Browsing PBH By Articles

Do The Math On The Deficit

The Article: Repeat After Me: Obama Cut the Deficit and Slowed Spending to Lowest Level in 50 Years by Bob Cesca in The Huffington Post.

The Text: llustrative of his contempt for the truth, Mitt Romney’s campaign website continues to host the following statement: “Since President Obama assumed office three years ago, federal spending has accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent history.”

On Friday, we discovered yet another reason why this is a super-colossal lie.

With the end of fiscal year 2012, the Congressional Budget Office announced the 2012 federal budget deficit: $1.1 trillion. Taken purely at face value, this number is enormous. Yet every Democrat, and especially the Obama campaign, ought to be telling anyone who will listen: Not only has the president cut the deficit by $312 billion during his first term (so far), but he’s cut the deficit by $200 billion in the past year alone. And the CBO projected that the 2013 Obama budget, if enacted as is, would shrink the deficit to $977 billion — a four year total of nearly $500 billion in deficit reduction.

Okay, yeah, I get it. It’s risky to mention the deficit, but not when you couch it in math and the facts.

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VOTE FOR KARLOS IN 2040!

INTRO

To our likable enough [EDIT: Who let Barack near the teleprompter script again?] Chairman Chelsea Clinton and to all my 410 million fellow citizens across our 51 states, it is with profound gratitude and humility that I accept your nomination for the 2040 presidency of the United States of America.

Well, last night Senator Ben Affleck of the great state of Massachusetts showed us how a real nomination speech should be given. And made us all forget he once made the movie “Gigli” [That was Matt Damon.]

Now, as we all know, Senator Affleck rides the high-speed rail with a devotion that would do the late Vice President “Amtrak Joe” Biden proud. Thanks to the now-completed Northeast Corridor, Senator Affleck now makes it from Washington to his Boston home in just over three hours. After decades of watching China and Brazil out-build us, we finally have world-class high-speed rail of our own!

[Dramatic pause]I only wish we could say the same for Washington. My friends, I know it’s been tough these last four years. President Marco Rubio has been behind the wheel of our train, and he steered it off the rails and into a ditch.

The president derailed the train by failing to regulate the Virtual Telepathy speculative bubble of the 2030s. He derailed the train with tax breaks to the billionaires and lunar jet owners who needed them the least.

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America’s Hierarchy Of Human Life

The Article: The tragic consulate killings in Libya and America’s hierarchy of human life by Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian.

The Text: Protesters attacked the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya on Tuesday night and killed four Americans, including the US ambassador, Chris Stevens. The attacks were triggered by rage over an amateurish and deeply hateful film about Islam that depicted the Prophet Muhammad as, among other things, a child molester advocate, a bloodthirsty goon, a bumbling idiot, and a promiscuous, philandering leech. A 13-minute trailer was uploaded to YouTube and then quickly circulated in the Muslim world, sparking widespread anger (the US embassy in Cairo was also attacked).

The anti-Islam film was originally reported by the Associated Press news agency to have been written, directed and produced by an Israeli real estate developer living in California, Sam Bacile. Later the news agency issued a fresh story having investigated further and traces the genesis of the film to a Coptic Christian, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, living in California. [see footnote] Its purpose, as described by the Israeli newspaper, was to show that “Islam is a cancer” and to provide a “provocative political statement condemning the religion”. It’s hard to believe that the film – which is barely at the level of a poorly rehearsed high-school play – required $5m to make, but the intent seems clear: to provoke Muslims into exactly the sort of violent rage that we are now witnessing.

Events like this one are difficult to write about when they first happen because the raw emotion they produce often makes rational discussion impossible. A script quickly emerges from which All Decent People must recite, and any deviations are quickly detected and denounced. But given the magnitude of this event and the important points it raises, it is nonetheless worthwhile to examine it:

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Did The Baby Boomers Destroy The Economy?

The Article: Who Destroyed the Economy? The Case Against the Baby Boomers by Jim Tankersley in The Atlantic.

The Text: My father taught me how to throw a baseball and divide big numbers in my head and build a life where I’d be home in time to eat dinner with my kid most nights. He and my mother put me through college and urged me to follow my dreams. He never complained when I entered a field even less respected than his. He lives across the country and still calls just to check in and say he loves me.

His name is Tom. He is 63, tall and lean, a contracts lawyer in a small Oregon town. A few wisps of hair still reach across his scalp. The moustache I have never seen him without has faded from deep brown to silver. The puns he tormented my younger brother and me with throughout our childhood have evolved, improbably, into the funniest jokes my 6-year-old son has ever heard. I love my dad fiercely, even though he’s beaten me in every argument we’ve ever had except two, and even though he is, statistically and generationally speaking, a parasite.

This is the charge I’ve leveled against him on a summer day in our Pacific Northwest vision of paradise. I have asked my favorite attorney to represent a very troublesome client, the entire baby-boom generation, in what should be a slam-dunk trial–for me. On behalf of future generations, I am accusing him and all the other parasites his age of breaking the sacred bargain that every American generation will pass a better country on to its children than the one it inherited.

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A Rumsfeld Reminder Of Terrorism

The Article: A Rumsfeld-era reminder about what causes Terrorism by Glenn Greenwald in Salon.

The Text: The debate over Afghanistan — or, more accurately, the multi-pronged effort to pressure Obama into escalating — is looking increasingly familiar, i.e., like the “debate” over Iraq. The New York Times is publishing articles filled with quotes from anonymous war advocates. Permanent war-justifier Michael O’Hanlon is regularly featured in “news accounts” as he all but blames Obama for increasing combat deaths due to his failure to escalate the moment the military demanded it. The New Republic is churning out pro-war screeds. Every option is on the proverbial table except one: not fighting the war. And there’s a widening gap between (a) public opinion (which sees Afghanistan as “turning into another Vietnam” and which opposes more troops, with 49% favoring a full or partial withdrawal) and (b) the virtual unanimity of establishment punditry which, as always, is cheerleading for the war. The only difference is that, with a Democratic President, there seems to be more Democratic and progressive support for this war (though there was, of course, plenty of that for Iraq, too).

The primary rationale for remaining — and escalating — in Afghanistan is the same all-purpose justification offered for virtually everything the U.S. has done since 2001: Terrorism. Apparently, the way to solve the Terrorist threat is by sending 60,000 more American troops into a Muslim country and committing to at least five more years of war there. That, so the pro-escalation reasoning goes, will make us safer.

In 2004, Donald Rumsfeld directed the Defense Science Board Task Force to review the impact which the administration’s policies — specifically the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — were having on Terrorism and Islamic radicalism. They issued a report in September, 2004 (.pdf) and it vigorously condemned the Bush/Cheney approach as entirely counter-productive, i.e., as worsening the Terrorist threat those policies purportedly sought to reduce. It’s well worth reviewing their analysis, as it has as much resonance now as it did then (h/t sysprog).

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