Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

T R E 4 5 O N

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

This fight is for everything.

The press swings at every pitch, we don’t have to.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

Decision time: keep arguing about the last election, or try to win the next one?

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

We’re watching the self-immolation of the leading world power on a level unprecedented in human history.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

This really is a full service blog.

GOP baffled that ‘we don’t care if you die’ is not a winning slogan.

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you do not.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

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TGIF

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I am headed to dinner with a friend, so here are some pet pics and a clean thread for you. First, a snapshot of Tunch from about five minutes ago:

And now some of your kids:

Claim your kids.

Two quick things, though. I was watching the Dog Show again last night, and even though I love Jack Russell’s, I have decided I just like bigger dogs. I loved the standard and giant schnauzer in the show (was Spirit something, or what?), I always like Boxers (I just love how emotional they are), and having had a friend with a mastiff, I just adore them. Sadie the Mastiff was the sweetest dog ever, although a total pain in the rear end to sleep with.

Second, I gave Tunch wet food this morning (some high protein low carb stuff by Wellness), and he made a liar out of me. He inhaled it. I swear he has always turned up his nose at it before. I guess I might make the transition to wet food. We need shots, so maybe I will get him on that M/D stuff.

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The Iseman Walkback

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I’m late to the game on this, but I see that Vicki Iseman dropped her lawsuit against the NY Times in return for letting her lawyers make a statement, and the NY Times contends that they were not and are not apologizing while Iseman has told the Politico otherwise.

You can read the original story here, and I still think now, as I did then, that what the Times did was sleazy and wrong. They essentially published rumors that McCain staffers had at one point thought McCain was having an affair with Iseman, and somehow or another the Times wanted us to believe that they were not asserting that McCain had actually had the affair, just that others thought he had (wink wink). It was a pretty crappy spectacle, if you ask me, and it is a mark on the Times.

Beyond that, though, I think it was just terrible journalism, because the sexing up (if you will) of the story with the affair nonsense obscured the entire premise, which the Times didn’t even get to until the sixth paragraph of the original story:

But the concerns about Mr. McCain’s relationship with Ms. Iseman underscored an enduring paradox of his post-Keating career. Even as he has vowed to hold himself to the highest ethical standards, his confidence in his own integrity has sometimes seemed to blind him to potentially embarrassing conflicts of interest.

Mr. McCain promised, for example, never to fly directly from Washington to Phoenix, his hometown, to avoid the impression of self-interest because he sponsored a law that opened the route nearly a decade ago. But like other lawmakers, he often flew on the corporate jets of business executives seeking his support, including the media moguls Rupert Murdoch, Michael R. Bloomberg and Lowell W. Paxson, Ms. Iseman’s client. (Last year he voted to end the practice.)

Mr. McCain helped found a nonprofit group to promote his personal battle for tighter campaign finance rules. But he later resigned as its chairman after news reports disclosed that the group was tapping the same kinds of unlimited corporate contributions he opposed, including those from companies seeking his favor. He has criticized the cozy ties between lawmakers and lobbyists, but is relying on corporate lobbyists to donate their time running his presidential race and recently hired a lobbyist to run his Senate office.

There was and still is no reason for the Iseman stuff to underscore anything- the subsequent examples about the corporate jets made the point by itself. When you consider that there was much noise at the time about the fact that many of McCain’s campaign team were in fact lobbyists, this was a valid point, but it got lost in the sleaze of the Iseman rumors. And because the lead of the story was a bunch of stuffs about an affair, you know what everyone was talking about the next day. McCain supporters had every right and reason to be furious about this.

It was sleazy, and the Times did themselves and their readers a profound disservice, and continue to do themselves a disservice with their weaselly handling of their statement yesterday.

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This Seems Familiar…

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Rich Lowry, writing at K-Lo’s House of Crazy:

I got blowback today from Arnold’s office saying it’s wrong to say (as I did in my column) that he wanted a bailout because he explicitly said he didn’t. On January 26, I’m informed, the governor said…

So, Arnold opposes a bailout of California—as long as he gets lots of federal money while opposing a bailout.

That sounds a lot like someone publicly stating they were opposed to money for a bridge to nowhere, saying “thanks, but no thanks,” and taking that money anyway. And we all know the hard-hitting diatribes Lowry launched at her:

I’m sure I’m not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, “Hey, I think she just winked at me.” And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America.

Sorry, Arnold. You just aren’t Rich’s type.

(Picture lifted without shame or permission from Rumproast.)

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Takin’ to the streets

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Be afraid:

NYC: You don’t see it in the media, but there is a groundswell of public anger over the Democrats’ attempt to spend their way out of a spending crisis. There have been numerous small protests — and conservatives haven’t taken to the streets in decades. Do you think this will all go away, or does Obama have a problem?

You can laugh at me, but you really do find some good stuff in the WaPo chats.

I think we all know that when numerous small protests occur, governments fall.

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Checking facts to the fullest extent possible

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Sometimes these posts write themselves (the new WaPo ombudsman via Wonk Room)

Basically, I was told that the Post has a multi-layer editing process and checks facts to the fullest extent possible. In this instance, George Will’s column was checked by people he personally employs, as well as two editors at the Washington Post Writers Group, which syndicates Will; our op-ed page editor; and two copy editors.

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Good News From the “Good Government” Front

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The NY Times reports some changes in how our federal spending is reported:

For his first annual budget next week, President Obama has banned four accounting gimmicks that President George W. Bush used to make deficit projections look smaller. The price of more honest bookkeeping: A budget that is $2.7 trillion deeper in the red over the next decade than it would otherwise appear, according to administration officials.

The new accounting involves spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Medicare reimbursements to physicians and the cost of disaster responses.

But the biggest adjustment will deal with revenues from the alternative minimum tax, a parallel tax system enacted in 1969 to prevent the wealthy from using tax shelters to avoid paying any income tax.

Even with bigger deficit projections, the Obama administration will put the country on “a sustainable fiscal course” by the end of Mr. Obama’s term, Peter R. Orszag, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, said Thursday in an interview. Mr. Orszag did not provide details of how the administration would reduce a deficit expected to reach at least $1.5 trillion this year.

Mr. Obama’s banishment of the gimmicks, which have been widely criticized, is in keeping with his promise to run a more transparent government.

Fiscal sleight of hand has long been a staple of federal budgets, giving rise to phrases like “rosy scenario” and “magic asterisks.”

The $2.7 trillion in additional deficit spending, Mr. Orszag said, is “a huge amount of money that would just be kind of a magic asterisk in previous budgets.”

“The president prefers to tell the truth,” he said, “rather than make the numbers look better by pretending.”

This is great news, long overdue, and something that I bet even a bunch of conservatives will really like (Coburn, Brownback, DeMint, Ron Paul- I’m looking at you). The dirty secret for ages has been all this off-budget stuff, and you never even see it mentioned on blogs, the more obsessive government watchers in our society. Offhand, the only time I remember ever seeing it mentioned is by guys like Steve Verdon and Alex Knapp at OTB. Case in point- here is the Heritage Foundation railing about off budget spending in… 1985.

At any rate, this will have several outcomes. The first, as was mentioned in the article, is to give the appearance of a much, much larger deficit, even though nothing has changed other than the fact that we are now acknowledging that we are spending money we have already spending. This is, in a sense, moving us from the current state of denial about our spending. If you need an analogy, what we have been doing for the past couple of decades in regards to spending is standing on the scale, seeing the number 300 and not liking it very much, and then saying “Well, I guess I won’t count 100 lbs of this because it is bone and organ and blood, and I can’t live without that, so I will just tell everyone I weigh 200 lbs! A little bit over my target weight of 180, but not that bad! Take that, critics!” Really, it is about that simple, although the analogy may not be perfect.

Second, this will help set the stage for any and all reform (including entitlement reform). You can’t honestly set the country on the right track without having a clear picture of what our finances really look like. As in the example above, you can not set yourself on a road to healthy living if you are pretending you weigh 200 lbs when you actually weigh 300. This fixes that problem.

The third outcome is that this will lead to a general freakout on both sides of the aisle. Democrats are going to hate not being able to hide the large entitlement numbers out there, and Republicans are not going to be able to lie about the real costs of our excellent military adventures overseas and the yearly cost of our defense budget.

Politically, this is very risky for Obama, because you just know that the Republicans, in their current effort to re-brand themselves as fiscal conservatives, are going to look at the new and much larger accounting numbers for the upcoming years and scream blood murder about tax and spend liberals, and without hesitation will compare the current and future numbers under a more honest and open accounting system with past numbers using the OLD accounting system. I can guarantee it. I wouldn’t give it an hour after the change is made before someone at Red State or elsewhere in the wankosphere or talk radio is saying something to the effect of “People said George Bush spent a lot of money, but look at the deficits under the socialist Obama!” They are that dishonest and that shameless.

The first thing I would do if I were Peter Orszag and company, and this is one of the very few times I actually hope someone in government listens to me, is to go back and re-score the last decade or so of budgets using the new accounting system, so when they roll this out they can say “Here is what this year’s budget would have looked like under the old system. Here is what it looks like under the new system. Here are the past ten years worth of budgets under the old system. Here they are under the new system.” For political reasons, this simply has to be done.

At any rate, overall, this is good news, and if I am wrong about anything or have made any mistakes, fill me in. Regardless, if there is anyone who can summon the nerd fury needed to beat the budget into submission, I would bet it is this guy:

That picture of Peter Orszag was taken from the excellent photo essay at the NY Times magazine about the folks who make up the Obama administration.

*** Update ***

Another possible outcome is this could lead to revision/simplification of the tax code due to the AMT stuff.

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Bastille Day at the Brokerage Firms

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The most amusing thing to me about this Rick Santelli faux populist broker revolt is not his invocation of the Nixonian silent majority, but the utter lack of perspective it displays. Yes, there is a simmering discontent and anger out there, and clearly the Republicans are going to try to tap into it, but the problem for Santelli and his crowd is that the anger is not directed at the people who are losing their homes, but at the people Santelli spends every day rubbing shoulders with at the trendy Chicago restaurants the brokers go to these days.

The audacity of Santelli’s “revolt” is that a mere 75 billion is being spent to help struggling families repackage loans- a pittance in the terms of the gargantuan amount of money being thrown at the banks, the Wall Street wizards, and the rest of the rocket scientists who are the root of this problem. Case in point:

First, Arthur Santa-Maria called Bank of America to ask how to check the balance of his new unemployment benefits debit card. The bank charged him 50 cents.

He chose not to complain. That would have cost another 50 cents.

So he took out some of the money and then decided to pull out the rest. But that made two withdrawals on the same day, and that was $1.50.

For hundreds of thousands of workers losing their jobs during the recession, there’s a new twist to their financial pain: Even when they’re collecting unemployment benefits, they’re paying the bank just to get the money — or even to call customer service to complain about it.

Thirty states have struck such deals with banks that include Citigroup Inc., Bank of America Corp., JP Morgan Chase and US Bancorp, an Associated Press review of the agreements found. All the programs carry fees, and in several states the unemployed have no choice but to use the debit cards. Some banks even charge overdraft fees of up to $20 — even though they could decline charges for more than what’s on the card.

Santelli, who is kind of the CNBC version of a right-wing Cafferty, better be careful where he leads his mob with their chants of “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité,” because before he knows it, he could be looking down on the mob not as a leader but from his new position mounted at the end of a pike. Joe The Plumber isn’t big on nuance, and a broker wearing a thousand dollar suit is on the wrong end of the equation.

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