What I saw when down in NY to pick up my Chinese visa:*
In these days, when one of our major political parties has come to resemble nothing so much as a fifth column seeking to undermine the United States from within…perhaps a little snark is warranted. Not to mention a tip of the hat from this Boston guy at the pitilessness of our NY friends.
I guess this would be an(other) open thread.
*and yes, I am glad to be home. Shanghai is a great place to go if you want to see just how much a globally warmed world would (will) suck.**
**Which isn’t to say that it isn’t a fascinating city that showed me great hospitality — amidst the grotesque heat, humidity and air quality.
update: can’t figure out why the first footnote bolds. Can’t get it unbolded. FYWP.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
Saigon was sort of hot too.
Trurl
—
[[[[ On a policy level the Reid’s plan is nothing but support of an all out war on progressive values. It is spending cuts during a jobs crisis. It would foolishly reduce demand, during an economy downturn, a prolongation of pain and lowering demand, which would make the economy worse. It is also a major deficit reduction plan without tax increases. Doing this will fully legitimize the conservative framing that we have a “spending problem not a tax problem.”
This will be seen by the GOP as a validation of the “no new taxes” demand. It will only encourage Republicans to be even more intransigent in the future.
Worst of all Reid’s plan contains the Catfood Commission II. It would pave the way for cutting Medicare and Social Security benefits using a special legislative process designed to destroy basic democratic accountability. ]]]
“We’re facing the possibilty of seeing more damage to Social Security and Medicare while the Democrats control the White House and the Senate then we saw when the GOPers had the White House, the Senate and the House. And, the Democrats are going to claim this as a victory. Stunning.”
lamh34
Via twitter:
MikeJ
If you surround text with Nathan Hales[1] it will bold. Probably something to do with that.
[1] I regret that I have but one asterisk for my country.
Omnes Omnibus
@ Trurl: Oh, shut the fuck up. Didn’t you get paid by Norquist today? Shouldn’t you be out doing whatever it is that you do?
JPL
Trurl.. The Reid plan cuts spending but most occurs in the future and it does not cut entitlements. It’s not a good bill by any means but it’s not cut, cap and balance which would decrease social security and medicare by twenty-five percent.
DonkeyKong
“We didn’t commit suicide, we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of a human world.”
lamh34
Now for the more superficial. I’m watching one of my all time guilty pleasures of action movies “Mortal Kombat“. Love the original video game, love the original movie. I was probably one of the only girls in my fam & circle of friends who loved playing Mortal Kombat and Streetfighter (my 2nd guilty movie pleasure. It’s so bad, but it’s so good too…lol)
My fav characters to this day are still Sonya(MK) & Chin Liu(SF). All the gamers out there, is there a Mortal Kombat vs Streetfighter game out there. If so, I’m sure gonna get that for my console. If not, then hell there should be one!
Warren Terra
Single asterisks are a shorthand for bold tags. In some systems, slashes are shorthand for italics tags, underscores are shorthand for underline tags, and hyphens are shorthand for strikethrough tags.
Corner Stone
@Omnes Omnibus: Whatever mish mash bill Reid sends back down let there be no doubt. We’re gonna get fucked.
Chyron HR
But if you squint real hard it could pave the way to hypothetically laying out a roadmap for cutting benefits. What are you, some kind of Reidborg?
Corner Stone
@lamh34: Oh man, the original Streetfighter was the absolute shit!
Less of a fan of the orig MK, but still enjoyed it.
Ha-Do-ken!!
beltane
I hate to say it, but Trurl is absolutely correct here. During the worst economic downturn in 80 years, there is absolutely no logical reason to be inflicting so much gratuitous suffering on non-rich Americans. I’m actually quite furious right now. Perhaps the proper analogy would be to compare the Republicans to foreign invaders, the Democratic leadership to a fifth column, and the media to the propagandists for the foreign invaders. Where is the f**king resistance?
On a lighter note, a friend of mine just finished hosting a couple of very impressive Chinese exchange students. She says they could not get over how clean the air was here, and that it was really OK to swim in the lake. It was an important experience for them to have, I think.
lamh34
@CornerStone
Oh, no doubt the original Streetfighter was the bomb shiggity, but man was VanDamme’s accent horrible. You can always count on VanDamme for some good fight scenes though. His round house kick was a thing of beauty back then.
But for my money, Mortal Kombat has the better overall fight scenes, and if I recall correctly, MK also had more hand to hand combat sequences that were pretty cool for that time.
jwb
Et tu, beltane?
MikeJ
@beltane:
Next she could host some people from Houston.
gwangung
There is none. I’m truly convinced that the vast bulk of the company wants austerity.
Geoduck
Is this because of the pollution, or do the Chinese have something against lakes?
burnspbesq
When I was in NY in the spring, I saw a bus-shelter ad for a self-storage place: “Don’t store your stuff in Jersey, it’ll come back Republican.”
Also too, yesterday was the 71st anniversary of the initial movie appearance of the ultimate smart-ass Noo Yawkah, Bugs Bunny.
lamh34
Gotta love twitter sometimes. Anyone seen the TheJoeWalshkids twitter feed yet?
http://twitter.com/#!/TheJoeWalshKids
Linda Featheringill
Reid’s bill:
As I understand it, most of the “cuts” are going to happen anyway: wind down of a couple of wars or so, savings on interest payments as we borrow less, and such. Most of the cuts seem to be accounting hocus pocus. But they aren’t dangerous.
And I think that Reid’s bill extends into 2013.
MikeJ
@burnspbesq: No, the 27th was the anniversary.
Violet
@beltane:
Back in the early days of America’s industrialization right through to the 1960’s, our lakes weren’t necessarily safe and our air was terrible. They’ll get their act together at some point.
beltane
@jwb: I apologize for that little rant. But I’m really at the point where I cannot take this any more. I have a sixteen year-old son, and apparently all the bills out there take a chainsaw to Pell Grants and subsidized loans. During the worst of the Great Depression I had family members who were able to attend CUNY schools at little or no cost, thus transforming themselves from the children of poor immigrants into middle-class American citizens. Now, my kids are being deliberately pushed back into a life of poverty. Why? So a few thousand obscenely rich and insatiably greedy assholes can gorge themselves on the carcass of this country?
JPL
Linda Featheringill, That’s how I interpreted the Reid Bill. The original Boehner bill and the Reid bill both contained spending cuts so the media called them the same except for the fact Boehner cuts Pell grants and such and the Boehner bills call for debt discussions every six months. About the same as apples and oranges. Unfortunately, the bills do hurt the economy.
Beltrane, I didn’t realize Reid was cutting Pell grants also.
beltane
@Violet: That’s why I think it was an important experience for them. These were elite students, future policy makers, etc., and their appreciation for our clean air and water (this is Vermont) can only lead to good things.
Davis X. Machina
Fighting over whether it’s ‘Bernie Sanders’, or Bernie ‘Saunders’.
The silk-screen cadres are waiting on the results.
Keith G
Tom, did you eat local? If so, how was the cuisine?
Comrade Mary
beltane, where have you seen reports that Reid’s plan cuts pell grants? I found this very recent article at Tapped that says otherwise:
We knew Boehner was cutting: where are the reports that Reid is doing the same?
beltane
@JPL: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/07/29/1000201/-Just-as-I-thought:-Its-all-back-loaded?detail=hide
The diarist is not a Firebagger and the numbers come from the NYT. Maybe they are wrong but I am not inclined to trust too many people in Washington right now.
Felanius Kootea
@Corner Stone: No way is the tea party going to compromise on whatever Reid sends back to the house. So we are looking at (a) default, (b) a compromise on the Reid bill between the Dems in the house and maybe 40 sane Republicans, or (c) a clean raise of the debt ceiling with Dems in the House and the aforementioned group of sane Republicans. I would love (c) but it’s looking less likely with every passing hour. Let’s see how the teatards react to the senate vote and the fact that the house is not a dictatorship that the senate has to blindly follow.
Davis X. Machina
@beltane: What’s the point of building the world’s best tree-house if you can’t pull up the ladder?
We’re returning to the pre-WWII status quo on federal support for higher education. The 70-30 grant/loan mix I received (class of ’79) was reversed by the middle of the Reagan years.
The GI Bill wasn’t an act of blind altruism. All those returning soldiers and sailors had to be fed slowly back into the workforce, lest the demobilization recessions at the end of WWI repeat themselves. And 10-12 million men, and women, with at least basic small arms proficiency and fresh memories of the Freikorps tend to focus the mind.
Any broad-based education program after that was subject to erosion because the elite incentives to run them were different, or missing altogether.
Tom Levenson
@Keith G.
The crab meat and pork soup dumplings (a Shanghai speciality) were divine. Lots of good food — some less interesting in the university canteen. On balance, many dumplings = much happiness.
Linda Featheringill
http://edmoney.newamerica.net/blogposts/2011/debt_ceiling_plans_converge_reid_and_boehner_include_pell_grant_funding-55366
Discussion of Pell Grants under the Reid plan and the Boehner plan. With charts and stuff.
It looks to me like there won’t be much difference from the way it is now, but I didn’t really study it.
aimai
Hey Tom, sounds like it must have been an amazing trip. I hope you have some time to write it up, here or at your home place. Off to the cape next week. See you there? Or when we get back I hope.
aimai
JGabriel
Tom Levenson @ Top:
In FYWP, a single asterisk, followed by a space, bolds the rest of the quote. Get rid of the space between the first asterisk and the first word, and the asterisk(s) at the end, and that should fix it.
WordPress literalizes the old convention of using asterisks to surround emphasized text on old-style BBS’s by interpreting them as (em) tags.
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Linda Featheringill
Senate now voting to table the Boehner bill.
Davis X. Machina
@Linda Featheringill: Which up-or-down vote will immediately be followed by a chorus of GOP trolls demanding an-up or-down vote..
General Stuck
This is why it was so important for dems to hold the senate last election. I’m sorry, but the tea tards are going to be with us, at least till after next election. And there is precisely no chance that John Boehner is going to go bipartisan with accepting dem votes to pass shit in that body on a regular basis.
Just nah gonna happen on any sustained basis. And there is equally zero chance that dems are going to let the wingnuts own them with another one of these disasters in six months. Not on the debt ceiling issue, though the wingers will try every other way to monkey wrench entitlements and the safety net, with blocking funding of the government, and anything else they can think of. But this one is headed for some painful extra innings. looks like
So we are headed for a default, and when the markets start tanking big time, and the plutocrats go on the warpath, Boehner will call a clean vote to the floor and pass it with dems votes, this time. OR, the Reid bill, once it’s been amended, that must be in a way that House dems can live with.
Davis X. Machina
Two Pell pieces at Tapped, the American Prospect group blog, today.
For Whom the Pell Tolls
Will the Kids Be Alright?
WereBear
I’m not thrilled with either bill, but what is the alternative?Where are the votes? Are we going to round up enough R’s to vote FOR raising taxes? When they have seen how the Tea Party primaries people for it? It’s nit just the TP caucus who has this problem.
Without the cover of a national crisis the R’s wouldn’t be voting for THIS. Can someone explain otherwise?
FlipYrWhig
@ beltane: Linda’s link suggests, as far as I can tell, that Pell Grants were doing OK in both plans — which of course is why the Tea Party caucus threw a fit and forced Boehner to treat Pell Grants worse in the new plan, whose numbers aren’t crunched in the link. It looked like the detrimental change that produced savings in both Boehner-before-today and Reid involves reducing repayment incentives tied to Stafford Loans.
Tom Levenson
@aimai ’twas interesting — climate change and journalism are both subjects that evoke some very complicated responses in the Chinese setting (and not only there). I’ll try to write it up, but the jet lag is very strong in me right now. (My plane landed at Logan at about 7 a.m., completing a journey with two consecutive overnight flights.)
Let’s try to connect — I’ll contact.
General Stuck
I fully agree and this is spot on, imo. If Boehner had not reworked this bill to put back into it all the insane shit about a balanced budget amendment and the other awful shit that dems will never vote for, I had some hope that he would just bite the bullet and pass the Reid Bill when it arrived, with dem votes, and this could be over. But not the way he did it. It was a big FUCK YOU to Obama and dems and we aren’t budging. Unless the banksters send over some ninjas and tickle Boehner into submission, it will be up to the FSM and pain and dems still hold about all the cards. It would be different if the wingers had the senate too, but not just holding the House.
Frankensteinbeck
I have a question for the legally minded. A large element of these bills are caps on future spending years down the line. Is this worth the paper it’s printed on? What’s intuitive to me is that future budgets will overwrite that limit anyway. The newer law overturns the older law. But ‘intuitive’ is not necessarily ‘true’. So how does this work? Right now, this is a very important question.
Comrade Kevin
@Linda Featheringill: Tabled, by a vote of 59-41.
FlipYrWhig
@ WereBear :
It might have been possible to round up enough R’s to vote for raising revenue through mechanisms other than raising tax _rates_. Which is why there has been all this talk about corporate jet owners and subsidies for oil companies, because those are “tax expenditures” that incentivize dumb behavior and make money flow out of the treasury.
And some Republicans had joined with Democrats to cancel one of those subsidies just before this debate heated up… my memory is hazy… anyone else remember?
But that probably led to hope about the possibility of D’s and R’s teaming up to bring in revenue by, in essence, stopping revenue from leaking out of the system rather than finding new ways to get revenue _into_ the system. That would mean raising revenue without “raising taxes” in any seriously defensible sense of that term.
Unfortunately, it was false hope.
Corner Stone
@aimai:
Coupla damn coastal elites.
General Stuck
Not sure about this, and it is a good question. This is not a budget, so I think it would be codified, and binding, depending on the language. But it can be undone be any number of ways in the legislative process, over the next ten years. In new budgets, or amendments to bills that can’t be filibusterd like defence. Or, I am pretty sure it can be modified during the appropriations process for future spending bills, to add monies back on for that which was cut.
fuckwit
Social Security destroyed, Medicare destroyed, no jobs, no nothing.
My goal is to die young.
Urza
reply to Post 8:
There’s Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter for both PS3 and Xbox right now. They’re ok but to me dont seem to capture the original magic of the SNES days.
Frankensteinbeck
General Stuck:
Just how easy it is to overwrite becomes very important. Linda’s article was describing that for two years Pell Grants are unchanged or expanded under the Reid plan, and only affected after because of spending caps outlined in this bill. If it’s as easy as the budget in two years going ‘Yeah, we changed our mind’ then that cap really is meaningless, and large portions of the cuts in Reid’s bill are fantasies for the gullible. You know, the media.
WereBear
I’m sure some of Boehner’s intransigence was that he’d been rolled last time. But I think he’ll get rolled this time too. Hope so.
Fifi
Oh, I see.
Have you ever been to Singapore?
:->
Kane
I’ve never been to Shanghai, but last summer I visited Beijing for a week. An amazing place to visit and quite affordable. And the people there are most generous and kind, although some young people that I talked with voiced their animosity towards Japan, which was somewhat surprising. But that’s another story.
Twice while walking around Beijing, I tripped and fell to the ground. Some of the sidewalks there are made of uneven stones and it takes some getting used to. Anyway, both times that I fell, several locals rushed to my aid and physically picked me up off the ground and dusted me off and asked if I was okay. It was a unique experience. I wondered at the time what would have been the response of strangers had I fallen in the States.