to do when she found a listening device in an electrical socket at her home. She called a Press conference.

It was common knowledge, she told the world in thrilling theatrical tones, that the internal security service MI5 had been bugging her conversations since she’d been a member of a Trotskyist organisation called the Workers Revolutionary Party.

Well, she wasn’t going to stand for it. So she was making a formal complaint to the European Commission, claiming that MI5 had violated her human rights.

Unfortunately, her grand gesture fell flat. Not only did the EU maintain that bugging radicals such as Vanessa Redgrave was ‘necessary in a democratic society’ — but it turned out that the bug had nothing to do with MI5 in the first place. It had been planted by a rival Left-wing faction.

Anyone else might have been utterly humiliated at making a fool of themselves, but not Vanessa. As her daughter Natasha once said, it never bothered her that she wasn’t liked — because being disliked gives her enormous freedom.

This is one celebrity biography that I can’t wait to read.

I first got the OBL kill news via CNN breaking news.  The NYT is trying to claim the credit for the story.  The truth is that it broke on twitter and was leaked by an aide of Donald Rumsfeld.  Here’s the tick tock according to Felix Salmon.

Brisbane is the NYT’s ombudsman, and today he describes the way that the paper broke the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death. Well, he can’t do that, because the NYT didn’t break the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death. But he ignores the people who did break the news, and just tells the story of how the official NYT machine worked. His story starts at 10:34 last Sunday night, when a source told NYT reporter Helene Cooper that Osama had been killed. By 10:40, an alert was up on nytimes.com. Then, by Brisbane’s account, Twitter got involved:

One minute after Ms. Cooper’s news alert was posted on the Web, Jeff Zeleny, The Times’s national political correspondent, posted on Twitter: “NYT’s Helene Cooper confirming that Osama Bin Laden has been killed. President to announce shortly from the White House.”

At virtually the same time, Jim Roberts, an assistant managing editor, sent a similar Twitter message. Next to come was an automated Twitter post generated by NYTimes.com, regurgitating the original news alert.

Those links are all Brisbane’s, by the way, including the rather hilarious link to the homepage of the very site his column is on. All of the links are internal; none are to the actual tweets in question. But here’s the first tweet that Brisbane mentions, from Zeleny. As Brisbane says, it was posted at 10:41pm.

For a very different look at how the Osama news broke check out SocialFlow’s exhaustive analysis of 14.8 million tweets on Sunday night. As far as Twitter is concerned, the news was broken by Keith Urbahn at 10:24pm. But it really got momentum from being retweeted at 10:25pm by NYT media reporter Brian Stelter, who added the crucial information that Urbahn is Donald Rumsfeld’s chief of staff. Urbahn, here, gets the goal, but Stelter absolutely gets the assist …

The first real interview of the president on the OBL operation was seen Sunday Night. If you want to see the 60 Minutes Interview with President Obama that covers the OBL kill operation you can see it here.

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The Pundits Live Blog the Alternative Universe so I don’t have to

Posted: May 5, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, John Birch Society in Charge, religious extremists, Republican politics, Republican presidential politics | Tags: | 46 Comments

There’s a Republican debate going on right now sans Mittens Romney.  There’s a lot of live blogs going on out there.  I’m putting this thread up but telling you that I really have no desire to watch a train wreck.  It’s being held in Greenville,  South Carolina.

Live blogs:

The Fix (WAPO)

National Journal

Slate

HuffPo

GREENVILLE, S.C. — The 2012 election season begins Thursday in earnest with the Republican Party’s first presidential primary debate here at 9 p.m. ET.

But only five GOP hopefuls are taking part, as some hang back and wait to fully engage (like former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman) while others have yet to commit to a bid for the Oval Office (see former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and current Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels).

Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty is the biggest name taking part at Peace Center for the Performing Arts, though Rep. Ron Paul (Texas) certainly has the most enthusiastic fanbase. Others hitting the stage include former Sen. Rick Santorum (Pa.), former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, and former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain.

and if you really want to watch it, it’s on FOX surprise, surprise, surprise!!! NOT!!!

The twitter channel is #SCdebate.

Things you really want to know or not:

All of the hopefuls but Herman Cain would release OBL’s photo.  (whew, they GOT the big one out of the way) and now they’re all singing the praises of  ‘enhanced interrogation’.

Please, deliver us from EVIL!!!

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