You're with McCain/McConnel on this, right?
Even McCain said no president regardless of party is going to bomb Americans on American soil. It was an absurd argument for a filibuster to begin with. I am anti-idiot. And by saying that if it implies that Rand Paul is an idiot so be it. If the Tea Party even used an ounce of common sense, they wouldn't exist to begin with.
bsting be used here on our soil to protect us, by surveillance, eye in the sky, etc., sure
Gotta disagree I am 100% against the government doing warrentless surveilance period
There already has been way too much infringement of our rights to privacy
drones overhead, is a dangerous step down a road that will lead to no good
I didn't pay attention to Paul's filibuster, but if was about the unconstitutionality of warrentless surveilance, I'm with him 100%
(This guy enodorsed Obama too) Mort Zuckerman
We think of the iconic images of the Great [Depression] as representative of a uniquely miserable period, long vanished from American history. The bread lines and soup kitchens of those abnormal times have gone. So, too, has the sight of thousands of men (there were very few women among them then) waiting all day outside a factory in a forlorn quest for work.
But they're there still, in the many millions across the country—little changed in their total since the 1930s: 12.3 million today are fully unemployed, compared to 12.8 million in 1933 at the depth of the depression. The difference is that now they're invisible, because we've organized relief differently. In our "recovery," the millions are being assisted, out of sight, by the government, through unemployment checks, [Social Security disability] checks, and food stamps. More than 47 million Americans are in the food stamp program, some 15 percent of the total population, compared with the 7.9 percent participation in food stamps from 1970 to 2000. Then there are the more than 11 million Americans who are collecting checks from Social Security to compensate for disability, a record. Half of them have signed on since President Obama came to office. Twenty years ago, one person was on disability for every 35 workers; today, the ratio is one for every 16. Such an increase is simply impossible to explain by disability experienced during employment, for it is inconceivable that work in America has become so much more dangerous. For many, this program is another unemployment program, only this time it is without end.
But the predicament of our times is worse than that, and worse in its way than the 1930s figures might suggest. Employers are either shortening the workweek or asking employees to take unpaid leave in unprecedented numbers. Neither those on disability nor those on leave are included in the unemployment numbers. The labor market, which peaked in November 2007 when there were 139,143,000 jobs, now encompasses only 132,705,000 workers, a drop of 6.4 million jobs from the peak. The only work that has increased is part-time work, and that is because it allows employers to reduce costs through a diminished benefit package or none at all.
Altogether, the broadest measure of unemployment today is approximately 14.5 percent, way above the 7.9 percent headline number you read about. The figure encompasses not only the unemployed but also the 8 million people who are employed part time because their hours have been cut back or because they have been unable to find a full-time job, and the more than 7 million people who have either stopped looking for work or are only "marginally attached" to the labor force.
Indeed, the labor force participation rate, which measures the number of people in the workforce and reflects discouraged workers who have dropped out, has dropped to the lowest level since 1984. If it were not for the dropouts, the formal unemployment rate would be around 9.8 percent. If the percentage of people looking for work now were the same as on the day that Obama was elected, the unemployment rate would be almost 11 percent.
Sometimes the announced employment numbers are not understood. January was supposed to have created 157,000 jobs, provoking relief and even enthusiasm. But that news was based on seasonally adjusted numbers. The real unadjusted figures show that 2.8 million jobs actually disappeared in January, slightly more than the 2.6 million lost last January. This new number of 157,000 was cheered, though it was less than the 311,000 of January 2012, because most commentators didn't understand the effects of seasonal adjustment.
So there is no solace in the statistics. One study by researchers at the American Enterprise Institute and the Center for Economic and Policy Research shows that a worker between the ages of 50 and 61 unemployed for over a year has only a 9 percent chance of finding a job in the next three months and only a 6 percent chance if he or she is 62 years or older. At the current growth rate, it will take almost seven years to restore the jobs lost. Jobseekers are only one third as likely to find a job as they were seven years ago, and a record number of households have at least one member looking for a job, which affects everyone. The recession has clearly shown that employers now think they can make do with fewer workers. Over 20 percent of companies now say that employment in their firms will not return to pre-recession levels.
Imagine the sense of futility that must overcome people who month after month fill out forms, go for interviews if they are lucky, and end up as they started with nothing to show, because there are approximately 3.3 unemployed workers for every job seeker, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Millions of families are one layoff or one medical emergency away from going into bankruptcy. It is harder to find work today than it has been in any previous recession, and most of the newly available jobs don't match the pay, the hours, or the benefits of the millions of positions that have vanished during this recession.
It typically takes 25 months to close the employment gap from the employment peak near the start of the downturn, yet this time, over 60 months after employment topped out in January 2008, non-farm unemployment is still more than 3 million jobs below where it started. The great American dream is no longer a house in the suburbs. It is now a secure job—and any job will do.
The growth rate of 1.5 percent has been tepid, for it is only about one half what is typical in the fourth year of a recovery. That is primarily because the recovery is not built on real job creation but on record monetary easing by the Federal Reserve and record stimulus by the federal government. The result is slack in the U.S. economy. We are coping with a near 6 percent output gap, which is as high as we have ever gotten even in the most severe recessions.
Clearly overdue is a plan to recover from the recovery. The government must take the lead and arrange the marriage of private and public capital to regenerate real growth. The way to do it is the old-fashioned way we used to do it, by investing in projects that enrich our productive capacity and employment through the well-known multiplier effect. Not to do that is to inflict still further damage on the economy. How long can we put off repairing and renewing? The investments should be tolled through user fees so as to produce revenues to service a good part of the debt.
There is so much to do to get America back to the powerhouse it was:
Ordinary Americans are looking for leadership and renewal. They know that a job is the most important family program, the most important economic program, and the most important national program that America could put in place, and, by this standard, we have failed.
You're with McCain/McConnel on this, right?
Even McCain said no president regardless of party is going to bomb Americans on American soil. It was an absurd argument for a filibuster to begin with. I am anti-idiot. And by saying that if it implies that Rand Paul is an idiot so be it. If the Tea Party even used an ounce of common sense, they wouldn't exist to begin with.
OK, and you can stick by bozo that was merely grandstanding for attention. I don't give a whit what you think about McCain, but facts is facts. And this is how he put it that basically no president regardless of party is going to bomb Americans on American soil. Your anti-establishment Tea Partiers were only doing this for attention. In case you have already forgotten, there were only 2 other senators that "helped" with said fillabuster. It's not a question of establishment/no-establishment because if Paul in fact were right in this concern, more would have supported his cause. You want to use definitions? Look at the following:
crackpot: a person who is eccentric, unrealistic, or fanatical.
That's Ron Paul for you
Invest in the national electricity grid and in a high-speed internet grid; in bridges, roads, tunnels, airports, and high-speed rail; i
That's your opinion, unless it is backed up with an example or two of how both are equally responsible for sacrificing their journalistic integrity.How would I know how to quantify such a thing? you're the one who made the statement, not I. If you don't have the stones to back it up, then you should retract,
Saying it alone don't make it so.
Fine, you come up with an arbitrary unit of measurement for "amounts" of journalistic integrity, and we'll go from there...
lol
On his Thursday radio show, conservative talker Hugh Hewitt discussed both South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham’s dismissive reaction to Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul’s Wednesday filibuster with National Review columnist Mark Steyn.
Graham had noted that there wasn’t much opposition to the use of drones when President George W. Bush was in power and using them overseas. But Steyn explained that he had been uncomfortable not only with the use of drones domestically — as Paul was objecting to — but also to their use in war zones, which he said weren’t in the United States’ best interest.
“I’d like to speak to that, because I’m not, you said the people who are at ease with the use of drones in Waziristan and Yemen, and not at home,” Steyn said. “I’m not actually all that comfortable about the expansion of their use overseas. I think in a psychological sense, it fits into al Qaida and the broader Muslims’ worldview of the West, which is that we are technologically advanced, but that we are deficient in a kind of moral fiber and that the sort of antiseptic drone strike that hovers above [your] Waziristani village, and then takes out the bad guy — but also takes out 27 members of the wedding party across the street, that somehow that actually — I’m not persuaded that that is, that the reliance on drones is in the long term strategic interest of the United States.”
“I’ve been, again to address the hypocrisy thing, I’ve been consistent on this,” he said. “I was opposed to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, I don’t think the bureaucratization of the national security state was a good thing, and I was opposed to the [Transportation] [Security Administration]. You can go back and look at what I was writing in the fall of 2001 and 2002, and I’m completely consistent on that. And I think there is a legitimate concern about the para-militarization of domestic law enforcement, that you don’t have to be some wacky libertarian who believes in no government whatsoever to have concerns about … there should be, the idea, and this is, I think again, where Lindsey Graham and John McCain are not helpful to the Republican Party cause, because the sort of blank-check national security approval that they want to give for this, I think, is actually repugnant to a large number of people.Steyn, author of author of “[After America: Get Ready for Armageddon],” went on to explain how at the time he had been opposed to other elements of the then-U.S. policy reaction to the September 11, 2001 terrorists attacks and pointed to problems with Republican Sens. Graham and John McCain attacks on Paul in the wake of the filibuster as being bad for the GOP and at times inconsistent.
“It also doesn’t seem to square with John McCain’s solicitude, for example, towards those held at Guantanamo, and those subjected to waterboarding. And I certainly think that the care he demonstrates for the handful of people, foreign nationals who have been waterboarded, ought to at least extend to his compatriots as well.”
And despite the objections of McCain and Graham, Steyn praised Paul for his “effective” use of new media for the betterment of the Republican cause.
“I think you’re absolutely right on that. You know, John McCain and Lindsey Graham are mercurial figures,” he added. “But on this side, you know, Rand Paul demonstrated how to be effective, how to use the new media, and how to do yourself and the party a lot of good.”
Much will be written about Sen. [Rand Paul]’s (R-KY) [filibuster]. It may be viewed through the prism of history as a turning point. It may be quickly forgotten as subsequent events diminish its relevance. Before Wednesday, however, Paul spoke for a narrow slice of the Republican Party’s coalition. Today, he speaks for a reinvigorated GOP base. But as the hours wore on, another phenomenon began to take shape – Paul’s ultimately unsuccessful efforts to rein in the president spoke directly to the forgotten millions of Americans wary of the ever-expanding scope of the unconstrained global war on terror. Paul offered himself up as something of a martyr. His voice, once lonely, grew in stature as his Republican colleagues – one after the next – shared his demand for redress from the White House, though all knew that would not be forthcoming. It was poetic. It was romantic. What may be most important, it reframed Congressional Republicans. All of the sudden, they were fighting for a cause with self-evident nobility that requires no public [education] campaign: life, liberty, and due process. In filibustering, Paul chipped away at the monopoly on romance that the left has enjoyed for more than a century.
The Republican Party’s consulting class has been beating their heads against the wall since well before the November election as they determine the best way to reach out to and convince young voters to consider the GOP’s [programs]. They are frustrated that their message of economic liberty, a check on the government’s power to confiscate wealth, and the preservation of America’s role as the guarantor of global security do not seem to resonate with the youth.
Too often, Republican officeholders and commentators give in to despair in the face of what at times appears to be an intractable problem. The least sanguine of them see the GOP’s inability to appeal to the youth vote as a terminal condition.
The political right has suffered from a romance deficit with the left for generations. The struggle against entrenched interests and insurmountable establishments has been the exclusive province of the left for as long as there has been an organized left. The young conservative, instinctively attracted to the struggle against perceived injustice, must always wrestle with and overcome their heart first in order to join the conservative movement. This is a fundamental impediment to the right’s ability to speak to the young voter.
Then a funny thing happened during President Barack Obama‘s first term. The president pursued the internationalist foreign policy ideals once limited to the nation’s university faculty lounges. He intervened in civil wars and sent American service personnel to the globe’s hottest and most[forgotten battlefields] of [Africa]. Obama[ embraced drone warfare] with abandon. He violated sovereignty of [many nations] with manned and unmanned raids. Though the public understood that the interests of American national security were being pursued, the peace-loving American character was never comfortable with the concept of global warfare. The expansion of the president’s power to execute American citizens without due process does not sit well with the public, as [evidenced ]by multiple recent [public opinion polls].
Yesterday, Paul presented the left with an impossible conundrum: how can they support the president, the Democratic Party’s leader, when they do not fundamentally [agree] with him? Sen. Dick Durbin’s (D-IL) facile question to Paul in about the 12th hour of his filibuster, noting that Osama bin Laden posed an imminent threat to the United States even if he was not engaged in planning any attack on American interests, betrayed his support for Paul’s motives. Durbin’s was a perfunctory objection – his admiration for Paul’s efforts was written all over his face.
The Republican Party is, as are all successful political parties, a coalition of divergent groups with a variety of views on issues. One does not need to share Sen. Paul’s mistrust of American military interventionism — I certainly do not — to appreciate the monumental political shift his actions may presage. The public is hungry for a check on the executive, and Democrats are vulnerable on the sprawling drone warfare program.
Paul chipped away at the Democratic Party’s monopoly on romance yesterday. His actions broke through traditional firewalls that keep politics out of the homes of the nation’s marginally interested voters. He showed that the struggle for personal freedom is an idealistic pursuit. For a moment, the pervasive cynicism that has hardened voting patterns over the last two decades melted away. The political class will miss it, but the apolitical citizenry who could care less for what a consultant or a pundit says or thinks will not. The shift that Paul’s actions have ushered in will not remain imperceptible for long.
Noah Rothman MEDIAite
Amid the sequester noncrisis, President Obama is attempting to revive political appetites for a grand budget bargain—and this time he's even calling Republicans on the phone and asking for support. Maybe he's finding that berating them in public as moral cretins doesn't inspire trust. That's progress, but what hasn't changed is that the deal he's offering as fair and "balanced" is neither grand nor a bargain.
Mr. Obama says he can support $930 billion in spending cuts over the next decade as long as Republicans reverse the sequester's $1.2 trillion in cuts and raise taxes by another $680 billion. In other words, he is proposing to ratify the fiscal status quo with only token spending cuts and no major entitlement reform and selling it as the gift of the century.
If trimming $930 billion from the $46 trillion 10-year budget sounds less than impressive when Washington is running an annual $845 billion deficit despite a 17% surge in revenue this year, the details are even less of a concession.
• [Health care], $400 billion. Mr. Obama says he's prepared to make tough choices on [Medicare] and other entitlements, even though some Democrats "violently disagree" with his plan to save $400 billion. We doubt these liberal opponents, if they exist, are sincere, because his proposal would simply expand the failed cost-control methods of the last 30 years.
To put $400 billion in perspective, Medicare's long-term "unfunded liability"—the gap between promised benefits and the program's ability to fund them—is roughly $42.7 trillion. When Republicans say they want to reform Medicare, they mean they want to make durable changes to the program's structure and operations so that this gap narrows over time while achieving the same or better results. They don't want to cut for the sake of cutting or "austerity." They want to solve Medicare's problems.
Mr. Obama's definition of reform is different. Medicare would continue its current march into insolvency, but at a slightly slower pace: some nips and tucks, but nothing approaching the larger modernization that the health safety net needs to survive.
So Mr. Obama gets to his $400 billion bid by toting up many small items. Some $120 billion, or 30% of the package, comes from a catch-all category called "other health savings" filled with initiatives that are so micro the White House doesn't itemize them.
More substantively, Mr. Obama endorses another round of arbitrary cuts for hospitals and other providers, to the tune of about $30 billion. He favors new price controls for the [Medicare drug] benefit for a $140 billion pop. He wants a new program to "encourage efficient care after a hospital stay," as if the central planners can issue a decree and care will suddenly become more efficient. None of this will make a difference in practice.
Mr. Obama's offer would ask the most affluent seniors to contribute more for benefits and tweak the program's cost-sharing system for everyone else, but even this means-testing is very modest. The White House's favorite health economist, Jonathan Gruber of MIT, estimates that better cost-sharing incentives for Medicare beneficiaries can save $125 billion. Mr. Obama's version saves $35 billion.
• [Social Security], $130 billion. Outside of the left-right fringes, there is broad bipartisan agreement about changing the consumer price index slightly to more accurately measure real inflation in the economy. This fix is a natural part of any bargain, since it reduces the growth of Social Security payments and increases revenue at the same time. But Mr. Obama can't bring himself to support it, while pretending that he does.
Known as "chain weighted" CPI, this index reflects how consumers change their purchasing habits when prices change. The Congressional Budget Office says Social Security and other benefits would fall by about $216 billion over a decade. Chain CPI would also raise the tax brackets by less each year for inflation, which would introduce more "bracket creep." Upper-income taxpayers would be docked an extra $123 billion as more of their real earnings were exposed to taxation. So while chain CPI is a small change that is better than nothing, it's also less entitlement reform than meets the eye.
But Mr. Obama is not ready to take even this short walk on a long pier. The White House supports a similar but weaker index it calls "superlative CPI" that only takes $130 billion from Social Security, not $216 billion. It raises taxes by less too. So Mr. Obama has taken what would be a mere 0.03% cut to Social Security and converted it to a 0.02% cut.
• Discretionary programs, $200 billion. Half would come from unspecified savings from the domestic accounts. These are the same programs that Mr. Obama also says are so lean that the sequester is forcing him to furlough meat inspectors and White House tour guides. The other $100 billion is taken from the Pentagon budget, even as he is trying to peel off Republicans worried about the sequester harming defense.
• Odds and ends, $200 billion. Here Mr. Obama continues his approach of taking a bit of money out of this and that pot, instead of prioritizing. He won't end a single program.
There is one USDA employee for every eight U.S. farmers and the government spends $140 billion on crop supports, but Mr. Obama can only countenance eliminating $30 billion in "certain subsidies" to farmers. He can save $45 billion in part by reducing "improper payments," the Washington euphemism for cutting checks in the wrong amount, to the wrong person, for the wrong reason or all three.
It's good to know the President is in favor of the bureaucracies not accidentally sending money to people who didn't earn it, but what his grand bargain would really do is endorse the status quo—maybe stave off a crisis for a year or three, but nothing tangible that would put the fisc on a more sustainable path. His tax demands would damage economic growth even as they ensured revenue would continue to finance an explosion of federal spending.
If Mr. Obama is serious about a grand bargain, he'll offer more than notional entitlement reforms and a grab bag of things his Administration ought to be doing anyway. There's no harm in Republicans listening, but his actual proposals show he's more interested in posing as a budget reformer than reforming the budget.
