A Budget Cut I Can Believe in

This is one of the best plans I've seen lately to reduce spending at the federal level: "Today, U.S. Congressman Jim Moran (D-Va), joined Representatives Earl Blumenauer, Ed Markey, John Conyers, Lois Capps, Peter Welch and David Price to introduce legislation to cut the budget by ending roughly $40 billion over five years in wasteful subsidies to the oil industry." The bill is called the Ending Big Oil Subsidies Act.

The sponsor of the bill, Representative Blumenauer reminds us how well the oil industry actually does for itself. He said:

The oil industry is one of the most profitable industries in the world and does not need help from the government. With Congress already discussing painful budget cuts that will require American families to make sacrifices, it is only fair that we also stop the handouts to our richest oil companies. It makes no sense that we are borrowing money from China to subsidize the most profitable industry in the world and corporations like ExxonMobil that earn billions every year. It’s time for us to have a serious, rational discussion about cutting the budget.

From a policy perspective, it just doesn't make much sense to hand out tens of billions of dollars to wealthy corporations while we cut spending from programs that need it. While Americans struggle with unemployment, hunger, and homelessness, why should we continue to subsidize big oil corporations? It will be interesting to see if Republicans will even allow this to come to a vote. I kind of feel like they are going to choose their big business constituents over actually trying to limit spending. I predict they will show that they are actually just budget peacocks.

Another One BItes the Dust

It's hard to find compelling news stories what with all that's going on in the Middle East. We got one this week that was almost buried when Jim Webb announced he would not seek reelection. This was a little surprising, but we did all suspect it, especially after he released his fundraising numbers. Naturally, this led our conservative media to whip up their frenzy to "inform" us that it pretty much guarantees that Republicans will take the Senate in 2012. I even saw one "expert" on our local Fox affiliate saying that with Webb, Joe Lieberman, and Kent Conrad retiring, it would make it that much more difficult for the Democrats to hold the Senate.

Not so fast. I hate to let facts get in the way, but I don't think this is that terrible. First, I'll concede Kent Conrad. That was a winnable seat that the Democrats will lose. Joe Lieberman? In Connecticut? Not only will the Democrats hold that seat, but they'll get a better Senator to replace Joe Lieberman. He's caused many problems since Ned Lamont beat him in a primary, and I don't see the Republicans picking this one up. Let's look at Virginia now. Just before the announcement, my new favorite politics blog looked at the potential reelection match up between Webb and former Senator George Allen (let's just assume for now that Allen wins his primary against a tea party organizer that has already declared). According to Public Policy Polling, Webb was only leading Allen 49-45 and Webb has a 43/41 approval/disapproval rating. Not bad. But also not overwhelmingly convincing for Webb. Allen isn't any more popular though. His approval/disapproval is 40/41 overall and 38/45 with independents. Allen's numbers just don't jump out to me as a well-known candidate who has it in the bag.

Now, I'm just going to spitball here about possible replacements for Webb. Tim Kaine has already won a statewide race but has said he will not run. I'm going to guess he will jump in if polling shows he is the only candidate who can beat Allen. I've heard Gerry Connolly may jump in. I like Tom Perriello more. Sure, he lost his House election, but he stuck by his principles. It was a tough year for Democrats and he fared pretty well downstate near Charlottesville. If Terry McAuliffe decides to run, he has great name recognition, a huge ability to raise funds, and has been doing good work creating jobs in Virginia. That's a bench that is 3 deep with names that could probably fare pretty well in an election. At the very least, they would make it difficult for the Republicans to win.

Elsewhere, I have a hunch that Republicans are vulnerable in Maine, Massachusetts, and Nevada. Olympia Snowe is already being challenged by a tea party group and may lose the very far right in a more liberal state. Scott Brown is also being challenged by tea partiers, but has amassed a large war chest above $7 million already. He's also the state's most popular politician, but this is still Massachusetts. Jon Ensign is not popular in Nevada since he had an affair with a married staffer and had his parents pay off her husband. Nevada also has a growing Hispanic population and an excellent blueprint to follow from Harry Reid's recent win. Finally, since Webb's announcement, Jon Kyl has announced his retirement. Kyl was going to be an easy win, and it will still be difficult for the Democrats to pick up this seat, especially since they don't have any big names down there. However, this seat is now at least more in play and will probably require some resources to defend.

Now, throw in the fact that this is a Presidential election year, the electorate appears to be changing from 2010 back towards 2008 (but not all the way), the fact that Obama's approval ratings are growing in some of these states, and my prediction that Republicans nominate a Presidential candidate that is out of the mainstream, I'm going to guess that the Democrats are not in as precarious a situation as the media would make it seem. It's not that absurd to say that Republicans will shoot themselves in the foot again by choosing "ideological purity" over electability in Massachusetts and Maine while further weakening their prospects across the country by nominating a weak presidential candidate.

Reagan Turns 100

This past weekend, communities across the country held their annual love fests for Ronald Reagan. I find this amusing. I find it even more amusing when every Republican, especially tea partiers, bow down at his figurative feet as if he was some sort of deity. Then, in the same breath, they go on some nonsensical rant about taxes. It's funny because Reagan would be a democrat today. Eugene Robinson, so eloquent at stating the obvious, makes the case today:

Some Republicans, I suppose, might be so enraptured by the Reagan legend that they are unaware of his actual record. I hate to break it to Sarah Palin, but Reagan raised taxes. Often. Sometimes by a lot.

When he took office as governor of California in 1967, the state faced a huge budget deficit. Reagan promptly raised taxes by $1 billion - at a time when the entire state budget amounted to just $6 billion. It was then the biggest state tax increase in history. During Reagan's eight years in Sacramento, the top state income tax rate increased from 7 percent to 11 percent. Business and sales taxes also soared.

When Reagan moved into the White House, he brought with him a theory that critics derided as "voodoo economics" - the idea that the way to balance the budget was to lower taxes, not raise them. Reagan quickly pushed through the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, a tax cut of about $264 billion. Republicans seem to rank this event alongside Columbus's discovery of the New World as one of the great milestones in human history.

What eludes the GOP's selective memory is that Reagan subsequently raised taxes 11 times, beginning with the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982. All told, he took back roughly half of that hallowed 1981 tax cut. Why? Because he realized that the United States needed an effective federal government - and that to be effective, the government needed more money.

Republicans laud Reagan's unshakable commitment to smaller government. Yet federal employment rolls grew under his watch; they shrank under Bill Clinton. Reagan had promised to eliminate the departments of Energy and Education, but he didn't. Instead, he signed legislation that added to the Cabinet a new Department of Veterans Affairs.

It's no secret that I've never been a Reagan supporter, but I'll give him credit that he at least knew that to have an effective government, you sometimes have to raise taxes. Cutting every government program doesn't make government better. I think Burnsy nailed it today when he said to me, "Fuck the Gipper. I don't understand why he's so revered; I'd rather the mantle of Clinton than Reagan any day."

Friedman's Before Egypt

We continue to monitor the situation in Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood just entered talks with the government. In the US, however, the issue always revolves around the question: "What does this mean for Israel?" I may never understand why every foreign policy issue in this country revolves around Israel, but Thomas Friedman had an interesting take:

If Israel does not make a concerted effort to strike a deal with the Palestinians, the next Egyptian government will “have to distance itself from Israel because it will not have the stake in maintaining the close relationship that Mubarak had,” said Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian pollster. With the big political changes in the region, “if Israel remains paranoid and messianic and greedy it will lose all its Arab friends.”

To put it bluntly, if Israelis tell themselves that Egypt’s unrest proves why Israel cannot make peace with the Palestinian Authority, then they will be talking themselves into becoming an apartheid state — they will be talking themselves into permanently absorbing the West Bank and thereby laying the seeds for an Arab majority ruled by a Jewish minority between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

What the turmoil in Egypt also demonstrates is how much Israel is surrounded by a huge population of young Arabs and Muslims who have been living outside of history — insulated by oil and autocracy from the great global trends. But that’s over.

“Today your legitimacy has to be based on what you deliver,” the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, explained to me in his Ramallah office. “Gone are the days when you can say, ‘Deal with me because the other guys are worse.’ ”

I had given up on Netanyahu’s cabinet and urged the U.S. to walk away. But that was B.E. — Before Egypt. Today, I believe President Obama should put his own peace plan on the table, bridging the Israeli and Palestinian positions, and demand that the two sides negotiate on it without any preconditions. It is vital for Israel’s future — at a time when there is already a global campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state — that it disentangle itself from the Arabs’ story as much as possible. There is a huge storm coming, Israel. Get out of the way.

I find faults with the positions of both the Palestinian leadership and the Israelis, but right now, Israel could take the simple steps of halting settlements to restart the peace talks. As Friedman points out, with all that's happening in the Middle East now, renewing peace talks will be essential to the future of both Israel and Palestine.

A Reader Comments

I've previously expressed my frustrations with the country's myopic media. It feels like all we've heard about this past week is Egpyt. I kind of feel badly for Jon Huntsman, who is losing all his good press time. Anyway, my friend Gabe left a comment to my last post about this subject on facebook that I wanted to share:

Uh, speaking of Tunisia, where did they go? They execute a successful peaceful revolution and get what, one day in the news? Now it's all "Egypt Egypt Egypt" all the time, and they haven't even done anything. Big deal that there's thousands of young people in the streets, there are always thousands of young Egyptians in the streets, because none of them have jobs. This is a revolution of Lebowskis. How about we spend a little more time giving kudos to Tunis, yeah?

Criminalized Farting!

You must read this:

I don’t know much about Malawi. I know they had a fuel shortage recently. So when I heard they were banning gas, I thought, “Well, that’s an elegant solution.”

But Malawi isn’t banning gas, it’s going to criminalize passing gas. Yeah, because of all the things going on in Malawi, I’m sure farting is a primary concern. I’m sure the Malawian ambassador to the U.N. is going to love hearing fart jokes in 50 different languages. (And yes, the French guy is going to be obligated under international law to say: “I fart in your general direction.”)

However funny this is, and it surely is that; this measure also leaves a stench of totalitarianism, as ATL goes on to point out:

You know, these laws seem funny, but they’re actually silent but deadly. It’s not so much that the code shows a complete lack of respect for freedom and personal liberty, it’s that these laws mean that the Malawian government can arrest you for any reason or no reason at all.

So if Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika and his ruling party doesn’t like what you think, bang, the international press has a story about how a man was “arrested for farting.” It’s always political protesters, religious leaders, and opposition candidates who get arrested for “farting,” “trespassing in a graveyard,” or “challenging somebody to fight.” Laws about farting just mask the scent of totalitarianism.

Cairo, We Have a Problem

So this week has really been something in the Middle East - Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan. It seems like democracy is spreading across the region (are we finally seeing George Bush's vision when he decided to invade Iraq?), and I know that this is supposed to be a good thing. But please allow our domestic cynics to come out. First, David Brooks "teaches" us that these kind of uprisings are usually successful in forming democracies. However, after explaining the lessons we should have learned, he warns us:

The other thing we’ve learned is that the United States usually gets everything wrong. There have been dozens of democratic uprisings over the years, but the government always reacts like it’s the first one. There seem to be no protocols for these situations, no preset questions to be asked.

Policy makers always underestimate the power of the bottom-up quest for dignity, so they are slow to understand what is happening.

Need examples? Enter Ross Douthat:

Americans don’t like to admit this. We take refuge in foreign policy systems: liberal internationalism or realpolitik, neoconservatism or noninterventionism. We have theories, and expect the facts to fall into line behind them. Support democracy, and stability will take care of itself. Don’t meddle, and nobody will meddle with you. International institutions will keep the peace. No, balance-of-power politics will do it.

But history makes fools of us all. We make deals with dictators, and reap the whirlwind of terrorism. We promote democracy, and watch Islamists gain power from Iraq to Palestine. We leap into humanitarian interventions, and get bloodied in Somalia. We stay out, and watch genocide engulf Rwanda. We intervene in Afghanistan and then depart, and watch the Taliban take over. We intervene in Afghanistan and stay, and end up trapped there, with no end in sight.

Sooner or later, the theories always fail. The world is too complicated for them, and too tragic.

However, we should remember that these moments aren't about us. Sure, we should be concerned about the spread of radical political and religious ideologies and think about our national security, but, as David Ignatius reminds us, these protests are about the people trying to improve their lives:

Washington debate about the new Arab revolt tends to focus on the U.S. role: Has President Obama blundered by not forcing Mubarak out sooner? Should America abandon other oligarchs before it's too late? But this isn't about us. If Washington's well-chosen emissary, former ambassador to Cairo Frank Wisner, has helped broker Mubarak's departure and a stable transition to new elections, so much the better. But Egyptians don't need America to chart their course.

It's encouraging to see that the demonstrators in the streets of Cairo, Amman and Sanaa are not shouting the same tired slogans about "death to America" and "death to Israel" that for several generations have substituted for political debate. And it's reassuring, as well, that the Muslim Brotherhood and other militant groups have so far played it cool. They know that the past "decade of jihad" was ruinous for Muslims and is unpopular.

"This is not about slogans," says [Lebanese journalist Jamil] Mroueh. "The real issue is life: I want an apartment, I want a job." And it's about the dignity that comes from these essential human needs. In reaching out to the military, the protesters have chosen the right allies for a path of stability and change.