Different Day, Same Shit.

You gotta hand it to President Obama. Keeping the cool, calm and conciliatory tone when faced with the wrath and obstinence of hundreds of petulent assholes and "True Believer" types is nothing short of amazing, especially when dealing with a deadline for American financial solvency. It feels like any other president would have dropped kicked a congressman or two just for appearances sake over something of this magnitude.

But a lot of people are pointing out that this conciliatory, compromising nature of his is his biggest weakness. They want him to grow some of those minerals (for all you "Snatch" fans) and start breathing down some necks, or at least go out on his own and effect policy that momentarily resolves the debt ceiling issue. The level-headedness of the president isn't gonna impress or help someone who relies on SSI disability checks for income, or job-seekers using the last of their unemployment benefits to keep things at home afloat. These people want to see some action on part of the president, and I don't blame them.

Meanwhile, you gotta hand it to the ever-present Tea Party contingent of the GOP for "staying the course", or whatever they call it these days. They have a goal, and it is to use this current (manufactured) crisis to not only hang a failure over Obama's neck like so many dead Albatrosses and send him packing come November 2012, but also to drive the country over the fiscal edge right now and into a genuine depression, one that may or may not rival that of the Great Depression that kicked off in late 1929 and didn't let up until sometime near the end of WWII. The whole idea behind this plan is to trigger a moment of weakness in American history where they can finally present and implement their socioeconomic policies and make their ideology the "gold standard" among Americans.

And not for lack of trying. So far, they've made it clear that "compromise" is out of the question -- either Obama can accept their policies in whole or he can deal with the upcoming shitstorm, with the Tea Party apparently secure in the knowledge that Obama will end up shouldering the blame for "inaction" or "not acting enough". Either way, they believe they have a win -- Obama caves to them in order to save the country or people turn their backs on him on Election Day.

These policies are more of the same "cut spending, cut taxes, cut services" spiel that's done nothing to stimulate the economy, except this time, the policy comes from a group of people whose fervor and conviction that these things work rivals that of the Evangelicals and Jehovah's Witnesses. They just know, deep down in their hearts, that these things will work and they will make them work. Reality? Please. These guys will ignore reality -- they've managed to create their own reality where they see themselves as the heroes that Americans don't want, but need and even deserve to have. When you have that much fanaticism within the party, you're bound to have problems. (More after the break)

Earlier today, House Speaker John Boehner finally managed to pass his proposal for raising the debt ceiling, in exchange for numerous spending cuts. The bill was pushed through with a 218-210 vote, with 22 Republicans opposing the measure and no Democrat support.

Now the proposal has to go through the Senate, where Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid vowed to shit-can the proposal in favor of his own, which needs at least 7 Republican votes to pass to avoid filibuster.

The differences between Reid's and Boehner's plan?

Boehner's plan, which has since been revised, proposed generating a total of $917 billion in savings while initially raising the debt ceiling by $900 billion. The speaker has pledged to match any debt ceiling hike with dollar-for-dollar spending cuts.

(Reid's) plan, however, would require a second vote by Congress to raise the debt ceiling by a combined $2.5 trillion -- enough to last through the end of 2012. It would create a special congressional committee to recommend additional savings of $1.6 trillion or more.

As for Reid's plan, it would reduce deficits over the next decade by $2.2 trillion. Democrats have promised that the final version of the plan will contain additional savings -- enough to match any required debt ceiling hike through 2012.

Reid's plan would cut spending by $1.8 trillion, including $1 trillion in savings based on the planned U.S. withdrawals from military engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A small debt ceiling bump matched with pound-for-pound dollar amount cuts designed to starve "unwanted" programs and have the president crawling back for a second ceiling bump plea months down the road, vs. a larger bump that gives the U.S. more fiscal breathing room for a longer period of time, with more substantial cuts coming from areas that actually need spending cuts (military spending), as opposed to leaving those areas sacrosanct while taking bites out of "social net" programs (Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, etc).

EDIT: As of 8:31 this evening, that proposal's been tabled, 59 to 41. Unless the Democrat-led Senate decides to bring it up again, it's stone dead.  And now there will be weekend negotiations to seek a solution to avoid a sovereign default come August 2nd.

Here's a little something I posted some time back at Field Negro, concerning the different factors and challenges that blacks in the United States that whites simply do not have to think about, and how flippant some whites can be when blacks attempt to articulate these factors:

I've been thinking about the whole idea of what it means to be a white person in these United States, and I think I've stumbled across what irks me so much about the whole idea of...ahem...."whiteness".

Whites can afford to walk around with this air of cluelessness and obliviousness throughout nearly any area of their lives, and when such things hurt them, the penalty for such is relatively light for them, in most cases. They aren't burdened with this omnipresent self-consciousness about themselves or their actions, nor do they have to think, rethink and double-check their actions to make sure they aren't on the wrong side of some authority. A black person has to be conscious of their self and their actions, in order to safely navigate themselves around unspoken pitfalls and traps that could deny them opportunities, end their livelihoods and/or their lives.

Another thing that irks me is how whites readily trend towards their historic mental training of seeing blacks and other non-whites as "things", and not people. "Gee, those things are lazy. Why not move them off to the fields over there and make them actually work, for once?" When you see a fellow human being as "non-human" or "not one of us", it's piss-easy to do things to them that you normally wouldn't do to another human being (unless you harbor sociopathic tendencies, but that's a whole nother kettle of fish).

Nor do whites have to constantly worry about becoming a target of color-aroused individuals, groups or organizations that continue to operate from a script filled with stereotypes and justifications for mistreating, abusing and otherwise subjugating blacks and other groups that don't look or behave as white American culture expects them to behave.

Now someone can counter with endless stories of blacks victimizing whites for kicks or economic gain. But it's hard to sympathize with these folks when the stories are produced solely for cancelling out whatever grievances blacks have with whites over the way they were treated historically and how they're still being treated now.

And someone else can counter with how the above is just justification for blacks to whine, moan and complain about how things were in the past, and not realizing that things are much better for them -- or at least would be better for them if they'd simply stop whining so freaking much.

But when you're attempting to relate to someone how the inexplicable color-aroused hatred still exists today, only to be told you're a whiner and a complainer who should just shut up and be thankful you're still not where you were 60, 100 or 160 years ago, you can't help but become vexed and just plain angry, thinking that "this motherfucker simply DOES, NOT, GET, IT".

Americans, by far and large, are a people who tend to forgive and forget, preferring to hold on to good experiences while sweeping the bad ones under the carpet, never to be spoken of or remembered. It takes a lot of national trauma to mark those bad experiences in their brains deep enough for them to at least acknowledge that those experiences happened. Learning from them, on the other hand, is another story.

Forgetting about the past mistreatment and adverse experiences of blacks, while expecting them to forget along with you, and then having the gall to complain when they refuse to simply forget shows a deep lack of empathy for anyone but you and yours, and a flippant dismissal of the concerns of others that angers blacks to no end.

Perhaps that's the true meaning of "whiteness" in this context: the ability to walk a mile in someone else's shoes, only instead you walk a dozen feet or so and then slip back into your own, comfortable shoes while remarking how they should be thankful they aren't walking barefoot.

This one comes courtesy of FT Alphaville. According to Citigroup’s Willem Buiter and Ebrahim Rahbari, there are five possible scenarios that the government could go with in regards to the impending August 2nd debt ceiling deadline:

Scenario 1 (60% likelihood): The Federal debt ceiling is raised in time. There is a small bipartisan fiscal package. The US sovereign long-term rating is downgraded to AA.

Scenario 2: The Federal debt ceiling is raised in time. There is a large bipartisan fiscal package, which is backloaded and not credible (33% likelihood). The US sovereign long-term rating is downgraded to AA, but maybe not initially.

Scenario 3 (5% likelihood): The Federal debt ceiling is not raised in time and the US sovereign defaults.

Scenario 4: The Federal debt ceiling is raised in time. There is a large bipartisan fiscal package, which is frontloaded (1% likelihood). There is no downgrade.

Scenario 5: The Federal debt ceiling is raised in time. There is a large bipartisan fiscal package, which is backloaded and credible(1% likelihood). There is no downgrade.

But there is a Scenario 6 that Obama could pursue: unilaterally lifting the debt ceiling, citing the 14th Amendment, Section 4 as reason enough to raise the debt ceiling or even ignore it entirely:

Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

You know what's ironic about the 14th Amendment? It also includes the Citizenship Clause in Section 1. You know, the one that overturned Dred Scott vs. Sanford. And today, there's the possibility of a half-African U.S. president having to cite the 14th Amendment to pull America's fat out of the fiscal fire. Ain't life grand?

The above quoted is from Field Negro, by an otherwise anonymous commenter under the name of "rfd". This was in response to the following comment:

The main problem is how recent housing and retail developments have been built with only cars and highways in mind. That makes it much harder to implement mass transit whenever it's needed.

That, and the fact that many states and municipalities don't like funding mass transit, and people don't like seeing their taxes raised to support it. And there are no private companies waiting in the wings to come out and create their own ideal private mass transit systems.

I didn't mean to make a post about mass transit or voting patterns yet, but it is interesting how this guy thinks he speaks for other taxpayers.

Speaking of taxpayers, it's interesting to notice people who actually get out and vote, and those who don't. According to the U.S. Census bureau, only 58% of Americans turn out to vote, on average. And those percentages vary in local, state and federal elections. Other nations have a 90% or more voter turn out. Then again, those places usually have compulsory voting and assign huge penalties for not casting a ballot. But getting down to brass tacks, one has to take a look at exactly who's casting ballots and why in order to understand how this nation ends up with some of the policies it has. (More after the break)

5 days left before the United States hits its head on the "debt ceiling" and officially "defaults" on its $14 trillion dollars of debt and financial obligations, House Speaker John Boehner, also known as the "Tan Man" and "Orange Julius", is busy convincing his fellow GOP members and the Tea Party contingent within the House of Representatives to vote on a plan that raises the current debt ceiling, in exchange for billions in government spending cuts. Apparently, it's gonna be a hard sell, not just among Teabaggers who'd rather see the U.S. jog straight off of the fiscal cliff, but from Democrats in the Senate who are not pleased with the concessions being made.

And speaking of concessions, it seems that a lot of people have about had it with President Obama's all-too-conciliatory tones and actions of compromise. Many wish that Obama would just sack up and invoke the 14th amendment "nuclear option", where Obama could simply raise the debt ceiling on his own.

Browsing the comments at Balloon Juice, I came across an interesting bit of insight about Obama's current course of action from one Roger Smith:

I don’t think he believes in austerity. He does believe that the budget needs to be balanced in the long term, i.e. that we’ll need to pay down the debt when the economy recovers. If he’s lost a messaging battle, it’s about the timing of the cuts. AFAIK, he’s proposing cuts that are far enough in the future that the economy should be healthier by the time they hit. They may still be too soon, but he’s not proposing that we slash everything next year.
It looks to me as if this is an opinion that Boehner shares, which is part of the reason he’s being stabbed in the back by the Teabagger Caucus. The negotiations going on right now are over long-term cuts that won’t kick measurably for a few years. That’s obviously not enough for the neo-Hooverites, who want austerity now, not a promise of austerity in the future that the next Congress could ignore if they choose. That’s why the Teabaggers are ramping up the calls for a showdown on the upcoming budget even if they get a big cut in the debt ceiling negotiations.

"Austerity". That's a word that keeps getting tossed around in conservative circles. The whole idea of austerity is to slash spending wherever you can, buckle down and ride out the economic storm. Which is a great idea if you're budgeting for a household of 5. Your income is dictated by whatever you can bring in from work and other income sources and if you have kids, well...those are outgoing expenses that you won't see any monetary returns on anytime soon. As an exercise, try imagining your kids actually make money, and you receive a portion of that money in the form of tax revenue, and that revenue goes towards the family budget. If the kids don't make any money because they're out of work, eventually you go begging for bread and beans. Unless you do as the U.S. government does and rely on a series of low interest, high spending limit credit cards that you don't necessarily have to pay off right away.

The U.S. government is not a household. Instead, you have approximately 111,000,000 potential sources of revenue, yet over 20,000,000 of those are cooling their heels, wondering if they'll ever get any jobs in an "austere" economy.  In order to put those people back to work and get them to spend their money on things that corporations and the government make money on, you have to spend a little money on things that put people back to work. Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously did that with the Works Progress Administration (although he later had WWII as a rather convenient pick-me-up). This country has countless miles of interstate highway that needs revamping -- a public works project can not only help fix that, but also put tens, if not hundreds of thousands back to work.  It's a start, after all.

But the Tea Party wants the U.S. government to treat itself like a 5-person household, withholding spending on essential programs that could help stimulate the economy and bring back needed jobs and hunkering down while the recession drags on. Doing nothing for those jobless 20,000,000 means you miss out on revenue from 20,000,000. Those 20,000,000 don't - and can't - spend their money on things that make make corporations money. Well, not that those corporations are hurting -- they're having the time of their lives right about now, with extra profits that are more than likely NOT being taxed. The Powers That Be™ can continue stacking their money in a corner in relative peace.

Without that revenue, the U.S. government continues borrowing. And yes, I do realize the government tends to mismanage its funds on a constant basis. Come to think of it, conservatives point towards Social Security and welfare as two black holes of endless spending, yet they consciously ignore military spending and the various tax cuts and stimulus payouts given to multinational corporations and wealthy individuals. Remember when I said the top marginal tax rate in this country was about 35%? Yeah, they don't have to pay much, given the majority of their income comes from dividends and interest payments. That's something the capital gains tax takes care of. But only at a top 15% rate.

At this point, not raising the debt ceiling will put the U.S. government's "AAA" financial rating at risk. And it is likely that grandma won't be getting her Social Security check. Or those 20,000,000 unemployed their unemployment benefits. With Wall Street begging the Tea Party contingent to come to their senses and not fuck things up for them, the GOP is most likely to come to an agreement between now and August 2nd, which is when the proverbial fiscal shit hits the fan. If not, things are gonna get a hell of a lot more interesting.

The above is a quote from a commenter at The Heaviest Corner, a blog that gives a great deal of insight into what makes the Magic City what it is today.



This is the city of Birmingham, Alabama.

It originated as a company town, methodically planned out by men of industry and vast wealth, situated on a number of coal seams that made coal mining and steel production a no-brainer. Located smack dab in the middle of a county staring down the biggest bankruptcy this side of Orange County, CA, the population is currently at 212,000 and falling. It was hit hard by the loss of the steel industry, with a high number of the plants and foundries closing shop around the 1970s, only to reinvent itself as a medical research mecca of sorts, with the University of Alabama at Birmingham at the forefront. With high crime rates, deteriorating city sectors, a laughably corrupt government and a people still divided by racial and urban/suburban strife, this city is hurting. Big time. But there is hope.

The most recent news of progress is the planned baseball stadium for the "AA" minor league Birmingham Barons, near the recently-developed Railroad Park. The current stadium is located in Hoover, a suburb that's a rather long and inconvenient drive for most people near the city center, and the current attendance numbers reflect that.

And then there's Railroad Park itself. Located along the rail lines that divide the north and south ends of downtown Birmingham, it's a 19-acre oasis of greenery among an otherwise urban backdrop. And by all accounts, people love it. It's also proof positive of how a little urban redevelopment can help revitalize a dying city.

But as the quote suggests, this city still has a lot of problems to deal with. More of that after the jump.

This comes courtesy of Booker Rising and one "Mr. Ref".

As I understand so far, the gentleman who gets his shit kicked in was supposed to look after the business while the proprietor (the gentleman executing the shit-kicking) was away on unknown business. Instead, the gentleman elected to conduct illegal activity (drug sales) out of the establishment. When questioned about it, the gentleman seemed to effect relatively little remorse. And apparently that was all the proprietor could stand.

Part of me says this ass whipping was long-coming, thanks to the braided-up gent jeopardizing this man's livelihood and liberty by slinging dope in the man's shop. Part of me says this man shouldn't have lost his composure and instead just shown young buck the door, with a strong warning to NOT come back, if he valued his life.

At the end, a little kid asks if he can go outside and see his daddy finish up the beatdown. And his mother responds "No, you don't want to see that baby..."

No one should, but it happens.

“So they’re happy for tax rates to be raised on the other half that DOES pay taxes.”

The above is Rick Warren's tax tweet.  Or at least it was before it was unceremoniously pulled down and replaced with a retraction stating how it could have been a bit "mean".

Pray tell, Mr. Warren, which half do you speak of when you say they don't pay taxes? Surely you're not talking about those making under $18,530 (for a family of 3), which happens to be the 2011 federal poverty level and for whom a 35% top marginal tax rate would eat at least a third of their income, if they happened to be dropped into that bracket without any change in income. As it stands, the current tax bracket in this case is just 15%, which doesn't sound bad until you realize that at $18,530/yr for a family of 3, every dollar counts.

Meanwhile, the wealthy have a much easier time avoiding their 35% top marginal tax rate, through the creative use of loopholes and tax breaks generously gifted by our past and previous government. Even corporations get in on the act and find ways of paying absolutely no taxes. And the proceeds go straight to the stockholders and executives' bonuses. I'd guess this is the half Mr. Warren was talking about, but I have a feeling it isn't....

It amuses me to no end how people in this country want to see the poor and less-well-off get loaded down with taxes, while making every excuse in the world for the wealthy to get off scot-free from paying taxes, as though their wealth has somehow given them the Divine Right™ to stockpile and sit on as much money as they please. Not that I'm an advocate of the stereotypical "redistribution" schemes conservatives love to cry about, but there's this obligation to take care of the golden goose that lays your golden eggs. We all know how that story went....

"God bless the child that's got his own...."