Blogito, Ergo Sum
by Gregg Calkins
10 December 2010, a Friday
Something for you to think about:LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. — It was just another suburban fender-bender. A car zoomed into an intersection and braked too late to stop at a red light. The Georgia woman driving it, an American citizen, left with a wrecked auto, a sore neck and a traffic fine.
But for Felipa Leonor Valencia, the Mexican woman who was driving the Jeep that was hit that day in March, the damage went far beyond a battered bumper. The crash led Ms. Valencia, an illegal immigrant who did not have a valid driver’s license, to 12 days in detention and the start of deportation proceedings — after 17 years of living in Georgia.
Like Ms. Valencia, an estimated 4.5 million illegal immigrants nationwide are driving regularly, most without licenses, according to an analysis by The New York Times. Only three states — New Mexico, Utah and Washington — currently issue licenses without proof of legal residence in the United States.
Many states have adopted tough new laws to prevent illegal immigrants from driving, while expanding immigration enforcement by the state and local police. As a result, at least 30,000 illegal immigrants who were stopped for common traffic violations in the last three years have ended up in deportation, Department of Homeland Security figures show.
Now explain to me again why Obama’s justice department is suing Arizona? I read only the first page of this item but Arizona was never mentioned.
Here’s an
interesting map you should go see:The 1860 Census was the last time the federal government took a count of the South’s vast slave population. Several months later, in the summer of 1861, the United States Coast Survey—arguably the most important scientific agency in the nation at the time—issued two maps of slavery that drew on the Census data, the first of Virginia and the second of Southern states as a whole. Though many Americans knew that dependence on slave labor varied throughout the South, these maps uniquely captured the complexity of the institution and struck a chord with a public hungry for information about the rebellion.
The map uses what was then a new technique in statistical cartography: Each county not only displays its slave population numerically, but is shaded (the darker the shading, the higher the number of slaves) to visualize the concentration of slavery across the region. The counties along the Mississippi River and in coastal South Carolina are almost black, while Kentucky and the Appalachians are nearly white.
I’ve spent the past couple of days trying to make my peace with the Obama-McConnell tax-cut deal. President Obama did, after all, extract more concessions than most of us expected.
Yet I remain deeply uneasy — not because I’m one of those "purists" Mr. Obama denounced on Tuesday but because this isn’t the end of the story. Specifically: Mr. Obama has bought the release of some hostages only by providing the G.O.P. with new hostages.
About the deal: Republicans got what they wanted — an extension of all the Bush tax cuts, including those for the wealthy. This part of the deal was bad all around. Yes, some of those tax cuts would be spent, boosting the economy to some extent. But a large part of the tax cuts, especially those for the wealthy, would not be spent, so the tax-cut extension increases the budget deficit a lot while doing little to reduce unemployment.
Saving and investing are not something Mr Krugman recommends as a means of future growth, only spending. When "the wealthy" put their money in the bank or to some other profitable use, which they are certainly going to do if they don’t spend it and thus create jobs.
In return for this bad stuff, Mr. Obama got a significant amount of short-term stimulus. Unemployment benefits were extended; there was a temporary cut in the payroll tax...
The payroll tax is money which supposedly goes into the Social Security "trust fund" but I guess Paul figures that since all of that money has been stolen by the legislators, anyhow, no sense adding any more to it for them to take.
Meanwhile, he warns us, Social Security is in bad shape.
Well, I clearly don’t understand his economics so I’ll try another columnist this morning.
Hmmm...it’s
David Brooks, in love with Obama:The big story of the week is that Obama is returning to first principles... ... It’s standing at one spot in the political universe and trying to build temporarily alliances with people at other spots in the political universe.
The fact is, Obama and the Democrats have had an excellent week. The White House negotiators did an outstanding job for their side. With little leverage, they got not only...
I gulped hard at the notion of Obama the shape-shifter standing in one spot, but this "with little leverage" when you control both houses of congress was too much to gag down.
You don’t have to abandon your principles to cut a deal. You just have to acknowledge that there are other people in the world and even a president doesn’t get to stamp his foot and have his way.
The president who now is praised for standing in one spot is the same president who originally, right after taking office, bluntly told Republicans how the cow ate the cabbage. "I won," he told them. Message ends.
He made no real attempt to acknowledge that there were conservatives in the world, much less Republicans, as he turned all of his legislative powers over to Nancy and Harry. Now Brooks tells us...
Well, add him to the Krugman pile of b.s. that I can no longer finish this morning. "With little leverage"...boy, that’s really a good one. Next year his leverage will be reduced, happily, but he’ll still have Senate-proof veto power, and one hell of a lot of past presidents would have been delighted to have the leverage Obama had all year long. So, okay, he foolishly did not believe the election was not going to turn out the way that it did and thus waited too long, but the Republicans are not seated yet, either, and he still has his hands on the lever.
So how do you read Brooks’ Liberal Logic? Did Obama do what he did because (a) he had little leverage, or (b) because he was the kind of guy who stands in one spot and voluntarily builds alliances with others in his political universe, the position Brooks tells us is Obama’s first principle of governing?
Yeah, I know you can’t have both...that’s why I call it Liberal Logic and have to move on now.
Amusing
excerpt from the Schumer disagreement with Obama over tax cuts:On Nov. 22, Obama and Schumer met one-on-one to discuss taxes and other issues. Schumer urged the president to take on Republicans by refusing to accept a short-term extension of the entire Bush package. He also proposed that Obama spend December selling voters on tax increases for the wealthy, even suggesting that the president appear at events alongside local millionaires who were prepared to relinquish their tax breaks to help reduce federal deficits.
Of course, those patriotic millionaires do not HAVE to take their tax breaks, they can always pay their taxes according to the higher way they believe in. I wonder why they don’t want to do this?
Charles Krauthammer says:Barack Obama won the great tax-cut showdown of 2010 - and House Democrats don't have a clue that he did.
I don’t understand why Charles wants to clue them in? If they’re going to shoot Obama down because they don’t get it, why tell them? Especially when Krauthammer grumps:
Obama is no fool. While getting Republicans to boost his own reelection chances, he gets them to make a mockery of their newfound, second-chance, post-Bush, Tea-Party, this-time-we're-serious persona of debt-averse fiscal responsibility. ...
"This is the public option debate all over again," said Obama at his Tuesday news conference. He is right. The left never understood that to nationalize health care there is no need for a public option because Obamacare turns the private insurers into public utilities, thus setting us inexorably on the road to the left's Promised Land: a Canadian-style single-payer system. The left is similarly clueless on the tax-cut deal: In exchange for temporarily forgoing a small rise in upper-income rates, Obama pulled out of a hat a massive new stimulus - what the left has been begging for since the failure of Stimulus I but was heretofore politically unattainable.
Obama's public exasperation with this infantile leftism is both perfectly understandable and politically adept. It is his way back to at least the appearance of centrist moderation. The only way he will get a second look from the independents who elected him in 2008 - and abandoned the Democrats in 2010 - is by changing the prevailing (and correct) perception that he is a man of the left. ...
Hence that news-conference attack on what the administration calls the "professional left" for its combination of sanctimony and myopia. It was Obama's Sister Souljah moment. It had a prickly, irritated sincerity - their ideological stupidity and inability to see the "long game" really do get under Obama's skin - but a decidedly calculated quality, too. Where, after all, does the left go? Stay home on Election Day 2012? Vote Republican?
No, says the current buzz, the left will instead challenge Obama for the Democratic nomination. Really now? For decades, African Americans have been this party's most loyal constituency. They vote 9 to 1 Democratic through hell and high water, through impeachment and recession, through everything. After four centuries of enduring much, African Americans finally see one of their own achieve the presidency. And their own party is going to deny him a shot at his own reelection?
Not even Democrats are that stupid. The remaining question is whether they are just stupid enough to not understand - and therefore vote down - the swindle of the year just pulled off by their own president.
Once again, Charles...why warn them about their mistake?
Eugene Robinson doesn’t mind a little deception of his own:Approve the lousy deal. ...
For a two-year cost of nearly $1 trillion, we get a bit more than $300 billion worth of measures that are truly stimulative: a cut in the payroll tax, a provision allowing businesses to write off capital investment and an extension of unemployment benefits. ... The deal invests basically nothing in the nation's future.
We need to be channeling money into education and clean energy, where it can help the United States remain competitive against China and other economic rivals...
Wow. "Truly stimulative" measures include a cut in the payroll tax and an extension of unemployment benefits, he says, in his best Nancy Pelosi imitation, The lousy deal, he then said, invests basically nothing in the nation’s future...which is right about those two supposedly stimulative items, if not the capital investment write-offs, which actually do. Capital investment is all about the future, unemployment benefits are about the present and past, and cutting payroll taxes reduces the size of the Social Security trust fund...it’s about the future, only in a negative sense.
If you are a boomer who thinks there won’t be enough money in the fund by the time you retire, one way to guarantee that is to stop putting any more money in today.
But if Robinson wants money channeled into education and clean energy then why is he in favor of approving funds for unemployment and slashing deposits into the Social Security trust fund now?
As a practical matter, I don't see how Democrats could possibly think they have leverage to exact concessions before the end of the year. Republicans can simply wait them out, knowing that Democrats will be in a much weaker position when the new Congress convenes in January.
As a practical matter, why didn’t the Democrats push it BEFORE the elections, then? Why wait until they got weaker and then do it at a point where Republicans could simply wait them out? How does that make sense?
Except we know why, don’t we? A bunch of nervous Democrats thought they could save their seats if they avoided voting on the issue at all prior to the election. They thought if they could avoid showing their true colors that they could get reelected first and THEN vote the way they wanted.
Alas for a dozen handful of them, that strategy did not work. But who knew? Nancy Pelosi kept assuring them they were going to hold their majority in the House and she would be Speaker For Life. First they could dominate the elections, then ram through whatever legislation they wanted. Alas for the best-laid plans.
A better question might be to ask why the Republicans did not wait them out, since they are going to be in a stronger position in January?
It's a sad story, for the country and especially for the Democratic Party. I believe the White House continues to underestimate the anger and disillusionment among the party's loyal base - and the need for some victories, or at least some heroic battles, to lift the spirits of the faithful. Obama needs to train his newfound passion and outrage on his foes in the GOP, not on the friends and supporters that his press secretary once derisively called the "professional left."
Pyrrhic victories don't make anything better, however. And that's what killing the tax cut deal would clearly be.
King P. Obama sighs. A few more "friends and supporters" like those from my "loyal base" recently, he said to his friend Plutarch, will certainly undo me.