Michael Tomasky's Blog, page 17

Chefs in the GOP kitchen | Michael Tomasky

You may have heard Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour's inflammatory remark from earlier in the week about how "we have people pull up at the pharmacy window in a BMW and say they can't afford their co-payment." The Washington Post sizes it up today, noting that Barbour's office never responded to a request for backup and comparing Medicaid subsidies offered in his state to the asking prices of new and used BMWs, and gave him the full-on four (out of four) Pinocchios.

Behind that quote is larger GOP campaign against Medicaid, discussed elsewhere in this morning's Post in a more illuminating article.

A little background for the Brits (and maybe many of the rest of us): Medicaid, passed in 1965, mostly provides healthcare services for uninsured poor people; about 50 million of them. But it also pays for certain middle-class services, notably nursing home care, which Medicare does not cover. Many of you Americans might have had the experience of a parent (or you) needing to be in a nursing home for a couple of weeks after a surgical procedure, say, and being told that Medicare would pick up only 10 days or whatever. That's how it works. For longer-term stays, even for middle-class people, it's Medicaid that does the work.

But here's the fiscal catch: Whereas the feds pick up 100% of Medicare costs, Medicaid costs are split 50-50 between the feds and the states. It's been a while since I read this history, but I'm pretty sure this was for the fairly obvious reason back in 1965: Washington lawmakers didn't mind paying for grandma, but were less enthusiastic about paying for poor people, so half the cost was shoved off to the states. These costs are a legitimate concern of governors of both parties and have been for years.

The healthcare reform bill, of course, expands Medicaid vastly, making coverage eligible to people up to 188% of the federal poverty line. And so we come to this, which happened yesterday:

"Medicaid is poised to wreak havoc on the state's budget for years to come," said [Utah Republican Governor Gary Herbert], "threatening our ability to fund critical services, such as transportation and education."

To buttress that argument, congressional Republicans unveiled a report by the committee's majority staff estimating that the Medicaid expansion would cost states $118 billion through 2023 - a substantially larger amount than recent estimates by the Congressional Budget Office and independent analysts that consider a shorter time frame.

At the hearing, the committee's chairman, Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich), pronounced the finding "sobering."

But administration officials countered that the additional expense to states will be largely offset because the law also enables states to save on Medicaid...

...At first, the federal government will fully fund the extra cost. But beginning in 2017, the states' share will gradually increase to 10 percent by 2020.

The report released Tuesday - which was jointly produced with Republican staff of the Senate Finance Committee - arrived at its grand total by compiling and extrapolating from separate estimates provided by governments of each state as well as outside experts.

These figures do not appear to include an analysis of several potential sources of savings to states identified by researchers. A recent report by analysts at the Urban Institute calculated these savings could range from $40.6 billion to $131.9 billion between 2014 and 2019.

For example, the expansion of Medicaid coverage to a greater share of the uninsured could enable states and local governments to cut back on funding they now provide hospitals and other providers for treating patients who are unable to pay. Similarly, states whose Medicaid programs now cover people with incomes above the minimum required by the law could shift those people to state-run marketplaces, through which they will be able to buy insurance plans with federal subsidies.

In other words, their staff report cooks the numbers, the Post is clearly implying. News stories don't often go into that much detail on reports, unless the reporter is smelling a rat in the room. The CBO estimate was about $60 billion. Here's a page from the Kaiser Health News site that gives a range of views, but with emphasis on the fact that the feds will be paying all the added costs for the first several years of the new law. All of them.

Meanwhile, get a load of Mississippi's Medicaid payment tables:

Mississippi provides some of the lowest Medicaid benefits to working adults in the nation. A parent who isn't working can qualify only if annual family income is less than 24 percent of the poverty line. Working parents qualify only if they make no more than 44 percent of the federal poverty level. Seniors and people with disabilities are eligible with income at 80 percent of the poverty line. Pregnant women do better -- they're eligible with income up to 185 percent of the poverty level.

Translated from the federal poverty guidelines, that means a working Mississippi couple with one child could earn no more than $8,150 a year and still qualify for Medicaid, seniors and people with disabilities could earn no more than $8,700, and a pregnant woman could earn no more than $20,000 a year.

And that seems high to Barbour? Gotta keep those people driving the kinds of cars they deserve. After all, according to Republican religious belief, the ability to drive a 550i demonstrates a kind of moral superiority, and such a person must be spared having to pay for the losers and freeloaders.

US domestic policyRepublicansMichael Tomasky
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Wisconsin news you can really use | Michael Tomasky

From the clever folks at Swing State Project, here is a chart showing some of the kind of extremely useful hard information out of Wisconsin I've been looking for.

The chart shows the results of the 2008 presidential election broken down by the state's 33 state senate districts. There are 19 Republicans in the body. Fully 14 of them represent districts where Barack Obama beat John McCain. Six of them represent districts where Obama won by at least 8% - that is to say, a reasonably big margin.

What does this tell us? Nothing scientific. But it does suggest that they represent districts where there's either a fairly strong Democratic vote, or failing that, where lots of independents lean Democratic (independents usually lean one way or the other, in truth). And this tells us in turn that if the right kind of pressure is applied in the district, these six at least ought to be feeling some heavy pressure. There of course will be local variables that will affect how much pressure -for example, maybe the Democrats just don't have plausible candidates in this or that district, so the GOP incumbent has reason to feel safe despite the presidential number. But in general, presidential performance is a pretty good guide to a district's demography and voting patterns.

Dale Schultz of the 17th district (carried by Obama 61-38%) said at a community forum last night that he wouldn't declare his position. FireDogLake reported that he told a Democratic colleague he was a no.

Eyes turn next to Dan Kapanke, whose district Obama carried by the same margin. He said on Feb. 27 he was for the bill. Michael Ellis represents a district Obama carried by 10 points, but seeing as how he's the state senate leader, one doubts he's going to buck his governor.

The Democrats need three defections. Even assuming they have the one in Schultz, getting another two seems tough. But this is good hard information that I thought I'd pass along - you can be sure, these are the sorts of numbers pols themselves look at and think about. It's all about their own necks at the end of the day.

United StatesWisconsinMichael Tomasky
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From freedom fries to freedom lighting | Michael Tomasky

Hefty style points to my Guardian colleague Suzanne Goldenberg for this lede (as we spell it in the biz) in this article from yesterday:

A bit like the Republican party, they are white, seemingly indestructible and bad for the environment. But after an absence of four years, foam plastic coffee cups have made a comeback in the basement coffee shop of the United States Congress building after Republicans began reversing a series of in-house green initiatives undertaken by Democrats.

Other examples of busy-bodyism now staved off include biodegradable utensils - it's back to good old all-American plastic - and energy efficient lightbulbs.

Are these people serious? They really needed to expend energy, as it were, on going through a whole new contracting and purchasing process just to make a point? One Republican said the green initiative cost $475,000 a year, but I frankly don't believe it, and in any case recycling schemes always cost money at first and save it later, not to mention the non-biodegradable waste matter saved.

But does it stop there? No! Goldenberg:

Next on the Republican agenda of environmental retro moves? Lightbulbs. House Republicans introduced a bill last week to repeal the government's decision to phase out the old energy-inefficient bulbs, which was due to start in 2012.

This morning, I was running an errand in the car and listening to Diane Rehm, the Washington-based and nationally syndicated talk show host. She was doing a segment on this. Her guests included Congressman Michael Burgess, Republican of the great state of Texas. I don't have a transcript, and I wasn't writing it down, but I promise you that what I am about to report to you is accurate.

He laid out a couple of bases on which he opposes the lightbulb switch. First and foremost it's a constitutional question. The government should not be in the business of telling businesses and people what kind of lights they should have. He also said the mercury in the new bulbs could raise issues of toxicity. And then he said, as God is my witness, that "the ugly truth, no pun intended" was that when people get older and the beauty of youth is stolen from them, they have the God-given right to light their sagging faces as they see fit.

Here is Dr. (yes, Dr.) Burgess. Judge for yourself what sort of light he should use. I don't think he looks so bad, personally, but then, maybe that photo is poorly lit.

The mercury argument, by the way, was quickly rebutted by a guest from the Natural Resources Defense Council, who noted that there's more mercury in a thermometer than in 20 or maybe even 50 new lightbulbs. Burgess' substantive points crumbled to dust in most cases, or in other cases, presented dilemmas that a reasonable amount of simple human ingenuity could solve. But that ingenuity, of course, would likely also be government funded, and would hence be inherently evil.

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Wisconsin: Scott Walker tanking | Michael Tomasky

Lots of folks are buzzing today about the NYT poll:

Americans oppose weakening the bargaining rights of public employee unions by a margin of nearly two to one: 60 percent to 33 percent. While a slim majority of Republicans favored taking away some bargaining rights, they were outnumbered by large majorities of Democrats and independents who said they opposed weakening them.

Those surveyed said they opposed, 56 percent to 37 percent, cutting the pay or benefits of public employees to reduce deficits, breaking down along similar party lines. A majority of respondents who have no union members living in their households opposed both cuts in pay or benefits and taking away the collective bargaining rights of public employees.

Heartening numbers, to be sure. But they're national numbers, probably disproportionately including blue staters, since the blue states have most of the population. The more relevant thing here would be to find numbers from Wisconsin, right, since that's where we face the matter at hand. There, perhaps, in the land of Joe McCarthy, things might look better for Scott Walker? Not so much. From TPM:

A majority of Wisconsin voters now disapprove of Walker's job performance, a reversal from the positive approval rating he enjoyed immediately after election day. Further, most voters support collective bargaining rights for the state's public employee unions, and oppose Walker's proposal to cut those same rights.

In the poll, 57% of respondents said public employees should have the right to collectively bargain, compared to 37% who said they should not. A similar majority, 55%, said the state's unions should have the same amount of rights or more than they already enjoy, a rebuke to Walker's efforts to roll back those rights.

Further, slim majorities said they side with the unions and senate Democrats -- who fled the state to delay a vote on Walker's bill -- over the governor in the dispute.

Walker's job approval has fallen as the budget stalemate drags on. According to PPP, 52% of voters now disapprove of his job performance, while 46% approve of the job he is doing. That split mirrors another finding in the poll that PPP released Monday, which found Walker losing in a hypothetical do-over election against Democrat Tom Barret, 52% to 45%.

Also ominously for the governor, the state is evenly split at 48% over whether he should be recalled.

Recalled! Now I like the sound of that. How about Governor Feingold? Has a nice ring to it. Don't forget that in addition to McCarthy, Wisconsin is the land of William Proxmire, the La Follettes, and loads of liberals. Walker could not be recalled, however, until next year by law.

There are, however, recall petitions being circulated right now involving eight Republican state senators. Reports FireDogLake:

There will absolutely be recall elections for many of the "Republican 8″ state Senators who can be recalled immediately. The organizing for this has already begun; a Democratic strategist in the state found the Republican 8 vulnerable to recall because of the heightened passions around the issue. This will also happen on the Democratic side; a group from Utah has already begun that process. You will see many recall elections in the coming year, putting the closely divided state Senate up for grabs in Wisconsin.

I'm not sure I'm wild about this idea in principle - recalling legislators who have committed no act of malfeasance or misfeasance that disgraced their office. If the threat makes a couple of these people oppose this bill, well, that's political pressure, and that's how the game is played.

What I still haven't read, and if any of you have please enlighten us, is specific information about which GOPers in the state senate might be persuaded to vote against the plan. Because as I keep saying, unfortunately, Walker has the votes.

But now it's clear from the PPP poll that even if he does succeed in pushing this through, perhaps especially if he does succeed in pushing this through, he's going to pay a huge political price in that state. Reports that Wisconsin had turned red are apparently (despite the Badgers' colors, I know) premature.

United StatesWisconsinMichael Tomasky
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Obama and "grand strategy" | Michael Tomasky

Here is an interesting tidbit from the Washington Post:

Obama has not spoken publicly about Libya since last week, when he warned the Libyan leader against continued violence toward his people. Last weekend, the White House released a statement saying Obama wanted Gaddafi to step down. For now, it has left it to others on his senior national security team to "amplify that message" in public, a senior administration official said.

The official said Obama was receiving up to three briefings a day on the Libyan situation and on Monday held an Oval Office meeting with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. He "doesn't need to give a play-by-play" public analysis of the rapidly changing situation, the official said of the president.

Instead, Obama's senior aides are "looking for an opportunity for him in the next few weeks to be articulating a broader set of ideas about how we see the change in the region . . . and the implications for U.S. policy" in the wake of crises across the Middle East and North Africa, the official said.

Well, I think that's a good idea. The foreign-policy intellectual crowd (Fareed Zakaria calmly, Niall Ferguson dyspeptically) are calling on the Potus to announce a "grand strategy" for dealing with this situation. When that happens, it kind of become incumbent on the incumbent to say Something Big.

Yet, I return to the dilemma of not being sure what he can say. Here are some snippets from an intelligent piece today by Hussein Ibish, writing for the excellent Lebanese web site NowLebanon:

For decades the US has based its foreign policy in the Middle East on maintaining stability, above all, and preserving the status quo. Washington has been guided by perceived core interests: ensuring that the US remains the sole regional superpower, securing the flow and pricing of energy resources, and a commitment to Israel's security. The George W. Bush administration toyed with the idea of introducing a "freedom agenda" into US policy toward the Arab world, even releasing a "Greater Middle East Initiative" document outlining this.

But the Bush administration's approach was badly flawed. The Greater Middle East Initiative was drafted without Arab input, and was slated to be unveiled at a multilateral meeting at which no Arab state would have been present. Even Arab reformers for the most part viewed the document with deep suspicion. It smacked too much of a neocolonial dictate, was premised on an unrealistic one-size-fits-all model, and ignored the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory...

...[Now,] The challenge for the US is to be seen as unequivocally taking the side of the Arab peoples even when it comes to pressuring long-standing allies. Otherwise, there is every danger that change will be both out of American control and hostile to American interests.

In truth, the US has a limited ability to influence what happens in most Arab states. However, the wisest course for Washington is to issue bold statements and use whatever leverage it has, even when this is more symbolic than practical, to demonstrate a real commitment to Arab democracy and reform in spite of potential risks to short-term American interests. This is happening, whether the US or the West likes it or not. It is futile to try holding back the waves like an impotent King Canute, or stand on the sidelines issuing vague statements to the effect of, "We may or may not be trying to have it both ways."

Obviously, American interests haven't changed, and they still center on energy, stability, American power and influence, and Israeli security. But the best way to secure these interests is to do everything possible to avoid being seen as the guarantor of domestic and regional orders that are plainly anathema to the Arab peoples in general.

That's accurate. But as far as big presidential speeches go, no one wants to hear that our leverage is limited. People want a Big-Sounding Idea with a catchy name that sounds like it can change the world. I think those speeches go bust more often than they succeed.

That said, what an opportunity this unexpected unrest presents for the west, especially for a sitting president. The point, I think, is not to impose anything; to acknowledge the limits of our influence; but to guide these societies toward more openness, to show them that it's a good thing and compatible with their traditions. The US, as Bush and Condi said, let alone Chomsky, was too often on the side of dictators, as long as they were our bad guys. This is the chance to start undoing that history. That's your big picture. Everything should proceed from there.

Obama administrationUS foreign policyLibyaMichael Tomasky
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Happy birthday to an old friend | Michael Tomasky

I heard a report on NPR last night that this (well, February sometime) marks the 60th anniversary of the Fender Telecaster, the first successfully mass-produced solid-body ee-lektrik git-tar. Changed the world.

Up to that time, there were hollow-body electric guitars, and semi-solid. They couldn't handle really loud volumes without producing feedback. Along comes Leo Fender. There were a few solid-body guitars before, says the Wikipedia entry, but old Leo made a better one, changed the business. Definitely raised the volume.

Country and western guitarists took to it first. The sound it produced fit country music perfectly. It's very bright and trebly through the one pickup, and sort of low and bluesy through the other. Or you can set the switch to give you a sound combining both pickups. The Tele (pronounced telly) pretty much stayed in country music in the 1950s and moved over to rock'n'roll in the 60s.

The story gets confusing to me here, because Fender sold his guitar company (by then also making the three pickup Stratocaster, which Clapton plays) to CBS in 1965. Guitar geeks consider that a dark period of piggy corporate ownership, but even so, somehow, George Harrison and Keith Richards and Bob Dylan among others played them, so it couldn't have been all bad.

As for my old friend...I was sitting in the WVU student union cafeteria one day minding my own business, and here comes my buddy J.H. He's buying a new guitar, switching to Gibson, I think it was. He knew I'd started playing. Would I like to buy his Tele? It was a '72 model, he said (I'd seen him play it at a teenage party once, when we were about 13, and he actually even played a solo, on a Bread song called "Mother Freedom"; the idea that I knew someone at that age who could play a guitar solo was barely comprehensible to me). A purist would have said, "No way man, that's CBS, dude, that's totally bogus."

I was no purist. We settled on $200. I didn't have anything close to that amount of money, and this was certainly not a category of purchase that I could carry to my then-suffering parents to see if they'd front me the cash. J.H. - we played Little League baseball together and had been friends since he moved to town in (I think) third grade - cheerily said: whatever; 10 dollars here, 20 dollars there. To this day, I don't know if I even ended up paying the full amount.

And that's it, above, in a photo taken last night, right after I heard the NPR story. Yes, that's my A-to-Zed. Not placed there as a prop, I promise you. That's my study, the bookcase just to my right as I type these words. In truth, the Guild acoustic is usually the guitar sitting right there, which I turn to for solace after reading an ErskineColdwell comment.

Anyway...music. Of all the things I've ever done or accomplished with my life, I am happiest that I play an instrument. Very grateful in retrospect that dear mom made me take those two years of piano lessons when I was 11 and 12, and delighted that I applied myself to the guitar as I did for about seven or eight semi-intensive years. I'm not that good anymore, but one retains enough, and every two or three months, I tune it to open G and make sure I can still play "Can't Ya Hear Me Knockin'," and I can, and it makes me really happy. My wife plays the violin beautifully, although she hasn't in a while. I go into homes without music, and they seem a bit sad to me somehow; one of life's highest-order pleasures just missing. This seems like a good place to end and encourage you all to share your stories.

United StatesMichael Tomasky
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Parker-Spitzer and the general theory of gender and opinion giving | Michael Tomasky

Here's a piece of unsurprising news from the world of US political media; unsurprising, yet the occasion for me to run a nice theory past you:

Kathleen Parker, a prominent political commentator, is leaving CNN's "Parker Spitzer," the much-ballyhooed prime-time talk show she co-hosted with Eliot Spitzer, the formerly disgraced governor of New York...

...Spitzer, 51, whose aggressive and voluble personality overshadowed hers from the beginning of the show last fall, will remain. He was reported to have been telling friends that Parker would be leaving in short order.

Parker, cast in the stand-by-her-man role on the show, was reported in December to have been fed up playing second fiddle to the motor-mouth Spitzer. Though both of them and CNN issued statements denying the rift, it was known to media insiders that the pair was not working well together.

First of all, Parker. Seven or eight years ago, I thought she was a serious winger. But the pack has fast out-galloped her, as it has so many, and these days she's sort of an interesting moderate-conservative most weeks.

But here's the point. She's not the only woman to have thrown in the towel on trying to get equal time with a man on cable TV. And beyond that, there's the whole opinion journalism game: op-ed columns, journals, and so on. Why are there so many more men giving their opinions than women?

This was the subject recently of an exchange you can read about here. Someone counted up the female bylines in leading intellectual journals, and of course they were predictably low: 15% here, 26% there. This led Jonathan Chait of TNR to explain what he thinks is at the root here:

But I believe the bigger factor by far is that opinion journalism disproportionately attracts men.

My explanation, which I can't prove, is [that] socialization predisposes boys to be more interested both in producing and consuming opinion journalism. Confidence in one's opinions and a willingness to engage in intellectual combat are disproportionately (though not, of course, exclusively) male traits. I've come across several writers in my career who are good at writing in the argumentative style but lack confidence in their ability. They are all female.

This goes way way back to early childhood. I think (I'm no sociologist of course) that boys are taught to express their opinions from the time they're three, while little girls (not mine, by cracky!) are taught to be polite and deferential. That's overly general of course, but I think it's the basic picture. Something inculcated in people when they're that little is bound to stick in the system like yeast, fermenting for years.

Maybe when Hillary becomes president in 2017, she can start those state-run re-education camps the right wingers are always saying she is intent on creating, take away people's children just like conservatives say she wants to, and train girls to be voluble and obnoxious and boys to be sweet little buttercups. That would show 'em. In the meantime, we're stuck with Spitzer, who after what he did as governor, potentially corrupting law enforcement for the entire state of New York by engaging in repeated illegal activity, belongs no closer to a television than sitting in front of one and watching it.

And in the meantime, my opinionated and rumbustious female commenters, I ask God's blessings upon your parents, who obviously raised you the right way!

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Tim Pawlenty warns Arizona about the ruling class | Michael Tomasky

I wonder what C. Wright Mills would make of this:

Tim Pawlenty made a splash at the Tea Party Patriots American Policy Summit on Saturday in Arizona. The former governor scored a close second in the event's straw poll and threw plenty of red meat to tea party activists in his speech Saturday evening, including thanking the tea party for "standing up to the ruling class" which includes unions.

Former Godfather's Pizza CEO Herman Cain was the favorite of the summit attendees with 22 percent of the straw poll vote. Pawlenty finished second with 16 percent, followed by Ron Paul at 15 percent, Sarah Palin with 10 percent, Mitt Romney with 6.5 percent and Rep. Michele Bachmann with 5.6 percent.

"The mood at this summit shows that Tea Party activists are looking for leaders who share our principles of fiscal responsibility and limited government and who will vow to uphold policies that reflect those principles once in office," Jenny Beth Martin, national coordinator of Tea Party Patriots, said in a statement.

"I'm here today to say, 'Thank you.' Thank you for standing up to the ruling class," Pawlenty told the crowd. "Thank you for standing up to the liberal power brokers, guardians of the status quo and the royal triangle of greed: big government, big unions and big bailed-out businesses."

We've really hit a bizarro historical point. When did 200, or even 2,000, years of agreed-upon reality get turned on its head so that now "the ruling class" is not the actual objective ruling class but a bunch of school teachers and child services workers in Wisconsin? Don't answer that, ngavc, that was a rhetorical question.

US elections 2012RepublicansTea Party movementMichael Tomasky
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Obama steps it up on Libya | Michael Tomasky

In the video a couple of posts down, I said that the prez had been "disquietingly quiet" about Libya last week. That remains objectively true, but having read this, I see now that there may have been a pretty good reason:

The U.S. Embassy and other diplomatic posts in Tripoli, reopened only five years ago, comprise a series of lightly protected compounds and trailers. The guards there were Libyan, not the U.S. Marines posted outside most embassies. And an armed and angry Libyan opposition was approaching the city from the east, as hundreds of Americans awaited evacuation across rough seas.

Administration officials said the diplomats in Tripoli told them that, in the words of one official, "certain kinds of messaging from the American government could endanger the security of American citizens." There were fears that Americans could be taken hostage.

"Overruling that kind of advice would be a very difficult and dangerous thing to do," said Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications.

"That was the debate, and frankly we erred on the side of caution, for certain, and at the cost of some criticism," he continued. "But when you're sitting in government and you're told that ignoring that advice could endanger American citizens, that's a line you don't feel very comfortable crossing."

In addition, remember, the launch carrying Americans to Malta was delayed by three days, I think, because of rough seas.

By Friday evening, with the Yanks safely out, Obama had said this, according to the Cable, the blog at Foreign Policy magazine:

President Obama issued an executive order Friday evening that imposes immediate sanctions on Libyan ruler Muammar al Qaddafi, his sons and his accomplices in the slaughter of civilians. In a letter accompanying the order, Obama declared a national emergency over the situation.

"I have determined that the actions of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, his government, and close associates, including extreme measures against the people of Libya, constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States. The order declares a national emergency to deal with this threat," Obama wrote in the letter to House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).

The executive order itself condemns the "wanton violence against unarmed associates" perpetrated by Qaddafi, his sons, his government, and his close associates. Effective immediately, all U.S.-based assets of Qaddafi and his four sons are to be frozen and transactions intended to move those assets are prohibited. The order allows the measures to be expanded to include any member of the Libyan government who are determined to be complicit in Qaddafi's brutality.

I don't know exactly what it means, in terms of implications and so forth, to declare a national emergency. I'll try to find out if it means anything in particular.

The no-fly zone apparently comes next. So this is the week the international noose tightens around the regime's neck. To what end? Who can say. The leverage is limited. All we can do - we, all of us, Americans, Brits, etc. - is take the right stand and see what happens and play it as it lays. What happens, for example, if the regime flouts the no-fly rule, and we shoot down a plane or two?

Last point: Needless to say, the same people smacking the administration for not saying much last week would be popping blood vessels if one American had been taken hostage. So maybe erring on the side of caution was the right thing here. Any of you want to say that if you were responsible for American lives, you'd have rolled the dice with them?

Paul Wolfowitz was one such over the weekend. Anytime that man rears his tousled head, remember this, from 2004:

Asked how many American troops have died in Iraq, the Pentagon's No. 2 civilian estimated yesterday the total was about 500 -- more than 200 soldiers short.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was asked about the toll at a hearing of a House Appropriations subcommittee. "It's approximately 500, of which . . . approximately 350 are combat deaths," he responded.

The actual number that day was 722. So the chief intellectual architect of the war, who helped send men and women off to die for a theory, couldn't be bothered to keep track of how many had given lives for it. That's all one ever needs to know about him.

Obama administrationUS foreign policyLibyaMichael Tomasky
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Government shutdown probably avoided | Michael Tomasky

So it appears there will be no government shutdown this Friday. Here's how the Washington Post described it yesterday:

The threat of a government shutdown receded Friday, as Senate Democrats tentatively embraced a Republican plan to immediately cut $4 billion in federal spending by targeting programs that President Obama has already marked for elimination.

The GOP proposal, unveiled late Friday by House leaders, would keep the government running only until March 18 - two weeks past the current March 4 deadline - a shorter extension than Democrats are seeking. But by offering a stopgap measure that cuts only programs Obama has identified as unnecessary, Republicans appear to have broken an impasse over spending that has been brewing since they took control of the House this year.

Contained in those grafs, in between the lines, are the two interesting back stories here. First, Senate Democrats caved. You may remember that Harry Reid's position a week ago was: let's pass a continuing resolution to keep the government functioning for a month at current levels. As I believe I wrote at the time (did I? or did I just say this to friends? In either case, trust me, I happened to call this one), that was untenable in the current climate.

Republicans fired back saying, he can't find one dime to cut? It sounded effective to me, and it appears it polled well. Politico today is more blunt about it:

Republicans and some Democrats say Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and top lieutenant Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) staked out shaky turf from the start by saying they weren't willing to shave a dollar from the budget over the short term.

"What's the use of a hard line if you're going to back off it in two minutes? These guys are the worst at playing chicken that I've ever seen," a senior Democratic aide said of Senate party leaders. "They get in the car to play chicken; they go in reverse."

The aide said Democratic leaders failed to understand the national appetite — and the need — for spending cuts.

Democratic leaders banked on Republicans backing down in the face of political fallout from a shutdown.

So there's a black eye for the D's. But the R's can't quite gloat either. As the WP story notes, these immediate $4 billion worth of cuts cover only agencies that Obama had proposed to cut or eliminate anyway. If the question is who is likely to be unhappy about that, the fairly obvious answer is the tea-party Republicans in Congress. They're going to want far more cuts than that.

The resolution they've agreed to will keep the government going only for two more weeks, so we'll go through all this again as March 18 approaches.

Meanwhile, did you notice over the last few days that those alleged instances of socialism that gave birth to the movement that put these extremists in Congress seem to have worked out in fact rather well? The Tarp bailout:

Almost three years after a series of government bailouts began, what many feared would be a deep black hole for taxpayer money isn't looking nearly so dark.

The brighter picture is highlighted by the outlook for the bailouts' centerpiece — the $700-billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.

"It's turning out to cost one heck of a lot less than what we all thought at the beginning," said Ted Kaufman, a former U.S. senator from Delaware who heads the congressionally appointed panel overseeing TARP.

In mid-2009, the program was projected to lose as much as $341 billion. That's been reduced to $25 billion — partly because of the controversial decision to pump much of the TARP money into banks instead of launching a large-scale purchase of securities backed by toxic subprime mortgages.

There is now broad agreement that the bailouts worked, stabilizing the financial system and preventing an even deeper crisis.

General Motors:

Less than two years after emerging from bankruptcy, General Motors announced on Thursday its largest annual profit in more than a decade as it gained market share and rolled out a new lineup of cars...

...Taxpayers have a vested interest in GM's future after the federal government spent $50 billion to prop up a company that had been hemorrhaging money for years as Asian competitors launched smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles. GM emerged from bankruptcy in July 2009 and returned to the stock market in November, raising $20 billion in the largest initial public offering in U.S. history. In GM's announcement yesterday, the company said the government's stake in the company has dropped from 61 percent to 27 percent.

So in other words, the two major things Obama was doing to destroy the American economy have in fact saved the American economy from far worse distress and saved America's most symbolically important corporation from bankruptcy, said corporation responding by actually getting its act together and making really good cars.

And yet because of this absurd rage over these government policies that have benefited the country and the taxpayer well, we now have a hard-right Congress demanding massive and cruel spending cuts without a penny in tax increases, and governors like the one in Wisconsin using his fiscal crisis as an excuse to bust unions. It's completely surreal.

Obama administrationUS CongressMichael Tomasky
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