Think of the wounded warriors

Republicans "support the troops" on the TV when it makes for a good press but in the chambers of the so-called "greatest legislative body in the world," the GOPers kick "America's brave warriors" to the curb.

This afternoon, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont brought forth a carefully crafted bill to provide $21 billion in new veterans benefits over the next decade. These included medical benefits, education benefits, and job-training. It contained 26 provisions that came from the Republican members of the Veterans Affairs Committee, which Sanders chairs.

It failed miserably. Republicans blocked it from even coming to an up or down vote. But not before they took to the floor during the procedural "debate" to shout about Bengahzi!!! Bengahzi!!! BENGHAZIIIIII!!!!!

In GOP world, the politics always rank above the people who go out and fight the damn wars they're so fond of starting.

What deficit?

Can't fail to notice the GOPers don't really mention the once dreaded deficit anymore. Probably because:

Nothing To Cheer

But for the deficit fetishists, the 2013 deficit is $139 billion lower than Simpson-Bowles promised to deliver.

That's actually bad news, and of course it won't even be seen as good news by people who claimed it was the most important thing ever. Because nobody cares about the deficit.

Stolen from Atrios. Supporting documents linked at Eschaton.

All your government surveillance is privatized

As I said in the previous post, we're having the wrong arguments about domestic surveillance. All the chatter is about Snowden and Obama and Bush. What's being lost in the noise is talking about the policy. The bigger scandal than the surveillance is that the surveillance is being contracted out to private corporations. Take for instance Snowden's last employer from whence he apparently hacked his documents, Booz Allen Hamilton.

The company employs about 25,000 people, almost half of whom hold top secret security clearances, providing “access to information that would cause ‘exceptionally grave damage’ to national security if disclosed to the public,” according to a company securities filing.

In January, Booz Allen announced that it was starting work on a new contract worth perhaps as much as $5.6 billion over five years to provide intelligence analysis services to the Defense Department. Under the deal, Booz Allen employees are being assigned to help military and national security policy makers, the company said…

Think Progress points out Booz Allen Hamilton is just one of many contractors.

According to a 2013 report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, a total of 483,263 contractors held Top Secret clearances in 2012, the highest level one can obtain, with another 582,524 holding them at the Confidential and Secret levels.

Think about that for a moment. How many more young and possibly delusional computer geeks might there be lurking in corporate cubicles with no accountability to the taxpayer at all? Some of those guys might be accessing your personal internet communications, not because they have to, but because they can.

Beyond that, it's not even cost effective. It's a myth that the private sector can deliver public services at a lesser cost. Private industry is profit driven, above all else. Atrios is right when he says "the security/surveillance state industry is just a giant grift, a big scam there to enrich certain communities in Northern Virginia."

Of course surveillance is just one area of government being run by and enriching private industry. Military contractors like whatever Blackwater is being called right now for foreign security forces and Halliburton for military support services are also sucking billions out of our national treasury for services the government could provide at a much lesser cost. It's not just the grift, it's the graft. These corporations are cheating us and even if they get caught cooking the books, or outright stealing, nothing happens to them. They still get paid and they get their contracts renewed forever. That's at the heart of the "small government" scam.

Yes, austerity kills economies

Just when you think there's no hope left for this country, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) does something spectacular:

So it was a little striking to see her using the Senate Budget Committee, which she chairs, to hold a hearing on the negative effects of austerity. This isn’t a flip on policy; her budget does, after all, include some stimulus spending. But instead of the usual routine of emphasizing the importance of medium-run deficit reduction, while paying lip service to the need to prevent premature cuts, Murray used the hearing to focus almost exclusively on the latter concern.

The CBO’s latest projections and the Reinhart-Rogoff debacle, she argued, “make it clearer than ever that now we need to focus above all else on our fragile economic recovery, and that the case for austerity in a time of economic weakness is simply wrong.”

Lots of charts and wonkery at the link, but the other important point is The Heritage Foundation has devolved under DeMint from a pseudo think tank that at least made some attempt to advance logical argument into a hotbed of pure conservative crackpottery. Steve Benen makes the case for why any remaining pundits of good conscience should be embarrassed to afford Heritage any credibilty at all.

GOP credo: feed the rich, starve the poor

The Republicans are hellbent on destroying any and all government assistance for the olds, poors and other needy Americans. Their most inhumane target remains cuts to food assistance programs. Krugman blasts the GOPers today and notes:

And why must food stamps be cut? We can’t afford it, say politicians like Representative Stephen Fincher, a Republican of Tennessee, who backed his position with biblical quotations — and who also, it turns out, has personally received millions in farm subsidies over the years.

Prairie Weather has the full numbers. Congressman Fincher and his family have received roughly $8.9 million in government handouts over the last 10 years. In fact, Rep. Fincher is the second largest recipient of farm subsidies in Congress. And did I mention this farm bill that severely slashes food assistance for poor children, including the WIC program which insures the bare basic nutrional requirements for babies, also includes a $9 billion increase in crop insurance to the sole benefit of big agribusiness guys like Fincher?

That, in the world according to Fincher, we can afford. No problem because cotton farmers need that help. Those poor kids and poverty stricken olds can just go rummage in garbage bins for their daily bread I guess.

Once again, on the stupid or evil scale, we're putting this down as pure evil.

I feel the bridge fall under my feet

Austerity maniacs are literally going to kill us. When you have a major political party which is effectively one half (or sometimes more) of our government refusing to spend a red hot penny on the public commons while they bleed our national treasury to wantonly pass out tax breaks to the obscenely wealthy, this is what you get.


[RJ Matson cartoon]

This is not a joke. Cutting government funding for infrastructure projects verges on criminal negligence. Our bridges are falling down and it will only get worse. [via]

...The 607,380 bridges in the U.S. are 42 years old on average, and 1-in-9 are rated “structurally deficient,” according to the American Society of Civil Engineers, which advocates more spending on such structures.

The deficit is shrinking. We can borrow our own money for practically nothing. Repairing our critical infrastructure would create jobs, improve the economy and reduce the deficit with increased revenues making the cuts unnecessary. The Republicans ongoing refusal to allow these spending bills to even get to the floor for a vote redefines "death by a thousand cuts" as pure homicide. When we weigh this on the "stupid or evil" scale, the obvious answer is pure evil.

Crumbling infrastructure is our national shame

Miraculously no one was killed when that bridge went down in Washington state this week. It's unlikely we'll be so lucky the next time and there will be a next time because we can't get the funding out of DC. The chart shows our national neglect of our critical infrastructure.



You might have thought the horrifying bridge collapse on I-35W in Minneapolis in 2007 would have been a wake up call, but no. At a time when one in nine of our bridges are deficient in some way, Republicans continue to block all infrastructure spending simply because they see it as win for Obama and they're still trying to squash our economy for their own politcal gain in the next election.

It's stupid. Hell it's evil. We could put people to work rebuilding our roads and bridges and as Atrios said, replace aging waterlines in our cities. Those are so ancient, they're busting open all over America.

Fiscal conservatives are killing us

It's always useful to remember budgets are only political documents. They're a rhetorical weapon of mass deception. Appropriations are the real deal. And more proof that the GOP really doesn't give a flying leap about budgets, even as they now refuse to go to conference to pass one, Republicans are furiously slicing and dicing funding to circumvent the sequestration cuts.

Of course they never offer specifics but the plan "focuses the biggest cuts" on aid to local school districts, health research and enforcement of labor laws. Also:

Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security and the Pentagon would be spared under the plan approved by the House Appropriations Committee on a party-line vote, but legislation responsible for federal firefighting efforts and Indian health care would absorb a cut of 18 percent below legislation adopted in March. [...]

Capitol Hill's budget would be untouched, however. House GOP leaders, who have boasted recently of their efforts to cut Congress' generous budget, opted against cutting further below levels imposed under the automatic, across-the-board spending cuts that began taking effects in March. In fact, the House would get a 1.6 percent budget increase when measured against current levels.

The foreign aid budget would be sharply cut as well, while a bill funding the IRS budget and implementation of new financial regulations would absorb a 20 percent cut from levels approved just two months ago.

Much more at the link but basically anything that aids or protects the middle class and working Americans or the needy gets the ginsu knife while their wealthy cronies are pretty much completely spared from the Republican whopper chopper. Now all they have to do is figure out how to blame the Democrats for it.

The cost of repealing Obamacare

Not talking about the costs as related to health care or the deficit. This is simply the cost to the taxpayer for the time it takes Congress to keep producing these "message bills" the crackpot cons insist on repeatedly bringing to the floor in order to impress the rubes back home.

Steve Daines represents Montana, which, at last count, takes in $1.92 of money from big government Beltway solutions for every dollar in taxes Montanas send to the rest of us. And, by the time the House arranged to define the word "quixotic" for the ages for the 33rd time, which was almost a year ago, the collective cost of all the tantrums to American taxpayers — including Montanans — already had topped $50 million. ...

House GOP leadership just agreed to bring futile attempt number 37 forward because they have freshman crackpots who didn't get a chance to show their contempt for President Obummer, the rule of law and the will of the people yet.

Now if somebody would just figure out what Darrell Issa's clown show has cost us so far instead of the endless iterations on the political standings of the playahs, we'd be getting somewhere.[image via]

Look at all the hungry people

Think Progress looks at real world effects of Meals on Wheels cuts brought to you by the GOP sequester clown car.

Directors of Meals on Wheels programs across the country spoke with ThinkProgress about how they are coping with decreased funding. Some, like Meals on Wheels of Western Broome in New York, are private nonprofits that don’t rely on government funding and will therefore be shielded. But by and large, the heads of these programs described facing deep cuts after having already slimmed down in response to lean times over the past few years.

The list is depressing but olds going hungry is just the obvious result of sequester fever. The long term consequences won't be seen right away. Maybe they'll be too subtle for Big Media to notice.

The isolation of already housebound clients will literally kill people. A recent study showed social isolation contributes to early death. For many of them, the daily delivery is probably the only daily contact they have with outside human beings. Those who don't die of loneliness will likely end up in hospitals and nursing homes from lack of decent nutrition. Which will end up costing us all much more than the few million they're saving on delivering food.

Cut the CODELs

Our useless Congresscreatures are busy slashing funding for vital social services for the poors and the olds because they claim government spending is out of control, but they don't have any problem spending millions on pleasure trips abroad under the thin aegis of CODELs. This one is especially egregious because she had to jet over to join only part of the trip.

The House Judiciary Committee reported Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, traveled around the world on an official trip in February that cost $23,646. The Feb. 16-22 trip on commercial flights was to Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia.

Mary Landrieu organized this little jaunt to the far east that "included several members of the Congressional Coalition on Adoption" and for what, you ask?

The delegation was to meet with local community leaders, adoption officials, and other government officials, such as the Vietnamese Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs.

Seriously. If they're so hot to find unneccesary spending they should start here. What's so damn important about these trips? Who the hell do they think they are, the freaking State Department? According to them, we can't afford to feed kids in America and they're jetting off for a week or so to discuss adoption with foreign bureaucrats? This is 2013. We have this thing called teleconferencing. Almost like being there in person.

These guys take these CODEL trips under the radar all the time. You don't hear about them unless they do something unusual like skinny-dipping in Sea of Gallilee.

In 2008, members of the House and Senate spent $13 million on codels abroad. They don't really need to go to any of these places, not even war zones. They should cancel all of them immediately until their deficit fever breaks.

Yellowstone business owners unhappy campers

Guessing most of these owners vote for Republicans because, small government. That would be the same Republicans who forced the sequester cuts designed to take a chainsaw to the national budget to take effect because, pisses off liberals, or something. Then the business owners discovered this is what "small government" looks like.

Yellowstone Park having to cut something, suspended snow plowing for a couple of weeks to save $400K . Bad for business. Via Kevin Drum, owners decided to pony up the cash to get it done themselves.

But therein lies the perennial rub: Cuts that are welcomed in the abstract are not always appreciated when they hit home. And everything the government does, however small, touches somebody. "You pay your taxes to get certain services," said Bruce Eldredge, executive director of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, a world-class museum in the center of town, which delivered a $10,000 check to the chamber. "We would, I think, probably argue as a community that we pay our federal taxes to make sure the park is open at a specific time."

This is, obviously, the problem of government in a nutshell: everyone wants spending to be cut, but no one wants spending to be cut on them. They want it to be cut on other people.

In particular—and please excuse the wild guess here—I imagine that most people who have a serious jones for cutting federal spending are really only interested in cutting spending on poor people. Cutting other services just isn't what they signed up for. It's the Obamaphones and the food stamps that are wasteful, not the Yellowstone snowplows and small town air traffic controllers.

Exactly. Their spending is necessary. They are the mighty makers. Only wasteful spending is on those shiftless poors. You know, those takers who are dependent on government services these people don't need.

The true cost of the Iraq war

James Fallows reminds us George W. Bush fired anybody who dared suggest the true cost of Iraq war. Before the invasion the Bush administration falsely claimed it would be over in a few months, with few troops and cost a couple of billion dollars because as Paul Wolfowitz put it, "the invasion would be largely 'self-financing' via Iraq's oil." Of course, it didn't happen that way at all. Not even close.

Furthermore, according to a new study done at the the Kennedy School at Harvard, we've only just begun to pay and the real costs look more like this:

The Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, taken together, will be the most expensive wars in US history - totaling somewhere between $4 to $6 trillion.

Mother Jones created a set of cost charts about this as well. You'll notice the greatest cost driver is the interest. Never let them forget, the Bush administration borrowed a ton of money to pay for this folly.



And then there's the hidden costs which were mostly not covered in appropriations at the time. Taking care of the troops that survived and came home damaged. That was the double edge sword of improved battlefield care of the injured. It kept the death count relatively low compared to previous wars, but now we have an obligation to take care of these veterans for the rest of their lives. Considering how young they were when they were deployed, those costs will survive longer than those who started this abomination will live themselves. Our children, and quite possibly our grandchildren, will be paying this war off until they reach old age.

Funny, you never hear the austerity addicts talking about that spending.

Freedom ain't free and neither is Iraq

I've been suffering a bad case of PTSD this week and I wasn't ever deployed to that hell hole. Just following the news and trying to rally an outcry to make it stop was as much trauma as I could stand. But with the 10th anniversary retrospects, it's coming back to me in waves of recollection. Don't think I'm the only one.

Thinking we need to make the warmongers live the motto they used to perpetrate that atrocity. Never forget. Starting with the true cost of the Iraq war.

That's just the measurable costs and I doubt it includes all of them. It doesn't count the human toll. Neither the hundreds of thousands who died, nor the role the occupation played in the deterioration of civil society here and in Iraq is quantified by the number crunchers. Not sure any one of us could bear to fully comprehend the entire scope of this failure at once.

Worse yet the innocent Iraqi people are still paying the price. I'm told at least 65 people died there this week in sectarian fighting. For the Iraqis, the war George W Bush started may never end. Certainly it won't before the millions of U.S. dollars worth of paint peels off all those school houses.

House Republicans cave on government shutdown

It seems the House GOPers didn't see a large enough ransom potential in a government shutdown at this time and decided not to take the economy hostage. Instead the House easily passed a bill to keep the government running, at least in the short term.

The House gave final approval Thursday, in a bipartisan 318 to 109 vote, to a continuing funding resolution that outlines spending through the end of the fiscal year, Sept. 30. It assures that the government will stay open when the current funding measure expires March 27. The House vote came a day after the Senate approved the bill. It now goes to President Obama for his signature, ending a relatively smooth and drama-free process for a Congress that has repeatedly deadlocked on spending issues. But it only covers the next six months.

Haven't seen a breakdown on the vote but feel safe in assuming most of the 109 nays were Republicans indebted to a largely crackpot con base.

But that's not all. They were busy at John Boehner's place this week. House Republicans also endorsed Paul Ryan's vision to starve granny and kill off the excess poors.

Just this morning, House Republicans passed this year’s version of Paul Ryan’s budget proposal, which — if implemented — would defund the Affordable Care Act, slash tax rates on the wealthiest Americans, slash spending on social programs, and radically restructure the nation’s retirement programs. The measure won support from the vast majority of House Republicans, passing with 221 votes, with all Democrats in opposition.

Ten Republicans joined House Democrats in opposing the Ryan budget measure.

Six of the 10 said the Wisconsin Republican’s budget didn’t cut spending fast enough, while four said it cut spending too steeply or in the wrong areas.

The other four are in more vulnerable districts, where those lawmakers could conceivably lose to a strong Democratic challenger.

Meanwhile, the effects of the sequester cuts are trickling out into the states and cities like toxic fracking waste seeping into the water table, slowly eroding vital public services. Sadly not seeing much BigMedia reminders that this is happening because the GOP refused to raise an extra dime's worth of revenue from the investor class -- a/k/a the only people who benefited from the recovery so far.

Voters support stimulus spending for job creation

More proof nobody cares about the deficit. When it gets down to specific policy voters support "government spending" to create jobs. Even Republican voters:

Americans widely support each of three job creation proposals, including offering tax breaks to businesses that create jobs in the U.S. and a program that would put people to work on urgent infrastructure repair projects. Support for these programs is only slightly lower in a variant of the question that asks respondents if they are in favor of spending government money to pay for the programs.

Greg breaks out the figures:

* 72 percent support a “federal government program that would spend government money to put people to work on urgent infrastructure repairs.” This is also backed by 71 percent of independents and 53 percent of Republicans.

* 72 percent support a “federal jobs creation law that would spend government money for a program designed to create more than 1 million new jobs.” This is backed by 69 percent of independents and 52 percent of Republicans.

So why does the polling always show deificit concern in the abstract you ask? It's all that other spending that's wasteful.

More than two-thirds of Americans think the budget deficit is largely a result of waste and fraud? But wait! It's all explained by a deeper dive into the poll results:

A more detailed look at which programs were named by Democrats and by Republicans suggests that for many, waste is indeed defined as "money spent on some government program I don't like."

It has always been so. Voters like spending when the money goes to their priorities. I believe this is called "enlightened self-interest" by conservatives and glibertarians. An old liberal like me calls it selfishness and quite often greed. Doesn't help that we have an entire political/corporate/media system dedicated to promoting that mindset as an appropriate definition of morality.

Wimpy GOP weasels out of fiscal responsibility

I have to agree with Charlie Pierce. I think Brian Beutler missed the mark a little in this piece about GOPers dealing with sequester cuts in their own districts. You should, of course, read Charlie's post because he's smarter and more eloquent than me. But I'll add this much.

Brian is right that Republicans love spending cuts. Their base loves spending cuts. Everybody loves spending cuts as long as they're happening somewhere else. Because their government handouts are necessary. It's all those other people who are wasting the taxpayers' money.

But as Charlie says, it's no given the blame will fall on the Republicans. It's not like they're going to take any responsibility. Take for example:

“My bill will require the Office of Management and Budget to submit a plan to Congress that implements the President’s cuts without harming our civilian employee’s ability to keep pace with their demands and provide for their families,” said Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-TX). “In the district I represent, the civilian employees of Corpus Christi Army Depot (CCAD) and Naval Air Station Corpus Christi (NASCC) could be furloughed for up to 22 days. Our local airport towers in Corpus Christi and Victoria might also face extreme cuts. Those reductions in force are unacceptable.”

Catch that? "The President’s cuts." Obviously implying Obama is picking and choosing to punish GOP districts with the sequester and the same thing isn't happening in Democratic districts. The base will believe it because they don't get real news, they watch Fox. Neither will they find out Blake's bill is a sham solely designed to reinforce the fiction they're being singled out.

There are millions of people in America who have no clue the sequester was purposely designed to be a chainsaw massacre on the budget of every agency, so indiscriminately murderous that no sane person with a milligram of compassion would be willing to pull the starting cord to inflict the mayhem. Nearly the entire GOP pulled that damn cord in unison and threw it into the innocent crowd.

The alleged neutral observers of BigMedia aren't going to tell the underinformed that 80% or more of what Republicans say is a big fat lie. Doesn't fit the business model. Besides, they're already fully vested in the Obama invented the sequester meme, premised on the flimsiest technicality. Which I guess is good enough for anti-government work -- at least when a Democrat is in charge. [graphic credit]

SCOTUS is not amused by sequester cuts

Didn't expect this to happen. SCOTUS Justices beg Congress for more money:

The cuts to the court system from sequestration are “simply unsustainable,” Justice Anthony Kennedy warned Thursday.

The judicial branch is subject to a 5 percent cut under sequestration. The Supreme Court and lower courts throughout the country wouldn't be able to carry out their duties if those cuts stay in place for more than a few months, Kennedy said.

"If it's for any long term, it will be inconsistent with the constitutional obligation of the Congress to fund the courts," Kennedy said.

Maybe our Honorable Justices didn't get the memo. According to a duly elected Oklahoma Congressman, (who was probably helped by dark money enabled by the Citizen's United decision), SCOTUS doesn't get to decide what's constitutional anymore.

When austerity addicts overdose the world will change

Riffing off Sam Stein, Greg Sargent flags the disconnect inside the Beltway bubble between the Villagers view of the sequester and the reality of the cuts on the streets. The insiders are all about who's winning the optics game and hurling themselves en masse onto the fainting couches about the cancelled White House tours. The outsiders, meaning the vast majority of the population, have greater concerns that are finally showing up on their local news stations.

Most people haven't paid attention because they're bored with the endless Congressional theatrics that so obsesses the national media. Nobody told them what the sequester was going to do to in their town. That's changing.

But this local coverage tells a different story with a different emphasis. Real people around the country are beginning to tune into the possibility that these spending cuts could do real damage to their communities and to the country’s economic recovery.

The sequester cuts are only just beginning to filter down tangibly enough to disrupt the daily lives of the unengaged masses. And they will be widely felt. Think Progress assembled The 32 Dumbest And Most Devastating Sequester Cuts. I picked out 10 of them.

$75 million cut from the Aging and Disability Services Programs
$199 million cut from public housing
$928 million cut from FEMA’s disaster relief money
$125 million cut from the Wildland Fire Management
$53 million cut from Salaries and Expenses at the Food Safety and Inspection Service
$57 million cut from the Health Care Fraud and Abuse Control
$633 million cut from the Department of Education’s Special Education programs
$512 million cut from Customs and Border Protection
$79 million cut from Embassy Security, Construction, and Maintenance
$232 million cut from the Federal Aviation Administration

These cuts aren't just going to be felt by the poors and the olds. They're going to greatly inconvenience the reasonably secure. When the spending cuts start bleeding already underfunded local budgets and reversing a still sluggish economic recovery, the people will not be amused.

Austerity addicts have yet to feel the bite of public opinion. There will be backlash and I'm pretty sure it will fall on the Republicans much more heavily than on Obama or the Democrats.

[Big thanks to Batocchio for linking in at Crooks and Liars blog round up.]

Gentlemen prefer platinum coins

I don't know if the newly fabled One Trillion Dollar Platinum Coin, would work or not. Kevin Drum says it's illegal. But this fomer head of the US Mint says there's no reason not to mint a platinum coin and Josh Barro argues fiercely that we should. And though he never gets any credit, Atrios has been pushing the One Trillion Dollar Platinum Coin solution for literally, years.

If there's a chance it could shut down the GOP's hostage strategy, it's worth trying. Our government wasn't built to function well under extortion by a minority with the most money.

I've seen a lot of calls to put Reagan on the face. Don't hate that idea but why add to the outrage if we're to actually try it? I'm thinking mint the Platinum Bull. Like the Golden Eagle. Put the Wall Street bull on the front and maybe the Goldman Sachs building on the back. It would be the Holy Grail of coin collecters someday.