I just think the whole "we need to cut spending now" people going "what?! we didn't mean defense" is definitely strange and doesn't make Republicans look all that good to the general public.

Found more details. It doesn't sound so bad "...In fact, the defense budget will still be larger than it was toward the end of the Bush Administration.”

Obama announces new, leaner military approach - The Washington Post

I'm fine with it if they do it smartly, which is asking a lot.

So, libertarian- for the common defense- big and bloated or small and ineffectual? Those are your two choices

SI

Tongue in cheek? There is no middle ground just two extremes?

Listening to you guys, those are the only choices we have with government. So, which is it you prefer?

SI

Which one do you prefer?

I'm more of a small and ineffectual sort for the military but large and bloated for my social programs. I thought you knew that by now. :D

I was curious if forced to pick which you prefer since you seem to find fault with it at any turn.

SI

It's obvious I pick small and effectual for all programs. ;)

Unfortunately, if you're the President with the Congress you are dealt and the defense department you have, you don't get to make that choice. And you have to pick one- you can't just punt on the choice.

SI

It's not the current President or the Congress (it could be anyone). It's the same that ails (some) corporate capitalism: political/management cronyism. Partisinism is too petty compared to the system which, for the most part, produces either of the two results.

It's like asking whether I would cheer for KU or K-State. How about neither? ;)

Seriously though the military budget (not spending time to research so I could be wrong on the exact numbers but my point shouldn't change much) is like 6 times any other country in the world. Obama's new "drastic cut" is like 5.8. Why can't it be 4 times? Twice? Nobody ever said (including Libertarians) that it should be zero.

Seeing the massive job opportunities a large military provides in personal, research and manufacturing, I always thought of the military as being mostly a social program.

Unemployment rate falls to 8.5 percent; Obama: Economy starting to ‘rebound’ - Josh Boak - POLITICO.com

Unemployment falls to 8.5 percent.

Numbers continue to look good, but will they continue to get better in the run up to the election? (and if they do, does the chances of the Republican nominee, be it Romney or whoever else, get seriously hurt?)

Without reading the article wouldn't employment numbers tend to go down during the holidays?

Employment numbers are adjusted for seasonal fluctuations.

So NPR said there have been 2 million private sector job gained since Obama took office. However, the cuts in government jobs is preventing a significant decrease in the unemployment figures (saw some reference to 500k lost gov't jobs)

Have the Republicans landed on the Holy Grail of strategies? Push for enough government (job) cuts that will mute nearly all private sector growth while still painting Obama as a Marxist....

Brilliant. They deserve the win for pulling this off and (mostly) for the Dem's being stupefied.

People with guns don't count.

For Obama, I think the first criteria most will look at is whether the economy is getting better. So if this trend continues, it will definitely help him and hurt the GOP chances.

Got the official read on this

Jobless rate falls to nearly 3-year low - The Washington Post

It is a social program, for well connected and otherwise incompetent lobbyists and corporate executives who generate overly inflated contracts to pad various people's pockets while donating a relative trickle to jobs (some of which are not even in this country). The military industrial complex is a very successful ponzi scheme, big pyramid of contributors, a lot sliced off for corruption, and some payments back in the form of actual military hardware but not enough to justify the costs.

Good lord. Some politicians and their families need to learn that they don't have to react defensively to every thing that's critical of them. That's part of the gig. Reacting in this way brings it more attention and legitimacy at some level than it every would have if it was ignored.

http://news.yahoo.com/mrs-obama-her-...150915657.html

You really like to dig deep don't you? This article seems to be about an interview Michele Obama gave on TV where she was asked about a book written about her that was critical. Seems she just said the book was mostly silly and moved on. I don't know in what way she reacted that brings legitimacy except to mouth-breathers who repost every piece of garbage they find. :shrug:

She said people were trying to make her look like an angry black woman. She didn't say it was 'silly'. She didn't say it was portraying her as a 'bitter woman' or an 'angry woman'. She implies that there's some sort of racial stereotype where none exists in the excerpt that I've seen released. It makes her look like a defensive person who indicates that there may be a lot more truth in the statements than she'd like you to believe.

FWIW......Newt's comments related to black people and food stamps last week were equally as mind-numbingly stupid from where I stand. Why he ever thought that he had to limit his comments to just black people when discussing food stamps (other than the obvious reason) just boggles my mind. There's people abusing state and federal aid programs all over the place and it's certainly not limited to just black people. His comments make it clear we should be glad no matter what party or ideology we support that he's not going to be our President.

It's just annoying that two people who should be more conscious of their comments and how they are stated given their status in our society are so lacking in those skills as was made obvious by their statements this week.

False equivalencies and false outrage for teh win!

SI

I'll worry about this when I finally get an apology from Martin Luther King Jr.

There's a guy that should have known better.

You stay classy MBBF.

The obvious reason being that Newt Gingrich is an idiot and a racist. I thought that was pretty clear, but perhaps the clouds of politics somehow seem to put a fog over the obvious.

MLK Jr. set and example 50+ years ago that Michelle Obama could learn a lot from and that would even hold up under present times. He focused on the positive of what could come of a situation where race wasn't used as a crutch or a defense. He focused on NOT being defensive when stating his convictions. It's not even remotely close to similar.

Not obvious at all. That makes sense though. I rescind my pointing out of the sentence in question.

Lose credibility when using a word like "all-time" when you really don't know anything that happened before 1980. More accurate to say worse disparity in the last 32 years. All-time would include the late 1800s which makes today looks like a communist paradise, I would think.

Does it say how much the lower end of the population's income went up between those years? Heck I've quadrupled my income since I left college in '92...

You can't just look at your own data as you have to take into account aging curves and consider the small sample size. My income has gone up 30000% (or something like that) since 1992! Never mind that I was in 8th grade and mowing lawns.

Heck, my wife and I have done great throughout this recession (aside from the moving across country twice). But that's because we just hit our early 30s and we're at that point in life where we're moving from entry level to more experienced jobs. It doesn't mean the job situation out there doesn't suck.

SI

Does anyone smarter than me have some thoughts on what this means for the US / World economy?

I thought it was pretty clear that they were referring to the history of that specific poll when they meant all-time. If I saw "highest approval rating of all time", I would assume they meant since approval polls started being done, not that they're really claiming someone had higher approval than George Washington.

Imagine that. If he had said this in 2009, then he would have had some credibility. Now it's too little, too late.

If it's like here, it means you can expect the EU to open up an investigation into the gross incompetence of S&P in 2008 within the next week ;)

SI

Tensions are heating up and I would not be surprised if we are indirectly supporting these assassinations (via a third party). Somehow, I just don't think diplomacy or sanctions will work with Iran ...

Iran Says CIA Behind Nuclear Scientist's Killing | Fox News

World News - US: Encounter with Iran ship not hostile

It just depends on where he is in his career. As a Senator, he criticized Bush for spending and for wanting to raise the debt limit. When he's running against Hillary, he's a super liberal. As the general election gets closer, he's going to get more moderate (I mean really, he wants to consolidate agencies? What a nut. Is he against public roads too?). His last term, his strategy will be based on what will give him the best book deals/speaking fees post-presidency. The guy's only 50 and he's in good health (other than the smoking). He going to be prominent public figure for decades. He's got to set that up.

I don't think any of what are you said is necessarily unfair, but I feel like Obama was billed a pragmatic thinker rather than a strict ideologue. Lots of people call it wish-wishy or flip-flopping, but I think it is largely a matter of being practical.

Most of the people that thought he was a super liberal were his political opponents. Certainly in the primaries he held some positions to the right of Hillary, healthcare being a prime example.

This just needed to go in here:

Not confirmed but indications another #2 or #3 down the drain.

Pakistan Taliban Leader Reportedly Killed In U.S. Drone Strike | Fox News

I hear all fourteen were the number three man in AQ.

Here's some Washington Post fact checking from the debates. The most puzzling they say is below. Any Perry fans care to comment?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...g.html?hpid=z1

The most puzzling thing is that you assumed there were any Perry fans on this board.

Even more puzzling that anyone thinks Perry is capable of making fact-checked statements in a clear manner.

That too.

Erdogan is more conservative than some previous rules, to be sure. I mean, Turkey had a female prime minister back in the mid 90s and it's not like we've had a female President. The country prides itself on being secular and progressive, tho there are always going to be conservative and liberal elements (in the loose definition of the word) of any political system.

SI

Well, somewhat disappointed. I get accidents happen etc. but there has to be someway to mitigate and remediate enviromental problems.

NBC Politics - Obama set to reject Keystone oil pipeline

You force a decision long before the environmental impact report is finished and this is what you're going to get.

SI

Egypt will be an interesting case study. Let's hope some modernity wins out.

My Way News - Egypt's Islamists win 75 percent of parliament

I love the rhetoric from the third paragraph where I couldn't figure out which party was more "Islamist" between one being described as fundamentalist and the other as ultraconservative.

SI

Intuitively I understood this but had no idea the true deficit $. I'm sure there can be quibbles but at least a method to quantifying it overall.

Ezra Klein: Doing the math on Obama's deficits - The Washington Post

Whoopsie:

Alabama immigration crackdown costs state up to $11 bln: study - Yahoo! News

I'm sure Alabama is just happy that there's less, darker than white people, in the state now. So it's probably a wash to them.

Utah has a pretty successful model on how states can handle this since the Federal government has shown no interest in doing anything:

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/utah-...8#.TymaibES01I

I wonder though, if someone opposes states enforcing their own anti-immigration laws on constitutional grounds, how do they distinguish that from states granting some type of legal immigration status?

One could easily go the other way and nail Obama for failing to alter the policies he inherited and allowing the debt to continue to spiral out of control.

Easy, by not being consistent.

I'd happily use constitutional means to get something like Alabama's law thrown out if it were in place in Wisconsin. But if we adopted Utah's laws, I'd fight against it getting thrown out for constitutional reasons. Totally inconsistent, but I'm trying to get something accomplished here. The means of accomplishing it are fairly irrelevant. It's been that way in politics forever.

If you look at deportations and inflow of illegal immigrants it certainly doesn't look like the federal government is doing nothing.

Ya, that's refreshingly candid and true. The constitution doesn't really have meaning, it's just a tool to get your preferred policy enacted, or your opposed policy stopped. Still, in the legal fight, people will have to come up with some made-up distinction or justification (so will appellate judges). This could be a tricky one.

This is true, but in terms of comprehensive reform or somesuch thing, it's been talked about for ages and nothing has gotten done. I think W had the best opportunity to do something reasonable. No way the right let's Obama do anything that resembles amnesty.


That's what lawyers are for :)

I'm sure they could frame separate arguments that are completely inconsistent and as long as they aren't heard in the same courtroom by the same judge, it could probably work both ways, no?

Maybe not quite "forever" but certainly for a pretty long time.

This isn't much different with what I've said at times in the past, at this point I see the Constitution as little more than a means to an end. Any meaning it had beyond that was lost long ago afaic.

Well if the only constitutional reason they oppose state anti-immigration laws was that it usurps federal authority, thus violating the Supremacy Clause, then they obviously can't make a reasonable distinction there. But that is hardly the only reason people oppose the laws in Arizona and Alabama.

As the article said, Utah is attempting to get a federal waiver. If they don't get it, then, as much as I think its a good idea, the law should be struck down.


Well yeah. The Constitution is simply the highest (legal, as opposed to moral or whatnot) law in the land. It doesn't get any divine favor simply for being that ;). It is like all laws are, a means to an end. The question is what end do people have in mind.

I disagree. To me, the point of the Constitution is to protect the rights of the minority from the tyranny of the majority. Without the Constitution, what would stop a state from deciding, for example, Hispanics should not be allowed to vote? We're not too far removed from that happening with African Americans in the south. The only thing stopping it from happening is the knowledge that it would never pass Constitutional muster.

If the Constitution is just another set of laws, there is not a right that the government can't take away from us. It seems odd that people who (correctly) note that our government serves the needs of corporations and the military to a much greater extent than the needs of the people are the most eager to throw away the few restrictions that remain on its power over us.

Unemployment drops another .2% to 8.3%, the same number as Obama's first full month in office. So much for that holiday hiring spin.

Politics notwithstanding, that's really good news. Things could change for the worst overnight (i.e. Europe implodes), but, for now, I'll take a dose of good news.

Yeah, things are starting to look up a bit. Still a ways to go but nice to see some progress.

Yeah- it's going to take getting a lot more jobs to pull back those who have left the workplace and decrease wage stagnation to really make big changes

SI

Yeah, that's the crazy part about the unemployment numbers. I think true unemployment numbers were hovering around the 16% range. If those people get encouraged by dropping unemployment rates, they could actually reenter the job market and spike the number back up to 8.5-9%. That's why you always have to be reserved about small changes such as this.

To be fair, the U-6 number is down quite a bit (unemployed + underemployed). It's at 15.1 now and Obama's first numbers (Feb 09) were 15.1. That ramp up in 2008 is just crazy: 9.2 up to 15.1. It peaked at 17.2 but really, very little has happened under Obama- positive or negative- for the employment numbers. The hole was really deep, it got a little deeper, and now we're starting to dig back out.

Year	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec	Annual
2002	9.5	9.5	9.4	9.7	9.5	9.5	9.6	9.6	9.6	9.6	9.7	9.8
2003	10.0	10.2	10.0	10.2	10.1	10.3	10.3	10.1	10.4	10.2	10.0	9.8
2004	9.9	9.7	10.0	9.6	9.6	9.5	9.5	9.4	9.4	9.7	9.4	9.2
2005	9.3	9.3	9.1	8.9	8.9	9.0	8.8	8.9	9.0	8.7	8.7	8.6
2006	8.4	8.4	8.2	8.1	8.2	8.4	8.5	8.4	8.0	8.2	8.1	7.9
2007	8.4	8.2	8.0	8.2	8.2	8.3	8.4	8.4	8.4	8.4	8.4	8.8
2008	9.2	9.0	9.1	9.2	9.7	10.1	10.5	10.8	11.1	11.8	12.7	13.5
2009	14.2	15.1	15.7	15.8	16.4	16.5	16.5	16.7	16.8	17.2	17.1	17.1
2010	16.7	16.9	16.9	17.0	16.6	16.5	16.5	16.6	16.9	16.8	16.9	16.6
2011	16.1	15.9	15.7	15.9	15.8	16.2	16.1	16.2	16.4	16.0	15.6	15.2
2012	15.1

SI

Europe will go fucky-fuck in March. Greek default will happen. I met with someone yesterday who has connections at the very high-level (we're talking EU heads-of-state), and that was the conclusion he's drawn/they're prepping for.

Only question is to what extent have the markets priced it in, and to what extent will they react anyways. And will there be an effective ECB/EFSF/EU firewall to protect Italy/Spain.

Yeah, none of the numbers are good. Underemployment is likely a big problem too. But any improvement is still improvement in the big picture. At least it's not getting worse.

My work is so busy right now that we cannot hire people quickly enough (and I wish we could...its killing me). Niche jobs but still not a bad thing.

I imagine the same to be true with some of the vendors we buy things from as we are seeing really big delays in getting product so clearly they don't have the manpower to produce enough for the market.

One thought about the depressed wages thing I had (anecdotally). Since late 2008 we've lost a LOT of management overhead. Directors, VPs, and even Presidents & a CIO. Only 1 of them have been replaced in actual title and the rest have just had job duties repurposed. That would (in my company's case) account for quite a bit of wage depression I imagine but overall the company is close to flat on employee count so I dont know if thats a good thing or not but we definitely have more "doers" (and are hiring more) than we have management than we did in the past.

Even if there is some progressivity in the federal tax code it's largely offset by the states.

I'd like to see the ratio of the bottom 1% to the top 1%, or even the bottom 20% to the top 20%.

Don't know about other areas but same for ERP consulting. I like to think this is a leading indicator (but could be due to refresh cycles) ... can't hire enough.

.

First six words reduced the rest of the statement to "sensationalistic twaddle"

Why does it have to be government or charities? There are programs better run by charities ad there are programs better run by government.

"The enemy of my enemy is my friend," per old Arab proverb.

Leader Of Al Qaeda Calls On Muslims To Help Syrian Rebels | Fox News

I actually feel sorry for Assad. As ME strongmen goes, he seemed relatively pragmatic and the only time he bumps against us is Lebanon (I think). Any government faced with civil war would ultimately take up arms against the population advocating for it.

His main problem was not wanting to compromise (enough) before it escalated to this point. Its pretty serious crap when Turkey and large number of ME Muslim countries turn against you.

Hope he goes. It'll further isolate Iran and Russia/China will have lost a degree of influence.

And Chris Christie decides to be the "before" picture in future civil rights textbooks.

dola

Chris Christie may be miscalculating how the gay marriage issue will have developed by 2016. It would be sweet justice if his veto dooms his future presidential hopes.

I have no doubt that by 2020, the GOP candidate will be running on a plank that will include married gay voters as part of their social outreach platform. What we're seeing now is the death throngs of bigotry as they desperately lash about trying to fight the inevitable.

Given the steady decline in our civilization you could be right.

He'll still be just as correct then as he was today.

And the Democrats knew this was going to happen and failed to push this through when they held a majority in the state senate and had a Democrat as governor a few years ago.

I wonder how many Democrats in the state senate voted yes purely because they knew Christie would veto but would have voted no otherwise.

In other words, not at all.

Big Banks Accused of Manipulating Key Interest Rates | Business | TIME.com

and heeeeeeeeeerrre comes the next banking scandal...

However, he's playing his cards well for someone who vetoed a marriage equality bill, by saying that he thinks this is something for the voters to decide on the ballot rather than just the representatives. So he can, plausibly, say he wasn't against marriage equality, just the manner in which it was attempted.

But wait, isn't Obama not in favor of gay marriage?

Exactly. But some liberals have convinced themselves that he's just faking for political reasons (wouldn't that be worse though?)

Of course Obama is lying on the issue - gay marriage opinion is evolving over time, and he's done more for gay rights than any president to date.

But IMO, I look forward to the time when Craig or JIMGA or any of the others who hold on so dearly to the past have a gay kid, or a gay niece or nephew, or grandkid, and see if they can explain to them in good conscience why they ought to be second class citizens.

I actually think that those who think Obama is lying on the issue are deluding themselves (just as most liberals thought Obama would be the great lefty hope instead of a centrist).

Whether he's faking it or not isn't important. He absolutely will not look as good in historical context as if he'd supported it sooner, but the reason liberals will and have given him a pass is (as Crapshoot noted) that he's done more for gay rights than any other President. Obama will be known as the President that ended DADT, and before his term is up maybe DOMA as well. If you can't see how that will differ him from Christie in the historical context, then I don't know what to say.

Making people vote for their civil rights is a bunch of bullshit and I'm confident it will be correctly seen as such by 2016.

Obama flew over my office today in a helicopter. I got nothing.

And he can say that until he's blue in the face, it's still a bullshit argument.

Saying that "it ought to be decided by the voters" is to say that Congress giving women and non-whites the vote via the 14th and 19th Amendments was illegitimate because white males should have made that decision instead.

Saying "I'm not against marriage equality, I just think the voters should have made the decision" is going to be wishy-washy as all hell with the Republican base, and is not going to be the winner he thinks it'd be among independent voters, either.

It's basically a no-win play, other than to shore up his right to prevent a primary opponent if he chooses to run for re-election as Governor of NJ.

You think so? Gay marriage support is at over 50% in the latest Gallup poll. Do you truly believe that Obama doesn't support gay marriage? Hell, I'd expect him to note it officially right after the 2014 mid-term elections (to blow back any potential politiical implications).

Yeah, I truly believe that Obama doesn't support gay marriage. If he did, he'd be backing it right now. A lot of liberals have assigned a lot to Obama that he never actually backed. I think marriage equality is one of those things.