SOTU

My basic reaction: Obama just lost the 2012 election.

He said a lot of the things we needed to hear; he wants us to do the things we really need to do; but he's trying to lead us in a direction that's always been seen as a threat by practically all of the big money interests.

Just by pushing for Clean Energy and an end to Corporate Welfare, Obama set himself up to get slammed.  Large piles of cash are sitting in the coffers of Big Business and PACs and Trade Groups, and the execs at those places will not sit idly by waiting for somebody to pinch off the flow of tax dollars out of our pockets into theirs.  They have huge amounts to spend and no limits on how they can spend it.  We're about to see the real effects of the Citizens United decision.

Ya heard it here.

Budget Woes

Politicians like to talk about cutting spending, and doing more with less, etc.  We've heard it all forever.  Now we're forced to do something real or we'll go broke for real.  But nobody's talking any specifics about what exactly they're going to cut.

Case in point: this bit from TPM:

"We've got to learn how to prioritize and do more with less in all areas of government," said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor at his weekly press conference today. "It just is what it is. In the terms of transportation, we've got to figure out ways how to leverage dollars, how to come up with innovative ways to address the nation's ailing transportation infrastructure."

So this is nothing new at all.  The only thing that's changed is that we have a new bunch of nephews and brothers-in-law who will suddenly discover their passions for Road Paving or Childhood Development or any number of business interests they can get into quickly once the Repubs start killing off federal agencies and funneling the dollars out to their private sector cronies.

These guys WILL NOT spend significantly less for any length of time.  They'll still spend the money, but they'll spend it outside the government, and then they'll claim they're keeping their promises.  I saw a story the other day saying they're going to reduce the FBI and DEA by some thousands of agents - how much are you willing to bet those jobs won't actually be taken over by private security contractors?

So here's the kicker: they'll use the high-sounding rhetoric of "Cutting the Budget" to hack away at the Democratic constituencies in the fed gov't, and bolster their own constituencies in the private sector.  Any bets?

Bullying The Seniors

From Bob Herbert via NYT:

The demagogues would have the public believe that Social Security is unsustainable, that it is some kind of giant contributor to the federal budget deficits. Nothing could be further from the truth. As the Economic Policy Institute has explained, Social Security “is emphatically not the cause of the federal government’s long-term deficits, since it is prohibited from borrowing and must pay all benefits out of dedicated tax revenues and savings in its trust funds.”

Social Security is good at least thru the mid-2030s. And once the giant bulge known as The Boomers moves thru the system, it should get a whole lot easier to finance the thing.

One From TED

I especially like the part where she ties it all into problem-solving.

Kinda Interesting

This is what a political statement looks like when you take out the content, and you only see the stagecraft.

I don't quite get the bleep at the end, but what really stands out is something that looks suspiciously like a teleprompter reflected in her glasses.

Tunisia

It occurs to me that we could file this one under The Pen Is Mightier Than The Sword.

With all the sound and fury here in the US over "2nd Amendment Remedies", and "If ballots don't work, bullets will" - with all the potential for bellicose rhetoric to turn into real bloodshed, it's strangely reassuring to look at events in Iran and now Tunisia, and draw the conclusion: The revolution will not only be televised, but will actually be fought with cell phones and video cameras.

Disarming your citizens can have the unintended consequence of effectively neutering your government's authority to use force.  If you shoot an unarmed protestor, you aren't defending some lofty sounding governing principle.  You're just an asshole.

I don't know a lot about what's going on in Tunisia.  I only know that Ben Ali's government has been tagged as repressive for years, but now there's video on the web that shows unarmed citizens being gunned down in the streets.



And here's a write-up from Foreign Policy.

Fantasy

Stochastic Terrorism

This is an excellent day because I've learned a couple of things.

First, I learned a little something about Stochastic Terrorism.  This is the tech term for the process that gives rise to the kind of Lone Wolf action that we saw on Saturday in Tucson.

And second, I finally did a little reading on Henry II and his problems with Thomas Beckett.

So, when I put these things together, it's a little clearer than before.  Not a lot, but some.

Read this from The Agonist.

The core of the theory claims a causal connection between the highly evocative political rhetoric of figures like "Beck, Hannity, and O'Reilly" and acts that have a probabilistic inevitability when you factor in the total number of "people who are emotionally unstable" and the nonstop exposure of these three (and more) by Rupert Murdoch's Fox News and broadcast operations.

There's still no direct-line cause-and-effect at work, but that's pretty much exactly what Plausible Deniability is all about, isn't it?

Stephen Budiansky's Liberal Curmudgeon Blog: Not us (cont.)

Stephen Budiansky's Liberal Curmudgeon Blog: Not us (cont.)

#4 is exactly what we need to be talking about:

For as long as I can remember, I have heard conservatives blaming everything that is wrong in the universe, from violent crime to declining test scores to teen pregnancy to rude children to declining patriotism to probably athlete's foot . . . upon Dr. Spock, Hollywood liberals, the abolition of prayer in school, Bill Clinton, the "liberal 1960s," the teaching of evolution — in other words, upon symbols, rhetoric, cultural norms, and the values expressed by political and media leaders. Yet from the moment when someone gets a gun in their hands, apparently, society ceases to have any influence whatsoever on the outcome and individual responsibility takes hold 100%. Something is driving the tripling of death threats against congressmen (and the concomitant rise in threats against Federal judges and other villains of the right, from Forest Service rangers to climate scientists) and it isn't the sunspot cycle.

Ms Giffords Of Arizona

An assassination attempt just misses - nine dead, more wounded, the main target barely clinging to life - and somehow, we can't just come out and say we have a problem in this country with the way we talk about politics.

Howie Kurtz does the usual hand-wringing, and I've heard some others soaking up large quantities of valuable airtime angsting about whether or not this kind of act can be attributed to the rhetorical recklessness of politicians and pundits.  And in the end, they say nothing.  They all "have to leave it there" after deciding nothing; all we come away with is that it was yet another senseless tragedy of our times, and that "gosh, I hope it wasn't something we said."

Look guys, words have meaning.  Politicians and commentators say the things they say for a reason.  They put words together in ways that are intended to prompt people to take some action.  Your actual intention may be simply to get people up off their asses to go out and vote.  But when you use the imagery of violence to get them to go out and do something, you don't get to sit back being surprised when somebody decides to take your words at face value.  In an obviously important way, this Loughner asshole did exactly what he heard Palin or Angle or any number of others say they wanted him to do.

For the most part, this lies squarely at the feet of the Repubs.  They own it; and I think they know it.