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Ramadan Mubarak! to all Muslim members of the Balloon Juice community. May you always have kindred spirits to share your Iftar!
Archives for August 2011
FREAKOUT
Tell me why I am supposed to be freaking out right now. I’m remarkably calm, and not used to it. I don’t even feel angry at the moment. I’m not drunk. Am I having a heart attack?
Conservatives maybe a tad worried about Wisconsin?
The charitable Koch Brothers, out and about, helping the community, like they do:
mailers have now turned up from Americans For Prosperity Wisconsin, addressed to voters in two of the Republican-held recall districts, where the elections will be held on August 9. The mailers ask recipients to fill out an absentee ballot application, and send it in — by August 11, after Election Day for the majority of these races. “These are people who are our 1’s [solid Democrats] in the voterfile who we already knew,” a Democratic source told Politico. “They ain’t AFP members, that’s for damn sure.”
The mailing address for the applications is listed as “Absentee Ballot Application Processing Center, P.O. Box 1327, Madison WI 53701-1327.” A Google search shows that this address is not any sort of government office, but has been used by the conservative group Wisconsin Family Action.
In addition, Wisconsin Right To Life previously used the same address for absentee ballot application letters and phone calls that were sent out shortly before the July 12 Democratic primaries, but after the official deadlines for the applications. The group responded to criticism, saying the phone calls were intended to be for the general elections in August.
A Democrat on the ground in Wisconsin said the fliers were discovered to be hitting doors in District 2 and District 10 over the weekend.
Politico has a pdf of an actual letter and envelope.
Americans For Prosperity, Wisconsin claims it was a typo. Democrats have already filed a complaint.
I love the “Absentee Ballot Application Processing Center” they invented. Sounds official and vaguely governmental, doesn’t it? Nice touch.
Conservatives maybe a tad worried about Wisconsin?Post + Comments (92)
We can live in fear or act out of hope
I don’t know what I think about using the 14th amendment to go around Congress on the debt ceiling, my gut instinct is to oppose it, because it seems like one more place for the executive branch to grab power. That said, this is the worst argument I’ve heard against using it:
If he had cited the 14th Amendment and simply ordered Treasury to pay the bills, he would have been impeached by the radical Republicans. This would have guaranteed that the next 16 months would have been overwhelmed by an even worse version of the silliness visited upon our nation by the poisonous Limbaugh-Tea Party nihilists.
As you know, I wish a motherfucker would try to impeach Obama. It would blow up in Republicans’ face, I am confident of that. More generally, we can’t allow Republicans to intimidate us into being a banana republic. Obama can’t raise the ceiling on his own, because crazy Republicans would impeach him. We have to have short-sighted spending cuts, because otherwise Republicans will cause a default. Women can’t exercise their reproductive rights, because wingers will harass them and murder their doctors if they do. We can’t have an honest press, because they’re afraid of complaints from teahadists when they tell the truth. Public Broadcasting has to turn itself over to Paul Gigot and Juan Williams, otherwise they’ll be targeted by James O’Keefe.
Where does it end? You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much til you spend half your life just covering up. There has to come a time to bite back.
On that note, the Wisconsin recall elections start in earnest on August 9.
Megan McArdle: Is it her reading that’s the problem? Her comprehension? Her honesty? You Make The Call!
I know that this is all kind of moot in light of the events of the last few days, but someone passed word of this McArdle post to me yesterday, and it seemed to me to capture so much of what has gone wrong in the way the media engaged the debate over deficits and their discontents.
In this particular example of Village media retailing a false narrative, She Who Is Always Wrong™ took issue with a chart referenced by and a conclusion her actually, you know, accomplished colleague* James Fallows has been arguing for a while.
And yes, I know, a cage match between Fallows and McArdle is kind of like watching Ali (in his prime) against the Weehauken Regional Golden Gloves champion, at least as far as intellect and journalistic chops are concerned. McArdle would win, no doubt, were the judges scoring condescension and high-school in-group wit. But when it comes to actually reporting an issue, understanding what one has been told, and reporting both facts and (clearly demarcated) analysis/opinion, Fallows v. McArdle wouldn’t be licensed even in Nevada.
But that doesn’t stop the divine Ms. MM, unsurprisingly. Her role is not to be responsible, or accurate, or even coherent. It is to advance the approved Central Committee line — which, McArdle, loyal and very effective apparatchik that she is, seems to know before the word from on high need ever get spoken out loud.
Hence her attempt to deflect the hideously liberally biased facts of the history of the deficit.
For, you see, the Fallows post she seeks to undermine focused on this chart:
Fallows made the point, also raised by such raving loony left organizations as the Pew Charitable Trusts and the ever-liberal New York Times that such recourses to history and actual data suggest both a problem and solutions that are different from those we’ve just gone through the wringer trying to debate. (Both references supplied by the White House.)
The broad point is both obvious and obviously too painful for McArdle to contemplate: George Bush the Lesser inherited significant surpluses and a budget that promised to generate further surpluses through times of economic growth, and transformed that extraordinary fiscal idyll into a crater, a truly spectacular failure of financial prudence.
As the chart above accurately depicts, the largest driver of the deficit is the Bush tax cuts that coincided with the eight years of desperately unspectacular economic returns, culminating in the catastrophic failure of global financial capitalism.** The next largest creator of new debt was expanding domestic spending, followed closely by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, both wars of choice. The prescription drug benefit (Medicare Part D) is a smaller item on this list — just 10% of the scale of the tax cuts — but it’s worth noting for the argument to come below.
All this, of course, shows what we already knew: Bush policies, supported overwhelmingly by a GOP party that controlled the House for six of the eight years of the Lesser’s adminstration, and the Senate for more than four of those years, are what produced something approaching half of the total still-outstanding debt accumulated to date by all administrations since the birth of the Republic. This, the Obama administration contrasts with its own record of a 1.4 trillion dollar addition to what we owe now, composed mostly of the stimulus, some particular policy choices, and a bit (and the significance of this will become obvious in a moment) of the extension of Bush tax policies.
So, given that none of these claims are controversial to anyone but McArdle, why is The Atlantic’s Business and Economics Editor so unhappy with her colleague?
Our failed media experiment
Open Thread
Needing this right now.
We will need two loveseats if he gets any bigger. For comparison’s sake, as of Thanksgiving last year there was still room beside his lazy butt for an adult-type person to sit.