Oklahoma and the Crusades

The American Taliban

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vH1gJESvfbc

A religious war (Latin: bellum sacrum) is a war caused by, or justified by, religious differences. It can involve one state with an established religion against another state with a different religion or a different sect within the same religion, or a religiously motivated group attempting to spread its faith by violence, or to suppress another group because of its religious beliefs or practices. The Muslim conquests, the Crusades, the Reconquista, and the French Wars of Religion are frequently cited historical examples.

   I woke this morning at around 1:30. I don't know why. I haven't been sleeping very well lately. I don't know why.

   I began my normal morning routine. Let Herkimer, my invisible cat out. 800 push ups. 972 sit ups. Three 147 count burpees. Meditation. Shower. Looking forward to the Academy Awards today at five o'clock. Herkimer came back. I knew pretty much how my day was going to pan out, what I would write about today. Then I checked my Email.

   I don't get a huge amount of Email on the weekends, and most of it's crap I can quickly delete, however I do usually read those that come from Care2 on a daily basis. They contain about 5 or 6 stories on various subjects that are remarkably concise and easy to get through, and I can send nice Ecards to my friends on holidays from their website.

   Anyway, this mornings Email had two stories concerning the Sooner State, Oklahoma.

   My dear mother actually drove me and my dear sister through Oklahoma once, as fast as possible, on the way to Kansas City.

   The first story concerned how two guys were trying to deny affordable birth control for nearly two million women who live in the state.

   Oklahoma already prevents women from using their insurance plans to help cover abortion services, but that's not enough for these guys.

   State Sen. Clark Jolley ((R) of course) has introduced a measure that would do for contraceptives what they've already done for abortion services.

   "Notwithstanding any other provision of state or federal law, no employer shall be required to provide or pay for any benefit or service related to abortion or contraception through the provision of health insurance to his or her employees."

   Jolley said the inspiration for the measure came from just one constituent, a Dr. Dominic Pedulla, an Oklahoma City cardiologist who says he is morally against contraception and abortion. He said he had to give up his small group health plan because the only plans available in the state required coverage for contraception and sterilization.

   Why did he have this coverage in the first place, I ask myself, if he was so morally opposed to contraception? Did he not know what he was buying? Now he's making a big stink about it?!

   Here's his explanation:   

   He was forced to buy it because all small group plans cover it. Now he's going to have to find more expensive insurance.

   Poor baby. He's a freaking cardiologist for Christ's sake! He can't afford to pay a bit more if he's so morally opposed?

   I guess not. He'd rather have the entire state ban contraceptive care on all health insurance plans.

   Also:

   Women are worse off with contraception because it suppresses and disables who they are, Pedulla said.

   "Part of their identity is the potential to be a mother," Pedulla said. "They are being asked to suppress and radically contradict part of their own identity, and if that wasn't bad enough, they are being asked to poison their bodies."

   Jesus H Christ and his mother Alice!

   So this guy knows what a woman's place in society is... shouldn't be anything except a nice complacent mom. And a man's role I guess is to provide guidance to all of these ladies who just don't know any better, or what's good for them.

   And all of the women in Oklahoma are being asked to poison their bodies? Who's asking them to do that? Poison? The Food and Drug Administration approved the first oral birth control pill in 1960, and that type of contraception is so safe that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends making it available without a prescription.

   I say if he's so worried about poisoned bodies why doesn't he have his pal Jolley introduce a measure banning cigarettes and booze?

   But public health is not their goal. Again, it's ideology, theirs, that they want to force it on everyone else.

   It sickens me.

   Another Oklahoma City doctor, Eli Reshef, medical director of the Bennett Fertility Institute, noted that depriving women of contraception increases the likelihood of abortion.

   "If one does not have access to contraceptives, unintended pregnancies can occur," and "with unintended pregnancies, abortions will increase," Reshef said. "Half of all unintended pregnancies will end up as an abortion."

   But that doesn't seem to concern these two morons. The measure, Senate Bill 452  passed the Senate Business and Commerce Committee by a vote of 9-0 with no debate and now heads to the full Senate. I wonder what will happen there.

   Lovely women of Oklahoma, migrate to California like in "The Grapes of Wrath." We will love and cherish you.

   The second story concerned education, or rather, the denial thereof.

   Let's say your a high school science teacher in Tulsa, OK, and you ask your students to turn in a paper concerning the age of the Earth. That's a simple enough assignment. The age of this planet is well known to be approximately 4.54 billion years old, determined by evidence from radiometric age dating of meteorite material and is consistent with the ages of the oldest-known terrestrial and lunar samples. Half of your class turn in papers with the correct answer. Accordingly you grade these papers with a A. The other half turn in papers stating the age of the Earth is around 6,000 years old, based on counting backwards people found in the Bible, back to the Garden of Eden. By Oklahoma law, you are required to give these students an A as well. You cannot do otherwise. Last Tuesday a bill mandating this practice was approved by the Oklahoma Common Education committee by a 9-8 vote. Issues concerning climate change and evolution are included as well. Of course they are.

   From Mother Jones:

   "Gus Blackwell, the Republican state representative who introduced the bill, insists that his legislation has nothing to do with religion; it simply encourages scientific exploration. "I proposed this bill because there are teachers and students who may be afraid of going against what they see in their textbooks," says Blackwell, who previously spent 20 years working for the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma. "A student has the freedom to write a paper that points out that highly complex life may not be explained by chance mutations."

      WTF? "students who may be afraid of going against what they see in their textbooks."

That's the whole point of having textbooks, to have a standard of accepted knowledge of which there is little debate. Otherwise a student can spew out any dribble they want... about anything!

   If students disagree with what's being taught for obvious religious reasons, then this is cause for discussion within the classroom, but to allow students to go through their education without applying accepted standards is doing them a huge disservice as you are allowing them to enter a real world for which they will be totally unprepared for. You are essentially equating opinion with fact. 

   This is just another attempt to get creationism into schools, 25 years after the Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana law that mandated religious instruction in science classes, and certainly has nothing to do with "scientific exploration."

   Judy Mulland, who wrote the article, reports "Just a few weeks into the 2013 legislative session, there are already anti-evolution bills circulating in Missouri, Montana, Colorado, Indiana, in addition to Oklahoma. And in some cases, like this one, climate change has taken a prominent place, along with evolution, as a target for creationists."

   Yet there's more sinister movements afoot.

   Wikipedia tells us:

   "School choice is a term or label given to a wide array of programs offering students and their families alternatives to publicly provided schools, to which students are generally assigned by the location of their family residence. In the United States, the most common option offered by 'school choice' programs are educational voucher programs. These programs offer a given student and their family the option to take a subsidy from public educational funds and put that money towards tuition in private schools. This subsidy may also be accomplished through tax-credit programs. Other 'school choice' options include open enrollment laws that allow students to attend other public schools and charter schools, and homeschooling."

   K.C. Boyd reports from Altenet:

   "With the money of wealth funders like Richard and Betsy DeVos (sister of Blackwater scion Eric Prince and daughter of Elsa and Edgar Prince of the Amway fortune) and the Walton, Koch and Scaife Foundations, simpatico politicians are hard at work bringing  Dominionist ideals quietly into the forefront of American education policy. While much of the country argues about budgets, deficits, and guns, a cleverly camouflaged package of School Choice and ”Bible-driven curricula“ make their way up the ladder.    

   On the surface, School Choice is purportedly about increasing opportunities for inner city and rural youth. The all-important subtext, however, is that School Choice is really about freeing up dollars for Christian-based education. An important arrow that energizes today’s religious quiver is the intentional misuse of language in changing the debate by referring to public schools as “government schools” and public education as a “government school monopoly,” thus instantly and directly speaking to Tea Partiers and Libertarians.

   To still relatively scant notice, the call for “School Choice” or Vouchers continues to play out in state capitols across the nation in an effort to increase Biblically based education through a redirection of tax dollars from public to private religious schools. In order to accomplish the end goal of Christianizing all students, stealth remains largely the rule of the day."

   This is a stealth program, a patient program, a well funded program to change the fundamental way our educational system works, to slowly transition it from one that is secular in nature to one that teaches Christian fundamentalism.  

   Rachel Tabachnick of Talk to Action reports:

   "'We need to be cautious about talking too much about these activities," Dick DeVos warned in a December 2002 speech at the Heritage Foundation. DeVos was introduced by former Secretary of Education William Bennett and then proposed a stealth strategy for promoting school vouchers in state legislatures.  DeVos and his wife Betsy had already spent millions promoting voucher initiatives that were soundly rejected by voters.  Pro-privatization think tanks had concluded that vouchers were the most politically viable way to "dismantle" public schools; the DeVoses persevered.  Dick DeVos introduced his 2002 Heritage Foundation audience to a covert strategy to provide "rewards or consequences" to state legislators, learning from the activities of the Great Lake Education Project (GLEP) initiated by Betsy DeVos. Vouchers should be promoted by local "grass roots" entities and could not be "viewed as only a conservative idea."  DeVos added, "This has got to be the battle.  It will not be as visible."   

   Ten years later, the DeVos stealth strategy has been implemented and is winning the voucher war in several states.  As recommended to the Heritage Foundation in 2002, the public face of the movement is bipartisan and grass roots, and millions of dollars are poured into media firms to reinforce that image. However, behind the scenes the movement continues to be led by the DeVoses, and the funding used to provide "rewards or consequences" for state legislators continues to be raised from a small group of mega-donors."  

   The Crusades that lasted between 1095 and 1291, used violence to achieve it's goals. People like Richard and Betsy DeVoses employ other methods appropriate for our times, yet it's no less a war. Those who share their beliefs would turn this country into one as religiously fundamental as that in Afghanistan and the first step in combating this movement is to be aware that it exists.

Drought, California

2012 Drought

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRCYIfbzcWE

   When I checked my computer a few Saturdays ago for the latest weather conditions here in Los Angeles it didn't say anything about it raining.

   Yet when I was on the westbound leg of my daily journey across the 6th Street Bridge I espied dark and heavy rain clouds to the south. Actually they weren't rain clouds per-say, but raining clouds, dumping vast quantities of water as they headed north.

   North?! That is where I was!

   I finished my walk and got home nice and dry. Not like what happened a couple of months ago when for the second time in my life I got caught walking at the very middle of a long bridge when water began to pour out of the sky.

   You know what happens when you get caught in the middle of a long bridge when water begins to pour out of the sky? You can turn around and go back where you came from, or you can continue on your way. It doesn't matter, the distance to the end of the bridge is the same.

   You get freaking soaked, that's what happens, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.

   It provokes a certain sense of eternal helplessness.

   Albert Hammond was quite wrong when he wrote "It never rains in Southern California."

   Southern California, at least, is essentially a big desert. The Mojave Desert lies directly to the east of Los Angeles. I mean it's so close I could walk there in about... two months. At 25,000 square miles it stretches from California into southern Nevada, southwestern Utah, and eastern Arizona.

   My sister lives in the Mojave desert, as Bullhead City resides within it's boundaries. So does Las Vegas for that matter.

   The Mojave Desert contains Death Valley, which is the lowest place in North America (300 feet below sea level), and sometimes the hottest  (the temperature surpassing 130 °F in the lower elevations at times (as does Bullhead)).

   California also contains the Colorado Desert... yeah, I know, it should probably be called the California Desert since it's in California and all, but it's actually part of the larger Sonoran Desert, which shares a border with the Colorado Plateau. The Colorado Desert lies in the southern border of the Mojave Desert in California and stretches down south into Mexico, which makes all of the southeastern part of California a desert.

   We have another one! The Great Basin Desert, which lies on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where I've camped out on occasion. It contains Mount Whitney, which is the highest mountain in the contiguous United States (14,505 ft and 3 inches), which are all of the states except Hawaii and Alaska.

   The Great Basin Desert is part of the larger Great Basin, which stretches all across Nevada, into Utah, up into Idaho and Wyoming, and north into Oregon.

   It is the only cold desert in the U.S., because most of the rain that falls within it is snow, which is cold usually. The "rainshadow effect" makes it that way. Winds from the Pacific Ocean rise over those Sierra Nevada Mountains, which cools them because the mountains are high. The cooling makes the air lose its water in the form of rain. By the time the winds cross over the mountains and sweep down the far side, they are very dry and absorb moisture from the surrounding area. This drying effect is responsible for creating the Great Basin Desert.

   According to Wikipedia the Great Basin Desert has no history, which I find rather odd.

   Anyway, my point is there is a lot of desert in California. A lot more then say... New Jersey.

   Since Los Angeles is on the border of a big desert we don't have a lot of water here. We've  even gone to war over water when William Mulholland, of "Chinatown" and Mulholland Drive fame, built the Los Angeles aqueduct in 1913 and stole a lot of water from the Owens Valley, which is actually within the Great Basin Desert in eastern California. The farmers there didn't like getting their water stolen because they wanted their water to grow crops, and Mulholland was stealing it from them, along with the mayor of L.A., Frederick Eaton, who used a whole bunch of dirty, underhanded tricks to get their water rights. By 1928, Los Angeles owned 90 percent of the water in Owens Valley and agriculture interests in the region were effectively dead.

   To add insult to injury, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) built a second aqueduct in 1970 to suck up all of the groundwater in the Owens Valley.

   We also steal water from the Colorado River, even though the Colorado River is around 300 miles east of L.A., and never enters California at all (it runs along the states southeast border).

   We suck it up near where my sister lives, near Lake Havasu, on the border of California and Arizona, and it goes to the city of Riverside, which shares it with Los Angeles.

   Other cities like San Diego and Phoenix steal water from it as well. The river now serves 30 million people in seven U.S. states and Mexico, with 70 percent or more of its water siphoned off to irrigate 3.5 million acres of cropland.

   This is all well and good (unless you live in Owens Valley), when there's lots of rain to keep the water flowing. But my state, like 80% of contiguous United States, have and are facing severe drought conditions.

   We've had droughts in the past. In 1976-1977 a drought caused surface water supplies in some parts of the state to dwindle sharply, and large quantities of groundwater were extracted to make up the shortage. The drought did the most damage to California's agriculture and livestock industry. A drought lasting from 1987 to 1992 is considered the most severe drought in California's recorded history. It seems droughts periodically transpire on a somewhat regular basis... in California, and the rest of the country.

   But what happens when you factor in a new set of circumstances that effect an old problem, such as global warming on our country's penchant to dry up.

   California experienced drought conditions in 2007, 2008, and 2009. Then it became wet again, for a little while, and now we're experiencing another drought.

   As of last February the precipitation in the state had only hit 60 percent of the average. Our snowpack water supplies are low as well.

   Drought conditions effect the number of wildfires that annually plague Southern California. The drier the conditions, the easier it is for fires to start and spread.

   According to the analysis of the drought's impacts by the Pacific Institute, a Northern California think tank that focuses on water issues, in an average year hydropower produces 15% of the electricity for the state.

   Citing data from the California Energy Commission, the authors found that figure dropped to 8%-10% with falling runoff levels during the 2007-09 drought. Utilities made up for the loss by burning more natural gas and buying more power from out of state, driving up production costs as well as greenhouse gas emissions. The authors calculated that the switch to other power sources resulted in an additional 13 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

   According to the Union of Concerned Scientists (who keep sending me Emails all of the time... I don't know why):

   Warmer global temperatures are expected to cause an intensification of the hydrologic cycle, with increased evaporation over both land and water. The higher evaporation rates will lead to greater drying of soils and vegetation, especially during the warm season. Climate models also project changes in the distribution and timing of rainfall. The combination of a decrease in summer rainfall and increased evaporation will lead to more severe and longer-lasting droughts in some areas. Increasing drought frequency has the potential to affect land-based natural and managed ecosystems, coastal systems, and both freshwater quality and quantity. Increasing drought frequency also has the potential to increase the likelihood of wildfires.   

   To sum up, California has experienced severe drought conditions on a periodic basis. Drought effects the amount of water available for use by humans for various purposes. For instance, the city of Los Angeles uses 200 billion gallons of water a year for personal, industrial, and agricultural (including the production of livestock foods) use, Los Angeles depends on water to provide for the production of energy as well. The effect drought has on the available water supply is to lessen it, which means other sources of water needs to be utilized (The prospect of increased demand coupled with reduced supply from the Mono and Owens basins is causing the LADWP to look into a number of new water sources, including a new direct connection to the California Aqueduct, increased use of recycled water, use of stormwater capture and reuse, and increased conservation (  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/01/business/energy-environment/a-costly-california-desalination-plant-bets-on-future-affordability.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130301&_r=0 )). Global warming, or climate change, whichever term you prefer, will increasingly tend to exacerbate the drought conditions we're already experiencing (as well as increase the amount of wildfires which are prevalent in the area. It will also effect insect propagation (A new study made at University of Washington suggests that global warming seems to lead in fact to more insects. Warmer climates seem to increase their reproductive rate and population growth, with widespread effects on agriculture, public health and conservation).

   So this is a big problem that we're currently ignoring, at least on a national policy basis. Since the government is reluctant to take the necessary steps required to curb the oil and gas industry's continued tendency to increase the amount of greenhouse gases pouring into the atmosphere, I'm wondering when other economic interests, such as the aforementioned agricultural and  hydropower interests, and other industries such as insurance companies for instance that are increasingly being adversely effected by warmer temperatures, will finally wake up and take steps of their own to begin to do something about this very real problem.

   Maybe a war between Archer Daniels Midland and Exxon will force the government into action.

   Just maybe.

Sequestration

President pushes for sequestration resolution

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m46sSfn_C0k

Picture Legend
1. Some building in D.C.
2. Paul Krugman
3. Chris Good  

   As I've mentioned before I have Facebook friends I've never met who live in the Eastern part of the country, a couple from the South. Not surprisingly our political views often differ, and sometimes when they post comments that are so patently false and outrageous I get into it with them, battling with facts rather than what I would like the world to be like as they do, and we go back and forth, and nothing ever comes of it. I shouldn't do this. I know I'll never change their world view from which they must take a great deal of comfort. However, I never start these things (I do repost items of a political nature that I agree with, and I shouldn't even do that), and if I find their comments so disturbing I feel a need to challenge them.

   I'm getting better at ignoring them though, I really am.

   However I found one comment from a friend yesterday that I responded to. I apparently share 8 mutual friends with this person, including my dear sister.

   I probably did this because he was commenting on the up coming sequestration federal budget cuts that are due to go into effect a week from now, with which this post is concerned with.

   This is what he wrote verbatim:

can you ecplain to me why obama is blaming the republicans, for the sequestration coming next week when it was the white houses idea,last year,gdp is at 0.1%,unemployment is up,and everyone knows where gas prices are at and going up,and this president is still pointing his finger,and of corse the main strean media,still has no hard line questions for this guy,with obama its always someone elses fault,a good leader takes responsabilty,this man has never taken any,then why is his approval rate so high

   I have no idea what he's talking about for the country's GDP which is not counted as a percentage and is currently stands at 15.09 trillion dollars and growing. Unemployment is at 7.8% and heading downward, not up, and gas prices are high, but the President has no control over that, yet I imagine his comment is trying to blame Obama for this.

   This was my reply to him:

I guess it's because the President can't implement policies, only Congress can. Oh yeah, and all of the House Republicans voted for it, and now say it's a bad thing, but won't stop it from occuring when it's completely in their power to do so. That may be the reason

   And low and behold, even though these comments appear on his Timeline, I received no reply. None whatsoever. This is the first time this has ever happened.

   Now we've had these battles before and remained friends, and I do understand that people are entitled to their own opinions, but as Ambassador Daniel Moynihan has stated, not their own facts.

   Well lets take a look at the facts of sequestration, as well as I can present them.

   What is sequestration? Funny you should ask.

   The word sequestration seems to mean a lot of things.

   Since the time of Rome the word meant the act of removing, separating, or seizing anything from the possession of its owner under process of law for the benefit of creditors or the state, which sucks if your the owner, and seems completely bent toward the benefit of the creditor or state... kind of like the law of eminent domain, where the state can just seize your property anytime it wants (that actually happened to me once, but that's a whole other story).

   There's jury sequestration, which is the isolation of a jury to avoid accidental or deliberate tainting, and which is similar to protective sequestration, which refers to isolating, by force, a section of people to protect them from an epidemic (or the public being protected from them (see the fine film "Outbreak," staring Dustin Hoffman)).

   In science there is carbon sequestration which is the process of the capture and long-term storage of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which we should be doing a heck of a lot more these days to stop global warming. Just suck up all of that CO2 and shoot it over to Texas where it belongs.

   There is a Canadian heavy metal band called Sequester.

   There's also bile acid sequestrants, pulmonary sequestration, and pyrrolizidine alkaloid sequestration, which is something bugs do.

   And of course the 4th or 5th century, Roman geographer, Vibius Sequester.

   But we're not talking about any of those, and I don't even know why I mentioned them.

   Silly me.

   What we are talking about is budget sequestration, which, in short, refers to a U.S. legal procedure in which automatic spending cuts are triggered, specifically in the Budget Control Act of 2011.

   Okay, this is how we got to where we are today:

   As you may remember dear readers, after the rise of the Tea Baggers  as a political power, they won a significant amount of seats in the House of Representatives in the 2010 mid-term elections and of course started their anti-government campaign almost immediately... well, let me rephrase that... they immediately started their anti-government campaign. In August of 2011 a vote was needed to raise the governments debt ceiling so the government could continue to pay the debts  it already owed, debts incurred by Congress itself, and a vote that had automatically been passed every time it had come up. The Tea Baggers didn't want to do this. They were perfectly willing to let the government go into default for the first time in our nation's history.

   Here, I'll let Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman put it in his usual succinct manner:

   "Republicans engaged in unprecedented hostage-taking, threatening to push America into default by refusing to raise the debt ceiling unless President Obama agreed to a grand bargain on their terms. Mr. Obama, alas, didn’t stand firm; instead, he tried to buy time. And, somehow, both sides decided that the way to buy time was to create a fiscal doomsday machine that would inflict gratuitous damage on the nation through spending cuts unless a grand bargain was reached. Sure enough, there is no bargain, and the doomsday machine will go off at the end of next week."

   What exactly will happen if no deal is reached by next Friday and the sequestration does go into effect? Here's a short list compiled by Chris Good of ABC News:

1. Air Travel Disruption; After a $600 million Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) funding cut, furloughs would mean fewer air-traffic controllers and fewer flights.

2. Longer Security Lines at Airports; Even the Travel Security Administration (TSA) is not exempt from sequestration, and fewer workers would mean longer lines.

3. Slower Extreme-Weather Forecasts; Government weathermen would feel the sequester, too.

4. Greater Risk of Wildfires; Cuts to the Department of Agriculture would mean less wildfire prevention and greater risk, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack warned: "Increased risk to communities from wildfires with as much as 200,000 fewer acres treated for hazardous fuels" were among the consequences he listed in his letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee.

5. Pest-Infested Crops; Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack wrote that the sequester would mean "a reduction in assistance to States for pest and disease prevention, surveillance, and response, potentially leading to more extensive outbreaks and economic losses to farmers and ranchers."

6. Nationwide Meat and Poultry Shortage; After furloughs to the Food Safety and Inspection Service, meat and poultry plants will have to shut down, as no one will be around to inspect their products.

7. Prison Lockdowns; A furlough of nearly 36,700 Bureau of Prisons staff for an average of 12 days could "endanger the safety of staff and over 218,00 inmates," Attorney General Eric Holder wrote.

8. Slower Gun Background Checks.

9. Fewer FBI Agents; FBI would furlough personnel for up to 14 days, Attorney General Eric Holder stated. 

10. Immigration Backlog; Unable to hire immigration judges, the federal government would see immigration applications pile up.

11. Longer Waits for Passports and Foreign Visas.

12. Neglect for Mentally Ill, Homeless, and Substance Addicted; Cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services would mean fewer services for vulnerable parts of the population.

13. 125,000 Would Be at Risk of Homelessness; Housing vouchers, shelter programs, and rural rent assistance are also on the chopping block.

14. 600,000 Women and Children Thrown Off WIC.

15. 424,000 Fewer AIDS Tests, 7,400 Fewer Patients Could Get HIV Medications.

16. No Rent Assistance for 7,300 AIDS Patients.

17. 807,000 Fewer Hospital Visits for Native Americans, Hospital Closures.

18. No Child Care for 30,000 Kids, No Head Start for 70,000.

19. Longer Waits for Disability Payments.

20. $725 Million in Cuts for Low-Income and Special-Needs Students.

21. Cuts to Schools on Indian Reservations.

22. Higher Risk of Terrorism; The FBI's ability to catch terrorists and stop plots will be mitigated, according to director Robert Mueller. The cuts include personnel furloughs and stalled investigations."   

23. Classified Information Vulnerable to Foreign Spies; Counterintelligence will also face cuts, raising the risk that foreign spies will gain access to classified national-security information.

24. An Even More Porous Border; Border Patrol will face cuts, Department of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano wrote to the committee: "U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) would not be able to maintain current staffing levels of Border Patrol Agents and CBP Officers as mandated by Congress."

25. Untended Nukes; Sequestration means less security at U.S. nuclear facilities.

26. U.S. Less Prepared for a 'WMD Incident' FBI Director Robert Mueller also warned that the FBI wouldn't be able to respond as quickly to a "WMD incident."

27. 1/3 Cutback in Pacific Naval Presence.

28. Reduced Army Readiness.

29. 46,000 Defense Jobs Could Be Lost, and the Pentagon would have to cut the pay for 800,000 employees by 20%

30. $1 Billion Cut from Disaster Relief

   And it goes on and on. Here's a link to Chris's story:

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/57-terrible-consequences-sequester/story?id=18551994

   Thanks Chris for allowing me to... borrow some of your fine work.

   Even Republicans as a whole disagree with what the House, led by Rep. John Boehner is doing. Only 19% of all Republicans believe sequestration is a good thing.

   But the House Republicans, pressured by the Tea Bagger contingent, seems to be stuck on stupid. They just lost the general election, then came out saying their Party needed to change it's ways to attract more of the populace, with the goal of winning elections in the future, and they continue to do dumb crap like this! It's totally amazing really. If their policies weren't so detrimental to the country it would be funny. As a matter of fact I believe that any American who would do this to their country and had the power to stop it, are simply traitorous. These people aren't Americans. They don't care about America or it's people. They're ideologues and insane. They need to go to the Funny Farm, draw nice pictures, listen to happy talk, and take lots of Olanzapine.

   So what does Krugman say we should do? Well lets ask:

   "The right policy would be to forget about the whole thing. America doesn’t face a deficit crisis, nor will it face such a crisis anytime soon. Meanwhile, we have a weak economy that is recovering far too slowly from the recession that began in 2007. And, as Janet Yellen, the vice chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, recently emphasized, one main reason for the sluggish recovery is that government spending has been far weaker in this business cycle than in the past. We should be spending more, not less, until we’re close to full employment; the sequester is exactly what the doctor didn’t order."

   I couldn't agree more.

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich's Take
 http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/16155-showdown-fatigue

Asteroids & Extinctions

Asteroid 2012 DA14 flyby Feburary 15, 2013

http://www.petapixel.com/2013/02/20/near-earth-asteroid-2012-da14-captured-in-a-gorgeous-time-lapse-video/

   My three favorite novels written by the late scientist and science fiction author, Sir Arthur C Clark (who is probably most famous for working out how geosynchronous satellites would work (those that stay in the same position over the planet's surface), and his collaboration with film director Stanley Kubrick on "2001, a Space Odyssey"), are these; "The Fountains of Paradise," which concerns a elevator that reaches into space, "Childhood's End," which concerns the final evolution of mankind, and my favorite, "Rendezvous With Rama," which is about our first contact with extraterrestrials, or at least their artifacts. 

   The novel begins quite smashingly with a thousand ton meteorite crashing through the Earth's atmosphere at 31 miles per second, and hitting the planets surface, completely destroying the northern Italian cities of Padua and Verona in the year of 2077.

   According to Clark this event was totally unexpected, and resulted in the creation of SPACEGUARD, which was a program designed to track objects in the solar system, which may or may not come near our planet. And this resulted in the detection of Rama, the great 25 mile long cylindrical spacecraft which was visiting our solar system, and which concerned the remainder of the book.

   It now seems odd that mankind would not have taken such efforts so far in our future, for we now have a program that searches for Near-Earth Objects (NEO), which is also called Spaceguard, the term coined from Sir Arthur's novel, in anticipation of the very circumstance described above.

   "A 1992 US Congressional study produced a "Spaceguard Survey Report"  which led to a mandate that NASA locate 90% of near-Earth asteroids larger than 1 km within 10 years." -Wikipedia

   It seems we are more far sighted than the Earth's civilization of Clark's imagination. Or it's possible that his vision warned us to get into action. For that we would owe him a great deal.

   The solar system was literally filled with objects floating around during it's early history. Our very own Moon was formed when a Mars sized object collided into the Earth shortly after it formed about 4.57 billion years ago. If you look at it now it's easy to see the scars of impact craters. The reason the Earth doesn't look like the Moon is due to the fact that it has an atmosphere which allows the erosion process to erase the evidence of thousands (or more) of it's own impacts. Still, the Meteor Crater near Flagstaff Arizona is proof of our planet's violent history, and that it is literally a target for future collisions.

   The Spaceguard Survey met it's mandated goal, although taking a little longer than 10 years. Still it has had it's exceptions. On June 6th of 2002, an undetected meteor exploded over the Mediterranean Sea with the force of a small atomic bomb. In September of the same year it is thought that a meteorite, or comet nucleus, impacted the Earth near the Vitim River Basin in Russia (It seems that Russia has had more than it's fair share of these type of events). And so on.

   Still the Spaceguard program has been successful in identifying many NEOs, and is much better than having no Spaceguard program at all. 

   The asteroid (asteroids are small solar system bodies or dwarf planets that are not comets (of course there is no reason comets can't smash into us as well). Meteors are small bodies of matter from outer space that enters the earth's atmosphere, appearing as a streaks of light (these are what we sometimes call Shooting Stars). The term meteoroid is synonymous with meteor. A meteorite is a meteoroid that survives impact with the Earth's surface. 100,000 tons of meteorite material reach the Earth's surface every year) 2012 DA14 was detected by astronomers in Spain on February 23, 2012. It's dimensions were calculated to be approximately 98 feet in diameter, with a mass of  40,000 metric tons. Astronomers examined it's orbit and discovered that it would come within 17,200 miles from the surface of Earth on Feburary 15, 2013, and indeed it did. This is a record close approach for a known object of this size (it came closer to the planet's surface than the satellite that transmitted the broadcast signal for the last Superbowl). Had it hit the Earth it would have resulted in immense damage, releasing the energy equivalent of 2.4 metric tons of TNT and wiping out 750 square miles.

   Astonishingly, 16 hours earlier that same day, an undetected meteor exploded over the Chelyabinsk Oblast of Russia, in the Ural Mountains region, on the border of Europe and Asia. According to calculations by Peter Brown at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, drawing on extremely low-frequency sound waves detected by a global network used to detect atomic bomb detonations, the object is estimated to have been about 56 feet across with a mass of 7,000 to 10,000 tons when it hit the atmosphere. It exploded with a force of nearly 500 kilotons of energy. The terminal part of the explosion likely occurred almost directly over the town of Chelyabinsk, causing extensive window breakage and some structural damage. Events of this magnitude are expected once every several of tens to 100 years.

   Meteorite impacts have caused significant damage to life on Earth in the distant past. It is theorized that a giant asteroid or comet hit the Earth about 65 million years ago causing an intense, global mass extinction. An estimated 75% of animals and plants, most notably non-bird like dinosaurs, took place in a geologically short period of time. One name for this event is the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) extinction. Why we believe this event was caused by an impact with an extraterrestrial object was the discovery of high levels of the metal iridium in the boundary clay of that period worldwide. Iridium is rare on Earth but abundant in asteroids. The identification of the 110 mile wide Chicxulub crater in Mexico provided conclusive evidence that the K-T boundary clay represented debris from an asteroid impact.

   "Such an impact would have inhibited photosynthesis by generating a dust cloud that blocked sunlight for a year or less, and by injecting sulfuric acid aerosols into the stratosphere, which would have reduced sunlight reaching the Earth's surface by 10–20%. It would take at least ten years for those aerosols to dissipate, which would account for the extinction of plants and phytoplankton, and of organisms dependent on them (including predatory animals as well as herbivores). Small creatures whose food chains were based on detritus would have a reasonable chance of survival." -Wikipedia

   Those small creatures, which we now call mammals, are our ancestors. It is fortunate for us that this event took place or the dinosaurs would probably still rule the Earth, as they had for the 135 million years previously.

   Other things have caused mass extinctions. It is believed that their have been 5 of them in the distant past, the K-T being the most recent.

   About 200 million years ago the Triassic–Jurassic extinction event took place, causing the extinction of approximately half of all life on the planet, and was caused not by an asteroid impact (no evidence has been discovered for an impact), but by either gradual climate change, sea-level fluctuations, a pulse of oceanic acidification, or massive volcanic eruptions, causing the release of carbon dioxide or sulfur dioxide and aerosols, which would cause either intense global warming (from the former) or cooling (from the latter).

   As the K-T event was fortunate for us, the Triassic–Jurassic extinction event allowed the dinosaurs to flourish.

   The Permian–Triassic (P–Tr) extinction event of 252 million years ago killed off 96% of all marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species. It was the largest of the extinction events, and was the  only known mass extinction of insects. The cause of this event was probably the same as the Triassic–Jurassic.

   Then of course we have the Late Devonian extinction of 374 million years ago, which caused the loss of 19% of all families and 50% of all genera (a low-level taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms). The cause?  Possibly an impact, or plant evolution (plants got bigger. The covering of the planet's continents with massive photosynthesizing land plants in the first forests may have reduced carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. Since CO2 is a greenhouse gas, reduced levels might have helped produce climate change, cooling the planet, which then adversely affected those very same plants.

   Lastly we have the first extinction event, the Ordovician–Silurian of about 445 million years ago. At the time, all known life was confined to the seas and oceans. More than 60% of marine invertebrates died. This was probably caused by massive volcanism and weathering.

   As can be seen climate change probably accounted for 4 out of 5 of these events. Our climate is changing now and we our causing it, or at least our short sighted dependence on fossil fuels is causing it, spurred on by the fossil fuel industry's short sighted infatuation with short term monetary gains is causing it, spurred on by our politician's reluctance to do anything about it, including our current president.

   As Chris Hedges article below indicates, we have no other choice other than to stop our dependence on fossil fuels and switch to clean energy. We owe it to our children and their children. To allow this to go on the epitome of irresponsibility.

   If we don't change our ways the next extinction event, this one caused by ourselves, will be unfortunate for us, and fortunate for, oh, probably cockroaches, allowing them to rule the planet  for the next few million years or so.

   How sad it would be that we, the most intelligent creatures that have ever evolved on Earth, only lasted for 100,000 years.

   That doesn't say much for intelligence as a survival mechanism, now does it?

http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/54-54/14730-focus-stand-still-for-the-apocalypse

Happy Birthday Heather Graham!

Heather, track and field, single payer, & yoga, all in 30 seconds

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ju8LZkkQgGM

 Picture legend:

1. Ms. Heather
2. Young Ms. Heather
3. "License to Drive"
4. As ex-nun Annie Blackburn turned waitress in "Twin Peaks"
5. With James Woods in "Diggstown"
6. As Rollergirl in "Boogie Nights"
7. As Dr. Judy Robinson in "Lost in Space"
8. As Felicity Shagwell in "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me"
9. With Johnny Depp in "In Hell"
10. An early favorite picture
11. In "Anger Management"
12. As Dr. Molly Clock in "Scrubs"
13. As stripper Jade in "The Hangover"
14. Another favorite picture... I don't know why.
15. With "The Hangover" boys.
16. Meditation... and Yoga with Heather and Beth Dian Prandini
17. Heather again!

   This morning it is my distinct honor and privilege to give a great big Joyce's Take happy birthday shout out to one of my favorite actresses and activists, and with whom I seem to have a great deal in common, Ms Heather Graham!

   Heather Joan Graham was born as a small female infant at a very early age in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where Laverne De Fazio & Shirley Feeney used to live, and where people drink beer all day. She is the eldest of two sisters, Aimee Graham, another actress, being her younger sibling. Her dad, James was an agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and her mom, Joan, is a teacher and author of children's books. The family, like me, is of Irish ancestry, which of course means their family came from Ireland, which is a beautiful island country west of Great Britain, where all the pommies live. James is 100% Irish, just like me. Joan's dad was 100% Irish, but her mom, Heather's grandmother, was of Scottish and German descent, so Ms Graham describes herself as being 3/4 Irish.

    Apparently the family may own some property in County Cork, in the south of Ireland, where those freaking Leprechauns live, the wily bastards!

   Like many of Irish descent, Heather's family was Catholic, and observed traditional Catholic values, which means the girls could have no fun whatsoever.

   Due to her dad's job the family moved around quite a bit, but eventually settled down in nearby Agoura Hills, California (34° 9′ 12″ N, 118° 45′ 42″ W), when she was 9, and where poor George C. Scott died (or Westlake Village, which is right next to Agoura Hills. He's buried in Westwood, right next to Walter Matthau... and Jack Lemon's nearby too!).

   Despite being somewhat shy (I was shy too! See how much we have in common! We're both not shy anymore as well) Heather developed an early interest in acting participating in a school production of The Wizard of Oz, and was eventually voted "Most Talented" by her Agoura High School class. However dad wasn't particularly keen on having his daughter, eventually both daughters) enter into the decadent acting profession, which created a certain tension within the family. Still Joan obligingly drove Heather to auditions in Hollywood throughout her adolescence.

   As a teenager Ms. Graham worked at Toys R' Us and as an usher at The Hollywood Bowl. I never did either of those things.

   At age 14 Heather got her first appearance on film as a factory girl in an uncredited roll in the film, "Mrs. Soffel," starring Mel Gibson and Diane Keaton. Two years later she appeared on a special "Teen Week" episode of the NBC-TV game show "Scrabble," and the next year she got her first credited role in the television film, "Student Exchange," along with Gavin MacLeod and Moon Unit Zappa.

   Being so pretty and all (for a girl), Heather modeled (contract with Emanuel Ungaro Liberte) and did commercials. She auditioned for the Jennifer Grey role in Dirty Dancing in 1987, which I'm sure made her dad real happy. In fact, the next year she was forced to turn down the lead role in "Heathers," because her parents thought the language was too risque (the part instead went to Winona Ryder, whose parents didn't mind how much she trash talked).

   Ms Graham graduated High School in 1988,  after which she enrolled in extension classes at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and studied English and drama for two years, but dropped out to pursue acting full time, again, much to her parents objections.

   She continued acting throughout those years, getting a big break and some critical recognition in 1988's "License to Drive," as Corey Haim's love interest. This part got her a a Young Artist Award nomination in the Best Young Actress in a Motion Picture Comedy or Fantasy category. The same year she also had an uncredited appearance as Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger's mother in "Twins" (Jeeez).

   The very next year Heather got what some consider her breakthrough role, as a drug addicted friend to Matt Dillon and Kelly Lynch, in Gus Van Sant's "Drugstore Cowboy," which was about a lot of cowboys who lived in pharmacies. Her performance earned her a nomination for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Actress.

   In 1990 Ms Graham appeared in Lawrence Kasdan's "I Love You to Death," with 3 more of my favorite ladies, Tracey Ullman, Phoebe Cates, and Victoria Jackson (before she became a right wing lunatic), and 1991's "Shout," staring John Travolta and Gwyneth Paltrow in her first film appearance. Heather received a nomination for the Young Artist Award for Best Actress Starring in a Motion Picture for her performance.

   After co-starring with ("Traffic"s) Benicio Del Toro (who was also in "License to Drive") in a Calvin Klein commercial directed by David Lynch, he cast her as former nun Annie Blackburn in his idiosyncratic television series "Twin Peaks." Following that show's cancellation, Lynch had Heather reprise the role in the 1992 prequel film "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me." This show's cast included several of my favorite actresses. As a matter of fact this show's cast could be considered a virtual hot-bed of my favorite actresses, including Sheryl Lee, Lara Flynn Boyle,  Moira Kelly, Alicia Witt, Phoebe Augustine, and Sherilyn Fenn (who I recently saw blow herself up in an episode of "NCIS").

   Lynch also introduced Heather to Transcendental Meditation, a mantra (sound, syllable, word, or group of words) form of meditation I do not adhere to. I like my meditation silent, like my women.

   In 1992 she appeared with James Woods and Louis Gossett, Jr. in the boxing con-game film "Diggstown," and with Will Smith in 93's "Six Degrees of Separation." That year she  also appeared with a pre-Gandolf Ian McKellen in "The Ballad of Little Jo."

   A few years later Heather came to my attention, as well as a whole bunch of others, in Paul Thomas Anderson's 1997 critically acclaimed, "Boogie Nights," which was loosely based  on the John Holmes southern California porn industry story. Heather played porn actress Rollergirl for her penchant for wearing roller skates all the time. She initially auditioned for Julianne Moore's part but that went to Julianne Moore instead. The film also starred real life veteran porn actresses Nina Hartley.

   Here's a clip with Julianne.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XWyZj6er5Q

   Ms Graham's role did require a certain amount of nudity, which her willingness to go along with caused a huge riff with her parents. They may not be speaking still. "I don't really like to talk about my parents. Because I just feel that it gets misinterpreted in the press, and stuff..." she says.

   Heather has gone on to star in such high-profile films as, "Lost in Space," with Mimi Rogers, "Bowfinger," with Steve Martin, "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me," with Will Farrell ("Those are skin tight. How do you get in those pants, baby?" "You can start by buying me a drink.")) Here's two clips:  American Woman in "The Spy Who Shagged Me"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS1WnWjxfsk

And with Burt Bacharach & Elvis Costello (son of Lou)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS1WnWjxfsk  ), and "From Hell," in 2001, with that Johnny Depp fellow, as well as a whole bunch of other fine films and TV shows. She was so busy she had to turn down the Teri Polo role in "Meet the Parents," and the Shannon Elizabeth role in "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back."

   Speaking of 2001, on September 11th, Ms. Graham was due to move in an apartment she had bought in Manhattan. "I was flying into New York that morning from the Toronto Film Festival. I'd bought an apartment in Manhattan and I was due to move in that day. We were flying towards New York when I could see this huge black cloud over the city. The first plane had hit the Twin Towers but nobody knew what was happening at that stage. We landed and I was in the baggage-claim area when the second plane hit the towers. There was general panic. After going through something like that, you never take anything for granted again."

   Soon after that all flights across the country were grounded... except those taking the family of Osama bin Laden out of the country.

   In 2003 she appeared with Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson in "Anger Management." Here's a clip:

Anger Management

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdoLNHJjLTc

   She was given special guest-star status on nine episodes of NBC's "Scrubs," during its fourth season (2004–2005). Here's two very funny clips:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8HqUfM1dZY

and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VH7_H05aeiY

   And now Heather has and will be in the entire "The Hangover" franchise, I, II, and III. Here's an Irish interview with her discussing the first film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BDBoWTt6Qo

   She enjoys yoga in Mexico (so do Beth and I!) and cooking (so do I!) and playing poker (me too! Boy, if she were only a couple of years younger I'd be after her myself)

   She is a public advocate for Children International, as I am ( http://joycestake.blogspot.com/2012/09/meivelyn-noemi-cacao-mendoza-children.html ), although I'm sure she's a  lot better at it than I am.

    "You are helping a child have a better life. It's great for that child to know that someone who lives in another country cares about them."

   Indeed.

   Heather has never married or had children, although she has had romances with actors Edward Burns, Heath Ledger, James Woods, Matt Dillon, Josh Lucas, Kyle MacLachlan, Leonardo DiCaprio, Elias Koteas, Benicio Del Toro, Russell Crowe, Scott Speedman, Rufus Sewell, Matthew Perry, and every other actor she's ever worked with, musicians Adam Ant, Elijah Allman, and Jason Falkner, directors Stephen Hopkins, Chris Weitz, and Yaniv Raz, former president Bill Clinton, nightclub owner Charles Ferri, theoretical physicist and cosmologist, Stephen Hawking, and the starboard watch of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln.

   Wow, reminds me of Liz Taylor.

   Anyway, all of us here at Joyce's Take wish Heather and her friends and family (those she's still talking too at least) continued good fortune and health, and of course, a very happy birthday!

   Happy Birthday Heather!

Two Views on the Fiscal Cliff

"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else," -Winston Churchill

   Last night as I was battling my computer (trying to make it work), I flipped my television's channel over to MSNBC and discovered that the Republican controlled House of Representatives had passed the Senate's bill to avert the most harsh effects of the so-called Fiscal Cliff. The measure, brought to the House floor less than 24 hours after its passage in the Senate, was approved 257 to 167, with 85 Republicans joining 172 Democrats in voting to allow income taxes to rise for the first time in two decades, in this case for the highest-earning Americans. Voting no were 151 Republicans and 16 Democrats.

   Now all that has to be done is for the President to sign it. As the picture above indicates it looks as if he will be happy to do so.

   As I predicted we did go over the Cliff officially at one second after midnight yesterday. What the House's action accomplishes is to help calm national and international markets, letting them know we aren't completely crazy, and allowing important items such as the Farm Bill to pass, so we all don't have to start paying $8 for a gallon of milk.

   The social security payroll tax holiday was not extended, so workers will see their pay checks shrink to a certain extent, but that was never meant to be a permanent cut anyway, and which was basically robbing Social Security of its rightful income. 

   As it is the Bush Tax cuts will remain in place for 98% of Americans, with those making more than $450,000 having to pay more. I would have liked to have seen that income limit lower, say $250,000 as the President first proposed, but during negotiations, concessions do have to be made, and considering all that was on the table, I can live with what was put through (as if I had a choice).

   Below is two view points on this matter by my two favorite economists, former Labor Secretary, Robert Reich, and Nobel prize winner Paul Krugmam:

Lousy Deal on the Edge of the Cliff, Robert Reich   December 31, 2012

   The deal emerging from the Senate is a lousy one. Let me count the ways:

   1. Republicans haven’t conceded anything on the debt ceiling, so over the next two months – as the Treasury runs out of tricks to avoid a default – Republicans are likely to do exactly what they did before, which is to hold their votes on raising the ceiling hostage to major cuts in programs for the poor and in Medicare and Social Security.

   2. The deal makes tax cuts for the rich permanent (extending the Bush tax cuts for incomes up to $400,000 if filing singly and $450,000 if jointly) while extending refundable tax credits for the poor (child tax credit, enlarged EITC, and tuition tax credit) for only five years. There’s absolutely no justification for this asymmetry.

   3. It doesn’t get nearly enough revenue from the wealthiest 2 percent — only $600 billion over the next decade, which is half of what the President called for, and a small fraction of the White House’s goal of more than $4 trillion in deficit reduction. That means more of the burden of tax hikes and spending cuts in future years will fall on the middle class and the poor.

   4. It continues to exempt the first $5 million of inherited wealth from the estate tax (the exemption used to be $1 million). This is a huge gift to the heirs of the wealthy, perpetuating family dynasties of the idle rich.

   Yes, the deal finally gets Republicans to accept a tax increase on the wealthy, but this is an inside-the-Beltway symbolic victory. If anyone believes this will make the GOP more amenable to future tax increases, they don’t know how rabidly extremist the GOP has become.

   The deal also extends unemployment insurance for more than 2 million long-term unemployed. That’s important.

   But I can’t help believe the President could have done better than this. After all, public opinion is overwhelmingly on his side. Republicans would have been blamed had no deal been achieved.

   More importantly, the fiscal cliff is on the President’s side as well. If we go over it, he and the Democrats in the next Congress that starts later this week can quickly offer legislation that grants a middle-class tax cut and restores most military spending. Even rabid Republicans would be hard-pressed not to sign on.

Perspective on the Deal, Paul Krugman   January 1, 2013

   To make sense of what just happened, we need to ask what is really at stake, and how much difference the budget deal makes in the larger picture.

   So, what are the two sides really fighting about? Surely the answer is, the future of the welfare state. Progressives want to maintain the achievements of the New Deal and the Great Society, and also implement and improve Obamacare so that we become a normal advanced country that guarantees essential health care to all its citizens. The right wants to roll the clock back to 1930, if not to the 19th century.

   There are two ways progressives can lose this fight. One is direct defeat on the question of social insurance, with Congress actually voting to privatize and eventually phase out key programs — or with Democratic politicians themselves giving away their political birthright in the name of a mess of pottage Grand Bargain. The other is for conservatives to successfully starve the beast — to drive revenue so low through tax cuts that the social insurance programs can’t be sustained.

   The good news for progressives is that danger #1 has been averted, at least so far — and not without a lot of anxiety first. Romney lost, so nothing like the Ryan plan is on the table until President Santorum takes office, or something. Meanwhile, in 2011 Obama was willing to raise the Medicare age, in 2012 to cut Social Security benefits; but luckily the extremists of the right scuttled both deals. There are no cuts in benefits in this deal.

   The bad news is that the deal falls short on making up for the revenue lost due to the Bush tax cuts. Here, though, it’s important to put the numbers in perspective. Obama wasn’t going to let all the Bush tax cuts go away in any case; only the high-end cuts were on the table. Getting all of those ended would have yielded something like $800 billion; he actually got around $600 billion. How big a difference does that make?

   Well, the CBO estimates cumulative potential GDP over the next decade at $208 trillion.So the difference between what Obama got and what he arguably should have gotten is around 0.1 percent of potential GDP. That’s not crucial, to say the least.

   And on the principle of the thing, you could say that Democrats held their ground on the essentials — no cuts in benefits — while Republicans have just voted for a tax increase for the first time in decades.

   So why the bad taste in progressives’ mouths? It has less to do with where Obama ended up than with how he got there. He kept drawing lines in the sand, then erasing them and retreating to a new position. And his evident desire to have a deal before hitting the essentially innocuous fiscal cliff bodes very badly for the confrontation looming in a few weeks over the debt ceiling.

   If Obama stands his ground in that confrontation, this deal won’t look bad in retrospect. If he doesn’t, yesterday will be seen as the day he began throwing away his presidency and the hopes of everyone who supported him.


The Ongoing War: The Battle Over the Debt Ceiling,     Robert Reich   January 2, 2013

   "It's not all I would have liked," says Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, speaking of the deal on the fiscal cliff, "so on to the debt ceiling."

   The battle over the fiscal cliff was only a prelude to the coming battle over raising the debt ceiling - a battle that will likely continue through early March, when the Treasury runs out of tricks to avoid a default on the nation's debt.

   The White House's and Democrats' single biggest failure in the cliff negotiations was not getting Republicans' agreement to raise the debt ceiling.

   The last time the debt ceiling had to be raised, in 2011, Republicans demanded major cuts in programs for the poor as well as Medicare and Social Security.

   They got some concessions from the White House but didn't get what they wanted - which led us to the fiscal cliff.

   So we've come full circle.

   On it goes, battle after battle in what seems an unending war that began with the election of Tea-Party Republicans in November, 2010.

   Don't be fooled. This war was never over the federal budget deficit.

   In fact, federal deficits are dropping as a percent of the total economy.

   For the fiscal year ending in September 2009, the deficit was 10.1 percent of the gross domestic product, the value of all goods and services produced in America. In 2010, it was 9 percent. In 2011, 8.7 percent. In the 2012 fiscal year, it was down to 7 percent.

   The deficit ballooned in 2009 because of the Great Recession. It knocked so many people out of work that tax revenues dropped to the lowest share of the economy in over sixty years. (The Bush tax cuts on the rich also reduced revenues.) The recession also boosted government spending on a stimulus program and on safety nets like unemployment insurance and food stamps.

   But as the nation slowly emerges from recession, more people are employed - generating more tax revenues, and requiring less spending on safety nets and stimulus. That's why the deficit is shrinking.

   Yes, deficits are projected to rise again in coming years as a percent of GDP. But that's mainly due to the rising costs of health care, along with aging baby boomers who are expected to need more medical treatment.

   Health care already consumes 18 percent of the total economy and almost a quarter of the federal budget (mostly in Medicare and Medicaid).

   So if the ongoing war between Republicans and Democrats was really over those future budget deficits, you might expect Republicans and Democrats to be focusing on ways to hold down future healthcare costs.

   They might be debating how to make the cost controls in the Affordable Care Act more effective, for example, or the merits of moving to a more efficient single-payer system, as every other advanced country has done.

   But they're not debating this, because the federal deficit is not what this war is about.

   It's about the size of government. Tea-Party Republicans (and other congressional Republicans worried about a Tea-Party challenge in their next primary) want the government to be much smaller.

   "My goal," says conservative guru Grover Norquist, "is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

   What's behind this zeal to shrink government? It's not that the U.S. government has suddenly become larger. In fact, non-military government spending relative to the size of the U.S. economy remains the smallest of any other rich nation.

   Apart from the military, Medicare and Social Security account for almost everything else the federal government does - and these programs continue to be hugely popular, as Republicans learn every time they threaten them.

   The animus toward government has more to do with the growing frustrations of many Americans that they're not getting ahead no matter how hard they work.

   Government is an easy scapegoat, utilized by much of corporate America to convince average Americans to cut taxes, spending, and regulations - and divert attention from record-high corporate profits and concentration of income and wealth at the top.

   The median wage continues to drop, adjusted for inflation, even though the economy is growing. And the share of the economy going to wages rather than to profits is the smallest on record.

Increasingly it's looked like the game is rigged, especially when people see government bailing out Wall Street (the Tea Party movement grew out of the bailout, as did the Occupiers), and handing out corporate welfare to big agriculture, big pharma, oil companies, and the insurance industry, to name but a few of the recipients.

   The outrage grows when average working people are told - falsely - that a growing portion of Americans don't pay taxes and live off government handouts.

   The battle over the fiscal cliff is over, but the trench warfare will continue.