The Budget Speech

Caption: Just waiting for the sleigh to pass by again.

Image credit: Arrr!.

Glenn Greenwald states what should be blindingly obvious. Referring to how the continued erosion of core Democratic values during budget negotiations, with no visible counterpoint of the GOP not getting what it wants, has brought out the usual progressive pundits explaining how President Obama is getting his ass handed to him:

All of that has led to a spate of negotiation advice from the liberal punditocracy advising the President how he can better defend progressive policy aims -- as though the Obama White House deeply wishes for different results but just can't figure out how to achieve them. Jon Chait, Josh Marshall, and Matt Yglesias all insist that the President is "losing" on these battles because of bad negotiating strategy, and will continue to lose unless it improves. Ezra Klein says "it makes absolutely no sense" that Democrats didn't just raise the debt ceiling in December, when they had the majority and could have done it with no budget cuts. Once it became clear that the White House was not following their recommended action of demanding a "clean" vote on raising the debt ceiling -- thus ensuring there will be another, probably larger round of budget cuts -- Yglesias lamented that the White House had "flunked bargaining 101." Their assumption is that Obama loathes these outcomes but is the victim of his own weak negotiating strategy.

Obama's "bad negotiating" is actually shrewd negotiating

[links from original]

I'm not criticizing Greenwald, mind you, when I say it's obvious. The problem is that we live in a political environment where the obvious needs to be repeated endlessly. Robert Reich provides another example of why it's necessary in his bit of advice to the President:

When I was a small boy I was bullied more than most, mainly because I was a foot shorter than than everyone else. They demanded the cupcake my mother had packed in my lunchbox, or, they said, they’d beat me up.
...
I hope the President decides he has to take a stand, and the sooner the better. Last December he caved in to Republican demands that the Bush tax cut be extended to wealthier Americans for two more years, at a cost of more than $60 billion. That was only the beginning — the equivalent of my cupcake.

Why the Right-Wing Bullies Will Hold The Nation Hostage Again and Again

Jeebus Frickin' Crispies - just how dumb do you reckon Barack Obama is? The man got himself a law degree, then got himself elected a state senator from Chicago, and then President without even the most rudimentary idea of how human psychology works? George W. Bush was easily the most mentally deficient President of my lifetime, yet I have no doubt that even he knew all this.

As if that wasn't enough, Professor Krugman had to chime in with this bit of wisdom:

Overall, way better than the rumors and trial balloons. I can live with this. And whatever the pundits may say, it was much, much more serious than the Ryan “plan”.

Update: I should probably say, I could live with this as an end result. If this becomes the left pole, and the center is halfway between this and Ryan, then no — better to pursue the zero option of just doing nothing and letting the Bush tax cuts as a whole expire.

The Budget Speech

The difference between Obama and the GOP proposal appears to be that the President won't "privatize" Medicare, but will instead ask Medicare to figure out how to keep costs from rising about as much as gross domestic product (GDP) does. Since the recently passed health care "reform" bill did little to reform health care, I think it's safe to assume that money will come out of Medicare patients somehow. Oh, and he will cut some from defense, but the bulk of cuts will be in domestic programs. Any clues where $60 billion a year in savings is going to come from, in the portion of the budget that is by far the smallest? Me neither.

Oh, and this is the "left pole", Professor, by definition. That's how it works in DC. I've explained before why it works that way, but it comes down to this - there's no money to be made in DC helping the poor and the middle class. As long as that's true, and the suckers, umm, I mean progressives, continue to vote Democratic, there's no reason for Democratic politicians to do otherwise.

And there will be plenty of progressive pundits handy to make sure that doesn't change.

Is it any surprise that one of the leading synonyms for "ineffective" these days is "progressive"? We should be happy that Obama did a little more than a man who not only clearly doesn't understand how a national economy works, but doesn't want to.

Nevermind that we're still going the wrong way, and the wolves never seem to have enough to eat. At least we're not driving so fast that we'll get in an accident.

Items Of Local Interest

A couple of items of interest mainly to people of the "Other" Washington, the one that's not along the Potomac River, from around the blogroll...

Caption: The North Portal of the Stillwater Water Treatment Project, in Bothell, Washington, under construction. Click on the picture to enlarge.

Image credit: Cujo359

First, there is a new wastewater treatment project near the north end of Lake Washington called the Stillwater Project. It's run into a few of the issues one would expect a project that builds tunnels through sand and silt would come up against. Dana Hunter tries to sort it all out:

All of you geotypes are probably shouting, "Glacial erratic!" about now. Seattle's got lots, random boulders dropped by the Cordilleran Ice Sheet during its stay. According to the articles I found, the tunnel-boring machine's been encountering quite a bit of sandy soil, which it sometimes proceeds to remove too much of. Not to mention running in to boulders. Tunneling through all of that glacial outwash, till, and random erractics has got to be an absolute nightmare, and goes a long way toward explaining why the project's run over on both time and money.

Local Geology Kicks Project's Arse

The geology of this area doesn't always lend itself to big subterranean projects, a thing that may come into play when the Alaska Way Viaduct is replaced with a tunnel.

The other story has to do with ongoing mortgage fraud, which our state attorney general seems to think is worth fighting, as Yves Smith reports:

LoanSafe reports that the Washington state attorney general, Rob McKenna, has uncovered a likely widespread violation of state law, that foreclosure trustees lack a physical presence as required and a means for borrowers to contact or visit them to submit last minute payments or present documentation. McKenna’s interest appears to result from the fact as with servicers, the foreclosure trustees are not accessible to borrowers and not responsive when there may be legitimate reasons to halt or delay a foreclosure.

Washington AG Investigates New Foreclosure Abuse Front: Trustee Non-Compliance

I'm not a big fan of McKenna's, but it's good that he's looking into this. As Naked Capitalism and others have documented, the ongoing fraud by financial institutions has cost many Americans their homes through no fault of their own. It's emblematic of what's going on in DC that a Republican state's attorney general is doing more to combat this than the federal government's Department of Justice, which is run by a supposedly Democratic administration.

Corrente Needs Help

Image credit: PuppyDogWeb.comj

A recent addition to the SnS blogroll is Corrente, a political blog that, as Ian Welsh says, often hits well above its weight when it comes to both analysis and reporting of the goings on in Washington, DC. It was an omission that was long overdue to be corrected.

Right now, though, Corrente needs help to stay online. I'll let Lambert Strether, the founder, explain:

Readers: Once again I find I need your help, and not only to keep the hamsters in kibble. First, I've been singing for my supper with a new venture to make Corrente permanently sustainable; see below for the soft launch. But I also need to deal immediately with a personal situation that's temporary (I hope) but still approaching the desperate.

However, before I get to the new venture, let me briefly report on the state of Corrente.

Help

If you like the blog and you can afford to help, please do. Corrente is one of the good ones, and it would be a shame for it to disappear.

Sunday Photo(s)

Quite some time ago, I promised that I would have more pictures of the Seattle Aquarium up soon. Well, maybe some day. Meanwhile, these are some pictures I took of Seattle's Elliot Bay after seeing the aquarium. This is a water fountain just to the south of the aquarium:

Image credit: All images by Cujo359

This the Seattle skyline from the next pier south:

and this is the container port near the Duwamish Waterway:

Art, buildings, and post-industrial transportation - what could be better?

Click on the pictures to enlarge. Have a good Sunday.

The Future Is All But Past

Bumped to keep this article on top today.

This song was playing in my head when I got up today:



It was a love song to America that was produced by the rock band Styx while I was in college. In some ways, it seems almost hopefully naive now, and yet strangely prescient:

Once long ago, a word from your lips
And the world turned around
But somehow you've changed, you're so far away
I long for the past and dream of the days
With you, madame blue

Suite madame blue, gaze in your looking glass
You're not a child anymore
Suite madame blue, the future is all but past
Dressed in your jewels, you made your own rules
You conquered the world and more, heaven's door, oh

Elyrics: Suite Madame Blue

Great art can often have meanings its creators never intended. Back then, it seemed that America was destined to lead the world to a better place. We'd just gone to the Moon, for what now looks like the last time. We'd taken care of a disturbing aberration in our nation's commitment to being a government of laws, or so we thought. What that song and Watergate both turned out to be was a harbinger of our decline into the frightened and corrupt nation we are now. (Isn't it just a sign of the times that I used the keyword Democrats to find that last link?) As Bob Herbert wrote in his final column in The New York Times:

Arthur Miller, echoing the poet Archibald MacLeish, liked to say that the essence of America was its promises. That was a long time ago. Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil have led us to an era of perpetual war and economic decline. Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone.

The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.

Losing Our Way

America was never perfect - just ask the people whose ancestors were here before Columbus accidentally bumped into the place. But, back when I was growing up, we wanted to be better. We clearly don't anymore.

What a difference a few decades can make.

An Anniversary

Speaking of the history of spaceflight, I know someone who was born the day after Yuri Gagarin went into space:

Image credit: found it here

Seems like yesterday...

Happy Birthday.

UPDATE: Looks like blogging friend Suzanne became a grandmother today. Congratulations. Julianna Renee picked an auspicious day to enter the world.

Greenwald Connects The Dots

Caption: The symbol of Democratic Party politics these days, because I can't find a public domain picture of a woman in a sleigh throwing her children to the wolves.

Image credit: Arrr!.

In an essay at Salon Tuesday, Glenn Greenwald connects the dots for all those people who think that the way to make the country more progressive is to vote for the Democratic Party, no matter what:

About that point, Rachel [Maddow] said this:

A Democratic President kicks his base in the teeth on something as fundamental as civil liberties -- he puts the nail in the coffin of a civil liberties promise he made on his first full day in office -- and he does it on the first day of his re-election effort. And Beltway reaction to that is. . . huh, good move. That's the difference between Republican politics and Democratic politics. The Republicans may not love their base, but they fear them and play to them. The Democratic Party institutional structures of D.C., and the Beltway press in particular, not only hate the Democratic base -- they think it's good politics for Democratic politicians to kick that base publicly whenever possible.

Only the base itself will ever change that.

How will that happen? How can the base itself possibly change this dynamic, whereby politicians of the Democratic Party are not only willing, but eager, to "kick them whenever possible," on the ground (among others) that doing so is good politics? I'd submit that this is not only one of the most important domestic political questions (if not the most important), but also the one that people are most eager to avoid engaging. And the reason is that there are no comforting answers.

The impotence of the loyal partisan voter

I'll just break in here to say that I agree with him that this is the most important single political question. None of the solutions the current crop of conservatives are offering is going to get us out of the mess we're in. There may be times when conservatism has something to offer, but that's definitely not true now. Their economic ideas, which are, of course, parroted by Democratic politicians who want to appear "serious", are nonsense. So are their ideas on health care and education. In all three areas, the world has conducted a laboratory experiment on those ideas, and they've been demonstrated to be the utter failures that anyone with any sense could have told them they were.

We're paying the price for those ideas already.

Anyway, back to Greenwald:

One thing is for certain: right now, the Democratic Party is absolutely correct in its assessment that kicking its base is good politics. Why is that? Because they know that they have inculcated their base with sufficient levels of fear and hatred of the GOP, so that no matter how often the Party kicks its base, no matter how often Party leaders break their promises and betray their ostensible values, the base will loyally and dutifully support the Party and its leaders (at least in presidential elections; there is a good case that the Democrats got crushed in 2010 in large part because their base was so unenthusiastic).

In light of that fact, ask yourself this: if you were a Democratic Party official, wouldn't you also ignore -- and, when desirable, step on -- the people who you know will support you no matter what you do to them? That's what a rational, calculating, self-interested, unprincipled Democratic politician should do: accommodate those factions which need accommodating (because their support is in question), while ignoring or scorning the ones whose support is not in question, either because they will never vote for them (the hard-core right) or will dutifully canvass, raise money, and vote for them no matter what (the Democratic base). Anyone who pledges unconditional, absolute fealty to a politician -- especially 18 months before an election -- is guaranteeing their own irrelevance.

The impotence of the loyal partisan voter

Progressives get kicked in the teeth for the simple reason that they keep taking it. If progressives want power, they need to start telling Democratic politicians that their support is not unconditional, and sticking to that promise when the time comes, instead of caving in. If progressives don't like what a Democratic politician is doing, they have not just the right, but the obligation, to make that politician unemployed.

I've pointed most of this out before, if not all of it. Here's a succinct quote:

[DC Democrats] aren't taking politics to the right because that's where America is going. They're taking politics to the right because that's where the money is. Those big corporations aren't going to drop campaign funds into the campaign coffers of the kind of politician who will watch out for the little guy. Despite blog activism and Act Blue, there's not much money there, and I doubt there will be as long as the income disparity continues as it is in America.

They're also taking politics to the right, as I've pointed out many, many times, because progressives don't demand that their politicians be progressives, where conservatives aren't foolish enough to accept progressivism from their politicians. Politicians will chase the power that can go elsewhere. Progressives don't change their votes - they can always be counted on to vote out of fear of the Other Guys, and any national politician who doesn't know that was probably appointed to his job.

On Moving Rightward

Or, as Wonk The Vote put it last year:

The only way the Democrats will learn to stop punching a hippie is if the grassroots will stop voting for them. This is why I am an independent. It’s not because I have forgotten how terrible the GOP is. It’s because I want the Democratic party to be an actual alternative to the GOP. I don’t want to be punched by two wings of the same corporate-controlled political system. I certainly won’t vote for one “party” over the other to continue punching the grassroots.

If you don’t want to be punched, don’t vote for a hippie-puncher

It really is that simple. To quote a cliche, it's not easy, but it is simple.

There are worse things than having Republicans run things for a while. One of those worse things is the situation we're in now, thanks to two decades of progressives not exercising their power to decide - a country in which there is no hope that either major party will do what needs to be done to stop our slide into permanent economic depression and perpetual war, with all the attendant problems if racism, crime, and loss of civil liberties.

It's nice of Glenn to try to connect the dots for progressives. Sadly, I think they're too stupid to recognize the picture, even when someone else has already done all that complicated math.

Today Is National Skepticism Day

It's that day again:

Image credit: I Has A Hot Dog

Remember, if it sounds too good to be true, there's a good chance that it is. That's probably a good thing to remember every other day of the year, too.

That Left A Mark...

No, this isn't a photo of the Moon. That mark is the Debussy Crater, and this is a place we haven't photographed at close range before:

Caption: Astronomy Picture of the Day writes: On March 17, the MESSENGER spacecraft became the first to orbit Mercury, the solar system's innermost planet. This is its first processed color image since entering Mercury orbit. Larger, denser, and with almost twice the surface gravity of Earth's moon, Mercury still looks moon-like at first glance. But in this view its terrain shows light blue and brown areas near craters and long bright rays of material streaking the surface. The prominent bright ray crater Debussy at the upper right is 80 kilometers (50 miles) in diameter. Terrain toward the bottom of the historic image extends to Mercury's south pole and includes a region not previously imaged from space.

Image credit: NASA/JHU APL/CIW/Astronomy Picture of the Day

All those inner-solar system, airless planetoids look about the same, don't they?

MESSENGER has been a spectacular engineering and operational triumph already. It has to orbit one of the most inhospitable places on the planet, and as Tony Wikrent pointed out at Corrente a few days ago, it wasn't easy getting there:

Placing spacecraft in orbit may sound rather commonplace today, but getting something into orbit around the first planet is actually quite a feat of space engineering. A spacecraft traveling directly from Earth to Mercury would be accelerated so much by the sun's gravity that it would pass Mercury far too quickly to orbit it.

NASA's solution was to launch the spacecraft in August 2004, and perform a complex series of flybys of Earth (once), Venus (twice), and Mercury itself (three times), which allowed Messenger to be slowed relative to Mercury with minimal fuel, according to Wikipedia. This is one of the reasons I just adore NASA: they repeatedly and spectacularly disprove the wrong-wingers' shibboleth that government is, by nature, unable to get a job done right[.]

New pics from Messenger, first spacecraft placed in ORBIT around Mercury

Now the work of doing what we sent it there to do begins. The MESSENGER website explains what that is:

On March 17, 2011 (March 18, 2011, UTC), MESSENGER became the first spacecraft ever to orbit the planet Mercury. The mission is currently in its commissioning phase, during which spacecraft and instrument performance are verified through a series of specially designed checkout activities. In the course of the one-year primary mission, the spacecraft's seven scientific instruments and radio science investigation will unravel the history and evolution of the Solar System's innermost planet.

First Color Image of Mercury from Orbit

At least, that's part of the mission. But, as with many trips, getting there is half the fun.

Click on the photo too see the full size version of this reduced image. Go to the image credit link, then click on the picture there, to see it at full resolution.

No Static Military Action For The Wicked

Caption: Here's some kinetic military action for ya, Baby:

U.S. Marine Corps tanks leave plumes of dust as they race towards their primary objective during a Combined Arms Exercise at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, Calif., on Feb. 1, 2000. Marines from the 2nd Marine Division's 2nd Tank Battalion took part in the exercise which is designed to involve all elements of the Marine Air Ground Task Force in a live fire, desert training environment.

Image credit: DoD photo by Pfc. Andrew A. Thornton, U.S. Marine Corps.

The Obama Administrations description of the military actions we're taking in Libya as "kinetic military action" caused James Ala to wonder:

Kinetic Military Action, are you serious Mr. Rhodes? As opposed to what, Inertial Civilian Rest? Sweet Baby Jesus on a Pogo Stick, these people can not be serious.
...
How “blowing shit up” became “kinetic military action” is a mystery best left to the PR flack that went there. Granted the possibilities are endless. The Lusitania was not sunk by a German sub, it was provided a submersive water experience. China did not suffer “The Rape Of Nanjing” it underwent a rapid urban clearing and renewal program. Pearl Harbor did not suffer a sneak attack, that was unannounced aggressive diplomatic messaging.

Mangled Wordsmithing

Having watched every presidential administration since Nixon's mangle the English language to obscure what they were really doing, I'd say that they really are serious. Of course, it does beg the question of what an opposite would be. Other possibilities that occurred to me:

Caption: An FA-18 Hornet breaking the sound barrier. It doesn't get much more kinetic than that, now does it? Wonder how many miles per gallon that bad boy gets?

Image credit: John Gay/Wikipedia

• static military action: This could be a good thing. All that driving and flying around certainly burns up fuel, and isn't that what got us into this mess?
• isometric military action: For when there's just no room for jazzersize.

I'm sure there are many other possibilities for a phrase this deliberately vague.

They've certainly set the bar at a new low when it comes to obfuscatory phrasing, but if I know our White House press corps, they'll still be able to bump into it. We'll be hearing about "kinetic military action" for months, if not years.