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August 13, 2012 03:33 PM UTC

Monday Open Thread

  • 54 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

“By ‘radical,’ I understand one who goes too far; by ‘conservative,’ one who does not go far enough; by ‘reactionary,’ one who won’t go at all.”

–Woodrow Wilson

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54 thoughts on “Monday Open Thread”

  1. He has advocated ending Medicare as it currently exists and replacing it with a voucher system. He has proposed a tax plan that would give large tax cuts to the richest people in the country which would be offset by eliminating items like the mortgage interest deduction and the deduction for employer provided health insurance. The net effect would be a tax increase of several thousand dollars a year for millions of middle income families.

    Ryan has also proposed privatizing Social Security. After economic mismanagement destroyed much of the wealth that people had in their homes and their retirement accounts, this position is likely to be even less popular than ever.

    And Representative Ryan’s budget would eliminate most of the federal government. The Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) analysis of his budget showed all non-health care, non-Security Security spending shrinking to 4.5 percent of GDP by 2040 and to 3.75 percent of GDP by 2050. The military budget is currently over 4.0 percent of GDP and has never been less than 3.0 percent of GDP since the start of the Cold War.

    This means that if we take Representative Ryan’s views seriously, he wants to get rid of the State Department, the Justice Department, the national park system, the federal court system, the air traffic control system and most of the other activities that we associate with the federal government. This must be the case, since CBO undertook the analysis at Ryan’s request and surely he would have corrected them if they misrepresented his position.

    It is questionable whether many voters will support a candidate such extreme positions. Romney is now associating himself with these positions by his decision to select  Representative Ryan.

    Dean Baker

    Co-director, Center for Economic and Policy Research :

    http://www.politico.com/arena/…

    .

    Oh, wait, it is pretty bad.

    1. it’s a plan.  And, Romney needed something to talk about since his record, his foreign policy acumen, and his business experience are all off the table.  

        1. At least at any depth.  Not that one can’t find out everything with a little research.  

          Does anyone recall if he did tithe his obligatory 10% on those tax returns?  

          2. his charitable ran about 14 pct as I recall, which is his tithe and a bit more for other stuff.  It made me feel a lot better about his carried interest 14 pct.

      2. Romney and Ryan should wear hats  when they campaign.  1950’s fedoras or some other seasonally appropriate head wear (no caps or berets).  That would be something to talk about and would further separate them from JFK.

  2. AIG,  insurance giant and crazy speculator was hit hard by the mortgage market collapse.

    The taxpayer bailout including a very large line of credit,  access to TARP, and other gov’t subsidies which  saved AIG (outrageous bonuses and all)  by March 2009, the government owned 92 percent of the company.

    The worst of the worst and the best illustration of Too Big To Fail.

    Friday Treasury announced the fourth sale oF AIG stock since the save, which will lower the gov’t ownership to just over 50%.  Treasury (taxpayers)  make  $300 million on the transaction, a bit better than the other three sales, though all were profitable.

    AIG has already paid it’s debt to the Federal Reserve, netting $13 billion profit to the Fed.

    AIG bailout will be studied for years to come as the classic example of of  moral hazard and TBTF.  It is still Too Big To Fail – and although Dodd-Frank probably gives the Fed authority for special oversight, legislation can and should be strengthened. Or AIG should be broken up. (T. Roosevelt was a Republican and he broke up several TBTF companies.)

    The AIG bailout sucked and was unfair to the taxpayers who saved it, and competitors who were less irresponsible.   But the alternatives would have been much worse. We can study and  debate the AIG rescue today because we are not coping with a complete global financial collapse.

    ht Charles Lane, Washington Post, today

    1. “The boom cannot continue indefinitely. There are two alternatives. Either the banks continue the credit expansion without restriction and thus cause constantly mounting price increases and an ever-growing orgy of speculation, which, as in all other cases of unlimited inflation, ends in a “crack-up boom” and in a collapse of the money and credit system. Or the banks stop before this point is reached, voluntarily renounce further credit expansion and thus bring about the crisis. The depression follows in both instances.” Mises, L. v. (1940), Critique of Interventionism, p. 40.

      1. Because the day any business in a boom (not just banks) “voluntarily renounces” what they’re doing in order to keep a bubble from inflating is the day monkeys fly.

      2. “If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it private enterprise on well tried principals of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is.”

        John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Book 3, Chapter 10, Section 6, p. 129

            1. Keynes attempted to paint a relevant and useful analogy, which of course he failed miserably. His scenario is incredibly far-fetched although it sounds like something guberment would try, to promote jobs. On the other hand, the Mises quote is exactly what was happening then and what is still happening today. Expand the base money with fiat currency via easy credit and create a bubble. A bubble that must be allowed to pop or continuously and forever reflated.

              Since you are so smart, give us your take on that Keynes quote.  You must admit, Keynes and his animal spirits are no better than fortune telling.

              1. An economist whose theories work when applied time and time again vs. Nock, he who thinks a skinny teenager could kill him with a single blow. Whom to believe, whom to believe…

    1. As a parent of an 8 year old watching the closing ceremonies, I though the bleep was shit.

      The bleep gives curse words way more attention than is needed. Without the bleep, my daughter would’ve kept bobbing her head and trying to whistle. Instead she stoppe mid-head bob and said, “He said a bad word!”

      I don’t subscribe to the idea of traditional bad words. I think it’s fucking stupid.

  6. Normally I leave the conspiracy theory posts to others, but after doing some research from legit news sources (Washington Examiner and RT being the antithesis of this) I found this on the Daily Mail website:

    U.S. government is secretly spying on EVERYONE using civilian security cameras, say Wikileaks

    Anyone who takes a photograph at high-risk locations is logged as a suspected terrorist on a vast network of secret spy cameras linked to the U.S. Government, according to leaked emails.

    People pointing cameras in New York are regarded as suspicious and the facial recognition images of them from the civilian CCTV are fed into a data centre run by U.S. firm Abraxas.

    The system then connects with hundreds of other cameras in a bid to pinpoint potential terrorist activity, it is claimed.

    Details of the system emerged from emails released by whistle-blowing website Wikileaks. The issue has caused outrage among privacy campaigners amid fears that it could be abused.

    It has disturbing echoes of the film, The Bourne Identity starring Matt Damon, in which CIA officials use a network of spy cameras to track around the world someone they though they had assassinated.

    According to the email released by Wikileaks, pictures of people’s faces are encrypted and sent to a fortified data centre at a secret location.

    The TrapWire system is run by Abraxas and is linked to civilian CCTV cameras. The firm, owned by the Cubic Corporation, is apparently staffed by large numbers of former CIA employees.

    The cameras in its TrapWire system are one of the methods it uses to do this.

    TrapWire is used by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in a bid to deter terrorist attacks – or catch those responsible once an incident has happened.

    According to the company’s own documents from 2007, TrapWire is ‘a unique, predictive software system designed to detect patterns of per-attack surveillance.’ This includes ‘photographing, measuring and signaling’.

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new…

    1. Not sure if they are so on the face recognition, databanking, etc., but definitely the most cameras of any nation at this time.

      They also have very strict rules about photography, this is all pre-Olympics.  Besides the usual stuff about not taking pictures of potential tarist targets, they are very strict about having rights to take photos of public buildings!  Like having to have written permission from the Parks Service to snap the Washington Monument.

      I don’t think we can put this genie back into the bottle.  

      1. but this was in WIRED a few months ago:

        The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)

        Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails-parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration-an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

        But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle-financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications-will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

        http://www.wired.com/threatlev…

        All that video footage has to go somewhere….I guess it’s going to the desert in Utah for “threat analysis.”

        1. belittles many people more than it belittles those who support Ron Paul. I have heard the term for more than 4 years. While I think you are using shorthand to describe a set of people who are remarkably ill informed, like the teabaggers, I think the use of this pejorative belittles those who simply have leaning disabilities or developmental disabilities.

          1. It’s a sad irony that most people with developmental and intellectual disabilities would suffer greatly if either Paul — Ron or Ryan — were elected.

    1. when you’ve got as many “home states” as Willard it’s gotta be tough just remembering them all, let alone carrying every damn one . . .  

  8. The habit of resending me an email I already deleted, with a new “Just wanted to make sure you saw this!” got on my last nerve.

    Email barrages have been a moderately effective fundraising method for a couple decades now, but I think they’re about to stop working entirely and start becoming a negative for organizations and campaigns. The volume of email received by anyone who is active on an issue or in a party is insane, and most people managing email marketing campaigns don’t bother to measure the reactions of the 98% who don’t open their emails; it’s all about the 2% who do and the .0000something% who convert and donate.

      1. I couldn’t handle the daily outrage that met me each morning in my inbox. Seriously? It’s 6:30 am and you’re already in a tizzy about something that, frankly, is not that big of a deal? Whether it was a misstep from an R candidate or something more serious, the round the clock outrage just got to be too much.

        If you’re THAT upset before the sleep is out of my eyes, I probably don’t want to be friends with you.

        http://dailydickpunch.com/2012…

    2. Local candidates.  An occasional mail from the local Dem party.  

      The begathon reminds me that I got yet another renewal notice for my ACLU membership…..last held ca. 2001.  I decided to unjoin because I saw all of my money going into mailings.  Every few days, another appeal, another cause.  When I moved to FL, the letters were showing up here in a month!

      You’d think those brainiacs would do some cost/effectiveness analysis.

  9. Romney did Obama a huge favor

    This year, an incumbent even more embattled than George H.W. Bush has his own preferred election theme. He doesn’t want to debate his own record, which is pretty dismal. He wants to debate the record of the congressional Republicans elected in 2010, a bunch radically less popular even than the president himself.

    You’d imagine that Romney’s job was to refuse the Democratic invitation, to choose his own ground for the election, and to keep his distance from the congressional GOP. You’d imagine, but you’d be wrong.

    Very good points.

  10. Lovely people, extremely friendly and brotherly discussion by a Rabbi, Imam, and Catholic community leader, and an eye-opening experience for Mini Cowgirl. Fascinating group and they are inspired by an Islamic scholar best known for saying that “A terrorist cannot be a Muslim and a Muslim cannot be a terrorist,” and supporting this thesis with extensive theological research and writings indicating that there is no supportable Islamic argument for terrorism.

  13. Uh, no…

    More inconvenient (for the GOP) facts about  The Talented Mr. Ryan:

    Ryan is not a “fiscal conservative.” A fiscal conservative pays for the government he wants. Ryan never has. His early “Roadmap for America’s Future” didn’t balance the budget until the 2060s and added $60 trillion to the national debt. Ryan’s revised plan, passed by the House in 2011, wouldn’t reach balance until the 2030s while adding $14 trillion in debt. It adds $6 trillion in debt over the next decade alone – yet Republicans had the chutzpah to say they wouldn’t raise the debt limit!

    It’s going to be intriguing to hear how the Romney/Ryan Traveling Medicine Show sells the benefits of their GOP Snake Oil.

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