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We open with some great news! James Pethokoukis posted on the debt ceiling negotiations early this morning. He claims Boehner walked from the administration’s deal. If true, it means there is a chance our country can someday get spending under control. It also means he acted contrary to constant exhortations from all the bien pensants (folks like David Brooks; more on that later today). Pickerhead had been pessimistic the GOP would have the strength to resist. Perhaps that was wrong. If so, we are going to want statues erected throughout the land celebrating the steadfast courage of John Boehner.
So in the end, it was bit of a Ronald Reagan moment for John Boehner on Saturday. Just as the U.S. president walked away from a bad arms control agreement with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at Reykjavik, Iceland in 1986, the House speaker passed on President Barack Obama’s mega-debt reduction deal in Washington.
In both case, the asking price was just too high. For Reagan, it was lethal limitations on his Strategic Defense Initiative. For Boehner, it was a trillion-dollar tax distraction from America’s true fiscal threat: spending run amok: “Despite good-faith efforts to find common ground, the White House will not pursue a bigger debt reduction agreement without tax hikes.”
A GOP congressional source was a bit less diplomatic, telling me Saturday afternoon via email:
“Their fierce insistence on higher taxes is beyond bizarre.” …
Krauthammer on the debt ceiling negotiations.
Here we go again. An approaching crisis. A looming deadline. Nervous markets. And then, from the miasma of gridlock, rises our president, calling upon those unruly congressional children to quit squabbling, stop kicking the can down the road and get serious about debt.
This from the man who:
1.? Ignored the debt problem for two years by kicking the can to a commission.
2.? Promptly ignored the commission’s December 2010 report.
3.? Delivered a State of the Union address in January that didn’t even mention the word “debt” until 35 minutes in.
4.? Delivered in February a budget so embarrassing — it actually increased the deficit — that the Democratic-controlled Senate rejected it 97 to 0.
5.? Took a budget mulligan with his April 13 debt-plan speech. Asked in Congress how this new “budget framework” would affect the actual federal budget, Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Elmendorf replied with a devastating “We don’t estimate speeches.” You can’t assign numbers to air.
President Obama assailed the lesser mortals who inhabit Congress for not having seriously dealt with a problem he had not dealt with at all, then scolded Congress for being even less responsible than his own children. They apparently get their homework done on time.
My compliments. …
Jennifer Rubin watched the Rose Garden speech after the jobs disaster.
Following the release of the dreadful jobs numbers, President Obama appeared in the Rose Garden this morning. However, it was entirely unclear why he was there or what his plan is for digging the economy out of the deep hole in which we find ourselves.
The speech, if you can call it that, seemed to be a disconnected collage of one-liners and excuses. …
Paul Greenberg says the Misery Index is back.
Remember the Misery Index? It tends to reappear whenever the economy exhibits a couple of unwelcome trends in unusual tandem: not just a high unemployment rate but more inflation, too. Talk about a double whammy.
Add those two figures together and you get the Misery Index. So if you combine the current 9.1 unemployment rate with the 3.6 inflation rate, the rate of misery in the American economy is 12.7. The country hasn’t seen that kind of number in almost 30 years.
The president indelibly associated with the Misery Index is Jimmy Carter, who made a talking point of it in the long-ago presidential election of 1976. He said the index was too darned high — it stood at a painful 13.6 percent back then. But by the time Mr. Carter ran for re-election as president in 1980, he had managed to raise it to almost 22 percent. And he would lose the White House to Ronald Reagan.
The Misery Index stayed under double digits from the early 1980s and the booming Reagan Years of the 1980s till the Great Recession struck in 2008. Now it’s moved into Jimmy Carter territory, and that’s not good news for Barack Obama. Or the country. …
Ed Driscoll of Pajamas Media says the private jet industry is just the latest to hammered by this president.
So starting as a presidential candidate, Obama has:
Called for bankrupting the coal industry.
Raised gas prices by forcing domestic production to a crawl.
Demonized bankers and automatic teller machines.
Went to war against Fox News, talk radio, and Twitter user Kevin Eder.
Alienated Wall Street, which backed him in 2008 — and will probably do so again.
Nationalized the car industry.
Forced Chrysler to terminate 25 percent of its auto dealers.
Demonized Las Vegas.
Alinskyized the Chamber of Commerce.
Blocked Boeing from expanding into a Right to Work State.
Is busy transforming the insurance industry into the equivalent of quasi-government utilities.
Created an uncertain (to say the least) regulatory environment, making new hiring a challenging proposition.
And is now Alisnkyizing private planes, despite having temporary custody of the greatest “private” plane of all. …
Just in case there is anyone on earth who thinks David Brooks is a conservative, be aware he is the Dems favorite columnist this week. Glenn Thrush from Politico has the story.
Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks is fast becoming the Democrats’ man of the hour, providing some of their favorite talking points of the week.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid cited the writer’s column published Tuesday, headlined “The Mother of All No-Brainers,” that blasted congressional Republicans for being unwilling to accept a compromise on raising the debt ceiling. And House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, at his weekly briefing with reporters, distributed copies of the column, calling it his version of Oprah’s Book Club.
“Have you all read it?” Hoyer asked journalists, who mostly murmured yes. “God bless you all.” …
Guy Benson thinks Brooks needs a vacation. Pickerhead thinks Brooks has been out in the sun too long already.
As someone who (a) admires the intellect of faintly conservative-ish New York Times columnist David Brooks, and (b) is currently on vacation, I’d humbly submit that some R & R may also be in order for Mr. Brooks. His new column on debt negotiations is lazy, is premised on a series of false assumptions, and — worst of all — relies on a string of strawmen that would make Brooks’ one-time political crush, Barack Obama, beam with pride. Brooks has concluded that Republicans are the bad-faith, fanatical actors on the debt ceiling and casts Democrats as the sensible adults in the room. Brooks’ column is so wrongheaded, it practically cries out for a thorough fisking — so away we go:
“Republican leaders have also proved to be effective negotiators. They have been tough and inflexible and forced the Democrats to come to them. The Democrats have agreed to tie budget cuts to the debt ceiling bill. They have agreed not to raise tax rates. They have agreed to a roughly 3-to-1 rate of spending cuts to revenue increases, an astonishing concession.”
Democrats have “agreed not to raise” taxes, but they also insist on “revenue increases.” How would that work, exactly? Brooks may protest that Democrats say they won’t insist on rate hikes, but how does that square with President Obama’s vow to raise marginal income tax rates on millions of small businesses and families when the current tax deal expires? And how does it jibe with the White House’s recent proposal to raise taxes by $600 Billion? Perhaps Mr. Brooks will explain this impressive feat of fiscal and rhetorical magic in his next column. …
John Steele Gordon on the blindness of the NY Times.
The British philosopher Bertrand Russell was once giving a lecture in which he stated the earth circled the sun, held in the grip of gravity. He was interrupted by an elderly woman in the audience who told him that was nonsense, and the earth rode on the back of a giant tortoise.
“What does the tortoise stand on?” Russell asked.
“Very clever, young man,” she retorted, ”very clever indeed. But it’s turtles all the way down.”
When it comes to explaining the current fiscal difficulties facing the country, for liberals and their principal mouthpiece, the New York Times editorial page, it’s the Bush tax cuts all the way down. …
The Economist reviews a book about the good and bad of internet personalization.
ELI PARISER is worried. Why? Call a friend in another city or a foreign country, and ask them to Google something at the same time as you. The results will be different, because Google takes your location, your past searches and many other factors into account when you type in a query. In other words, it personalises the results. As Larry Page, the chief executive of Google, once put it, “the ultimate search engine would understand exactly what you mean, and give back exactly what you want.” Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, muses that someday it might be possible for people to ask Google which college they should apply for, or which book to read next.
This is only one example of internet personalisation. Mr Pariser, an internet activist best known as a leading light at MoveOn.org, a progressive online campaign group, sees this as a dangerous development. Netflix, Amazon and Pandora can predict with astonishing accuracy whether you will enjoy a particular film, book or album, and make appropriate recommendations. Facebook shows you updates from the friends you interact with the most, filtering out people with whom you have less in common. “My sense of unease crystallised when I noticed that my conservative friends had disappeared from my Facebook page,” Mr Pariser writes. The result is a “filter bubble”, which he defines as “a unique universe of information for each of us”, meaning that we are less likely to encounter information online that challenges our existing views or sparks serendipitous connections. “A world constructed from the familiar is a world in which there’s nothing to learn,” Mr Pariser declares. He calls this “invisible autopropaganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas”. …