Crazy people out there. Please pick up a phone and ask your Congressperson to support a discharge petition and stop talking crazy about he debt limit. Everything really might depend on it.
Mid-Morning Open Thread
I dislike flying and almost never board a plane. But a plane almost crashed into me this weekend while I was innocently consuming mimosas and jalapeno potato chips at a tailgating party prior to the Gators-Razorbacks game in Gainesville, Florida.
A banner-towing plane went down. Luckily, there were no life-threatening injuries to the two people on board the plane OR the tailgaters on the ground. The plane and someone’s pick-up truck were pretty much destroyed, though.
Please talk about whatever.
Monday Morning Open Thread
(Jerry van Amerongen – Ballard Street via GoComics.com)
It’s a political cartoon, if you replace the name ‘Martin’ with ‘Ted Cruz (R-Tex)”…
Another happy thought for a Monday morning — here’s Professor Krugman on “Shorting Out the Wiring“:
… Ever since Reagan, the Beltway has treated Republicans as the natural party of government. Sunday talk shows would feature a preponderance of Republicans even if Democrats held the White House and one or both houses of Congress. John McCain was featured on those shows so often you would think he won in 2008.
And there was a general presumption of Republican competence. It’s hard to believe now, but Bush was treated as a highly effective leader who knew what he was doing right up to Katrina, while Clinton — now viewed with such respect — was treated as a bungling interloper for much of his presidency. Even in the last few years there was a rush to canonize Paul Ryan as a superwonk, when it was quite obvious if you looked that politics aside, he was just incompetent at number-crunching.
But I think the last two years have finally killed that presumption. It wasn’t just that Romney lost — his shock, the obvious degree to which his campaign was deluded, was an eye-opener. And now the antics of the Boehner bumblers…
Late Night Open Thread: Apocalyptica
(Tom Toles via GoComics.com)
.
The MSM is getting desperate, too. Jon Chait, in NYmag:
… The debt ceiling turns out to be unexploded ordnance lying around the American form of government. Only custom or moral compunction stops the opposition party from using it to nullify the president’s powers, or, for that matter, the president from using it to nullify Congress’s. (Obama could, theoretically, threaten to veto a debt ceiling hike unless Congress attaches it to the creation of single-payer health insurance.) To weaponize the debt ceiling, you must be willing to inflict harm on millions of innocent people. It is a shockingly powerful self-destruct button built into our very system of government, but only useful for the most ideologically hardened or borderline sociopathic. But it turns out to be the perfect tool for the contemporary GOP: a party large enough to control a chamber of Congress yet too small to win the presidency, and infused with a dangerous, millenarian combination of overheated Randian paranoia and fully justified fear of adverse demographic trends. The only thing that limits the debt ceiling’s potency at the moment is the widespread suspicion that Boehner is too old school, too lacking in the Leninist will to power that fires his newer co-partisans, to actually carry out his threat. (He has suggested as much to some colleagues in private.) Boehner himself is thus the one weak link in the House Republicans’ ability to carry out a kind of rolling coup against the Obama administration. Unfortunately, Boehner’s control of his chamber is tenuous enough that, like the ailing monarch of a crumbling regime, it’s impossible to strike an agreement with him in full security it will be carried out.
The standoff embroiling Washington represents far more than the specifics of the demands on the table, or even the prospect of economic calamity. It is an incipient constitutional crisis. Obama foolishly set the precedent in 2011 that he would let Congress jack him up for a debt-ceiling hike. He now has to crush the practice completely, lest it become ritualized. Obama not only must refuse to trade concessions for a debt-ceiling hike; he has to make it clear that he will endure default before he submits to ransom. To pay a ransom now, even a tiny one, would ensure an endless succession of debt-ceiling ransoms until, eventually, the two sides fail to agree on the correct size of the ransom and default follows.
This is a domestic Cuban Missile Crisis. A single blunder could have unalterable consequences: If Obama buckles his no-ransom stance, the debt-ceiling-hostage genie will be out of the bottle. If Republicans believe he is bluffing, or accept his position but obstinately refuse it, or try to lift the debt ceiling and simply botch the vote count, a second Great Recession could ensue….
Open Thread: The Notorious RBG
Nice little Washington Post “lifestyle” piece on Judge Ginsburg:
… It shows what a different time it was in judicial politics that Ginsburg — a leader of the American Civil Liberties Union, a believer in the “evolving” Constitution and promoted by the White House as a supporter of abortion rights — was approved by the Senate, 96 to 3.
She is reminded each time she unlocks the door to her chambers; her key is on a plastic keychain with the words, “With best wishes, Strom Thurmond.” The former segregationist and Dixiecrat from South Carolina was one of the 96.
So Ginsburg understands politics but does not feel she faces a deadline to leave so that Obama, whom she admires, can choose her successor.
“I think it’s going to be another Democratic president” after Obama, Ginsburg said. “The Democrats do fine in presidential elections; their problem is they can’t get out the vote in the midterm elections.”…
There is something of a Ginsburg renaissance at work. Her willingness to take on the conservatives on the court has delighted liberals, who never thought she was quite liberal or bold enough. Students pack her appearances at law schools. The slightly profane Ruth Bader GinsBlog praises her every move; “Notorious R.B.G.” T-shirts are available online.
A new opera, “Scalia/Ginsburg,” will premiere next year, the work of Derrick Wang, a composer and recent graduate of the University of Maryland School of Law. Dueling constitutional interpretations, set to music.
And still, the question: When is it time to leave a lifetime appointment?
“When I can’t do the job, there will be signs,” Ginsburg said. “I know that Justice [John Paul] Stevens [who retired when he was 90] was concerned the last few years about his hearing. I’ve had no loss of hearing yet. But who knows when it could happen?
“So all I can say is what I’ve already said: At my age, you take it year by year.”
***********
What’s on the agenda as we wrap up the weekend?
NFL Sunday Open Thread
So as not to put stuff in the beautiful pet tribute below that doesn’t belong there…
The plan for the weapons
I saw a lot of questions on how this might be accomplished in the comments during the Syria debate:
The United States and its partners are planning a series of rapid steps to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons program, a strategy that is intended to guard against backsliding by President Bashar al-Assad and limit the time that international experts need to work in the country, according to senior American officials.
A major step is to be taken in early November, when equipment for producing chemicals and filling warheads and bombs with poison gas is to be destroyed by the Syrians under international supervision. That move can be carried out by equipment as simple as sledgehammers and bulldozers.
The basic plan for eliminating Syria’s chemical weapons program was outlined last month in a framework agreement between American and Russian officials and has been refined in consultation with experts at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, an international watchdog group.
While the plan has been endorsed by the United Nations Security Council, its goal is unprecedented: the elimination of a nation’s chemical weapons, agents and equipment on an accelerated schedule in the middle of a civil war.
International inspectors who recently arrived in Syria have generally had good cooperation with the Assad government. Still, the disarmament effort will depend heavily on the cooperation of the Syrian military and on Russia’s willingness to use its leverage with the Syrian authorities.
The State Department official said that there were “good grounds” to think the target date for eliminating Syria’s chemical weapons program could be met. “We take nothing for granted,” he added. “It could go off the rails in many ways, but we are planning for success under both ideal and difficult circumstances.”