Obama Will Cut Money To People, More For Corporations, Pentagon

President Obama will call for a three-year freeze in spending on many domestic programs..The freeze would cover the agencies and programs for which Congress allocates specific budgets each year, from air traffic control and farm subsidies to education, nutrition and national parks...But it would exempt the budgets for the Pentagon..The payoff in budget savings would be small relative to the deficit.

Because Mr. Obama plans to exempt military spending while leaving many popular domestic programs vulnerable, his move is certain to further anger liberals in his party. Senior Democrats in Congress are already upset by the possible collapse of health care legislation and the troop buildup in Afghanistan, among other things.

Administration officials also are working with Congress on roughly $150 billion in additional stimulus spending and tax cuts to spur job creation....One administration official said that limiting the much smaller discretionary domestic budget would have larger symbolic value....Only when the public believes such perceived waste is being wrung out will they be willing to consider reductions in popular entitlement programs [such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security], the official said.

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Your Vote Is Now Worth A Thimble Of Warm Spit

A ruling by the Supreme Court regarding spending on advertising is based on the idea that corporations are human beings. On Thursday, the court voted 5-4 that corporations can throw as much money as they want to back or oppose candidates in elections. The decision is based on the concept that corporations have the right to freedom of speech.

When the men who put this country together back in the 1700s decided that freedom of speech should be guaranteed, I'm pretty darned sure they were thinking that the people doing the speaking would be people. You know, living, breathing human beings who do things like, you know, help a kid do his math homework.

Has a corporation ever helped a high school kid do her geometry?...Has a corporation ever put on a 100-pound backpack and gotten off a helicopter in 120-degree heat in Afghanistan with bullets flying all around? Has a corporation ever died for its country?...A corporation has never fallen in love. A corporation has never sent a girlfriend a basket of flowers on Valentine's Day. A corporation has never helped an old lady cross the street. A corporation can't join the Boy Scouts...Has a corporation ever had a heartbeat? Has a corporation ever had a pulse?

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Obama's Bankers: Do As We Say, Not As We Do

Some homeowners may keep paying because they think it’s immoral to default. This view has been reinforced by government officials like former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., who while in office said that anyone who walked away from a mortgage would be “simply a speculator — and one who is not honoring his obligation.” (The irony of a former investment banker denouncing speculation seems to have been lost on him.)

But does this really come down to a question of morality?

A provocative paper by Brent White, a law professor at the University of Arizona, makes the case that borrowers are actually suffering from a “norm asymmetry.” In other words, they think they are obligated to repay their loans even if it is not in their financial interest to do so, while their lenders are free to do whatever maximizes profits. It’s as if borrowers are playing in a poker game in which they are the only ones who think bluffing is unethical.

That norm might have been appropriate when the lender was the local banker. More commonly these days, however, the loan was initiated by an aggressive mortgage broker who maximized his fees at the expense of the borrower’s costs, while the debt was packaged and sold to investors who bought mortgage-backed securities in the hope of earning high returns, using models that predicted possible default rates....

Banks are unlikely to endorse [a moral approch] if they think people will keep paying off their mortgages.

--more from NYT story

Friends, Death, and PC Think

My best friend here in Thailand happens to be a conservative. Not an irrational barbarian, but a man who is so distrustful of big government, he's willing to cut the corporations some slack. We have yet to discuss how the Bush Supreme Court turned our election process over to corporations the other day. According to the Supremes, corporations are people but its workers are not: corporations have a perfect right to contractually limit the civil liberties of its workers, and can even get paid by insurance companies when their workers die. Naturally, my friend is anti-PC. Then, again, so am I when it goes "too far." But how much is too far?

Do you agree that killing people is not good? If so, why do we show people killing people in movies? How about if the killer is a "bad guy"? If killing is bad, only bad guys kill, right? How about if the bad guy is on "our side"? Then it' ok, right? In our present Obamanation, can we all agree that it is ok to kill a "bad guy" if he is on the "other side"? No?

"The logic of the Smoke-Free Movies campaign, which seeks an R rating for almost all instances of on-screen puffing, is straightforward enough," writes the NYT. If the Motion Picture Association of America’s ratings board advises parents about sex, violence, language and drug use, why should it not also shield children from exposure to a lethal (if legal) product that hooks, sickens and kills hundreds of thousands of people a year? Since 2007 the M.P.A.A. has considered smoking when it makes its judgments, and one studio, Disney, has since then made all its family films smoke free....Smoke-Free Movies has claimed that the R for tobacco is not only right but also inevitable, and such questions, and the quarrels that follow from them, are also inevitable. As are further attempts to expand the purview of the M.P.A.A., to include other products and behaviors. What about guns? What about trans fats? What about beer and Styrofoam and high-fructose corn syrup?" What about killing people?

Our government has legally killed millions of people in one way or the other during the past decade. If we don't want to show smoking on screen, even by the "bad guys," isn't it logical not to show killing on screen as well? During the Bush years pics of returning dead soldiers' coffins were deleted from the wiew of U.S. citizens. Was that PC? How about the torture pics that Obama has banned? Will our government prevent us from seeing another pic of a burning child screaming down an Asian road in the name of PC? Like Katrina it was a defining moment, wasn't it?

--Jerry Politex

Fascist U.S.A.: Supremes Decide Corporations Will Control Elections

With a single, disastrous 5-to-4 ruling, the Supreme Court has thrust politics back to the robber-baron era of the 19th century. Disingenuously waving the flag of the First Amendment, the court’s conservative majority has paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding....

As a result of Thursday’s ruling, corporations have been unleashed from the longstanding ban against their spending directly on political campaigns and will be free to spend as much money as they want to elect and defeat candidates. If a member of Congress tries to stand up to a wealthy special interest, its lobbyists can credibly threaten: We’ll spend whatever it takes to defeat you....

Congress must act immediately to limit the damage of this radical decision, which strikes at the heart of democracy.

more NYT Ed

Bush Katrina/Haiti Statement "Tragically Bungled"

Joined by former President Bill Clinton during a series of interviews on the Sunday shows, Bush [43] touted the need to get relief to the Haitian people, in both a streamlined and responsible way. Asked by host David Gregory if he drew any lessons from the recovery efforts after Hurricane Katrina (widely regarded as tragically bungled), Bush replied:

"First of all, it takes time to get the supplies in place. That shouldn't deter them. In other words, there's an expectation-- amongst people that things are going to happen quickly. And sometimes it's hard to make things happen quickly. Secondly, there is a great reservoir of good will that wants to help. And that's why he asked us to help, and we're glad to do it."

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Obama Health Care Disaster Killing Dem Majority, Alienating Public

How could the health care issue have turned from a reform that was going to make Barack Obama ten feet tall into a poison pill for Democratic senators? Whether or not Martha Coakley squeaks through in Massachusetts on Tuesday, the health bill has already done incalculable political damage and will likely do more. Polls show that the public now opposes it by margins averaging ten to fifteen points, and widening. It is hard to know which will be the worse political defeat -- losing the bill and looking weak, or passing it and leaving it as a piñata for Republicans to attack between now and November. Either way, the Massachusetts surprise should be a wake-up call of the most fundamental kind. Obama needs to stop playing inside games with bankers and insurance lobbyists, and start being a fighter for regular Americans.

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