Republicans would be putting their fingerprints on a tax increase in return for spending cuts as a first order of business, which would raise the dividend and top income tax rates to 39.6% (from 35%), or 41% if you include the phase-out of deductions. (Plus the 3.8% payroll tax hike baked into ObamaCare.) Only then would Mr. Obama and the Democrats negotiate the details of tax reform and lower overall rates.
But why at that point would Democrats want tax reform? They'd have achieved their main political goals of a huge debt-reduction deal, getting GOP cover for a tax increase, and putting Republicans cross-wise with the tea party. Raising tax rates first also makes the math of tax reform that much harder to negotiate on both revenue and income-distribution grounds. Under the Beltway's scoring rules, cutting rates would look like an even bigger gain for higher-income folks and an even bigger revenue loss for the Treasury.
Last week, LulzSec [a splinter group of Anonymous] said it had knocked the Central Intelligence Agency's website offline for about an hour. The CIA said no internal or classified networks were affected.
A call to a phone number set up by the group, 614-LULZSEC, wasn't returned. One LulzSec follower called "tflow" responded to a Wall Street Journal reporter in an online chat room, saying: "Unfortunately the gnomes are too busy to pick up your clearly inferior call."
"For the past month and a bit, we've been causing mayhem and chaos throughout the Internet, attacking several targets," LulzSec said in a statement last week. "This is the Internet, where we screw each other over for a jolt of satisfaction."
The gnomes are too busy to pick up your clearly inferior call....
"Women, on the other hand, do almost everything better. We’ve known this intuitively for a long time. If you didn’t, just ask your wife or your mother. But now there’s a raft of evidence that suggests women are better at everything — including investing." That's David Weidner — in the Wall Street Journal's Market Watch — citing Anthony Weiner, Eliot Spitzer, Bill Clinton, John Ensign, Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Edwards and riffing.
Remember it's okay to say one sex is superior to the other as long as you're saying women are better.
Let me attest to my hatred of fluorescent light by saying that this was the article that caused me — after all these years — to click through and subscribe to the Wall Street Journal.
And, here: Buy some 100-watt bulbs. You have until the end of the year to build up your lifetime stock of 100-watt bulbs. Unless Congress votes for the "Bulb Act" and repeals the loathsome law George W. Bush "signed in one of his all-too typical late-term decisions."
The ban passed at the height of the global warming fad-scare when all proper thinkers were supposed to sacrifice to the anticarbon gods.
Is the fad-scare over?!
You know if you put the argument for repeal like that, it's going to intimidate politicians who are still afraid of being labeled AGW deniers.
There's been some discussion here in Madison, Wisconsin, where former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Louis Butler is a visiting professor at the law school, about whether that headline, on a Wall Street Journal editorial, is racist. The editors begin:
As consolation prizes go, Louis Butler can't complain. After being twice rejected by Wisconsin voters for a place on the state Supreme Court, the former judge has instead been nominated by President Obama to a lifetime seat on the federal district court. If he is confirmed, Wisconsin voters will have years to contend with the decisions of a judge they made clear they would rather live without.
Judge Butler served on the state Supreme Court for four years, enough time to have his judicial temperament grow in infamy. Having first run unsuccessfully in 2000, he was appointed by Democratic Governor Jim Doyle to the seat vacated by Justice Diane Sykes in 2004. But after serving four years, voters had seen enough of his brand of judicial philosophy, making him the first sitting justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court in four decades to lose a retention election last year.
The editorial proceeds with a few paragraphs about how liberal Butler supposedly is and concludes: "Mr. Butler's nomination shows the dominance of liberal ideology in Mr. Obama's judicial selections, and especially a contempt for Wisconsin voters."
Now, my position is that the President of the United States, under the U.S. Constitution, has the power to appoint federal judges, and therefore he can choose liberal or conservative judges as he sees fit. If they are well enough qualified — which includes the requirement that they have a judicial temperament and are committed to legitimate legal methodology — the Senate should confirm them. This is why I supported George Bush's nomination of Samuel Alito:
Those Democrats who are already insisting that Judge Alito's record on the bench makes him unacceptable should keep in mind that someday they, too, will have a president with a Supreme Court seat to fill, and it would serve the country well if that president wasn't forced to choose only among candidates with no paper trail. To oppose Judge Alito because his record is conservative is to condemn us to a succession of bland nominees and to deprive future presidents of the opportunity to choose from the men and women who have dedicated long years to judicial work.
So Louis Butler has a liberal record as a judge. Obama is the President. I don't see the problem with confirmation.
But are the Wall Street Journal editors to be condemned as racist? I guess I need to nail down the point that Butler is African American. That's never mentioned in the editorial. Some of the people I have heard from are absolutely committed to the conclusion that the headline "The White House Butler" is undeniably and outrageously racist.
Now, it occurs to me that the person who came up with that headline may not even have known that Butler is black. It's not in the editorial, and I think headline writers tend to work with what's in the article. Here, the headline writer might have simply tried to come up with some play on the last name and didn't have to go very far to come up with the idea of a butler serving in the White House to insinuate that the judge would be doing Obama's bidding — carrying political ideology into the court.
The conventional image of a butler is quite white:
Those who see racism in the headline — because of the juxtaposition of "Butler" and "House"? — may perhaps be thinking of the idea of the "house negro and the field negro," as famously explained here by Malcolm X:
But there is nothing about Louis Butler's position in relation to Barack Obama that is at all like the "house negro" that Malcolm X opposed. And you'd have to stretch to say that the editorial insinuates that he is. You'd have to portray Obama as "the master" and the people of Wisconsin as the "field negroes." It's just too much to read into the editorial. You sound silly even saying it.
But that's not to say that the Wall Street Journal didn't lay a trap for Madison liberals. Maybe they knew they were putting in just enough resonance with racism to bait university types into crying racism. And if they do, as noted, those professors will sound silly, because there is nothing racial in the entire text of the editorial. And what will the people of Wisconsin think — those voters who twice rejected Louis Butler as a state judge — if they learn that Madison professors find outrageous racism in that headline?
Neither [the Virginia nor the New Jersey] gubernatorial election amounted to a referendum on the president....
Why not? Read... read... read... read... oh, here it is:
White House senior adviser David Axelrod said Tuesday's races were in no way a reflection of public opinion about the president or his agenda. "Whatever's driving these voters, it wasn't attitudes toward the president," he said, noting that local issues and attitudes toward the candidates on the ballots were the major influences.
Why not? Because David Axelrod says not.
Axelrod warned against extrapolating into the future the shift among independents. He said he believed that many people who called themselves Republicans in the past now call themselves independents but are still voting for Republican candidates. "I don't think they portend long-term trends," he said.
He said the only race with real national implications was the congressional contest in Upstate New York.
Noted.
To be fair to Balz, he did get a Republican, Haley Barbour, chairman of the Republican Governors Association, to agree with the proposition that the 2009 election was not "a referendum on the president." But on the substance of it, Barbour observed that "[t]he president's policies are very unpopular, and they are hurting Democrats in Virginia, New Jersey, New York."
The results in the New Jersey and Virginia races underscored the difficulties Mr. Obama is having transforming his historic victory a year ago into either a sustained electoral advantage for Democrats or a commanding ideological position over conservatives in legislative battles....
... Mr. Christie and Mr. McDonnell won after decidedly playing down their conservative views on social issues.....
The critical question after this setback [in NY 23] is whether the conservative groups who had clearly signaled that they intended to press their advantage and challenge other Republican candidates they considered too moderate would now have the impetus or support to continue down that road.
Let's see now.... who to go to for quotes?
“[McDonnell] focused on the issues that are on people’s minds: jobs, taxes,” said Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, the head of the Republican Governors Association. “I don’t think there are a lot of governors who are more conservative than I am. But I try to run campaigns on what people are interested in.”...
[David] Axelrod acknowledged that Mr. Obama’s supporters had not shown up in New Jersey and Virginia, but he said he did not believe that meant the end of the Obama coalition.
“That doesn’t mean they won’t come out for us,” he said. “I think they’ll come out for national races. But this wasn’t a national race.”...
The GOP has been flat on its back since the Obama ascendancy in last year's presidential election, but Republican Bob McDonnell's blowout victory over Democrat Creigh Deeds in the Virginia governor's race and Chris Christie's defeat of Jon Corzine in New Jersey should help dispel the party's gloom.
Yesterday in advance of the results, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs was dismissing commentary on the impending bad news as "navel gazing." If so, navel gazing's bad reputation is suddenly looking up. The onrushing Obama Democratic machine has just hit a significant speed bump....
Mr. McDonnell ran straight into the teeth of the blue trend, explicitly campaigning against the policies of the Obama presidency. In at least one swing state that matters, the Obama Democratic ascendancy is on hold....
The overweening liberal-progressive confidence of late suddenly looks misplaced. The party's Blue Dogs have a basis for their misgivings. Republicans, too timid until now, have an opening to find ideas to give obviously anxious voters an alternative to the party in power.
IN THE COMMENTS: Pogo said:
"Mr. McDonnell ran straight into the teeth of the blue trend"
But not straight into the yellow teeth of the blue trend, surely.
Buried in paragraph 5 (after talk of the "economic downturn" and "idle workers" cluttering the cafés):
So far, this appears to be largely a New York phenomenon, though San Francisco's Coffee Bar does now put out signs when the shop is crowded asking laptop users to share tables and make space for other customers.
Ha ha ha. It's just New York. And hello? It was always hard to find free WiFi and a place to sit in New York cafés. It drove me nuts when I lived in Brooklyn Heights from September 2007 to May 2008. My favorite local café was Tazza — depicted in the March 10, 2008 blog post called "Lunch at the Loneliness Café." (Ah, now I never go back to the Loneliness Café!)
Click through to enlarge that first photograph, and you'll see that the white sign near the laptop user's head says: "ABSOLUTELY NO COMPUTERS...." (Why did that guy get to flout the policy so close to the sign? He's cute. Right? That's the reason, isn't it?)
Well played, Mr. President, says William McGurn in the Wall Street Journal. In contrast, we see "the poverty of Notre Dame's institutional witness."
In a letter to Notre Dame's Class of 2009, the university's president, the Rev. John Jenkins, stated that the honors for Mr. Obama do not indicate any "ambiguity" about Notre Dame's commitment to Catholic teaching on the sanctity of human life. The reality is that it was this ambiguity that the White House was counting on; this ambiguity that was furthered by the adoring reaction to Mr. Obama's visit; and this ambiguity that disheartens those working for an America that respects the dignity of life inside the womb.
And here's the Rush Limbaugh treatment of the topic:
The New York Times in a story today, headline: "At Notre Dame, Obama Calls for Dialogue on Abortion." Now, what exactly has been going on in this country for 40 years? It's no different than the libs saying, "You know what, we need to have that national conversation about race." What have we been doing since the founding of this country but having a conversation about race? What have we been doing the last 40 years but having a dialogue on abortion? And Obama appealed to partisans on each side to find ways to respect one another's basic decency and even work together to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies.... I have often asked, "Where is the middle ground between good and evil? Where do you compromise? Where's the compromise between life and death? Where's the compromise between killing and birth? Where do you compromise on that?"
So the assumption here is, find ways to respect one another's basic decency. Well, what's decent? Language still matters to me. What the hell is decent about abortion? What's decent about it? This is the first time I've ever heard abortion categorized as a form of decency. Even the pro-choice crowd in trying to justify it, has tried to say that pregnancy is a disease, or that pregnancy is a sickness that can threaten the life of the mother, or a fetus is an unviable tissue mass. But I've never heard them say that abortion is decency. But Obama has now just said that both sides of the argument feature people who are advocating decency.
Ambiguity... compromise... You see the point. Obama's side of the debate wins simply by getting people to think that there can be a debate. By allowing Obama to be heard at all on the subject of abortion, Notre Dame loses ground, because the pro-Life position is not debatable, ambiguous or subject to compromise. That's a big political problem for pro-Lifers — their unwillingness to engage with the other side. And Obama is successfully exacerbating it.
MR. BROKAW: Let me just share with you what The Wall Street Journal had to say about the opening statements of your two candidates at the debate the other night.
"The debate took place amid the backdrop of the financial crisis, and perhaps most disappointing was how neither man seemed to have anything useful to say about it. ... What neither man showed was any real insight about our financial market issues, or any political courage in offering a solution."
Are you going to have to go back and replate [sic] your economic program, Mr. Axelrod, going forward, because of the changed conditions that result--as a result of this bailout program?
MR. AXELROD: Well, first of all, I don't accept the premise of the Journal piece. The fact is that Senator Obama's been warning for a year and a half about this crisis--about the possibility of such a crisis because of the lack of oversight and greed on Wall Street... But the decisions we make are to prioritize, and this is what Senator Obama said that night, are to prioritize the middle class. What was phenomenal about that debate was that in 40 minutes on the economy, Senator McCain never once mentioned the middle class, never talked about the struggles people are going through. We need to create an economic recovery plan that puts at its core the middle class in this country.
MR. SCHMIDT: Well, Tom, you know, this was a debate about national security, about foreign policy. You never heard the word victory from Senator Obama when it came to wars this country's fighting. But we did talk about the middle class.....
Translation: The Wall Street Journal is absolutely right! The candidates have no real insight about our financial market issues and no political courage in offering a solution.
I'm skipping all the other blah blah blah, which you can read at the link. It's about Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, al Qaeda, etc. Then Brokaw ends the interview like this:
MR. BROKAW: In fairness to everybody here, I'm just going to end on one note, and that is that we continue to poll on who's best equipped to be commander in chief, and John McCain continues to lead in that category despite the criticism from Barack Obama by a factor of 53 to 42 percent in our latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
Gentlemen, thank you very much. I wish we could spend the rest of the day talking about these issues. But you're invited back, and I hope you'll make your second appearance right here on MEET THE PRESS.
What? Why was it a matter of "fairness to everybody here" to end the debate with a thudding, unanswered poll result? At the end of a discussion in which both candidates were perfectly well represented by their mouthpieces, Brokaw thought fairness required him to say, essentially, "Well, the American people still think McCain is much better on these questions."
Brokaw began the discussion by saying "We're not going to get into this business about who won and lost the debate." He made a point of not presenting Schmidt and Axelrod with poll numbers on that subject. And none of his other questions were based on polls, nor did Schmidt and Axelrod bring up any polls. So why did Brokaw end like that?
My guess? Inside NBC, they are fretting about criticism that they show favoritism toward Obama, so Brokaw thought it might help to lob out a glaring hunk of McCain favoritism. Sorry! That just looked really weird. Consequently, it reinforced the perception that NBC favors Obama.
